The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

On Anarchy, State & Utopia (1974), ch. 1-3 and 7. What moral limits should we put on government power? Nozick thinks that the only legitimate functions of government are protection and enforcement of contracts. Contra Rawls, Nozick's "entitlement" version of justice doesn't look at income inequality or any other pattern of holdings, but only at whether holdings were legitimately obtained, e.g. through purchase, gift, inheritance, reparation, or taking something unclaimed. Of course, since our current distribution of wealth has its historical roots deep in war and pillaging... Hey, never mind that, says Nozick! The full foursome are joined by Slate's Stephen Metcalf. Read more about the topic and get the book, and also listen to Seth's introduction. End song: "Samuel" by Geoff Esty (with singing by Mark), revamped from the 1994 album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down by The MayTricks. Read about it. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation. Please also visit our new sponsor, mobile service provider Ting. Go to pel.ting.com and get $25 off your order.

Seth Paskin introduces Anarchy, State, and Utopia about libertarianism and the limits of legitimate government power. Watch for the full discussion to be released in a couple of weeks. Read more about the topic and get the book.

On Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854). What is the appropriate life for a truly thoughtful person? Thoreau warns against getting ensnared by social bullshit like jobs and charity, and instead living simply, in direct contact with nature, relying as much as possible only on your own effort. His time in the woods on Walden pond was meant to be an experiment to see what life lived this way really has to offer. Mark, Wes, and Dylan argue about how to best take Thoreau's brand of opinionating, and what the ethical upshot of the attempt to live naturally is supposed to be. Read more about the topic and get the book. End song: "Green Song" by Mark Linsenmayer, originally released on The MayTricks (1992), newly remixed. Read about it. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation. Also, please support our sponsor, Squarespace for your web-site creation needs. Use the checkout code "Examined" for a free trial and 10% off. Interested in a bitchin' PEL wall calendar?

On Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The American Scholar" lecture (1837) and his essays "Self-Reliance" and "Circles" (1841). How should we live? Emerson thinks that conformity, which includes most of what passes for ethics, jobs, and scholarship, makes us less than truly human. Be true to yourself! But since we're all ever-changing, that's a moving target, right? But Emerson thinks that when you get really truly honest about what you think and feel, it turns out that you've tapped into something universal, something beyond just you, something eternal. But don't expect Emerson to really explain that part; the upshot of these essays is primarily social, not religious, much less metaphysical. Trust yourself, stop bullshitting, stop living according to others' expectations! Mark, Wes, and Dylan argue over whether this is tired cliche or acutely perceptive, and whether Emerson's poetic language provides helps or distracts. Read more about the topic and get the essays. End song: "Idiot, Listen" by Mark Lint, recorded mostly in 1997, newly completed and mixed. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation. Also, please support our sponsor, Squarespace for your web-site creation needs. Use the checkout code "Examined" for a free trial and 10% off. The picture is by Corey Mohler for PEL.

On Guide for the Perplexed (1168). What is God? Central to Judaism, at least, is the idea that He's a unity: "God is One." Maimonides thinks that this means you can't attribute properties to God at all. Why? Because (according to M's Aristotelian metaphysics, anyway) size, color, spatial and temporal location, mental state, etc. are really parts of a thing. Unity = no parts = no properties, not even essential properties, i.e. those that define a thing. So God has no definition, and all the statements about God (He's good, he's all-powerful, omniscient, etc.) central to religion are strictly speaking false. You can only say what God is not. Mark and Seth are joined by Danny Lobell, comedian host of the Modern Day Philosophers podcast to figure out what this could possibly amount to. Read more and get the text. End song: "Double Negative Theology" by Mark Lint. Read about it. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation. Also, please support our sponsor, Squarespace for your web-site creation needs. Use the checkout code "Examined" for a free trial and 10% off. The picture is by Corey Mohler for PEL.

Mark, Seth, Wes, Dylan, and Philosophy Bro walk a live audience through Plato's dialogue about love, sex, self-improvement, and ancient Greek pederasty. You can also choose to watch this on video. Is love just a feeling, or does it make the world go 'round? Does love make you better, or make you weak? What's the difference between good love and bad love (and is any love bad)? Plato gives us a whole panel of related but conflicting opinions through the mouths of his characters here, including not only Socrates and his predictable "when you love in the right way, you're really loving the good itself," but comedic playwright Aristophanes (love completes us, literally!), mooning Athenian statesman Alcibiades, and a bunch of other historical figures who are to varying degrees fixated on teenage boys. The big show, recorded 7/20/14 in Middleton, WI, in front of an audience of PEL fans who traveled in to see us, starts off with a tune from Mark Lint featuring Rei Tangko, followed by Philosophy Bro doing his magic thing to give you background on Plato's "Apology" (which you should recall from our first episode), then the main event, followed by some Q&A from audience members and Daniel Horne reading webcam viewer comments. Read more about the topic and get the book. The Mark Lint tunes here are "Nothing in This World But You," then (bumped to the end of this recording), "Feeling Time," "Find You Out," "Adds Up to Nothing," "Granted," and a brand new one, "I Demand It." This picture of Plato is by Genevieve Arnold for PEL. Video by Glenn Loos-Austin. Watch on YouTube. Jump to Symposium part of the video.

What have we learned? How has our take on the PEL project changed? What are our future plans? On the eve before our big live-in-front-of-an-audience ep. 100, we four sat down in Dylan's living room together (with recurrent guest Daniel Horne to provide some semi-outisder perspective) to reflect on what we've been doing here. Folks new to PEL may want to listen to any other PEL episode before listening to this discussion, lest you be overwhelmed with our generally self-congratulatory musings. End song: "I Wanna Go Back," from Mark Linsenmayer's Spanish Armada: Love and Related Neuroses (1993). Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation. Also, please support our sponsor, Squarespace for your web-site creation needs. Use the checkout code "Examined" for a free trial and 10% off.

On his book What Money Can't Buy: the Moral Limits of Markets (2012), and also bringing Sandel into the discussion begun without him in our last episode about his first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Free economic transactions are supposed to benefit both the buyer and the seller, so why not allow prostitution, vote buying, pay-to-immigrate, selling ad space on your house or body, and premium versions of everything for those willing to pay more? Sandel thinks that these practices are degrading even if uncoerced, and argues that classical liberalism--by trying to maintain neutrality on philosophical questions like "what is the good?"--doesn't have the resources to prevent rampant and undesirable commodification. Read more about the topic and get the text. End song: "The Like Song," from The MayTricks' So Chewy (1993). Download the album for free. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation.

On his book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), mostly ch. 1 & 4. Classical liberalism from Locke to Rawls focuses on rights as primary: a good government is one that protects people from violations of their rights, and that's what social justice amounts to, though of course, there's some disagreement about what counts as a "right." Sandel thinks that there's a idea about the self behind this picture: we are selves that have interests, but are not itself composed of those interests. In other words, on this view, you are in your essence just a choosing being, not a member of your family or community. Sandel thinks that is bunk. It doesn't allow for real introspection, or even real freedom, as all of our choices would merely be based on ultimately arbitrary preferences, and not on understanding who we really are. Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan debate whether Sandel is really representing Rawls's liberalism fairly here and what alternative to a liberal state he's actually suggesting. Read more about it and get the book. Also, the post about Alec Baldwin that Wes refers to at the end is here. Make sure to listen to the follow-up to this episode where Sandel himself answers some of our questions about this book. Read Wes's extensive critique of "Liberalism and the Limits of Justice." End song: "Wonderful You," from Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio (1998). Download the album for free. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation. Please support our sponsor Harrys.com and enter the code "PEL" when you check out.

Discussing Lynda Walsh's book Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy (2013) with the author, focusing on Robert J. Oppenheimer. We also read a speech from 1950 he gave called "The Encouragement of Science." What is the role of the science adviser? Should scientists just "stick to the facts," or can only someone with technical knowledge make decisions about what to actually do? After leading the atomic bomb project during WWII, Oppenheimer thought that scientists needed to become politicians themselves to make sure that the power of technology wasn't abused. His views about openness (sharing weapons tech with other governments) didn't go over well with the Eisenhower administration, and he was stripped of his security clearance. Lynda's book is not philosophy, exactly, but about rhetoric. Her thesis is that the social role of preacher-scientists like Oppenheimer is comparable to that of ancient prophets like the Oracle at Delphi: they serve to bring about political certainty by providing knowledge inaccessible to ordinary citizens. Insofar as we can't ourselves analyze the data, we're taking them on faith as authorities. Lynda tries to get Mark, Seth, and Dylan to talk about the difference between philosophy and rhetoric. There's some talk of Bill Nye, Neil Degrasse-Tyson, Rachael Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, and others. Listen to Lynda's introduction and get more information about the topic, as well as Lynda's book. End song: "Request Denied," by Mark Lint, recorded in spurts between 2000 and now. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation. Thanks to Corey Mohler for the picture of Oppenheimer.

Guest Lynda Walsh describes her book Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy, focusing on J. Robert Oppenheimer's conflicted position after WWII as science advisor and anti-nuke spokesman. Read more about the topic and get the readings.

On Kurt Gödel's essays, “Some Basic Theorems on the Foundations of Mathematics and their Implications” (1951) and “The Modern Development of the Foundations of Mathematics in Light of Philosophy” (1961). Gödel is famous for some "incompleteness theorems" of direct interest only to those trying to axiomatize mathematics. What are the implications for the rest of philosophy? Gödel thought that, contra people's claims that incompleteness demonstrates some kind of relativism, he had showed that the world of mathematics even in its most abstract reaches is part of the real (though non-physical) world. Mark, Wes, Dylan, and guest Adi Habbu try to figure out these unpublished and dare I say incomplete essays. Listen to Adi's introduction, read more about the topic, and get the essays. End song: "Axiomatic" from Mark Lint & the Simulacra. Read about it. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation.

Adi Habbu lays out Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems and describes "Some Basic Theorems on the Foundations of Mathematics and their Implications" (1951) and "The Modern Development of the Foundations of Mathematics in Light of Philosophy" (1961). Read about the topic. Listen to the full episode.

On Arthur Schopenhauer's essays, "On Authorship and Style," "On Thinking for Oneself," and "On Genius" (all published 1851). Is the best way to do philosophy (or any art) to self-consciously build on the work of others to advance the genre? Schopenhauer says no! Geniuses are solitary, original, authentic, naive thinkers. They write because they have something to say, not because they're being paid. They don't read too much for fear of being overwhelmed by their influences, and certainly don't try to remember what they read too well like a scholar would. They think before writing, and get at perennial truths from their own, uniquely grown perspective. So don't burden them with responsibilities like jobs and families, okay? Mark, Wes, and Dylan try to figure out whether these harsh commandments hold water or whether S. is just giving excuses for his own unpopularity. Read more about it and get the essays. End song: "Drake's Song" from The Maytricks (1992) (chords: Brian Drake, lyrics/melody: Mark) Get the whole album free. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation.

On P.F. Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment" (1960), Galen Strawson's "The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility" (1994), and Gary Watson's "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme" (1987). Do we ordinarily act with the right kind of freedom so that blame is justified? Galen Strawson says no: our choices stem from our character, which is not something we chose (or if we did choose a path to having that character, that prior choice wasn't the result of another choice, etc.). Galen's father P.F. Strawson said that blame and resentment are essential parts of our social attitudes and aren't really open to philosophical critique, no matter what you think about determinism. Mark, Wes, and Seth are joined by Tamler Sommers of the U. of Houston and Very Bad Wizards podcast, who tries to convince us that ole' P.F. was right. Well Pffff to that! Listen to Talmer's introduction, then read more about the topic and get the articles. End song: "Irresistible" by New People, from Impossible Things (2011), written and sung by Matt Ackerman. Buy the album at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation.