“A bad work of art is an oxymoron,” Patrick Doorly says, “like bad skill.” He thinks there’s no such thing as bad art because the term does not refer to a class of objects or a category of activity. Art simply refers to excellence or to any “high-quality endeavor,” a phrase he borrows from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art Continue Reading …
Episode 79: Heraclitus on Understanding the World (Citizens Only)
Eva Brann discusses her book The Logos of Heraclitus (2011). What is the world like, and how can we understand it? Heraclitus thinks that the answer to both questions is found in “the logos.”
End song: “Trading Away” by New People, from Impossible Things (2011).
PREVIEW-Episode 79: Heraclitus on Understanding the World
Eva Brann discusses her book The Logos of Heraclitus (2011). What is the world like, and how can we understand it? Heraclitus thinks that the answer to both questions is found in “the logos.”
Topic for #80: Heidegger on our Existential Situation
Listen right now to Seth giving a 10-min summary of Heidegger’s essay via a new “Precognition” mini-sode. Back in episode 32 (over two years ago!) we covered the project of Martin Heidegger’s most famous work, Being and Time, composed early in his career. (Incidentally, I see a new and exciting looking translation of this on Amazon that you may want Continue Reading …
Topic for #79: Heraclitus’s Metaphysics of Tension with Eva Brann
On Saturday 6/22 the regular foursome sat down with Eva Brann, Dylan’s colleague at St. John’s in Anapolis, to talk with her about her book The Logos of Heraclitus. Heraclitus (who was active around 500 BCE) is the “Pre-Socratic” philosopher with probably the most influence today and together with Parmenides (it’s not clear which of the two lived first or Continue Reading …
Not School: Giles Deleuze’s “A Thousand Plateaus”
On Chapters 1-3 of the 1980 book by Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Featuring Mark Linsenmayer, Daniel McKay, Dom Romani, Paul Harris, and Rian Mitch.
The book presents a large-scale picture of cosmology; we hashed through a set of difficult concepts.
PREVIEW-Ep. 68: Guest David Chalmers on the Scrutability of the World
On David Chalmers’s book Constructing the World (2012). How are all the various truths about the world related to each other? David Chalmers, famous for advocating a scientifically respectable form of brain-consciousness dualism, advocates a framework of scrutability: if one knew some set of base truths, then the rest would be knowable from them.
Episode 68: David Chalmers Interview on the Scrutability of the World (Citizens Only)
On David Chalmers’s book Constructing the World (2012). How are all the various truths about the world related to each other? David Chalmers, famous for advocating a scientifically respectable form of brain-consciousness dualism, advocates a framework of scrutability: if one knew some set of base truths, then the rest would be knowable from them. Learn more.
End song: “What You Want” by New People, from Might Get It Right (2013). Download the album.
Topic for #68: Interviewing David Chalmers on Conceptual Analysis and Metaphysics
On 12/4 we spoke with David Chalmers about his new book, Constructing the World. Listen to the episode. The book explores a series of related positions that attempt to generalize and improve upon Carnap’s project of logical construction in the Aufbau, the subject of our episode 67 (which will be posted soon). Carnap’s project was problematic mainly because first, it Continue Reading …
Audiobook: W.V.O. Quine’s “On What There Is”
Dylan Casey reads the 1948 article, discussed on our episode 66.
Jim Holt Considering Why the World Exists
Jim Holt has a new book out with the provocative title Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story, featuring encounters with the mathematician Roger Penrose, author John Updike, physicist Steven Weinberg, philosopher Adolf Grünbaum, and theologian Richard Swinburne, among others. David Ulin at the L.A. Times summarizes: That question — “Why is there something rather than nothing?” — Continue Reading …
Russell’s Atomistic Metaphysics
Some information about Russell’s atomism was discussed in in our Wittgenstein’s Tractatus podcast. For a bit more information, here’s his essay “The Ultimate Constituents of Matter,” pointed out to us (dismissively) by frequent blog discussion contributor Burl and mentioned on our recent episode. I leave it to you all to explore this essay as you like, but let me give Continue Reading …
Information Theory and Metaphysics
Courtesy of listener Matt Gantner, here’s a Scientific American article on “Why Information Can’t Be the Basis of Reality.” The author, John Horgan, criticizes information theorists like James Gleick who posit that information is somehow the basic structure of the universe (which seems to be a modern variation on Anaxagoras’s idea that mind, or Nous, is the fundamental component). Horgan Continue Reading …
Episode 27: Nagarjuna on Buddhist “Emptiness” (Citizens Only)
Primarily discussing “Reasoning: The Sixty Stanzas” and “Emptiness: The Seventy Stanzas,” by the 2nd century Indian Buddhist Nagarjuna. Is the world of our experience ultimately real? If not, does it have something metaphysically basic underlying it? For Nagarjuna, the answers are “no” and “no… well… not that we can talk about.” With guest Erik Douglas.
End song: “Nothing in this World” by by Mark Lint.
PREVIEW-Episode 27: Nagarjuna on Buddhist “Emptiness”
Primarily discussing “Reasoning: The Sixty Stanzas” and “Emptiness: The Seventy Stanzas,” by the 2nd century Indian Buddhist Nagarjuna. Is the world of our experience ultimately real? If not, does it have something metaphysically basic underlying it? For Nagarjuna, the answers are “no” and “no… well… not that we can talk about.” With guest Erik Douglas.
Episode 24: Spinoza on God and Metaphysics (Citizens Only)
Discussing Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), books 1 and 2. God is everything, therefore the world is God as apprehended through some particular attributes, namely insofar as one of his aspects is infinite space (extension, i.e. matter) and insofar as one of his aspects is mind (our minds being chunks or “modes” of the big God mind).
End song: “Spiritual Insect,” by Mark Lint and the Fake from So Whaddaya Think? (2000).
PREVIEW-Episode 24: Spinoza on God and Metaphysics
Discussing Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), books 1 and 2. God is everything, therefore the world is God as apprehended through some particular attributes, namely insofar as one of his aspects is infinite space (extension, i.e. matter) and insofar as one of his aspects is mind (our minds being chunks or “modes” of the big God mind).
Episode 19: Kant: What Can We Know? (Citizens Only)
Discussing Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783). Do we have any business doing metaphysics, which is by definition about things that we could not possibly experience? With guest Azzurra Crispino.
End song: “Subjectivity” by The MayTricks, from Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (1994)
PREVIEW-Episode 19: Kant: What Can We Know?
Discussing Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783). Do we have any business doing metaphysics, which is by definition about things that we could not possibly experience? With guest Azzurra Crispino.
Episode 13: What Are the Metaphysical Implications of Quantum Physics?
On Werner Heisenberg’s “Physics and Philosophy” (1958), and talking about it with an actual former particle physicist, Dylan Casey.
What weird stuff about reality does quantum physics imply? Is Heisenberg (of the Uncertainty Principle fame) right that we need to reject “metaphysical realism” based on this very well established scientific framework? The discussion ranges over the uncertainty principle, relativity, wave/particle duality, Pre-Socratic metaphysics, why Kant is wrong about space, and lots of very weird things.