The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

On Plato's Dialogue, "Gorgias" (380 BCE or so). Why philosophize? Isn't it better to know how to persuade people in practical matters, like a successful lawyer or business leader? Plato (speaking as usual through Socrates) thinks that the "art" of rhetoric (persuasive speeches) isn't an art at all, in the sense of something that requires an understanding of one's subject matter, but merely a talent for saying what people want to hear. Gorgias (and Socrates's other interlocutors) think that being able to persuade gives you power, so it's awesome, but Plato thinks that unless what you say is likely to improve your audience, then it's worthless. The argument is generalizable to all artistic endeavor: Do the arts aim to just give pleasure, and even if they do, is that bad? Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan kick this one off with some discussion of how we pick topics, and then stroll through the this very entertaining dialogue, which you can also hear us read in "Not Episode 69." We consider Plato's doctrine that knowledge inevitably leads to virtue and his insistence that goods can't contravene each other, so that pleasure over an injustice can't be good just because it's pleasurable, and acting justly must always be in our long-term interest, by definition. We wrap up by joining Socrates in dissing those that would dismiss philosophy as a waste of time. Get the book and read more about the topic. End song: "Fallen Sun" by New People, from the new album Might Get It Right (written/sung by Matt Ackerman). If you enjoyed this episode, please consider a donation.

Three podcasters and two listeners join to read Plato's fabulous dialogue, which is discussed in PEL Episode 69. Listening to this will be MIGHTY good preparation for listening to that discussion. We are freely sharing the first half of this unabridged work of profound genius, in which Socrates (Mark) and his pal Chaerephon (Eileen), at the behest of Callicles (Dylan), call on the famous orator/teacher Gorgias (Seth) to ask him what this oratory crap is all about. After first trouncing Gorgias's student Polus (Evan), Socrates then eviscerates Gorgias himself, arguing that oratory is just a worthless form of flattery, like pastry baking (?!?!), feeding people what they want to hear while doing nothing to improve them. As part one concludes, Callicles steps up and gives Socrates a smackdown, arguing that orators, who argue the affairs of the state, have power, and hence happiness, and even though we may give lip service to the idea that exerting power unjustly is shameful, the law of nature says that more power is always better, and screw justice. And screw philosophy while you're at it, which is best left to undergrads to rant about in their dorm rooms and grow out of to go on and do real work. To listen to part two, where Socrates responds to this in an epic confrontation that you'll never forget so long as you live, and even afterwards as your soul is given a quiz on this dialogue to judge your final resting place, you'll need to sign up to be a PEL Citizen at partiallyexaminedlife.com, which will enable you not only to continue your Gorgias orgasmic experience, but also listen a bevy of other audio products, and read a heap of exclusive member content, and to participate in mind-expanding Not School discussions.

On his 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. What sort of base? Well, there may be many principles bases, and what's important for Chalmers is not the details of which is picked but of the scrutability framework as a whole. The base he discusses the most in the book is PQTI, for Physical, Qualia (mental), "That's all," and Indexical (like "I'm here now). Being able to derive the rest of reality from PQTI has implications, Chalmers thinks, for the philosophy of language, mind, and metaphysics. Mark tries to draw Chalmers into speculating outside his areas of expertise. Dylan asks about physics, of course. Wes has technical issues and drops off half way through (listen for the "ping" as he texts Mark to that effect). Read more about the project and get the book. End song: "What You Want" by New People, from Might Get It Right (2013). Become a PEL Citizen to get bonus content, including a free e-copy of the album and a full discussion of Chalmers's book on consciousness. You can also participate there in Not School discussion groups Alternately, support us by making a donation.

Excerpts of discussions about David Chalmers's The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, and Paul Auster's City of Glass. What's the relation between mind and brain? What is consciousness? Can science study consciousness, and can evolution really account for it? What is the self and how does this relate to language? All these questions are tackled in these discussions, which were recorded as part of PEL's Not School members-only website (aka PEL Citizenship). Each was recorded by a PEL podcaster (Mark or Wes, for the ones here) in conjunction with 2-5 listeners who joined a Not School group. Not School gives us the chance to cover more material than we have time to tackle as a full PEL group as well as the chance to get to talk with such great people: the listeners involved are often fully as articulate and informative as the guests we've had on the show, with expertise not only in philosophy, but in science, the arts, and other disciplines. (Don't be intimidated though; we've got active Not Schoolers of all levels.) Yes, the recording quality is not nearly as good as for our regular episodes, but you'll get past it. Read more and sign up at www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/pel-not-school-introduction. This will give you access to the full-length (ca. 90 min) recordings of these, plus lots of supporting forum posts on these readings. Best yet, you can join these ongoing groups yourselves, among many others. New ones are being proposed now to kick off at the beginning of January, so get in there to try to draft people into reading what you want to read (or listen to, or watch).

On Rudolph Carnap's The Logical Structure of the World (1928). What can we know? Carnap thinks that all the various spheres of knowledge (e.g. particle physics, attributions of mental states, moral claims, the economy) are logically interrelated, that you can in fact translate sentences about any of these into sentences about sets of basic, momentary experiences. This book, better known as the Aufbau, is Carnap's attempt to sketch out how this system of linguistic reduction can work. Though it certainly doesn't work, it's a pretty damned fascinating attempt. Carnap's hope was to integrate the language of scientific discourse with that of mathematics, and in doing so clarify traditional philosophical problems, in part by showing that anything that can't be recast in this philosophically respectable symbolic language is a bunch of vague nonsense. So we can describe the relations between the various contents of our experience, but the question of what these entities really are (i.e. the traditional realism vs. idealism debate) doesn't and can't arise in the system. Carnap at some points described himself neutral about such questions, but at others as hostile towards the dead-end sort of philosophy that generated them. Matt Teichman rejoins Mark, Wes, and Dylan to get into some of the details of this very funky constructional system and try to figure out what good it is and whether one can really ignore such metaphysical questions when doing science. Read Mark's spiffy essay summarizing the topic and get the text. End song: "Undershirt" by Mark Lint, the recording was produced and many instruments played by Edison Carter for his Talk Zack Talk Wound EP in 1996. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider a donation.

On W.V.O. Quine's "On What There Is" (1948) and "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951). What kind of metaphysics is compatible with science? Quine sees science and philosophy as one and the same enterprise, and objects to ontologies that include types of entities that science can't, even in principle, study. In these two highly influential essays, he first tells how to determine what ontological commitments your philosophical theory is making, and he advocates for one that, for instance, doesn't allow talk of the "possible twin sister" that you could have had but didn't. In particular, Quine doesn't want an ontology to have linguistic meanings in it. Sure, sentences can be meaningful, but that doesn't mean that the sentence refers to or makes use of some entity, the meaning, that must exist (as Frege thought) outside of the head of any speaker. In "Two Dogmas," he takes on a related point: the concept of synonymy, or "same meaning." We think that some sentences are true by definition ("Bachelors are unmarried") or true in virtue of logic alone ("x=x," "2+2=4"), while others ("my dog is on fire") require that we go out and look at the world to determine their truth. Quine challenges this distinction, arguing instead that our truths don't get individually verified by experience, but "face the court of experience as corporate body." So if I have an experience that seems to violate an established scientific law, I have leeway in which part of the "web of belief" can be adjusted to accommodate the new information. The statements we might have thought are analytically true (true by definition or logic) are really just those which most resist change. Quine drives us to this conclusion by allegedly showing that "true by definition" can't be explained without circularity: we always end up referring to some version of "same meaning," like synonymy or analyticity or a priori or necessarily true, and it's this set of terms that we're trying to give an account for. Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan are joined by Matt Teichman of the Elucidations Podcast. Read more about the topic and get the texts. End song: "Granted" by Mark Lint (2012). Should you want to get a subscription from Audible, please do so through our affiliate link, which is now audibletrial.com/PEL. Audio versions of the Quine essays, as well as another essay relevant to this topic, "On Denoting," by Bertrand Russell, are available free to PEL Citizens, along with other bonus content, access to Not School discussion groups, text chat office hours with the podcasters, and more. Sign up. You can also get the Russell audio from our shop/donate page. Or, if you enjoy this episode, please consider a donation.

Thanks to all you listeners who have brought us to the milestone of approximately two million downloads. In celebration, we thought we'd share our highlight reel, our clip show, our demo for various business uses, our oeuvre gougé, if you will. Will you? You will not. This was edited together by Erik Jourgensen, with a some additional bits tracked down and/or inserted by the podcasters. It draws heavily on our Episode 0, but includes clips from guests and other things to reflect where we're at now. May I suggest this as a good URL to send to people whom you'd like to talk into making PEL a part of their diet? May I? I may.

On Alexander Hamilton/James Madison's Federalist Papers (1, 10-12, 14-17, 39, 47-51), published as newspaper editorials 1787-8, plus Letters III and IV from Brutus, an Anti-Federalist. What constitutes good government? These founding fathers argued that the proposed Constitution, with its newly centralized--yet also separated-by-branch--powers would be a significant improvement on the Articles of Confederation, which had left states as the ultimate sovereigns. Hear Dylan, Mark, and Seth here rap about factions: Does our current system prevent the abuse of power by interest groups in the way Madison predicted it would? (Hint: no.) If we want to argue for change, we have to diagnose what went wrong in this and other instances: is it that Madison's/Hamilton's predictions were simply wrong in some areas, or have the contextual facts (e.g. education and technology levels) changed the situation, and/or do we simply have different central concerns now than we did then? For instance, their fresh-from-the-revolution audience was worried about kingly tyranny, and European powers were skeptical of any democracy, while we face new challenges like the rise of corporations that apparently have personhood according to our Supreme Court. Learn more about the topic and get the readings. End song: "Feeling Time" by Madison Lint (2002). Become a PEL Citizen to get free content and propose and/or join Not School discussion groups, or if you enjoyed this episode, please consider a donation.

On Fame: What the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity by Tom Payne (2010). What's the deal with our f'ed up relationship with celebrities? Payne says that celebrities serve a social need that's equal parts religion and and aggression. TV's Lucy Lawless (Xena, Spartacus, Battlestar Galactica) joins us to discuss the accuracy of this thesis, along with her obsession with philosophy (and our podcast), the relation between fandom and mental illness, the drive for fame, sacrificial heroes, celebrity encounters, fame for fame's sake, infamy, celebrity philosophers, mentally ill philosophers, and what Nietzsche's will to power has to do with all of this. Read more about the topic and get the book. End Song: "Celebrity" by New People (2012) Become a PEL Citizen to get free content and join Not School discussion groups, or if you enjoyed this discussion, please consider a donation.

On philosophical issues in McCarthy's 2005 novel about guys running around with drug money and shooting each other, and about fiction as a form for exploring philosophical ideas. What can morality mean for people who have witnessed the "death of God," i.e. a loss in faith in light of the horrors of war? For both the protagonist and antagonist in "No Country for Old Men," morality is about being satisfied with your own actions, even if what you've done is set in stone forever, and even if it were to be the last thing you do before death. This is not purely subjectivist, though, seemingly not just dependent upon our whims. In McCarthy's sort-of Nietzschean world, we have duties toward the dead, and duties towards ourselves. It's clear that this sort of "ethic" is not coincident with "ethics" as we're familiar with it, as it's something shared by both the risk-taker-with-a-heart-of-gold hero and the I'll-kill-you-like-cattle baddie. What does McCarthy himself think? Who knows? Like many good philosophical novelists, he puts philosophies in the mouths of his characters to try them out as world views, to see how they hang psychologically and what fate they lead to, in the author's best estimation. Another peculiarity of the novel as ethical philosophy is that is provides a full-blown concrete ethical situation to analyze instead of a classroom abstraction. We discuss these issues and more with Eric Petrie, Professor at Michigan State University, who's an old friend and teacher of Dylan's. Read more about the topic and get the book. End song: "My Grandfather" by Dylan Casey (2001). If you enjoy this episode, please consider making a donation, or become a PEL Citizen through a recurring donation. PEL Citizens get access to the Eric Petrie's unpublished essay that this episode discusses.

On Candide: or, Optimism, the novel by Voltaire (1759). Is life good? Popular Enlightenment philosopher Leibniz argued that it's good by definition. God is perfectly good and all-powerful, so whatever he created must have been as good as it can be; we live in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire loads this satirical adventure story up with horrific violence to demonstrate that Leibniz's position is just silly. Life is filled with suffering, and human nature is such that even in peace and prosperity, we're basically miserable. Yet we still love life despite this. Voltaire's solution is to "tend your garden," which means something like engaging in meaningful work, whether personal or political. This is a very special episode for us, as it's our first with all of us recording in the same room, as part of a weekend of fun and frolic in Madison, WI. Read more about the topic and get the book. End song: "Woe Is Me," from Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio (1998). Download the album for free. A transcript of this episode is available for PEL Citizens. Please consider joining or make a donation if you enjoy this episode.

On Friedrich Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (1873). What is truth? This essay, written early in Nietzsche's career but unpublished during his lifetime, is taken by many to make the extreme claim that there is no truth, that all of the "truths" we tell each other are just agreements by social convention. The regular foursome are joined by a U. Texas grad school classmate, Jessica Berry from Georgia State University. She argues that Nietzsche is really just being a skeptic here: our "truths" don't correspond with the thing-in-itself, i.e. the world beyond our human conceptions. He wants us to understand that all knowledge is laden with human interests. Taken this way, the essay won't undermine itself; if he isn't saying "there is no truth," then that claim won't apply to itself. What Nietzsche for sure does say is that the "will to truth" that philosophers so prize is puzzling, given how beneficial to our survival many mutually held illusions are: we're safe, things are stable, we understand our environment. When philosophers declare truth to be the most valuable thing, they're going beyond the mundane purposes for which the will to truth developed (e.g. communicating in a consistent way to our mutual benefit) and massively overestimating our capability to know the world as it "really" is. Read more on the topic and buy the book. Wes has also created a guide to this episode that you can purchase here. You can also purchase a transcription of this episode (and read a big chunk of it for free). End song: "Stupidly Normal," from Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio (1998). Download the album for free. We're supported by listener donations; if you like the episode, please donate, or if you become a PEL member for $5, you'll get Wes's guide and the transcript, along with a lot of other material, for free.

On Aristotle's Politics (350 BCE), books 1 (ch 1-2), 3, 4 (ch 1-3), 5 (ch 1-2), 6 (ch 1-6), and 7 (ch. 1-3, 13-15). Aristotle provides both a taxonomy of the types of government, based on observations of numerous constitutions of the states of his time, and prescriptions on how to best order a state. These are meant to be practical; though he does spend some time on the "ideal" government, he recognizes that that's going to be very rare, given that it requires those in charge to be virtuous according to his stringent standards. He provides advice for all the types, whether rule by one, or the few, or the many, to help keep them stable and from drifting into their corrupt forms. He sees the state as a natural outgrowth of human nature, and that one can characterize the health of a state in much the way one can describe the health (i.e. virtue, happiness) of an individual. Yes, he's a major league elitist, but there's still some good stuff here, applicable even to modern times. Read more about the topic and get the book. End song: "Don't Forget Where You Are," from the Mark Linsenmayer album Spanish Armada, Songs of Love and Related Neuroses (1993), newly remixed/remastered. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider a donation.

On Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981), mostly ch. 3-7 and 14-17. What justifies ethical claims? MacIntyre claims that no modern attempt to ground ethics has worked, and that's because we've abandoned Aristotle. We see facts and values as fundamentally different: the things science discovers vs. these weird things that have nothing to do with science. In Aristotle's teleological view, everything comes with built-in goals, so just as a plant will aim grow green and healthy, people have a definite kind of virtue towards which we do and should naturally strive. Though MacIntyre doesn't want to bring back Aristotle's biology, he does want to put the goal-directedness, i.e. the normativity, back into our conception of the facts of our lives. His new take on virtue has two components: the excellence involved in any established practice, like physics, cooking, or playing guitar; and the need to live a coherent life story given your particular culture and commitments. You might have bought into the aim to be a great chess player, for instance, which requires not only intellectual virtue, but being social enough to keep the enterprise of chess in business (i.e. no murder when you lose). To get from great chess player to great person means integrating your various practices into one fulfilling life, and MacIntyre thinks that this effort is sufficient to give you objective moral standards, given your particular practices and, moreso, your cultural traditions. Unlike the existentialists, MacIntyre thinks that for an individual in a real situation, having moral standards is not a matter of some free choice or "leap," as if morality was nothing in itself that we humans are bound to. No, morality is real, and fully justified, for an individual embedded in his culture and commitments. Just like you can't, yourself, decide to win at chess by changing the rules, you can't "create values" as Nietzsche might recommend by denying or re-interpreting your duties as parent, neighbor, citizen, etc. The regular four continue the discussion started in ep. 58, giving some of MacIntyre's dismissal of dozens of major figures in philosophy and trying our best to make sense of his proposals. Buy the book. End song: "Indefensible," by Mark Lint, 1998. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider a donation.

On G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, ch. 1 (1903); Charles Leslie Stevenson's "The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms" (1937), and Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, ch. 1-2. Is there such a thing as moral intuition? Is "good" a simple property that we all recognize but can't explain like yellow? G.E. Moore thinks that any attempt to define good in terms of properties like "pleasure," "interest," or "happiness" are doomed. Even if all pleasurable things were good, the word "good" still wouldn't mean "pleasant;" you could always sensibly ask, "but are those pleasant things really good?" This is Moore's "open question" argument, which expresses his objection to the "naturalistic fallacy," i.e. deriving an "ought" from an "is." Stevenson agreed that "good" isn't reducible to any natural property; saying something is good is not to express a property about it at all. Instead, moral terms are tools we use to convince other people to like things that we like. This tendency of the word "good" to elicit such a response is part of what Stevenson calls its "emotive meaning." MacIntyre thinks that this emotivism now pervades our current uses of ethical language. Because Moore is successful in debunking all the ethical theories that rely on natural facts (and supernatural ones too) to ground morality, we're left with no grounding at all, and people like Moore who pretend to be using intuition to discover primal moral facts are really just expressing their own preferences. The same goes for ethical theorists whose key terms don't hold up to scrutiny: when someone justifies an action by referring to a fiction like "greatest happiness," "natural rights," or "the dictates of reason," he is just, again, expressing his preferences; these bogus theories just serve to mask what's really going on. We'll give MacIntyre's positive account of how to ground morality (which is derived from Aristotle's) in episode 59. Read more about the topic and get the readings. End song: "When I Was Yours," by Mark Lint, 1997. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider a donation.