Kierkegaard instead of Prozac? That is the suggestion of Dr. Gordon Marino—leading Kierkegaard scholar, professional boxing coach, and author of The Existentialist’s Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age.
Episode 212: Sartre on Literature (Part One)
On Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Literature? (1948), ch. 1 and 2.
What’s the purpose of literature? Why write prose as opposed to poetry? Sartre argues that while poetry is about the words themselves, prose is about the ideas, so it’s necessarily political. A written work is essentially an ethical appeal for a reader to apply his or her own faculties and experiences to complete the work through the act of reading.
Continue on part 2, or get your ad-free, unbroken Citizen Edition. Please support PEL!
Sponsors: Please visit calm.com/pel for 25% off a stress-reducing subscription and the St. John’s College Graduate Institute: partiallyexaminedlife.com/sjcgi.
PEL Live is this Saturday 4/6 4-6pm Eastern time! We will post live-stream info and other details at partiallyexaminedlife.com/pel-live.
Episode 212: Sartre on Literature (Citizen Edition)
On Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Literature? (1948), ch. 1 and 2.
What’s the purpose of literature? Why write prose as opposed to poetry? Sartre argues that while poetry is about the words themselves, prose is about the ideas, so it’s necessarily political. A written work is essentially an ethical appeal for a reader to apply his or her own faculties and experiences to complete the work through the act of reading.
End song: “Things I Shouldn’t Have Told You” by Sam Phillips, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #90.
Episode 211: Sartre on Racism and Authenticity (Part Three)
Moving finally on to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Black Orpheus” (1948), where he introduces a book of black poetry by praising its revolutionary spirit as embodied in “negritude.” Is this a legitimate consciousness-raising exercise or a weird fetishization of blackness?
Listen to parts one and two first, or get the ad-free, unbroken Citizen Edition, which will also get you access to (sub)Text#5 on Checkhov’s Uncle Vanya. Please support PEL!
End song: “Punch Bag” by Godley & Creme as discussed on Nakedly Examined Music #3.
Sponsor: Visit TheGreatCoursesPLUS.com/PEL for two months of unlimited learning for 99 cents.
Episode 211: Sartre on Racism and Authenticity (Part Two)
Continuing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate (1946).
Is there an “authentic” way to respond to persecution? As part of his critique of anti-semitism, Sartre criticized the responses of some Jews to this situation, e.g. denying that the persecution exists, pretending to not be Jewish, or in any way accepting the terms of anti-semitism and setting up one’s life in reaction to it. Sartre instead recommends solidarity and “concrete liberalism,” which we try to figure out.
Listen to part one first. Don’t wait for the last part; get the full, ad-free Citizen Edition now. Please support PEL! Join us for PEL Live on 4/6!
Sponsors: Visit TheGreatCoursesPLUS.com/PEL for two months of unlimited learning for 99 cents. Visit the St. John’s College Graduate Institute: partiallyexaminedlife.com/sjcgi.
Episode 211: Sartre on Racism and Authenticity (Part One)
On Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate (1946) and “Black Orpheus” (1948).
How can we best understand the psychology of racism? Sartre condemns anti-Semitism as denying the facts of the human condition: the responsibility for fixing problems and not blaming them on a demonized other. But he also criticizes “the democrat” for a humanism that pretends we’re in a post-racial world, calling instead for “concrete liberalism” that treats Jews not as abstract individuals but as real people in an an oppressed situation.
Don’t wait for parts 2 and 3; get the full, ad-free Citizen Edition now. Please support PEL! See PEL Live in NYC on April 6.
Sponsors: Please visit calm.com/pel for 25% off a stress-reducing subscription, TakeCareOf.com (code PEL) for 50% off a month of personalized vitamins, TheGreatCoursesPLUS.com/PEL for two months of unlimited learning for 99 cents, and use code 30PEL get 30% off at Amazon of Bill Wooditch’s book Fail More.
Episode 211: Sartre on Racism and Authenticity (Citizen Edition)
On Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate (1946) and “Black Orpheus” (1948).
How can we best understand the psychology of racism and reactions to it? Sartre not only condemns anti-Semitism as denying the facts of the human condition (the responsibility for fixing problems and not blaming them on a demonized other), he also thinks that the victims of oppression can be inauthentic by denying their situation or otherwise being reactive to the racist’s attitude. “Black Orpheus” further explores this idea in characterizing the “negritude” of black poetry and how uncovering one’s negritude leads to solidarity and hence political and psychological change.
End song: “Punch Bag” by Godley & Creme as discussed on Nakedly Examined Music #3.
Episode 210: Frantz Fanon’s Black Existentialism (Citizen Edition)
On Black Skin White Masks (1952).
How does growing up in a racist society mess people up? Fanon’s “clinical study” includes phenomenology, poetry, and a lot of existentialism, which means that the “let’s embrace negritude in the face of bigotry” solution isn’t ultimately available to him: We’re all radically free, with no race-specific essence, whether positive or negative. With guest Lawrence Ware.
End song: “Malaika” by John Etheridge and Vimala Rowe; hear John interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #85.
Episode 205: Suicide with Dr. Drew (Durkheim et al) (Citizen Edition)
We are rejoined by Drew Pinsky to discuss philosophical and psychological readings on suicide by Seneca, Arthur Schopenhauer, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Albert Camus, plus some 2017 survey papers on the state of research into predictors of suicide.
Is suicide ever morally permissible? If it’s a symptom of mental illness rather than a chosen behavior, is it even appropriate to morally evaluate it?
End song: “Disappear” by Chris Cacavas as heard on Nakedly Examined Music #87.
Check the PEL Store for our Wall Calendar and new offerings including Mark’s new album, tutoring, and your very own Personal Philosophy.
Visit DrDrew.com.
Episode 164: Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” on Perfection (Part Two)
More on the novel with guest Corey Mohler, considering Dostoyevsky qua existentialist in terms of his analysis of the crisis of meaning and his consequent views on religion.
Listen to part 1 first, or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition. Get a Dostoyevsky T-shirt!
End song: “Don Quixote” by Nik Kershaw, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #37.
Please visit Talkspace.com/examined (use code “EXAMINED”) and blueapron.com/PEL.
Episode 164: Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” on Perfection (Part One)
On Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s philosophical novel from 1869. Could a morally perfect person survive in the modern world? Is all this “modernity,” which so efficiently computes our desires and provides mechanisms to fulfill them, actually suited to achieve human flourishing? Dostoyevsky’s Russian existentialism says no!
Episode 164: Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” on Perfection (Citizen Edition)
On Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s philosophical novel from 1869.
Could a morally perfect person survive in the modern world? Is all this “modernity,” which so efficiently computes our desires and provides mechanisms to fulfill them, actually suited to achieve human flourishing? Dostoyevsky’s Russian existentialism says no!
End song: “Don Quixote” by Nik Kershaw, as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #37.
Bojack Horseman and Aristotelian Self-Love
The popular Netflix show is rife with philosophical questions. “Can Aristotle teach Bojack a thing or two about self-love?” is one of them.
Episode 146: Emmanuel Levinas on Overcoming Solitude
More Levinas, working this time through Time and the Other (1948).
What is it for a person to exist? What individuates one person from another, making us into selves instead of just part of the causal net of events? Why would someone possibly think that these are real, non-obvious questions that need to be addressed?
End song: “Call on You” by Mark Lint from from the 1993 Mark Lint album Spanish Armada: Songs of Love and Related Neuroses.
Episode 146: Emmanuel Levinas on Overcoming Solitude (Citizen Edition)
More Levinas, working this time through Time and the Other (1948).
What is it for a person to exist? What individuates one person from another, making us into selves instead of just part of the causal net of events? Why would someone possibly think that these are real, non-obvious questions that need to be addressed? Levinas gives us a phenomenological progression from the “there is,” terrifyingly undifferentiated Being, to becoming an individual through “hypostasis,” which is becoming an existent through a voyage out to the world and back to oneself. But this existing makes us solitary, not only in this weird ontological sense of being a distinct thing, but in a concrete, emotional sense. Overcoming this requires grasping the Other as a real Other, not as an object to fulfill our desires or get in our way. Really understanding this at our core takes some doing, and in the process, we gain a mature sense of time and of death, so, good for us!
End song: “Call on You” by Mark Lint from from the 1993 Mark Lint album Spanish Armada: Songs of Love and Related Neuroses.
Episode 145: Emmanuel Levinas: Why Be Ethical?
On “Ethics as First Philosophy” (1984). More existentialist ethics, with a Jewish twist this time! Seth returns to join Mark and Wes in figuring out how to best leave off all this aggressive “knowing” and other forms of individual self-assertion to grasp the more primordial appearance of the Other in all his or her vulnerability, which Levinas thinks makes us wholly responsible for others right off the bat.
End song: “To Valerie” from The MayTricks’ So Chewy (1993).
Episode 145: Emmanuel Levinas: Why Be Ethical? (Citizen Edition)
On “Ethics as First Philosophy” (1984). More existentialist ethics, with a Jewish twist this time! Seth returns to join Mark and Wes in figuring out how to best leave off all this aggressive “knowing” and other forms of individual self-assertion to grasp the more primordial appearance of the Other in all his or her vulnerability, which Levinas thinks makes us wholly responsible for others right off the bat.
End song: “To Valerie” from The MayTricks’ So Chewy (1993).
Not School Intro Group: Camus’s “Myth of Sisyphus”
Brian Wilson leads a seminar on Albert Camus’s essay “The Myth of Sissyphus,” deepening our look into Camus following PEL episode 4. Recorded 8/8/16.
Ep 140/141 Aftershow on Simone De Beauvoir’s “Ethics of Ambiguity” feat. Jennifer Hansen
Mark and Danny Lobell welcome St. Lawrence University’s Jennifer Hansen to follow up on our episodes 140 and 141. Was Beauvoir really a Kantian? Do we find her description for founding ethics persuasive? Featuring PEL listeners Luke, Alex, Tiffany, Brittany, and Ken. Recorded 6/26/16.
What Do Existentialists Think about Love?
Given the existentialist emphasis on concrete personal experience, freedom, authenticity, responsibility, awareness of death, and personal determination of values, it is not surprising that existentialist philosophers should also consider the question of romantic love.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- Next Page »