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Ep. 271: Johan Gottlieb Fichte’s Transcendental Idealism (Part One)

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On The Vocation of Man (1799), Books I and II. What is reality?

Fichte’s armchair journey starts him considering nature and thus himself as determined, but then he backtracks to say that actually, experience doesn’t tell us whether we’re determined or free. In Book II, he argues that since our experience is always of something going on in ourselves, then causality, the external world, the self, etc. must be our own mental creations. So we’re free after all, yet everything is drained of significance!

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Ep. 271: Johan Gottlieb Fichte’s Transcendental Idealism (Part One for Supporters)

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On The Vocation of Man (1799), Books I and II. What is reality? Fichte’s armchair journey starts him considering nature and thus himself as determined, but then he backtracks to say that actually, experience doesn’t tell us whether we’re determined or free. In Book II, he argues that since our experience is always of something going on in ourselves, then all of our concepts like causality, the external world, and the self must be really just our own mental creations. So we’re free after all, yet everything is drained of significance! Tune into ep. 272 for the resolution of this drama!

Ep. 200: Kant/Mendelssohn/Foucault on Enlightenment (Part Two)

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Continuing on “What Is Enlightenment” by Immanuel Kant (1784), “On Enlightening the Mind” by Moses Mendelssohn (1784), and “What Is Enlightenment” by Michael Foucault (1984).

We finish up Kant (the courage to know!) and lay out the Mendelssohn (cultivation vs. enlightenment) and Foucault (ironically heroize the present!). Will this conversation enlighten you? Who knows?

Listen to part one first or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL!

End song: “Holy Fool” by Love and Rockets. Listen to singer Daniel Ash on Nakedly Examined Music #35.

Ep. 200: Kant/Mendelssohn/Foucault on Enlightenment (Part One)

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On “What Is Enlightenment” by Immanuel Kant (1784), “On Enlightening the Mind” by Moses Mendelssohn (1784), and “What Is Enlightenment” by Michael Foucault (1984).

At the end of the historical period known as The Enlightenment, a Berlin newspaper asked what exactly that is, and Kant and Mendelssohn responded. Both were concerned with whether too much enlightenment among the public can cause social unrest, and so whether there should be freedom of speech and opinion. Foucault thinks that we’re not yet Enlightened, that it’s an ongoing process of critique.

Continue on part 2, or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition now. Please support PEL!

Ep. 200: Kant/Mendelssohn/Foucault on Enlightenment (Citizen Edition)

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On “What Is Enlightenment” by Immanuel Kant (1784), “On Enlightening the Mind” by Moses Mendelssohn (1784), and “What Is Enlightenment” by Michael Foucault (1984).

At the end of the historical period known as the Enlightenment, a Berlin newspaper asked what exactly that is, and Kant and Mendelssohn responded. Both were concerned with whether too much enlightenment among the public can cause social unrest, and so whether there should be freedom of speech and opinion. Foucault thinks that we’re not yet Enlightened, that it’s an ongoing process of critique.

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End song: “Holy Fool” by Love and Rockets. Listen to singer Daniel Ash on Nakedly Examined Music #35.

Books of Wisdom

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What good are philosophy books? Can they make us any the wiser? A look at a humorous essay by Robert Wilson Lynd that demonstrates the difficulty of acquiring wisdom from books alone.

Episode 137: Bourdieu on the Tastes of Social Classes

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On Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979), introduction, ch 1 through p. 63, conclusion, and postscript.

How do our tastes in music, art, and everything else reflect our social position? This philosophically trained sociologist administered a few detailed questionnaires in 1960s France and used the resulting differences in what people in different classes preferred and how they talked about these preferences to theorize about the role that taste plays in our social games.

Featuring guest Tim Quirk of Too Much Joy and recent guest on Mark’s Nakedly Examined Music podcast #8.

End song: “When She Took Off Her Shirt” from Tim’s band Wonderlick’s Topless At The Arco Arena (2005).

Ep. 137: Bourdieu on the Tastes of Social Classes (Citizen Edition)

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On Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979), introduction, ch 1 through p. 63, conclusion, and postscript.

How do our tastes in music, art, and everything else reflect our social position? This philosophically trained sociologist administered a few detailed questionnaires in 1960s France and used the resulting differences in what people in different classes preferred and how they talked about these preferences to theorize about the role that taste plays in our social games. With guest Tim Quirk, recently featured on Nakedly Examined Music.

End song: “When She Took Off Her Shirt” from Tim’s band Wonderlick’s Topless At The Arco Arena (2005).

Episode 105: Kant: What Is Beauty? (Citizen Edition)

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On Critique of Judgment (1790), Part I, Book I. What is beauty? Kant thinks that finding something beautiful is different than merely liking it. It’s a certain kind of liking, not dependent on your idiosyncratic tastes (like your preference for one color or flavor or tone over another) or on your moral opinions. He wants these judgments to be subjective in the sense that they’re not about the object, but about the fact that people receive pleasure from it, yet he also wants them to be universal, so that if I (correctly) find something beautiful, then I expect others to feel the same way, and moreover, if they have taste, they should.
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End song: “Cool Down” from Mark Lint & the Fake Johnson Trio (1998), newly resung/remixed.

Convenience, Thought and Technology

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No-one could argue that technology does not make our lives easier, or that technology has not been one of the great liberators in the history of humankind; it certainly has been. Our lives would be more solitary, poorer, nastier, more brutish and shorter without technology, to steal a line from Hobbes. We should hope for continued advances in this liberating Continue Reading …

A Wealth of Not School Offerings in June

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Summer has arrived, and in case you can’t decide whether to take Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Franz Kafka’s The Trial to the beach with you, let me help: take them both and be prepared for Not School in June.  Thinking of taking summer classes?  Think better of it.  That’s expensive, and for a measly $5 a month you can Continue Reading …

Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant

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[Editor’s Note: Thanks to new blogger David Crohn for this glimpse into one aspect of Nietzsche’s relationship with his idol.] In ep. 84 PEL touches briefly on Nietzsche’s criticism of Schopenhauer—or rather, the ways Schopenhauer’s readers have, according to Nietzsche, accepted the weakest aspects of his philosophy first (aphorism 99). Nietzsche was a great admirer of Schopenhauer, however, not least Continue Reading …

The Subject: A Brief History

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[A post from Michael Burgess.  This reiterates some of the first half of our Popper episode.] The Cartesian subject, the “I” of the “I think”, sits apart from the world, receiving it. Descartes’ 17th Century inheritors, the British Empiricists took “the world” to be little more than a series of sense perceptions, perhaps perceptions of something – but we would never 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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