The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

On Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900). What is humor? Bergson says that, fundamentally, we laugh as a form of social corrective when others are slow to adapt to society's demands. Other types of humor are derivative from this: just as the clown falls on his face because of a (pretended) physical flaw, as if he's a machine that doesn't work and so becomes noticeable as a machine, in satire, we poke fun at society's breaking down, and in wordplay it's as if the language is breaking down, and in a sit-com featuring unlikely coincidences, it's like fate itself is breaking down into senseless patterns of repetition. Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan are joined by comedienne Jennifer Dziura, using Bergson as a jumping-off point to throw around lots of theories and questions: is it the unexpected that makes something funny (which would make timing key), or our identification with the funny situation, which would go against Bergson's notion that you need some distance from the person you're laughing at, or else you grasp him as an individual and get sucked into the breakdown as tragic? Can deformities be hilarious, as Bergson thinks? What about dark humor, or self-deprecating humor, or the laughter of delight or being tickled? Read more on the topic and get the book. End songs: Another two lo-fi, quickly recorded driblets from the Mark Lint album, Black Jelly Beans & Smokes: 1991's “The Nipple Song" and a song written by the Gerber Brothers (Ken Gerber being the guy who drew our PEL icon) performed with Mark from 1990, "Come On, Lady." Between these is a snippet of Jen's standup. No puppets, though. Sorry. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider a donation.

Continuing discussion of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Part I, sections 1-33 and 191-360. Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Philosophy Bro talk about "family resemblances" in concepts, including the concept "game" as used by Wittgenstein: is there really no theory that can capture all and only instances of games, e.g. do all games have rules? Also, what does Wittgenstein mean by characterizing philosophical problems as mistakes of grammar, and how might that apply to the mind/body problem? Finally, we get to the private language argument, where W. argues that we don't talk about our pains and things by pointing at and naming our inner states. Language is inevitably public, and our language about pains grows out of observable pain behaviors. Does this make Wittgenstein a behaviorist, and so hopelessly antiquated? Probably not. Listen to Part 1. Read more about the topic and get the text. End song: “Not a Woman,” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000). Download it free. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider a donation.

On Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Part I, sections 1-33 and 191-360 (written around 1946). What is linguistic meaning? Wittgenstein argues that it's not some mysterious entity in the mind, but that it is a public matter: you understand a word if you can use it appropriately, and you know the context in which it's appropriate to use it and how to react when you hear it in that context. W. calls such a context a "language game," and sees language as big heap of these games, spanning a wide range of human activity. Words don't just name objects; they could be commands, or variables, or exclamations, or even meaningless when considered outside of a particular game. When philosophers pull words out of the kinds of settings in which they originated and try to figure out what they really mean, that creates bogus philosophical problems. This discussion is part 1 of 2; we only get through the first sections of the book in detail, and you'll have to listen to part 2 for a good explanation of the famous "private language" argument. Read more about the topic and get the text. The foursome is joined by Philosophy Bro. End song: "Kite," by New People from The Easy Thing (2009), written and sung by Matt Ackerman. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider a donation.

Continuing our discussion of Owen Flanagan's The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (2011). Are the basic tenets of Buddhism compatible with a respect for science? In episode 53, Owen Flanagan outlined a science-friendly project of comparative ethics, and touched on Buddhism's empiricist theory of knowledge and its metaphysics of impermanence. If that was the lecture, this episode is the discussion section, where the regular foursome expands upon these themes and hopefully makes some of the previous discussion more understandable to folks new to philosophy. Folks that like hearing us free associating among anecdotes and rants about movies and discussion of our ground rules will enjoy this, whereas those impatient to hear about Buddhism are free to jump past the first 20, or even 40 minutes, at which point we get down to business and talk about karma, nirvana, emptiness, no-self, and the four noble truths. Read more about the topic and get the book. End song: "Who Wants to Love Me," a new song by Mark Lint (with some elements recycled from 1992 or so) If you enjoy the episode, please donate at least $1:

Discussing The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (2011) with Owen Flanagan. What philosophical insights can we modern folks with our science and naturalism (i.e. inclination against super-natural explanations) glean from Buddhisim? Flanagan says plenty: Buddhism is founded on common human experience (not faith), and we can profitably put Buddhist ethics in dialogue with familiar types of virtue ethics. However, we need to be skeptical of any claims to scientific support the superior happiness of Buddhists. We kick off with a general assessment of phenomenology and naturalist ethics, and Flanagan provides such a plethora of great insights that the regular PEL crew continued the discussion (without Owen) in Ep. 54. Get more info on the topic and obtain the book. Download Wes's summary of the book. End song: "A Few Gone Down" from Mark Lint & the Fake Johnson Trio (1998). Download the album for free. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider a donation.

On W.E.B. DuBois's "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" (1903), Cornel West's "A Genealogy of Modern Racism" (1982), and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963) and "The Black Power Defined" (1967), plus Malcolm X's "The Black Revolution" (1963). What kind of philosophical lessons come out of the history of black oppression in America? Historian and intellectual DuBois describes the "double consciousness" involved living as a black man in the white world (he was the first black man to graduate from Harvard); he sees the oppression experience as providing some spiritual insight that the rest of us could use. West analyzes the codification of racist aesthetic standards in western philosophical history, leaving us with traces (a white "normative gaze") that require more than a tolerant attitude to root out. The American civil rights writers discuss the practical ways to combat this legacy, the upshot being that whites will not in themselves become enlightened and fix everything, but that blacks simply needed more economic, political, and cultural power. So where does this leave us some decades later? Read more about the topic and get the texts. The full foursome is joined by Lawrence Ware of Oklahoma State University, who serves as the token professional in our amateur melting pot. Contemplate our liberal bias! Snicker at my awkward white guilt! End song: “Bankrupt” by The MayTricks, from the album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (1994), one of my more amusing musical crimes against the inventors of funk. Download the whole album for free. If you enjoy the episode, please donate at least $1:

On Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) (Part I and Part II, Ch. 4), Claude Levi-Strauss's "The Structural Study of Myth" (1955), and Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (1966). What is language? What is the relation between language and reality? Saussure argued that a language at a given time has a structure, where you can only really understand the meaning (or "value") of a word by contrasting it with other words. Structuralists like Levi-Strauss generalized this to all of culture, and Derrida, while rejecting the structuralist project, takes the notion of "difference" between words to uproot all meaning from any non-linguistic reality. (Probably... even our guest C. Derick Varn who's read the Derrida essay dozens of times isn't sure what it means.) Learn more about the topic and get the readings. End song: "Slipped into Words," written and recorded by Mark in 1991, released on The MayTricks, which you can freely download in full. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider a donation.

On Robert M. Pirsig's philosophical, autobiographical novel from 1974. What's the relationship between science and values? Pirsig thinks that modern rationality, by insisting on the fundamental distinction between objects (matter) and subjects (people), labels value judgments as irrational. Society therefore largely ignores aesthetic considerations in the buildings and machines that litter our landscape. People rebel against this ugly commercialism by rejecting technology altogether, and Pirsig thinks this is a mistake. If we realize that value judgments (where we sense "Quality") are fundamentally a part of experience, that they drive what what we consider "rational" (e.g. a "good" scientific explanation) in the first place, then we can stop with the hippie rebellion and more sensibly and peacefully co-exist with technology. Though the book is not about historical Zen, it is about keeping centered, connected, and in the moment. Featuring guest participant David Buchanan. Read more about the topic and get the book. End song: "Freeway" by Mark Lint and Stevie P. Read about it. If you enjoy the episode, please consider a donation.

Discussing Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975), parts 1, 2 and section 3 of part 3. This is a 33-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 42-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get it for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for "Partially Danto" and look under "Albums." Are we really free? Kings no longer exert absolute and arbitrary power over us, but Foucault's picture of the evolution from torture and public executions to rehabilitative, medical-style incarceration is not so much a triumph of liberty but a shift to more subtle but more pervasive exertions of power. Read more about the topic and get the book. Featuring guest participant Katie McIntyre, doctoral candidate at Columbia. End songs: Two short, stinky tunes from the Mark Lint album, Black Jelly Beans & Smokes, "The Zoo Song" and "Solitary Drama," both from 1991. If you enjoy the episode, please donate at least $1:

Discussing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "Primacy of Perception" (1946) and The World of Perception (1948). This is a 33-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 42-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get it for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for "Partially Merleau-Ponty" and look under "Albums." What is the relation of perception to knowledge? In M-P's phenomenology, perception is primary: even our knowledge of mathematical truths is in some way conditioned by and dependent on the fact that we are creatures with bodies and senses that work the way they do. Science is great, but it doesn't discover the truth of things hiding behind perception: it is an abstraction from certain kinds of perceptions. Other modes of approaching things, e.g. art, can equally well give us knowledge, though of a different kind. Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan argue over whether this thesis is just a bunch of truisms and despair over not having read The Phenomenology of Perception, the longer work which what we did read was meant to summarize. Is M-P just saying that scientific knowledge is defeasible, which scientists already believe? Read more about this topic. Buy "The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences," or read it online. Buy World of Perception, or read online. End song: "Write Me Off" by Mark Lint and the Simulacra. Read about it. If you enjoy the episode, please donate at least $1:

Discussing Jean-Paul Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego (written in 1934). This is a 31-minute preview of our vintage 2 hr, 1-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get it for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for "Partially Sartre" and look under "Albums." What is consciousness, and does it necessarily involve an "I" who is conscious of things? Sartre says no: typical experience is consciousness of some object and doesn't involve the experience of myself as someone having this consciousness. It's only when we reflect on our own conscious experiences that we posit this "I." The ego is our own creation, or more precisely a social creation. This means that far from being some primordial structure of all experience, this transparent thing inside us that we have more immediate knowledge of than anything else, the ego is an object: it has parts we don't see, and we can be wrong when we make judgments about it. Other people might even know us better than we know ourselves. This is a difficult text, and we spend lots of time bickering about what Sartre might mean by terms like "transcendent" or "non-positional consciousness," so surely you will love that. Read more about the topic. Buy the book or try this version online. End song: "Thing in the World," by Mark Lint. This song was begun around 1996 but mostly written and wholly recorded just now, with Mark playing all the instruments, with lyrics actually motivated by this Sartre reading. You can purchase the Close Reading mentioned at the end of the episode here or get it free as a PEL Citizen.

Discussing Plato's "Euthyphro." This is a 30-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 52-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get it for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for "Partially Plato Ethics" and look under "Albums." Does morality have to be based on religion? Are good things good just because God says so, or (if there is a God) does God choose to approve of the things He does because he recognizes those things to be already good? Plato thinks the latter: if morality is to be truly non-arbitrary, then, like the laws of logic, it can't just be a contingent matter of what the gods happen to approve of (i.e. what some particular religious text happens to say). We're joined by Matt Evans, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan to discuss the text, which seems to be not as directly related to modern debates regarding the Divine Command Theory as we thought going into this. Ah, well. We cover all the angles and Seth spends the last bit going on about Judaism. Oy! Buy the book or read it online. Read more about the topic. End song: "False Morality" by The MayTricks, from the album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (1994) Read about it. The suggested donation if you like this episode is $1. Donate via the button and you'll get a free download of a high-bitrate mp3 of this episode's song. After paying on the PayPal site, click the yellow "Return to the Partially Examined Life" box there, and you'll be sent to a page with the download link. If this doesn't happen, please email me.

Discussing parts of David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1740) and Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). This is a 33-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 46-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get it for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for "Partially Hume Smith" and look under "Albums." Where do we get our moral ideas? Hume and Smith both thought that we get them by reflecting on our own moral judgments and on how we and others (including imaginary, hypothesized others) in turn judge those judgments. Mark, Wes, Seth, and guest Getty Lustila, a phil grad student at Georgia State University, hash through the Scottish stoicism to lay out the differences between these two gents and whether their views constitute an actual moral theory or just a descriptive enterprise. We read the sections from the Treatise and from Smith in D.D. Raphael's collection British Moralists: 1650-1800 (Volumes 2): Volume II: Hume - Bentham, and Index Read more about the topic and selections. End song: "Honest Judge" by New People from the 2010 album "Impossible Things," written and sung by Nate Pinney. The suggested donation if you like this episode is $1. Donate via the button and you'll get a free download of a high-bitrate mp3 of this episode's song: After paying on the PayPal site, click the yellow "Return to the Partially Examined Life" box there, and you'll be sent to a page with the download link. If this doesn't happen, please email me.

Discussing selections from Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel C. Dennett. This is a 32-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 50-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get it for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for "Partially Examined Atheists" and look under "Albums." Should we be religious, or is religion just a bunch of superstitious nonsense that it's past time for us to outgrow? Does faith lead to ceding to authority and potential violence? Can a reasonable person be religious? We say lots of rude things about these authors, and at times about their targets in this listener-requested episode featuring Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan. Read more about the topic. Buy/read what we did: -Ch. 1-2 of Harris's The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004) -The last three chapters of Hitchens's God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) -Ch. 4, and some of ch. 2, from Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006) -Ch. 8 (and skimming 3 and 7 to get context) of Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) -Chapter 14 of Anthony Kenny's 2008 book From Empedocles to Wittgenstein: Historical Essays in Philosophy (which we read as a response to Dawkins). End song: “Goddammit” by by Mark Lint and the Simulacra, recorded partly in 2000 and partly just now.

Discussing the arguments by Descartes, St. Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, William Paley, Kant, and others, as analyzed in J.L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1983), chapters 1-3, 5-6, 8, and 11. This is a 33-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 43-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for "Partially Examined Existence God" and look under "Albums." Are the ontological, cosmological, and teleological (argument from design) arguments for God's existence any good? Mackie, a very sharp analytic philosopher well hooked into recent advances in philosophy of science, says no. He's chiefly responding to his Oxford colleague, Richard Swinburne, who takes a very rationalist approach to God, taking the concept of God to be wholly simple and intelligible and providing a superior scientific explanation for, e.g. the beginning of the universe than the brute fact of an ultimately uncaused physical universe. Read more about the topic. Buy the book For more detail on Swinburne, read Is There a God? (1996). Mark, Seth, and Wes are joined by groovy South African theist blogger Robert Scott. End song: "I Believe," by Mark Lint (2011). Read about it.