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Episode 141: Beauvoir’s Existentialism: Moral and Political Dilemmas

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More on The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), this time on part III. Ep. 140 laid out man’s “ambiguity,” but what does that mean in terms of practical decision making? B. talks about the practical paradoxes of dealing with oppression and what it might mean to respect the individual given that there’s no ultimate, pre-existent moral rulebook to guide us, nothing we can point to to excuse the sacrifice of someone to a “greater good.”

Become a PEL Citizen to listen to the the Aftershow featuring Beauvoir scholar Jennifer Hansen.

End song: “Indiscretion (Mess Things Up)” from the 1993 Mark Lint album Spanish Armada: Songs of Love and Related Neuroses.

Episode 141: De Beauvoir’s Existentialism: Moral and Political Dilemmas (Citizen Edition)

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More on The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), this time on part III. Ep. 140 laid out man’s “ambiguity,” but what does that mean in terms of practical decision making? De B. talks about the practical paradoxes of dealing with oppression and what it might mean to respect the individual given that there’s no ultimate, pre-existent moral rulebook to guide us, nothing we can point to to excuse the sacrifice of someone to a “greater good.”

Continued from ep. 140. After this, listen to the the Aftershow featuring Jennifer Hansen.

End song: “Indiscretion (Mess Things Up)” from the 1993 Mark Lint album Spanish Armada: Songs of Love and Related Neuroses.

Episode 140: Beauvoir on the Ambiguous Human Condition

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On The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), parts I and II. We return to existentialism! Instead of describing our predicament as “absurd,” de Beauvoir prefers “ambiguous”: We are a biological organism in the world, yet we’re also free consciousness transcending the given situation. Truly coming to terms with this freedom means not only understanding that you transcend any label, but also recognizing that your freedom requires the freedom of others. The full foursome discuss whether this attempt to ground an existentialist ethics works.

End song: “Reasonably Lonely,” by Mark Lint.

Episode 140: De Beauvoir on the Ambiguous Human Condition (Citizen Edition)

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On The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), parts I and II. We return to existentialism! Instead of describing our predicament as “absurd,” de Beauvoir prefers “ambiguous”: We are a biological organism in the world, yet we’re also free consciousness transcending the given situation. Truly coming to terms with this freedom means not only understanding that you transcend any label that you or anyone else has put on you, but also recognizing that your freedom requires the freedom of others. The full foursome discuss whether this attempt to argue for an existentialist ethics works.

End song: “Reasonably Lonely,” by Mark Lint.

Episode 109: Jaspers’s Existentialism with Paul Provenza (Citizen Edition)

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On Karl Jaspers’s “On My Philosophy” (1941), featuring comedian/actor/director/author Paul Provenza. What’s the relationship between science and philosophy? What about religion? Jaspers thinks that science gives you facts, but for an overarching world-view, you need philosophy. Living such a world-view requires Existenz, or a leap towards transcendence, which is of course religion’s stock and trade, though Jaspers is not a fan of dogmatism.

End song: “Another Way to Fall,” by New People, from The Easy Thing (2009). Download the album.

Not School Discussion of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

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Last weekend the Philosophy and Theater Group had our monthly discussion, and this time Phillip Cherny and myself talked about Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a tremendously clever, meta-fictional play which fills offstage moments of Hamlet with absurdist hi-jinks.  For the philosophically inclined, this play has fireworks from beginning to end, and Stoppard covers a lot of ground Continue Reading …

Not School: Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Nausea”

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Featuring Mark Linsenmayer, Sean Webb, Stan Martin, and Yannick Kilberger. Recorded January 26, 2014.

One of the seminal texts of existentialism, but very slow and hard to get through as an actual book. While ordinarily we see objects as meaningful as things with history and often purpose, we can set that aside and see them instead as brute and meaningless. We can’t handle that, aren’t meant to handle that, and so instead of this being a machine-like, unemotional way of experiencing things, it is (for Roquentin) intolerably icky.

Episode 87: Sartre on Freedom and Self-Deception

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On Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1946), “Bad Faith” (pt. 1, ch. 2 of Being & Nothingness, 1943), and his play No Exit (1944).

What is human nature? Sartre says that there isn’t one, but there is a universal human condition, which is our absolute freedom. If you claim to be determined by your character or circumstances, you’re acting in “bad faith.” Learn more.

End song: “Minnesota Freak” by Mark Lint and the Fake (2000).

The Existentialist Self in the World: Doubt, Being and Caring

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If from continental philosophy you throw out transcendental phenomenology and older idealist trappings–transcendental subjects and so on–you are left with a system which still has two components: the world and the self.  It was the relationship between these two that took hold as the major problem for 20th C. continental philosophy. The upshot of the first phase of the “analysis of the Continue Reading …

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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