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 …
Richard Rorty and the Origins of Post-Truth
In the chaotic flurry of consternation, excitement, and viral postmortems that followed the US election, two notions stood out to me as slightly contradictory yet strangely connected: the dreaded concept of “post-truth,” and the prescience of a philosopher who supposedly predicted Trump 18 years ago. “Post-truth” describes the blatant disregard for facts that has been Continue Reading …
Foucault Was No Relativist
[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 …
Topic for #48: Merleau-Ponty on the Role of Perception in Knowledge
Maurice Merleau-Ponty's magnum opus--his equivalent to Being & Nothinginess or Being & Time--is The Phenomenology of Perception. It is reputed (by Seth, at least) to complete Heidegger's project by paying proper attention to our embodiedness: we have bodies, with specific perceptual limitations and are not only culturally but physically situated in ways that (as Heidegger Continue Reading …
Boghossian vs. Goodman on Fact Constructivism
One book we'd mentioned on the episode as a counter to Goodman's epistemology was Paul Boghossian's Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. Boghossian's target is any theory of knowledge that says that facts are constructed, reflecting the contingent needs and interest of some society, and that consequently some different society with different needs could Continue Reading …
PREVIEW-Episode 28: Nelson Goodman on Art as Epistemology
This is a 31-minute preview of a 2 hr, 10-minute episode. Buy Now Purchase this episode for $2.99. Or become a PEL Citizen for $5 a month, and get access to this and all other paywalled episodes, including 68 back catalogue episodes; exclusive Part 2's for episodes published after September, 2020; and our after-show Nightcap, where the guys respond to listener email and chat Continue Reading …
Episode 18: Plato: What Is Knowledge? (Citizens Only)
On the Theaetetus and the Meno, two dialogues about knowledge. We're returning to Plato for a somewhat more thorough treatment than we gave him in Episode 1. This should be considered part two (Hume being #1) of three discussions intended to convey the main conflict in the history of epistemology between the empiricists (like Hume) and the rationalists (like Plato). We Continue Reading …
PREVIEW-Episode 18: Plato: What Is Knowledge?
This is a 34-minute preview of a 2 hr, 18-minute episode. Buy Now Purchase this episode for $2.99. Or become a PEL Citizen for $5 a month, and get access to this and all other paywalled episodes, including 68 back catalogue episodes; exclusive Part 2's for episodes published after September, 2020; and our after-show Nightcap, where the guys respond to listener email and chat Continue Reading …
Episode 11: Nietzsche’s Immoralism: What Is Ethics, Anyway?
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?
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 …