The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

Special guest Philosophy Bro introduces us to Elizabeth Anscombe's essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" and her book Intention (sections 22-27). Read more about the topic.

In support of our ep. #87 discussing Sartre, the PEL Players present our 2nd annual dramatic reading of a work of philosophical theater. Mark Linsenmayer and Wes Alwan are joined by real actresses Lucy Lawless (Xena, Battlestar Galactica, Parks & Recreation, etc.) and Jaime Murray (Defiance, Dexter, Warehouse 13, etc.), who are pals through working together on Spartacus. Warning: This is a cold read, not a rehearsed production, for educational purposes only (meaning you're not allowed to have fun listening to this, I guess). For sure, you'll get your money's worth for this free product. PEL Citizens can listen to amusing outtakes from this project. You can read the version we read of this 1944 French existentialist play online here. You may also want listen to Mark explain Sartre's view of human nature and freedom and read more about the topic. End song: "No Exit," by Mark Lint, freshly written and recorded for this occasion. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation.

On Jean-Paul Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism" (1946), "Bad Faith" (pt. 1, ch. 2 of Being & Nothingness, 1943), and his play No Exit (1944). What is human nature? Sartre says that there isn't one, but there is a universal human condition, which is our absolute freedom. This freedom is a basic certainty in our experience, and it comes out of the mere fact of our being able to will, so no subsequent alleged science can contradict it. If you claim to be determined by your character or circumstances, you're acting in "bad faith," which is what for Sartre has to serve as an ethics given the lack of good and evil floating out there in the world or duties assigned to us by nature or God or any of that. He describes his project as a matter of teasing out the often unrealized implications atheism. Though his reading is rife with fun, literary examples, we (the regular foursome) had trouble both with this insistence on absolute freedom in all circumstances and on on this claim about no human nature which ends up making bad faith seemingly inevitable: you can't be "authentic" to your "true self" because there is no true self to be authentic to! So ha! Read more about the topic and get the texts. Listen to Mark's introduction and our read-through of "No Exit." End song: "Minnesota Freak" by Mark Lint and the Fake (2000). Read about it. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation.

Mark Linsenmayer lays out some themes from Jean-Paul Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism" and the "Bad Faith" chapter (Part 1, Ch. 2) of Being & Nothingness. Listen to the full episode. A transcript is available on our Citizen site's Free Stuff page.

On The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published mostly in 1962. Does scientific knowledge simply accumulate as we learn more and more, coming closer and closer to a full and truthful picture of the world? Kuhn says no! Instead, each scientific sub-culture has its own "paradigm," or model for what constitutes legitimate science, which includes what problems to study, what to counts as a result, some background assumptions, and other things nebulous enough that you really can't enumerate them. While Kuhn still believes that the movement to a new paradigm constitutes progress in a sense, the traditional picture of progressive science is still wrong. Dylan enthuses at a weary Mark, Wes, and Seth over this fast and furious book, which is chock full of stories about phlogiston and all things mechanico-corpuscular. Read more about the topic and get the text. Listen to Dylan's introduction. End song: "Retrogress" from The Fake Johnson Trio New & Improved EP (1996), remixed now with freshly re-recorded vocals. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation.

Dylan Casey lays out Thomas Kuhn's thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Read more about the topic and get the book. Listen to the episode. A transcript is available on our Citizen site's Free Stuff page.

On John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), most of ch. 1-4. What makes for a just society? Rawls gives us a thought experiment: Imagine you don't know whether you're rich or poor or any of the other specifics of your situation (he calls this going behind "the veil of ignorance" into the "original position"). Now what principles would you pick to determine basic social institutions? Would you choose a caste society where you might be born an untouchable and be screwed? Rawls thinks that in this position you would instead support his basic rules of justice, which are (in short) to make sure everyone has basic liberties, and, more controversially, to allow only such inequalities as bring up the fortunes of those least well off. So you can allow super riches so long as doing so means that the poorest will be less poor than with any other arrangement; the default position is everyone getting an equal share of society's wealth unless you can demonstrate that letting some have more will benefit all. This theory has been massively influential, and you can easily read it into Obama's speeches. Even many defenders of free-market capitalism do so on basically Rawlsian grounds. The founding fathers (Mark, Seth and Wes) and an especially energetic Dylan debate whether this original position is really coherent and whether it yields the principles that Rawls wants it to. Read more about the topic and get the text, then listen to Seth's introduction. End song: "Yours to Keep," by Mark Lint & the Madison Lint Ensemble, featuring Bob Linsenmayer. Read about it. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation. Remember please to do any holiday shopping at Amazon you may do through PEL's Amazon link in the right margin of partiallyexaminedlife.com.

Seth Paskin summarizes the John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Listen to the full PEL episode. Read more about the topic at partiallyexaminedlife.com. A transcript is available on our Citizen site's Free Stuff page.

On Friedrich Nietzsche's The Gay Science (1882, with book 5 added 1887). What is wisdom? Nietzsche gives us an updated take on the Socratic project of challenging your most deeply held beliefs. Challenge not just your belief in God ("God is dead!") but uncover all your habits of thinking in terms of the divine. Question the motives behind relentless inquiry: the "will to truth." Realize how little of your life is actually a matter of conscious reflection, and the consequent limits on self-knowledge. The very act of systematization in philosophy overestimates what we can know; instead, we need a "gay" (in the sense of cheerful, carefree, and subversive) science (in the sense of organized knowledge; this is not about modern experimental science) that chases after fleeting insights and is able to question, i.e. laugh at, the pretensions of its own activity. This is the position from which one can then artistically create one's own character and one's values, and this "creation" is not whimsical in the sense of arbitrary, but is a matter of rigorous and careful discernment, an exercise of one's "intellectual conscience." Hear Mark, Wes, and Dylan frolic through this field of aphorisms and short essays. Read more about the topic, find out exactly which sections we read, and get the text.  Or read the transcription of the episode (Professionally transcribed by Rev.com) End song: "Take a Hike," by Mark Lint and Stevie P. Read about it. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation.

In light of our ep. 83, many listeners had questions on Frithjof's social/political/economic proposals for creating a post-job, pro-meaningful-work world. Mark Linsenmayer here pitches a number of these questions (culled from our blog and Facebook group) to Frithjof. What would a future New Work world look like? How do first-world folks fit into the project? How can I make MY calling economically work RIGHT NOW? What does New Work require for education? How do New Work proposals relate to legislative moves like a guaranteed minimum income? How do Bergmann's ideas relate to Marx's? Some sort of answer to all these questions and more is now yours for the listening. Connect with us via newworknewculture.com and partiallyexaminedlife.com The New Work Facebook group is at www.facebook.com/groups/nankcollaboratory.

Talking with Frithjof Bergmann, Prof. Emeritus from U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor about his book New Work, New Culture (2004, English release coming soon). Frithjof is a world-renowned ex-Hegel/Nietzsche scholar who has worked since the early 80s on projects to realize the goal of "New Work," which is an alternative to the current, dysfunctional job system. New Work enables people to do work (which is not the same as a "job") that they really, really want. Human nature is not such that we are born free and need restraining by a social contract; rather, we need institutions to help us develop a self, to figure out what we really want and become free by doing things that we deeply identify with. New Work Enterprises promotes technology like fabricators and cutting-edge farming to support community self-sufficiency in places like Detroit that the job system has left behind. Read more about New Work at newworknewculture.com. Be sure to listen to Mark's overview of the topic. Listen to a follow-up Q&A between Mark and Frithjof. Watch more interviews on the New Work YouTube channel Mark manages. Get more info, video, and a hefty hunk of the text. End song: "We Who Have Escaped," a brand new recording by the new lineup of Mark's band New People. Get the mp3, along with all three of their albums, a Not School discussion of this Bergmann book, and much more by becoming a PEL Citizen, or just support our efforts through a donation.

An introduction to and summary of Frithjof Bergmann's New Work, New Culture, read by Mark Linsenmayer. The full episode on this topic can be found here. Read more about the topic at partiallyexaminedlife.com. A transcript is available on our Citizen site's Free Stuff page.

On Conjectures and Refutations (1963), the first three essays. What is science, and how is it different than pseudo-science? From philosophy? Is philosophy just pseudo-science, or proto-science, or what? Popper thinks that all legitimate inquiry is about solving real problems, and scientific theories are those that are potentially falsifiable: they make definitely predictions about the world that, if these fail to be true, would show that the theory is false. With this idea, Popper thinks he's achieved a real respect for objectivity and beaten the epistemologists of the past, both empiricists (who think the ultimate source of knowledge is experience) and rationalists (who think that it's reason). For Popper, there is no such infallible source. We approach nature with expectations: we leap to a theory with little if any warrant (the "conjectures") and then we modify it when it fails us ("refutations"). Modify, not reject: really, the most powerful force in knowledge is tradition, so long as that tradition is open to critique. Read more about the topic and get the text. Listen to Dylan's summary of the essays. End song: "Falsifiable," by Mark Lint, written and recorded just for this episode. Read about it. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation.

A summary of the first three essays in Karl Popper's collection Conjectures and Refutations, read by Dylan Casey. We recommend listening to this before the full episode. Read more about the topic at partiallyexaminedlife.com. A transcript is available on our Citizen site's Free Stuff page.

On Carl Jung's "Approaching the Unconscious" from Man and His Symbols, written in 1961. What's the structure of the mind? Jung followed Freud in positing an unconscious distinct from the conscious ego, but Jung's picture has the unconscious much more stuffed full of all sorts of stuff from who knows where, including instincts (the archetypes) that tend to give rise to behavior and dream imagery that we'd have to call religious. We neglect this part of ourselves at our psychological peril, and Jung also attributes the ills of the age (like nihilism and WWII) to being out of touch with our larger, unconscious selves. Sound like goofy pop psychology? Well, Jung's book was written specifically for the populace, and many have run with his emphasis on spiritual self-knowledge and his openness to talk of the paranormal to conclusions less well founded than Jung would have liked. Mark, Seth, and Wes keep trying to make the text speak to other philosophical works but eventually get sidetracked and occasionally personal on this very special episode. Read more about the topic and get the text. Listen to Wes's introduction. End song: "Bedlam" by Mark Lint and the Simulacra. Read about it. Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation.