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Can Refugees Be Nietzscheans?

January 19, 2017 by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein 11 Comments

The massive flow of immigrants in Europe has led to predictions about future culture clashes because the values and mindsets of mainly Muslim immigrants are said to be incompatible with those of Western Europeans. The fact that most immigrants are religious is a main factor because in secular Europe the firm belief in God or literal interpretations of scriptures tend to be met  Continue Reading …

What Do Existentialists Think about Love?

July 10, 2016 by Ana Sandoiu 12 Comments

In this video, philosopher Skye Cleary introduces her new book, Existentialism and Romantic Love. If you skip past the rather awkward acting of Simone de Beauvoir’s play Who Shall Die, from about the sixth minute onward things become interesting. In a style that has become her own—treading lightly (and gracefully) between scholarly analysis and a lighter, more popular  Continue Reading …

How Plato’s “Phaedrus” Influenced Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”

July 3, 2016 by Ana Sandoiu 1 Comment

Death in Venice is one complex piece of writing. Besides dealing with homoeroticism (in 1911) and approaching complex questions of ethics, psychology, and aesthetics, the novella also manages to reference Nietzsche and Plato while making us empathize with someone who some might (crudely) just call a pedophile. Gustave Von Aschenbach, the protagonist, is an aging, famous  Continue Reading …

Not School This February

February 2, 2016 by Nathan Hanks Leave a Comment

Hey,  there. Nathan Hanks here with a February update on the Partially Examined Life's Not School and Citizen's Forum. While the semesters are starting, PEL Members are also meeting and talking with others about whatever is of interest. Currently there is a discussion in the forum on Nietzche's concept of  "The Death of God" and a conversation in the group for Consciousness  Continue Reading …

Is Morality Ethical?

December 15, 2013 by Wayne Schroeder 1 Comment

“Morality is neither rational nor absolute nor natural." (Nietzsche) Nietzsche and Spinoza both challenged the validity of morality based on transcendent or universal values. They both argued that moral restrictions are based on weakness:  Nietzsche via enslavement by harboring vengeance or "resentment" against life ( Genealogy of Morals), Spinoza via enslavement to passive  Continue Reading …

Dec. Not School: Sartre, Joyce, Nietzsche, Theater, Natural Law

December 8, 2013 by Evan Gould Leave a Comment

For this post, I give you some theme music by a very talented musician named Sumner McKane. I chose this nice little tune not for the music itself (deserving though it may be), but for its title: "The Winter I Got Louder than Bombs and Standing on a Beach." I'm going to assume this title reveals that Sumner has memories (and possible nostalgia) for a time in his youth when he  Continue Reading …

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

November 28, 2013 by Michael Burgess 4 Comments

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  Continue Reading …

Nietzsche the Hydra

November 23, 2013 by Randall Miron 3 Comments

[Editor's Note: Thanks to Randall Miron for this post. Randall's a long-time audio editor of ours and has been helping edit blog posts here recently as well.] In his short book Nietzsche, subtitled “Nietzsche’s Voices,” Ronald Hayman argues that, “Like Kierkegaard, who made copious use of pseudonyms and personae, Nietzsche was exploring his ambivalence.” This theme is  Continue Reading …

November Not School Groups

November 5, 2013 by Evan Gould 10 Comments

Here are the Not School group activities for the month of November for PEL Citizens. Intro Readings in Philosophy: Finally!  We have a Nietzsche discussion in Not School.  They will be reading the On the Genealogy of Morals.  Join up and reduce to sour grapes all of your precious finger wagging. See Hillary Szydlowski's plug here. Philosophy of Mind: We are beginning our  Continue Reading …

Is Philosophy Better Than Art?

October 2, 2012 by David Buchanan 9 Comments

If you believe Plato, then the answer is "yes". If all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato, then the artists have been subordinated to the philosophers for about 25 centuries. According to Plato's Republic, especially the last section, the artists present a danger to society and to your soul. Two of my favorite thinkers disagree with Plato and Socrates on this point. Friedrich  Continue Reading …

A Brief Guide to Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense”

August 9, 2012 by Wes Alwan 4 Comments

A Brief Guide to Nietzsche's On Truth and Lie in the Extra- Moral Sense For our episode on Nietzsche's On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense, I've created a guide that you'll find here. Here's an excerpt from the Introduction: Introduction Nietzsche’s question in On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense is how a drive for truth could ever have  Continue Reading …

Nietzsche and the “Death of God.”

August 9, 2012 by Chris Mullen 3 Comments

In connection with Episode 61, I submit the following discussion by The Big Ideas podcast concerning Nietsche's famous but often misunderstood claim that "God is dead." The several participants in the discussion each address Nietzsche's pronouncement from different angles. Giles Fraser argues that the "God is dead" revelation is that humanity can only become free if it  Continue Reading …

Badiou: Wittgenstein and Nietzsche as Anti-Philosophy

May 25, 2012 by C.-Derick-Varn 7 Comments

Listening to the guys and Philosophy Bro on the last episode, I want to interject that actually I see Wittgenstein as a bridge between analytic and continental philosophy for reasons beyond his being Austrian. What he brackets out and why is crucial to his project, which does become "anti-philosophical" in a broad sense. Anti-philosophy is defined by both Alain Badiou and  Continue Reading …

Foucault Was No Relativist

January 30, 2012 by Getty Lustila 10 Comments

[Editor's Note: We're pleased to have some more blog input here from Getty, the guest from our Hume/Smith episode, who wrote his undergrad thesis on Foucault and was in line to be a guest on this one himself. You can blame me for the image, which I found here.] Was Foucault a relativist about truth? Truth-relativism is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, only  Continue Reading …

In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens

December 16, 2011 by Daniel Horne 5 Comments

http://youtu.be/p4rF5mspaVk Watch on YouTube. Christopher Hitchens died on Thursday after a punishing bout with cancer, and I'd like to take the liberty of inserting a brief memoriam. I do this in a philosophy blog partially because PEL recently discussed one of his books. But mostly I do it because I would hate to think anyone remembers Hitchens as nothing more than a "New  Continue Reading …

Walter Kaufmann Lectures on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre

April 15, 2011 by Mark Linsenmayer 7 Comments

Via openculture.com, check out these lectures by Walter Kaufmann, who did most of the good Nietzsche translations you'd pick up nowadays and was the teacher of Frithjof Bergmann whose name I drop a lot on the show (who was in turn teacher of Robert Solomon). -Mark Linsenmayer  Continue Reading …

What’s at stake in the Heidegger/Nazism debate?

March 7, 2010 by Seth Paskin 5 Comments

So I have been established, or established myself, as the Heidegger 'guy' on this blog/podcast.  Why?  I read a bunch of his stuff in grad school, studied with one of his students (at the time a professor) in Germany, and wrote my Master's thesis on "Ereignis".  Wes just sent me a link to this review at The Time Higher Education of a new book by Emmanuel Faye on Heidegger  Continue Reading …

Christian Realism and Holy War

December 15, 2009 by Wes Alwan 7 Comments

"Christian Realism" -- even Christians ought to struggle with David Brook's latest invention. How delightful to juxtapose other-worldliness and practicality! But to really understand it, replace "Christian" with "love" and "Realism" with "War." Meaning, "I love war, but I wage it only out of love." It's almost a self-parodying confirmation of Nietzsche's critique of the human  Continue Reading …

Episode 11: Nietzsche’s Immoralism: What Is Ethics, Anyway?

November 10, 2009 by Mark Linsenmayer 1 Comment

Transcription of Episode 61 on Nietzsche

Discussing The Genealogy of Morals (mostly the first two essays) and Beyond Good and Evil Ch. 1 (The Prejudices of Philosophers), 5 (Natural History of Morals), and 9 (What is Noble?). We go through Nietzsche's convoluted and historically improbable stories about about the transition from master to slave morality and the origin of bad conscience. Why does he diss  Continue Reading …

Episode 11: Nietzsche’s Immoralism: What Is Ethics, Anyway?

November 10, 2009 by Mark Linsenmayer 91 Comments

Discussing The Genealogy of Morals (mostly the first two essays) and Beyond Good and Evil Ch. 1 (The Prejudices of Philosophers), 5 (Natural History of Morals), and 9 (What is Noble?). We go through Nietzsche's convoluted and historically improbable stories about about the transition from master to slave morality and the origin of bad conscience. Why does he diss  Continue Reading …

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