Subscribe to get parts 1 and 2 of this now, ad-free. On Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love (1475), with guest Peter Adamson from the History of Philosophy podcast joining Mark, Wes, and Seth. Attention: We'll be live-streaming video for our big ep. 300 on Friday, Aug. 19 at 8pm ET. More info at partiallyexaminedlife.com/pel-live. Leading up to that episode, Continue Reading …
Ep. 298: Marsilio Ficino on Love (Part Two for Supporters)
Continuing from part one on Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love (1475), with guest Peter Adamson. Peter gives us some context in terms of other Renaissance theories of love, and then we're back to the text, considering the role of beauty in the theory and how this connects to our recent coverage of various thinkers on aesthetics. We also fill out Ficino's neo-Platonic Continue Reading …
Ep. 298: Marsilio Ficino on Love (Part One for Supporters)
On Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love (1475), with guest Peter Adamson from the History of Philosophy podcast joining Mark, Wes, and Seth. Attention: We'll be live-streaming video for our big ep. 300 on Friday, Aug. 19 at 8pm ET. More info at partiallyexaminedlife.com/pel-live. Leading up to that episode, we're continuing to revisit some classic themes, and this Continue Reading …
Ep. 296: Heidegger Questions Being (Part Two)
Subscribe to get Parts 1 and 2 ad-free plus tons of bonus content. Continuing our close reading of selections of Being and Time from part one, we come back on a different day without Wes and focus on two parts from the Introduction 2, sec. 7: Sec. 5, where Heidegger says why time has to be the focus of the ontological analysis of Dasein (i.e. his description of the Continue Reading …
Ep. 296: Heidegger Questions Being (Part One)
Subscribe to get parts 1 and 2 of this now, ad-free. This close reading of sections near the beginning of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1926) is a direct sequel to ep. 32, which provides an overview of his project. In this episode and 297, we read and discuss particular textual passages, so you can experience along with us what it's like to read this text with its Continue Reading …
Ep. 296: Heidegger Questions Being (Part Two for Supporters)
Continuing our close reading of selections of Being and Time from part one, we come back on a different day without Wes and focus on two parts from the Introduction 2, sec. 7: Sec. 5, where Heidegger says why time has to be the focus of the ontological analysis of Dasein (i.e. his description of the essential human condition).Part A, on what are phenomena, according to Continue Reading …
Ep. 296: Heidegger Questions Being (Part One for Supporters)
This close reading of sections near the beginning of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1926) is a direct sequel to ep. 32, which provides an overview of his project. We re-introduced that episode in our most recent PEL Nightcap. In this episode and 297, we read and discuss particular textual passages, so you can experience along with us what it's like to read this text with Continue Reading …
Ep. 286: Malebranche on Causality and Theology (Part One)
Subscribe to get Parts 2 and 3 of this episode. You can hear previews of parts two and three. Hear this part ad-free. On Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688), dialogues 5-7, featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. Continuing from ep. 285, we've gathered more of the pieces of Malebranche's picture of epistemology, metaphysics, and science to explain his most famous Continue Reading …
Ep. 286: Malebranche on Causality and Theology (Part Two for Supporters)
Continuing from part one on Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688), dialogue 7 where he gets into his occasionalist theory of causality. We talk about how this theory relates to mind-body interaction and the student character Aristes argues that there's nothing more intimate than the relation of mind to body and how the teacher character Theodore smacks that claim Continue Reading …
Ep. 286: Malebranche on Causality and Theology (Part One for Supporters)
On Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688), dialogues 5-7, featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth. Continuing from ep. 285, we've gathered more of the pieces of Malebranche's picture of epistemology, metaphysics, and science to explain his most famous view: Occasionalism, which is a theory of causality that says that God jumps in at every moment of causality. Is this view Continue Reading …
Ep. 279: Aristotle’s “Categories” of Being (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On the Categories (ca. 350 BCE), which purports to describe all the types of entities that exist. The participants are Mark, Wes, and Dylan. Sponsors: Get a free month of Great Courses lectures and lots of other great content at Wondrium.com/PEL. Get a free month's access to a vast Continue Reading …
Ep. 279: Aristotle’s “Categories” of Being (Part Two for Supporters)
Continuing from part one on the Categories, we finish up our discussion of substance by talking about artifacts: Only "genuine unities" are substances, and hammers and cups, for Aristotle, don't count as such unities. Should being a cup be considered instead a property like being white? Can properties be complex? We're actually not sure about natural objects like rivers, Continue Reading …
Ep. 279: Aristotle’s “Categories” of Being (Part One for Supporters)
On the Categories (ca. 350 BCE), which purports to describe all the types of entities that exist. The participants are Mark, Wes, and Dylan. The most important of these Categories is substance, a term which primarily picks out individual natural things (a particular person, animal, plant, or material) and secondarily picks out the kinds that group those things (e.g. the Continue Reading …
Ep. 277: Hegel on Our Understanding of Physics (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. On The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), ch. 3, "Force and the Understanding." What is "force" as physics describes it? And scientific law? Do these terms denote objects in the world, or models for how we describe the world? For Hegel, force is a way of talking about the metaphysical relation that one object Continue Reading …
Ep. 277: Hegel on Our Understanding of Physics (Part One for Supporters)
On The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), ch. 3, "Force and the Understanding." What is "force" as physics describes it? And scientific law? Do these terms denote objects in the world, or models for how we describe the world? For Hegel, force is a way of talking about the metaphysical relation that one object has to other objects. Or taken from another perspective, it's the Continue Reading …
Ep. 276: Hegel on Perception (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. On The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), ch. 1 "Sense Certainty" and ch. 2 "Perception." After introducing Hegel's project in ep. 275, we now walk through the first two steps of his dialectic where he presents some basic theories of knowledge and shows why they're inaccurate. The first of these is direct Continue Reading …
Advance Release: Philosophy vs. Improv #2
Yes, this is happening, and you're getting this second installment in the new series in lieu of a Nightcap this week, as we couldn't get it together to record one between our two Fichte recordings, though we've already got one for you ready for the run-up to Schelling. Four episodes of PvI have now been recorded, and the website should be up within the next week. This Continue Reading …
Ep. 271: Johan Gottlieb Fichte’s Transcendental Idealism (Part Two for Supporters)
Continuing from part one on The Vocation of Man (1799), Book II. Is Fichte trying to keep the notion of a "real world" beyond our experience or not? It's part of the progression of the text that while at first he assumes that there must be something real behind this experienced world we as individuals create, he gives up that notion in the middle of Book II. So how does he Continue Reading …
Ep. 270: Classical Indian (Vedanta and Nyaya) Design Arguments for God (Part One)
Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free. On the new book God and the World’s Arrangement: Readings from Vedanta and Nyaya Philosophy of Religion, which presents two takes on the argument that God must exist because the world is a "product." The first is excerpted from the Brahma-sūtra (a.k.a. the Vedānta-sutra, compiled ca. the 2nd Continue Reading …
Ep. 270: Classical Indian (Vedanta and Nyaya) Design Arguments for God (Part Two for Supporters)
Continuing from part one on God and the World’s Arrangement: Readings from Vedanta and Nyaya Philosophy of Religion after the departure of our guest, Stephen Phillips. Wes grills Seth and Mark on what's really new here philosophically: We're all familiar with the design argument, so why wade through all these unfamiliar schools and archaic formulations? So we talk more about Continue Reading …