The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

NEM now features jazz, hip-hop, classical, folk, and more. Check out all the episodes at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com, where you can subscribe and follow on Facebook. Bill played with all of your top three '70s prog bands, as the original drummer for Yes, a default member of King Crimson, and even briefly played live with Genesis. His near-final foray into pop stardom was with U.K. in the late '70s, but most of his output has been with his own jazz-inflected bands Earthworks and Bruford, as rock proved too confining for his rhythmic and tonal creativity. We discuss King Crimson's "One more Red Nightmare" from Red (1974), "Thistledown" from If Summer Had Its Ghosts by Bill Bruford, Eddie Gomez, and Ralph Towner (1992), and "The 16 Kingdoms of the 5 Barbarians" from Every Step a Dance, Every Word a Song by Bill Bruford/Michiel Borstlap (2004). We also listen to "Hell's Bells" (written by Alan Gowen and Dave Stewart) and (during the intro) the title track of One of a Kind by Bruford (1979), and also during the intro you'll hear "Five Per Cent for Nothing" from Fragile (1972) by Yes. Learn more at billbruford.com. Here's more interview with Bill and one of the performances from his initial meeting/show with Michel Borstlap that I refer to in our discussion. Here's Bill demonstrating electronic drums in 1986. And here he is in that Yes reunion (technically "Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe") around 1990 (this is the tour where I saw him live), including a very long electronic drum solo starting about 3:30 in. Here's a later incarnation (2002) of Earthworks live, going full throttle. Here he with the band U.K., and then within about a year of that, live with his quartet Bruford (every member of which I'd like to interview). And if you doubt how difficult Bruford's composition for Yes's "Five Per Cent for Nothing" is,

Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan discuss our interview with Peter Singer. Does Singer's asserting such a heavy moral burden on us successfully condemn us to changing our priorities and/or feeling perpetually guilty, or is there something wrong with the argument? Even if we admit the moral demand is legitimate, can we soften Singer's position by seeking to balance the obligation to help the poor with numerous other obligations, even though the latter don't rise to the level of life and death? And how is the evolutionary basis of morality relevant to deciding what counts as a legitimate moral obligation? Listen to the interview itself first or get the whole thing unbroken and ad-free via the Citizen edition. Please support PEL! End song: "Ann the Word" by Beauty Pill (2015), explored in Nakedly Examined Music's ep. 19: nakedlyexaminedmusic.com. Sponsors: Visit criquetshirts.com/pel (promo code pel) for 20% off awesome polo shirts. Also, check out Gulf Breeze Recovery at www.gulfbreezerecovery.com.

Mark and Wes interview perhaps the most influential living philosopher! Our focus is the newly reissued/repackaged 1971 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," which argues that just as we would regard it as unethical to fail to save a drowning child because you don't want to ruin your expensive shoes, so it's unethical to let someone die of preventable illness or hunger when an expensive-shoe-level donation would save that life. The new publication includes supplementary essays, and Peter has spent much of the rest of his career elaborating and arguing for and preaching about the practical upshot of this essay, which is that our priorities in this consumerist society are very out of whack: We don't give nearly enough to charitable causes, and we don't judge our charitable giving by the standard of helping the most people in the most substantial ways. Peter is well known as a utilitarian (we covered him briefly back in our ep. 9 where we discussed that ethical theory), and characterizes the key insight of the moral point of view as impartialism: No one individual's interests take precedence over anyone else's from the point of view of the universe. Don't play favorites. While there are certainly utilitarian advantages of everyone being responsible first and foremost for their own children, the lives of two stranger children will still outweigh the life of your single child, and certainly (and this is the conflict we actually face) fulfilling your child's taste for luxury is much less important than saving the lives of many stranger children. Buy the book or read the original essay online. Other works we mention are "The Objectivity of Ethics and the Unity of Practical Reason" (2012, with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek), The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty (2009), The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (2015), One World Now: The Ethics of Globalization (2002), The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (2011), and

Broadway bigwigs Walter Bobbie and Bill Youmans perform Plato's dialogue in which Socrates awaits his execution after being convicted by an Athenian jury of corrupting the youth and dissing the gods. Given that the verdict was clearly unjust, should Socrates take up Crito's offer to help him escape the city? Socrates says no: given that he's lived his whole life benefitting by the laws of Athens, ignoring them in this case would display a lack of integrity. Bill then joins the full PEL foursome for a discussion, which you may as well listen to ad-free via the Citizen Edition. Please support PEL! Art by Genevieve Arnold.

Concluding on Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, books 8–10. First, more on friendship: Should you share your sorrow with your friends, or is that just you being a burden? What makes it difficult to make new, real friends as an adult in modern society? Do you need to love yourself before you can be a good friend to others? How can you have a real friendship with someone far above your social station? Aristotle reveals it all! Plus, more on happiness, pleasure, and ethics. Do we all at some level know what's really good, even if we proclaim different ideas? Folks may wish to delve back into our episode on Plato's Republic for some background on this debate. Listen to part 1 first or get the ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL! End song: "A Few Gone Down" from The MayTricks' Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (1994). Download the whole album for free.

On the final books 8–10 of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. What does friendship have to do with ethics? Aristotle thinks that friends are necessary for the good life (i.e., eudaimonia or happiness, which is the goal of ethics), and that the only true friends, as opposed to those who merely entertain us or are useful to us, are virtuous people. They're the only ones who won't outlive their usefulness, whom you can really count on. On the other hand, the number one virtue (according to our last episode on this book) is reason, and the good life is the contemplative one, which doesn't sound all that social, so how do reason and friendship connect? Mark, Wes, and Dylan are joined by PEL blogger Ana Sandoiu to try to figure out why we all love each other (but just as friends!): is it because of our uniqueness, or is it because of some generic characteristic like virtue, as Aristotle seems to be saying? Ana's translation of the book is this one by Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins. Here's part 2, but really, you should get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition with your PEL Citizenship. Aristotle picture by Sterling Bartlett.

Continuing on the Nichomachean Ethics (ca. 350 BCE), books 6–7. We're still talking about the various intellectual virtues for the first half here, including the ever-popular nous, translated sometimes as "rational intuition" (which you might call we discussed from a very different perspective in our episodes on Aristotle's De Anima. We finally then get to akrasia, i.e., weakness of the will or incontinence. I know I shouldn't eat the cake (or murder all those people), but darn it, I just can't help myself! Aristotle contrasts such a weak person (who at least seems to have correct moral beliefs, though he apparently is still confused in some way or he would do what he thinks he should) with a simply intemperate/self-indulgent/vicious person who actually has wrong beliefs about what's right to do. That kind of person can't just be habituated out of his bad habit, but has to be convinced. Aristotle is not optimistic about such convincing, given the person's obvious lack of the morally relevant intellectual faculties he's just told us about. Listen to Mark on the Seriously Wrong podcast! Listen to part 1 first, or better yet, get the Citizen edition that keeps the whole discussion intact, with no commercials. Please support PEL! End song: "I Die Desire" from The MayTricks (1992). Listen to the whole album free.

On the Nichomachean Ethics (ca. 350 BCE), books 6–7. Is intelligence just one thing? Aristotle picks out a number of distinct faculties, some of which are relevant to ethics, and he uses these to explain Plato's puzzle of how someone can clearly see what the good for him is, and yet fail to pursue it due to weakness of the will. This episode continues our discussion from way back in ep. 5, and was commissioned in honor of the wedding of Matthew Decker and Amanda Schloss. This time around Mark, Wes, and Dylan talk a lot about the Greek terminology. For a cheat sheet on that, see this page, esp. part D., which goes through the different faculties (hexeis). The only one you should really remember in this context is phronesis, or practical wisdom, which involves both having the right goals and having the know-how re: what to do to pursue those goals. (By contrast, see Ana's post here on deinotes, or cleverness, which leaves out the having the right goals part.) Buy the W.D. Ross translation that Mark used or read it online. Dylan refers to the Joe Sachs translation but read the Terence Irwin translation this time. Wes read this online translation by F.H. Peters. Continued on part 2, or get the ad-free, unbroken Citizen Edition. Aristotle picture by Olle Halvars.

Concluding Levinas's Time and the Other (1948), in which we talk about the present being freedom, before there's even a will! This sort of helps to justify the counterintuitive existentialist insistence that we are responsible for the current state of our life even if it didn't result from our choices. We also get another formulation of selfhood: Identity is when we depart from ourselves (i.e., get interested in something external) but then are in some way pushed back into ourselves, such as by resistance. One of the chief things that resists our efforts is our own body, so being an individual, i.e., being free, is at the same moment being encumbered by, responsible for a body. As a correlate of this, our primary mode of dealing with the external world, before we get around to using things as tools or explicitly contemplating them as knowledge, is as material to nourish our bodies: we enjoy the world. This is in contrast both to Heidegger and to more dour versions of existentialism. Finally, we get the end of L's story about how we can authentically recognize the Other as Other, and so overcome the solitude inherent in existence. Yes, there's ethics and death involved, and time, but new here is the erotic, not in the sense of ecstatically losing yourself in pleasure, but in actively, immediately, physically pleasing another person. So yes, this is a fancy chain of ontological reasoning that ends up telling you to get over yourself by going out and getting some good lovin'. Yay, Jewish existentialism! Listen to part 1 first, or get the ad-free, unbroken Citizen Edition. Don't forget, please support PEL! End song: "Call on You" by Mark Lint from from the 1993 Mark Lint album Spanish Armada: Songs of Love and Related Neuroses. The song was written in 1987 when I was 16, so it's extra gooey!

More Levinas, working this time through Time and the Other (1948). What is it for a person to exist? What individuates one person from another, making us into selves instead of just part of the causal net of events? Why would someone possibly think that these are real, non-obvious questions that need to be addressed? Levinas gives us a phenomenological progression from the "there is," terrifyingly undifferentiated Being, to becoming an individual through "hypostasis," which is becoming an existent through a voyage out to the world and back to oneself. But this existing makes us solitary, not only in this weird ontological sense of being a distinct thing, but in a concrete, emotional sense. Overcoming this requires grasping the Other as a real Other, not as an object to fulfill our desires or get in our way. Really understanding this at our core takes some doing, and in the process, we gain a mature sense of time and of death, so, good for us! This episode follows up on ep. 145, where we introduced some of these themes and gave Levinas's pitch for ethical responsibility. Buy the book or read this online version. The discussion continues on part 2, or get the ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL! Levinas image by Corey Mohler.

Continuing on "Ethics as First Philosophy" (1984) and other essays. We try to complete Levinas's story on how revealing the flawed, aggressive character of our culture and personal attitudes can lead us to recognition of the ethical demand of the Other. Why, look, there's a Face right there, which, whatever actual expression might be on it, betrays first and foremost vulnerability: we recognize death in viewing another person, and with it time (you don't get much of a sense of time by yourself on an island, for instance). So does this really reflect your experience, and if not, is that just because you're too used to the grasping character of knowledge and self-assertion? We found this intriguing enough, and our treatment of the "Time and the Other" essay skimpy enough, that episode 146 will be about that 1948 essay, which presents a different journey to essentially the same destination. Listen to part 1 first, or get the ad-free Citizen Edition. Buy the The Levinas Reader, which contains all of the essays we read, or try this online version. Go "Share" the post for part 1 of this episode on our Facebook page, and (if you mark the post as "public" so that we can see that you put it up or just let us know that you shared it) you'll receive a link to the mp3 of our ep. 32 on Heidegger. You'll also be in the running for a free month of PEL Citizenship. Please support PEL! End song: "To Valerie" from The MayTricks' So Chewy (1993). Download the album for free. Sponsors: Get your free month of The Great Courses Plus at thegreatcoursesplus.com/PEL. Also, check out Gulf Breeze Recovery at www.gulfbreezerecovery.com.

On "Ethics as First Philosophy" (1984). More existentialist ethics, with a Jewish twist this time! Seth rejoins Mark and Wes to discuss this difficult essay, with a bit of "Time and the Other" (1948) and "There Is: Existence Without Existents" (1946) thrown in, too. Levinas thinks that the whole train of Western thought with the advance of science and all has left us too aggressive, too self-asserting, as a matter of our culturally held ontology, and that this obsures our view of our fundamental relationship to other people, to time, and to death. However, we do have, right there in our everyday experience, a model of "non-intentional consciousness" in the awareness we have of ourselves when we're not thinking about ourselves, when we're absorbed in some activity instead of self-reflecting. "Intentional consciousness" makes whatever we're conscious of an object. It's like we're eating it, reducing it to some element in our minds. But if we can get at the more passive kinds of awareness we already have, we can see that "knowledge of" is not really the proper mode of dealing with another person, who is fundamentally Other and can't be reduced without falsification to an object. Ontologically (and probably developmentally), this passive way of relating is primary; it trumps all of our assertions of self and of mastery over our world. So that's supposed to be a phenomenological account of the primacy of ethics over any other kind of philosophy, over any thought whatsoever. This is interesting to compare with the account of Levinas's contemporary Simone de Beauvoir, whose ethics we just covered in episode 140. She was arguing (in a Kantian sort of way) that ethics is contemporaneous with willing, which is of course prior to any of our particular projects or values. But Levinas is trying to make it even more primordial, with the passive experience that comes prior to willing. In both cases, existentialism is trying to say that a proper phenomenological evaluation of yourself is supposed to reveal that yes, you are subject to this obligation toward others. For Levinas, this obligation is total, whatever that means (our discussion, like the essay, is focused on the foundations of ethics, not so much on what exactly we're supposed to do given this obligation). Buy the The Levinas Reader, which contains all of the essays we read, or try this online version. Here's part 2 of the discussion. Go "Share" the post for this episode on our Facebook page, and (if you mark the post as "public" so that we can see that you put it up or just let us know that you shared it) you'll receive a link to the mp3 of our ep. 32 on Heidegger, who is Levinas's chief adversary and influence. You'll also be in the running for a free month of PEL Citizenship. Of course, if you just go and become a PEL Citizen, you'll get immediate access to the unbroken, ad-free Citizen version of this episode and all the others including those like the Heidegger than have been removed from the public feed. So

We are again publicizing our partnership here with Great Discourses, who are offering fall courses that include Ashvaghosha’s Life of the Buddha, Hegel and Dostoyevsky on Freedom and Happiness, Principles of Roman Stoicism, The Trial and Death of Socrates, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and more! It's like YOU getting on PEL, except with professional education instruction: cheaper and less involved than going to your local college for a class, but more involved than our Not School sessions. Register at greatdiscourses.com, and use the code PELIFE for 15% off. Or become a PEL Citizen, join the Great Discourses Not School group, and you'll get a code for 20% off instead. The deadline for early-bird registration (i.e. ,cheaper) is Monday, August 29. PEL Citizens can also hear the entirety of this course session, which features Adam guiding a discussion featuring Dave Buchanan (reprising his role as Prisig enthusiast from PEL episode 50, plus participants from Berkeley, Seattle, Chicago, Brazil, and Mexico!

Post-interview discussion of more aspects of Martha Nussbaum's Anger and Forgiveness. Is Nussbaum right in saying that payback should not play any part in our justice apparatus? We try to lay out what changes in policy she's pushing for and discuss her self-improvement regimen of limited Stoicism. Wes thinks contra Martha (but with Aristotle) that ALL anger involves "down-ranking," but that this doesn't have to do just with your public status (what Martha is concerned with in describing some anger as involving this), but with any case where someone is disregarding something you care about, that you've identified as part of your circle of concern, i.e., part of yourself in a way. Dylan, on the other hand, thinks that anger is better analyzed in the dynamic of the will to power, where you get mad because you're being thwarted in some way. Mark brings up cases where we get mad at objects like your malfunctioning computer. Are those really just fringe cases where we're anthropomorphizing objects, or contra Martha, is it actually the case the anger does NOT necessarily involve an attribution of blame or desire for retribution? Listen to the interview first (part one and part two), or listen to all the parts together, ad-free with the Citizen Edition. Please support PEL! Congrats to Citizen winners of our drawing for a copy of the book: Marcus Richeson, Matt Cole, new Citizen Tim Markham, and our winner from among those that liked the post on our Facebook page: Jasper Silver. End song: "Forgive the Disco," a Nussbaum-inspired vocal overdub by Mark Lint of an instrumental by Sean Beeson, interviewed on ep. #23 of Mark's Nakedly Examined Music podcast. Nussbaum picture by Solomon Grundy.

More interview on Anger and Forgiveness, now covering social justice, the legitimate role (if any) of anger and forgiveness in enacting justice and bringing about social change, and more on when Stoicism is legitimate and when it runs contra to ineliminable and/or authentically valuable human sentiments. Listen to part 1 first, or get it and part 3 in one seamless, ad-free package with this via the Citizen Edition.