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Ep. 259: Locke Clarifies Misleading Complex Ideas (Part Two)

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More on Book II (ch. 22-33) of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 

On relations, then personal identity, with more on substances (spiritual and material), the various ways in which ideas can go wrong, and how mental association can entrench irrationality that disrupts clear thinking.

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Ep. 259: Locke Clarifies Misleading Complex Ideas (Part One)

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On Book II (ch. 22-33) of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).

Simple ideas get complex quickly when you put them into words, and can give rise to various philosophical problems that are either easily cleared up when you figure out how the complex idea is built out of simple ideas, or if they can’t be so broken down, then we really don’t know what we’re talking about and should just shut up.

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Ep. 259: Locke Clarifies Misleading Complex Ideas (Citizen Edition)

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On Book II (ch. 22-33) of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).

Simple ideas get complex quickly when you put them into words, and can give rise to various philosophical problems that are either easily cleared up when you figure out how the complex idea is built out of simple ideas, or if they can’t be so broken down, then we really don’t know what we’re talking about and should just shut up. We take on relations, cause and effect, personal identity, and more.

Ep. 258: Locke on Acquiring Simple Ideas (Part Two)

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Continuing on Book II (through ch. 20) of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).

How do we acquire our ideas of pain and pleasure, duration and motion? We talk primary (shape, size) and secondary (color, sound) qualities, the former of which are supposed to be actually in objects, and the latter just in our mind. Plus, is Locke really an atomist about experience?

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Ep. 258: Locke on Acquiring Simple Ideas (Part One)

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On the first half of Book II of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).

How do we get our ideas? Simple ideas must come in through perception, but this doesn’t just mean the senses; also reflection on our own minds, and this added layer of complexity allows us to bring in memory, concepts, time, and more.

Don’t wait for part two; get the full, ad-free Citizen Edition now. Please support PEL!

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Ep. 258: Locke on Acquiring Simple Ideas (Citizen Edition)

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On the first half of Book II of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).

How do we get our ideas? Simple ideas must come in through perception, but this doesn’t just mean the senses; also reflection on our own minds, and this added layer of complexity allows us to bring in memory, concepts, time, and more.

Ep. 257: Locke Against Innate Ideas (Part Two)

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Continuing on Book I of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).

We consider Locke’s arguments that since there are no universally agreed upon principles, therefore there are no beliefs that we’re all born with, or that we all (without the need for experience) immediately recognize as true as soon as we gain the use of reason or are otherwise equipped to understand them.

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Ep. 257: Locke Against Innate Ideas (Part One)

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On Book I of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).

How do we know things? Locke thought all knowledge comes from experience, and this might seem uncontroversial, but what are the alternatives? We consider the idea that there are some ideas we’re just born with and don’t need to learn. But what’s an “idea,” and how is it different from a principle? Clearly we have instincts (“knowhow”) but is that knowledge? We consider occurrent vs. dispositional nativism, the role of reason, and what Locke’s overall project is after.

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Sponsors: Visit literati.com/life for $50 off your annual book club membership. Have your donation matched up to $250 at givewell.org/PEL (choose podcast and partially examined life at checkout). See headspace.com/PEL for a free month of guided meditations.

Ep. 257: Locke Against Innate Ideas (Citizen Edition)

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On Book I of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).

How do we know things? Locke thought all knowledge comes from experience, and this might seem uncontroversial, but what are the alternatives? We consider the idea that there are some ideas we’re just born with and don’t need to learn. But what’s an “idea,” and how is it different from a principle? Clearly we have instincts (“knowhow”) but is that knowledge? We consider occurrent vs. dispositional nativism, the role of reason, and what Locke’s overall project is after.

Ep. 231: Descartes’s “Discourse” on Wisdom and Certainty (Part Two)

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Continuing on Descartes’s Discourse on Method, looking closely at part 4 (his proto-Meditations) and his “provisional” Stoic ethics.

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End song: “My Real Fantasy” By Joe Louis Walker, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #110.

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Ep. 231: Descartes’s “Discourse” on Wisdom and Certainty (Part One)

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On René Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637), an overview of his work that distills his method, outlines his famous Meditations, presents a provisional (Stoic) ethics, and considers whether he wants to be a public intellectual. This is all meant as a preface to scientific publications on geometry, optics, and meteors.

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Ep. 231: Descartes’s “Discourse” on Wisdom and Certainty (Citizen Edition)

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On René Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637), an overview of his work that distills his method, outlines his famous Meditations, presents a provisional (Stoic) ethics, and considers whether he wants to be a public intellectual. This is all meant as a preface to scientific publications on geometry, optics, and meteors.

End song: “My Real Fantasy” By Joe Louis Walker, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #110.

Ep. 229: Descartes’s Rules for Thinking (Part Three)

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Concluding René Descartes’s Rules for Direction of the Mind (1628).

We finish rule 12 through the end, talking about simples, the faculties of intuition and judgment, perception and imagination, necessary vs. contingent truths, and how to do Cartesian science, including what constitutes a “perfectly understood problem.”

Start with part one, or get the full, ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL!

End song: “Perfect Design” by Ian Moore, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #94.

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Ep. 229: Descartes’s Rules for Thinking (Part Two)

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Continuing on René Descartes’s Rules for Direction of the Mind (1628), covering rules 7 through the first part of the lengthy rule 12.

We try to figure out what he means by “enumeration”; the faculties of imagination, sense and memory; the virtues of perspicacity and sagacity; his psychology of the senses, the “common sense” where all sense data comes together, and the understanding; how Descartes recommends we do scientific investigation; why syllogisms stink; and whether some people are just better at philosophy than others.

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Ep. 229: Descartes’s Rules for Thinking (Part One)

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On René Descartes’s Rules for Direction of the Mind (1628).

Is there a careful way to approach problems that will ensure that you’ll always be right? What if you just never assert anything you can’t be sure of? This is Descartes’s strategy, modeled on mathematics. We likewise carefully move step-by-step through this text.

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Ep. 229: Descartes’s Rules for Thinking (Citizen Edition)

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On René Descartes’s Rules for Direction of the Mind (1628).

Is there a careful way to approach problems that will ensure that you’ll always be right? What if you just never assert anything you can’t be sure of? This is Descartes’s strategy, modeled on mathematics. We likewise carefully move step-by-step through this text.

End song: “Perfect Design” by Ian Moore, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #94.

Episode 191: Conceptual Schemes: Donald Davidson & Rudolf Carnap (Part One)

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On Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974) and Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” (1950).

What does it mean to say that we grasp the world through a conceptual scheme? Are schemes different between cultures or even individuals, such that we can’t really understand each other? Davidson thinks that this doesn’t make sense. With guest Dusty Dallman.

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Episode 191: Conceptual Schemes: Donald Davidson & Rudolf Carnap (Citizen Edition)

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On Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974) and Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” (1950).

What does it mean to say that we grasp the world through a conceptual scheme? Are schemes different between cultures or even individuals, such that we can’t really understand each other? Davidson thinks that this doesn’t make sense. Carnap gives us a picture of multiple, domain-specific vocabularies and doesn’t see a problem with the concepts of one not being translatable into concepts of another.

End Song: “Shut Up” by Chandler Travis, as heard on Nakedly Examined Music #46.

About The Partially Examined Life

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

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