The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

Primarily discussing "Reasoning: The Sixty Stanzas" and "Emptiness: The Seventy Stanzas," by the 2nd century Indian Buddhist Nagarjuna. This is a 32-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 44-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 Nagarjuna" and look under "Albums." Is the world of our experience ultimately real? If not, does it have something metaphysically basic underlying it? For Nagarjuna, the answers are "no" and "no... well... not that we can talk about." Mark and Seth are joined by guest Erik Douglas to discuss metaphysics, causality, the possibility of remaking your perceptual habits, why someone who believes that all is empty might still want to act ethically, and how to deny a claim without affirming its equally dubious opposite. Look at this document for our primary texts plus a couple of others that we mention; we also skimmed Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way. Secondary sources are discussed here. End song: "Nothing in this World" by by Mark Lint and the Simulacra, recorded partly in 2000 and partly just now.

Discussing Civilization and its Discontents (1930). This is a 32-minute preview of our vintage 2 hr, 5-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 Freud" and look under "Albums." What's the meaning of life? Well, for Sigmund Freud, an objective purpose rises or falls with religion, which he thinks a matter of clinging to illusion, so to rephrase: what do we want out of life? To be happy, of course, yet he sees happiness as a matter of fulfillment of pent-up desires, meaning it's by its nature temporary. Yet we can't shake off its pursuit, and so we're in a bind, and have a number of strategies for obtaining some satisfaction: some compensation for what we have to repress in order to live in a society that forces us to repress our innate desires. Read the book online or purchase it. End song: "The Easy Thing" by New People from The Easy Thing (2009).

Discussing Books II through V of the Ethics. Continues the discussion from Ep. 24. This is a 32-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 38-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 Spinoza" and look under "Albums." What is the relation between mind and body? How do we know things? What are the emotions? Is there an ethical ideal for us to shoot for? What is our relationship to God? Our rational nature prevails over urges to scream, sleep, or slap each other as we plow to the end of this strange and thorny text. Read a free version online or purchase the book. End song: "When I Think of You" from The MayTricks' Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (1994).

Discussing Spinoza's Ethics (1677), books 1 and 2. This is a 32-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 36-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 Spinoza" and look under "Albums." We mostly discuss his weird, immanent, non-personal conception of God: God is everything, therefore the world is God as apprehended through some particular attributes, namely insofar as one of his aspects is infinite space (extension, i.e. matter) and insofar as one of his aspects is mind (our minds being chunks or "modes" of the big God mind). Also, if you're not going to sell out and go for a university position in philosophy, should you instead grind lenses in your attic without adequate ventilation? (Hint: no) Plus, the Amsterdam of yesterday, whose heady aroma drove people to write like Euclid, property dualism rears its ugly head, and Mel Gibson as Rousseau! Read a free version online or purchase the book. One place to read the earlier Spinoza book I refer to, A Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being (1660), is here. The Karen Armstrong book I keep referring to is The Case for God,and at the end Wes recommends Matthew Stewart's The Courtier and the Heretic. Seth also brings up Giles Deluze's Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. The dumbed down, non-geometric presentation of the Ethics that I talk about is here. End song: "Spiritual Insect," by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000).

Discussing Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse in Inequality (1754) and book 1 of The Social Contract (1762). This is a 31-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 29-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 Rousseau" and look under "Albums." What's the relationship between culture and nature? Are savages really slavering beasts of unquenchable appetites, or probably more mellow, hangin' about, flexin' their muscles, just chillin', eh? Rousseau engages in some wild speculation about the development of humanity from the savage to the modern, miserable wretch. Association with other people corrupts us, especially association with Wes. Is there some form of government that will make things tolerable? Maybe that one where Oprah is our queen. Read the texts online here and here or buy them here and here. End song: "Love Is the Problem" by New People from The Easy Thing (2009).

On William James's "The Will to Believe" and continuing our discussion from Episode 20 on James's conception of truth as described in his books Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth, again including Dylan Casey. This is a 31-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 38-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 Pragmatism faith" and look under "Albums." Does pragmatism give ground for religious belief, like if I say it feels good for me to believe in God, is that in any sense a legitimate grounds for that belief? Is belief in science or rationality itself a form of faith? Is religious belief a "forced choice," or does it just not matter what you believe? Also, we sort further through James on truth: truth is created by us, but what does that mean? That only statements actually verified or otherwise useful are true, or can have a truth value (true of false) at all? In saying that we create truth, does that make James a relativist, and if so, is that bad? Read "The Will to Believe," Pragmatism, and The Meaning of Truth (the most useful chapters for our purposes are 3, 5, 8, 9, 12, and 15). You can alternately "The Will to Believe" here, and the other two books are packaged in this volume. End song: "Who Cares What You Believe?" by Madison Lint (2001).

Discussing articles by Alan Turing, Gilbert Ryle, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and Dan Dennett. This is a 31-minute preview of our vintage 2 hr, 20-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 Turing" and look under "Albums." What is this mind stuff, and how can it "be" the brain? Can computers think? No? What if they're really sexified? Then can they think? Can the mind be a computer? Can it be a room with a guy in it that doesn't speak Chinese? Can science completely understand it? ...The mind, that is, not the room, or Chinese. What is it like to be a bat? What about a weevil? Do you even know what a weevil is, really? Then how do you know it's not a mind? Hmmmm? Is guest podcaster Marco Wise a robot? Even his wife cannot be sure! We introduce the mind/body problem and the wackiness that it engenders by breezing through several articles, which you may read along with us: 1. Alan Turing’s 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence." 2. A chapter of Gilbert Ryle's 1949 book The Concept of Mind called "Descartes' Myth." 3. Thomas Nagel's 1974 essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" 4. John Searle's Chinese Room argument, discussed in a 1980 piece, "Minds, Brains and Programs." 5. Daniel C. Dennett's "Quining Qualia." Some additional resources that we talk about: David Chalmers's "Consciousness and its Place in Nature, " Frank Jackson's "Epiphenomenal Qualia", Paul Churchland's Matter and Consciousness,Jerry Fodor's "The Mind-Body Problem," Zoltan Torey's The Crucible of Consciousness,and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's long entry on the Chinese Room argument. End Song: "No Mind" from 1998’s Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio; the whole album is now free online.

On Pragmatism (1907) by William James and "The Fixation of Belief" (1877) and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878) by Charles Sanders Peirce. This is a 31-minute preview of our vintage 2 hr, 8-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 Pragmatism" and look under "Albums." Is truth a primitive relation between our representations and things objectively in the world, or is it an analyzable process by which propositions "prove their worth" by being useful in some way, like by fitting well with other portions of our experience or being delicious? Peirce, the inventor of pragmatism, focuses on the philosophy of science and thinks of inquiry as a way for us to just settle on any belief we can stomach. James, who popularized pragmatism, has a wider view that applies not only to science but to religious beliefs. If it makes you feel nice to believe in Hogwarts, should you do so? The episode features then-guest podcaster Dylan Casey; we continued it in episode 22. Read Pragmatism online or purchase it. Buy the Pierce essays together or read them online here and here. Another helpful resource we talk about is the chapter from James's book The Meaning of Truth where he responds to objections. End Song: "Friend" from 1998’s Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio; the whole album is now free online.

On Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), which is a shorter, dumbed-down version of his Critique of Pure Reason.

On the Theaetetus and the Meno, two dialogues about knowledge. This is a 34-minute preview of our vintage 2 hr, 18-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 Plato" and look under "Albums." 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 slog through most of the Theaetetus, where Plato considers and rejects a series of mostly very lame conceptions of knowledge and replaces them at the end with... NOTHING. Seth is crushed. In the Meno, knowledge is "remembrance" (maybe), like anything worth knowing can't be learned but only elicited out of the depths of your unconscious. Read along: The Theaetetus and The Meno, or if you don't like the funky background on those pages, look them up via Project Gutenberg. You could also purchasethem. Seth did this diagram to express his love of the Meno. End song: “Obvious Boy” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000). Listen to the whole album online.

On David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). This is a 31-minute preview of our vintage 2 hr, 5-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership, and after you're signed in to the Citizen site, get it here). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for "Partially Examined Hume" and look under "Albums." David Hume thinks that all we can know are our own impressions, i.e. what our moment-to-moment experiences tell us. Funny thing, though: he thinks that no experience shows us one event causing another event. We only experience one thing happening, then another, and these sequences tend to display a lot of uniformity. So, if we have any legitimate idea of causality at all, it must just be that: regular patterns of conjoined events. We discuss what Hume thinks this view implies for the free will question, belief in miracles, whether external objects are actually there, Seth's experience of Towlie, and more. Read the book with us. End song: "Twitch" by by The MayTricks, from the 1994 album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down. Get the whole thing free.

What effect should the avant garde have on our understanding of what art is? We read three essays by modern, first-rate American philosopher Arthur Danto, all published in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986): the title essay, "The Appreciation and Interpretation of Works of Art," and "The End of Art." This is a 33-minute preview of our vintage 2 hr, 13-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 Danto" and look under "Albums." I understand you may not have heard of Danto, and you may think modern art is goofy, but you'll definitely enjoy this discussion and the reading anyway. Danto gives a picture of philosophy and art at war throughout history: philosophy says that art can't get at truth and is otherwise useless, yet philosophers like Plato seem afraid of the power of art to corrupt. What's the deal? Also, Danto claims that art is over; the end of art has happened. So suck it, artists. (Actually, artists can keep on doing what they're doing; they're fine, yet art is still over.) Plus, can you stare at a urinal and thereby make it art? What if it's in a museum? Danto loves them crazy ass post-modern artists, and thinks that their work shows that art was not what we thought it was. Plus, Seth talks about the plane crashing into the IRS building near his house, and we respond some listener postings. Danto's book is definitely worth purchasing. We also refer heavily to Calvin Tomkins's The Bride and the Bachelors. For a summary of "The End of Art," you can read this excerpt from one of Danto's later books. You could also check out Danto's book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. End song: "This Night Before the End," by Mark Lint and the Simulacra, recorded mostly in 2000 but finished just now. Here's more info about the song. Note that after this was posted, Danto listened to it and liked it.

Discussing G.W.F Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Though he didn't actually write a book with this name, notes on his lectures on this topic were published after his death, and the first chunk of that serves as a good entrance point to Hegel's very strange system. How should a philosopher approach the study of history? Is history just a bunch of random happenings, or is it a purposive force manipulating us to fulfill its hidden ends? If you have asked yourself this question in this way, then you, like Hegel, are mighty strange. Here we talk about the unfolding of the world-historical spirit, world-historical individuals (hint: not you), dialectic, his alternative to the social contract, the formation of the self based on what others label you, the geist of America, why a constitutional monarchy is obviously the best form of government, and heaps more. Read with us: Pages 14-128 of this online version or buy the book with only the part we're concerned with. End Song: "Cold," by Madison Lint (2004), described in my music blog.

Reading Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince and Ch. 1-20 of The Discourse on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy. What's a philosophically astute approach to political matters? What makes a government successful? Should you keep that fortress or sell it for scrap? If you conquer, say, Iraq, do you have to then go and live there for the occupation to work out? Is it OK to display the heads of your enemies on spikes, or should you opt for a respectful diorama? Besides the famous Prince, Mr. M. wrote, at about the same time, the Discourses on Livy which focus on republics instead of princedoms, so the combined picture is less out of sync with our time than you might think, meaning we talk about G.W. Bush for a bit (sorry). Plus: An inspirational speech to play at middle school assemblies across the land! Skim the texts at here and here, or you can buy this book that includes both works. The Isaiah Berlin article we talk about a bit is "The Originality of Machiavelli," which you read most of if you search for the essay title in this book preview. End song: "Se Piangi, Se Ridi" (Mogol/Marchetti/Satti), recorded by Mark Lint in 2000.

On Werner Heisenberg’s “Physics and Philosophy" (1958), and talking about it with an actual former particle physicist, Dylan Casey. What weird stuff about reality does quantum physics imply? Is Heisenberg (of the Uncertainty Principle fame) right that we need to reject "metaphysical realism" based on this very well established scientific framework? The discussion ranges over the uncertainty principle, relativity, wave/particle duality, Pre-Socratic metaphysics, why Kant is wrong about space, and lots of very weird things. Read the text online or purchase it. Plus, we spend far too much time talking about an article by Thomas Nagel about intelligent design; you can read that here. And the blog post by Brian Leiter that got us talking about it is here. End song: "Neutrino of Love," written and sung by Dylan Casey, with backing and production by Mark back in 1997 or so (remixed and cleaned up just now). A different version appears on his Neutrino Sessions album.