The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

Mark, Wes, and Dylan discuss the interview with John in part one on Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception (2015) and try to sketch out the view and its potential problems in a little more detail. The two main issues are first, Searle claims that his theory is much better than historical alternatives because this "presentation" of the world is not an intermediary: we are directly perceving the world via such a presentation. Well, what is this "via?" If it meant "through" then the presentation would be an intermediary, like the rose-colored glasses sometimes (erroneously) described as Kant's take on perception. Second, Searle is not an atomist about perception: he admits that we don't take in sense data and then construct it into something. We perceive gestalt wholes filled with meaning from the human world. At the same time, there has to be some base layer that we for sure perceive that grounds these higher-level attributions, which are the ones that I'm wrong about. So I may not see MY car, but I did see a car with a similar color and other things such that I can explain the mistake. Such syntheses have to be potentially conscious: something that takes place as part of the background, but which we could focus on to figure out the mistake (since Searle does not believe that processing that is not in principle potentially conscious can be called "thought"). So we don't "infer" the existence of objects based on sense data, yet we must be synthesizing/constructing objects out of basic perceptual features (which nonetheless are actually in the world!). Get the Citizen edition to hear the whole thing including our previous interview ad-free. Please support PEL! End song: "Flesh and Blood" from The MayTricks' Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (1994). Download the whole album for free.

We interview John about Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception (2015). What is perception? Searle says that it's not a matter of seeing a representation, which is then somehow related to things in the real world. We see the actual objects, with no mediation. But then how can there be illusions? Well, we see things under an aspect: a presentation of the thing. And that presentation presents itself as caused by just that thing that the perception is of. If these "conditions of satisfaction" (i.e., that the perception is actually caused by that thing) are not met, then we have a case of illusion: we thought we were perceiving that thing, but we really weren't. Simple! Right? Searle lays out his theory for us and amusingly dismisses much of the history of philosophy. Recommended prerequisites: To understand the theories of knowledge that Searle is arguing against, start with ep. 17 on Hume, then ep. 18 on Kant and ep. 89 on Berkeley. Schopenhauer also comes up in the conversation; we talked about his epistemology in ep. 30 and his take on causality in ep. 114. The stuff about Hegel that Mark tries to bring in was covered in ep. 135. We previously talked about Searle and his theory of mind along with competing theories on ep. 21. Then we spoke with David Chalmers who comes up in the conversation in ep. 68. Continued on part 2, or get the ad-free Citizen Edition. Support PEL! Searle picture by Solomon Grundy. Check out ClubW.com/PEL for a free bottle of wine!

Continuing on Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979) with guest rock star Tim Quirk (from Too Much Joy). We continue talking about Bourdieu's conclusions regarding his survey of musical tastes: People use their tastes to distinguish themselves, to assert their social superiority. Bourdieu thinks the Kantian, upper-class, art-for-art's-sake paradigm of taste (which includes not just the arts but philosophy and other activities, too!) precludes, for example, joining in a mosh pit or roaring stadium crowd, but are the Kantian and social types of artistic abandon really so distinct? Is losing yourself a matter of exerting your freedom or being dominated? Buy the book. Listen to part 1 first, or get the ad-free, unbroken Citizen Edition. Please support PEL! End song: "When She Took Off Her Shirt" from Tim's band Wonderlick's Topless at the Arco Arena (2005). Bourdieu picture by Solomon Grundy.

On Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979), introduction, chapter 1 through p. 63, conclusion, and postscript. How do our tastes in music, art, and everything else reflect our social position? This philosophically trained sociologist administered a few detailed questionnaires in 1960s France and used the resulting differences in what people in different classes preferred and how they talked about these preferences to theorize about the role that taste plays in our social games. People with more education and/or with an upper-class social background use their ability to appreciate fine art (which requires some know-how to decode) to distinguish themselves: to prove that they deserve their social status. Other classes' tastes were in reaction to this dominant taste: middle-class responders aspired to have the taste of the elite (often getting it wrong by favoring simply pretentious works), while lower-class workers either made excuses for their lack of appreciation ("it's good but not not my cup of tea") or rebelled by reveling in low-class art. In all cases there was gamesmanship at work: the distinctions were at work in cementing or trying to move within or rebelling against the social order. (Seth posted the lists of classes as they were asked their opinions about a high-brow, middle, and low-brow work.) Buy the book. Mark, Wes, and Seth were joined by Tim Quirk, famed as singer from the 90s band Too Much Joy and recent guest on Mark's Nakedly Examined Music podcast. Here's that presentation, "Good News for Yo La Tengo," that he talks about. Recommended prerequisites: This can be seen as a reaction to the snobbiness displayed by Adorno (ep. 136), but Bourdieu explicitly identifies the un-worldly (which requires being shielded from economic necessity), aesthetic (and ultimately ascetic, i.e., denying of immediate pleasures) stance with Kant's theory of taste (ep. 105), and also explicitly discusses Schopenhauer's view (ep. 115). Here's part 2, or you get the full, ad-free Citizen Edition. Bourdieu picture by Solomon Grundy.

Continuing on Theodor Adorno's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" (1944). We cover topics within art and entertainment like the role of style: You think you're being so original with your personal style, but Adorno sees you has having already been brainwashed into being a clone, so your "authentic" expression is anything but. Also, humor is not, as you might think, a way of bringing an audience together in solidarity, but is the "eruption of barbarism!" And sex in the popular culture: what a tease! Manufactured entertainment products can't even get tragedy right! They just condition us into accepting our crappy situation. Buy the book or you can read this abridged version online. Listen to part 1 first or get the ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL! End song: "All Too Familiar," from around 1992 with all instruments by Mark Linsenmayer, released on The MayTricks. Get the whole album free.

On Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), plus Adorno's essay "Culture Industry Reconsidered" (1963). How does the entertainment industry affect us? Adorno and Horkheimer (who co-authored the book, but it looks like Adorno mainly wrote the essay we read) are founding figures of the Frankfurt school, which means using Marxism and the insights of psychoanalysis to diagnose the ills of society. According to Adorno, our "mass culture" is not from the masses at all. Not created by them certainly, but also not responding in capitalist fashion to their demands. Rather, it's imposed on us and brainwashes us into conformity. With stereotyped characters, by-the-numbers plotting, and an emphasis on style over substance, films entice and lull us into submission. Ditto for popular music and other media, each in their own insidious way. And it's not just a matter of high-brow art snobs worrying about low-brow material: The culture industry mixes the base and etherial together (to the detriment of both) to catch everyone in its net; capitalism is happy to appropriate it all, so long as real thinking is discouraged! The full foursome tangle with this quotable, laughable, overwrought text, finding many interesting observations about art even while finding the overall critique much too harsh and finicky. Get part 2 here or Become a PEL Citizen to get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition. Have you checked out Mark's new podcast Nakedly Examined Music yet? Adorno picture by Corey Mohler. This episode is sponsored by Zero Books: Check out their many titles in critical theory and related endeavors at zero-books.net.

The last of our four releases on G.W.F. Hegel's The Encyclopaedia Logic (1817). Here we finish sections 78–99 (still with guest Amogh Sahu), giving Hegel's account of how Being supposedly leads, when you analyze the concept itself, to Nothingness, and then Becoming, Quality, and Quantity. And we also get Infinity in there, which is nice. So, how does this work? Well, Being, which is the only starting point you could possibly have if you don't want to smuggle in any prejudices in kicking off your philosophy (in fact, you could just start with the concept "beginning" and you could figure this out), is totally undifferentiated, right? It's not "horse-being" but Being in general, what everything that IS has. So there's nothing that would distinguish it as the Being of anything in particular. Well, then there's no definition, no defined entity to it at all: it's Nothingness! Just like the notion of God as the wholeness of everything is really the same as the Buddhist notion of Void. So you contemplate those terms and see how they flip back and forth one to the other in your mind, and HEY! That flipping there, that's Becoming! So you just got Becoming out of Being. But what is Becoming? It's finitude: anything that Becomes (anything real, not just abstract Being) comes into being and at some point ceases to be. It is a specific thing, which is what Hegel calls "determinate being" (the German is Dasein, literally "Being-There"). And if someone is thinking about that something in particular, that determinate being, then it gets picked out by its Quality, so there's that basic category of metaphysics right there. Well, what's the flip side of this? If you've got something determinate, then by definition you have Otherness, i.e. determinate negation, and if you think about the Otherness of Otherness you get a loop, which is Infinity. And unfortunately, we ran out of time and energy before really talking about Quantity, so too bad for you! Yes, the matter is more complex than what I said here, but it's no less weird. This "practical application" is the big pay-off from listening to those three previous hours of us talking about Hegel's logic. Here's part one, or better yet, listen to part one of ep. 134 where this all starts. Or be cool and become a PEL Citizen to get both of these full episodes ad-free, plus then you can hear the aftershow. Here's that Hegel Glossary from the U. of London that Mark reads from. End song: "Flow" by Gary Lucas and Mark Lint. Have you checked out Mark's new podcast Nakedly Examined Music yet? I interview Gary on ep. 7.

A whole second discussion on G.F.W. Hegel's The Encyclopaedia Logic (1817), hitting sections 78–99 on the dialectic and how it's supposed to generate basic metaphysical categories like Being, Becoming, Quality, and Quantity. We also talk about Understanding vs. Reason: Kant thought that we can't do metaphysics because we can only talk sensibly about abstractions (via the Understanding) from our experience, and that Reason is the faculty by which we try to make sense of the big picture, and that Reason therefore tries to apply the categories of the Understanding beyond their proper province. Hegel thinks that right, Understanding only gives us abstractions, which are well and good, but don't tell us about metaphysics. When we use Reason to intuit Concepts, however, we're examining reality itself at a very high level, though Hegel doesn't want to call this "abstract," because when you examine these Concepts, they exhibit instabilities that propel them, so to speak, into other Concepts. You should probably listen to the two parts of ep. 134 before this one, but hopefully we're clearer this time around. We're rejoined by Amogh Sahu. Listen to part two of the discussion or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition with your PEL Citizenship, which will also let you hear the Aftershow. Hegel picture by Solomon Grundy.

More on G.F.W. Hegel's The Science of Logic (1812–1816), §1–§129 plus The Encyclopaedia Logic (1817) §1–§25. We continue trying to make sense of Hegel's method and purpose: How does he think that we can deduce something like Kant's categories (e.g., quantity, quality)? We can't start with the manifold of experience, which presupposes a subject-object distinction, which would be me having perceptions that may or may not actually resemble the world itself. Hegel wants to develop a Science (i.e. a philosophy) free of assumptions. Our thought DOES come in contact with reality, he says, when we think hard and systematically enough. Of course, the only way to really prove that is just to do it. We're still gearing up here; in episode 135 we're actually going to get down to brass tacks, or more precisely Being, which is where Hegel thinks we can safely start our derivation of the rest of the furniture of the universe. End song: "Procrastination" by Steve Petrinko from The MayTricks' Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (1994). Download the whole album for free. Listen to Mark interview Steve on Nakedly Examined Music. Listen to part one first, or get the ad-free Citizen edition. Please support PEL!

On G.F.W. Hegel's The Science of Logic (1812–1816), §1–§129 (i.e., the two prefaces and the introduction), plus The Encyclopaedia Logic (1817) §1–§25, which is supposed to dumb it down more so we can understand what's going on. "Logic" for Hegel isn't about symbolic logic; it's about how thought interacts with the world. In short, our thoughts about fundamental metaphysical categories bear the same relations to each other as the the categories themselves do. This will take some explaining, so we're doing another two-discussion series here, this time just taking on the introductory part of his account. We talk a lot about how Hegel is reacting to and and building on Kant: how Kant said that due to the structure of the mind-world relation, we can't really know anything about the world and so can't do metaphysics at all. Hegel denies this, saying that we can reach "absolute knowledge" through rigorous thought, which is a matter of analyzing the internal contents of our various concepts and philosophical theories to see how they break down and so lead to improved versions of themselves. This recording features Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Amogh Sahu of the Symptomatic Redness podcast. Recommended prerequisites: Ep. 19 on Kant's epistemology, ep. 35 on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, ep. 89 on Berkeley's idealism. Interesting points of comparison are ep. 131 Aristotle on "nous" and ep. 34 Frege on "Thoughts." Hegel's position in the Logic was the basis for British Hegelianism, which in turn was exactly what the logical atomism of Russell and early Wittgenstein (episode 7) was a reaction to. Continued on part 2, or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL. Write for us! Have you checked out Mark's new podcast Nakedly Examined Music yet? Hegel picture by Corey Mohler.

Host Danny Lobell joins Wes to welcome St. John's Annapolis tutor Rebecca Goldner to help folks understand Aristotle's De Anima as laid out in our episodes 130 and 131. Also featuring PEL Citizens Michael Burgess, Nick Halme, Erik Weissengruber, Chase Fiorenza, and Scott Anderson. This is the first 15 minutes; PEL Citizens can hear the full discussion. Rebecca has written a number of articles (like this one) on the book, and you can see her talking about it on the Digital Dialogue podcast. You can also watch it: Watch on YouTube.

Our first spin-off podcast has launched successfully! PEL host Mark Linsenmayer talks to songwriters about why and how they do what they do: Call it applied philosophy, the specifics that go into making this most popular of our arts. And who better to kick things off than David Lowery, lead singer of both Camper van Beethoven and its more famous alt-rock child, Cracker? You have heard at least some his music, I promise, and he's fully as well-spoken and full of ideas as many a decent philosopher. This is a taste: You can now hear three more episodes beyond this one (four within a day or two; I've recorded nine so far) at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com, or find it in the iTunes store. The three songs we discuss are: * "All Her Favorite Fruit," by Camper van Beethoven, from Key Lime Pie, 1989) * "I Sold the Arabs the Moon" by David Lowery, from The Palace Guards (2011), also discussed on David's website * "Take the Skinheads Bowling" by Camper van Beethoven from Telephone Free Landslide Victory (1985), the "hit" status of which was discussed by David on his website As a bonus, we also get to hear one of David's most recent songs, "Almond Grove" by Cracker from Berkeley To Bakersfield (discussed in Rolling Stone). The intro/outro music is from Cracker's biggest hit "Low," from 1993's Kerosene Hat. You can read lyrics for all of these songs here. David is a very lyrics-oriented guy, and isn't shy about telling the stories behind his songs. Not that you should expect this podcast to always focus on lyrics, or be restricted to this kind of music, much less restricted to songwriters associated with Camper van Beethoven ...

Continuing on Fromm's The Art of Loving (1956). In this second half of our discussion, we talk about love as requiring knowledge: as "knowing the secret" of humanity or at least being interested. This is related to sadism. Is there a difference between motherly and fatherly love? Fromm thinks so. He also talks about different degrees of maturity in one's belief in God, the best being like Spinoza's, where God is not an entity, but is the equivalent to the world and love of God is love of humanity, i.e., general orientation toward the good. Finally, we get Fromm's social recommendations: How could we reform society's structures and norms so that healthy love as he's describing it can be the norm instead of the purview of only those rebellious enough to reject the consumerist outlook? Hint: He likes Marx, though he argues that no allegedly Marxist actual state comes anywhere close to what Marx was after in terms of letting people live free, unalienated, fulfilling lives. Listen to part 1 first or get the ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL! End songs: "Kimmy" (recorded 1995), from Mark Lint's Black Jelly Beans & Smokes. Listen to the album free. Also its sequel, "Kimmy 2002 (Mommy)."

On Fromm's The Art of Loving (1956). A Valentine's Day special topic! What is love, really? This psychoanalyst of the Frankfurt school thinks that real love is not something one "falls" into, but is an art, an activity, and doing it well requires a disciplined openness and psychological health. Love is the answer to the deep human need to rid ourself of isolation, but a mere sexual union won't provide real intimacy. To connect the center of your being with the center of another's being, you need to really know yourself and know the other, and this knowing requires an overall openness that amounts to a love of humanity, a feeling of oneness with nature, and an overall orientation toward the good, which is what he considers a mature take on "love of God," which doesn't imply, e.g., a belief in a judging deity, which would be a mature imposition into nature of insecurities about the conditional love of one's father. So yes, this is replete with psychoanalytic weirdness (and without any clinical basis presented), and very much reflects its time (prurient, sexist, homophobic), but Fromm also puts forward a Marxist social commentary that's very much in line with our New Work and Hannah Arendt episodes, i.e., we need to remake society into the kind of place where loving can be the rule and not the exception, as our current society steers us to treat others and ourselves like commodities to be used, and romantic love as likewise trying to score the best deal, find the best love object and make yourself the most desirable (attractive, successful), none of which adds up to intimacy. Oh, and also, stop watching so much TV! This recording features the core four: Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan. Recommended prerequisites: Ep. 26 on Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, Ep. 100 on Plato's Symposium. We've also discussed this issue of others' recognition of you on many episodes starting with Ep. 36 on Hegel, but perhaps the clearest statement, most relevant to this episode is Ep. 71 on Martin Buber. Buy the book or try this online copy. Don't wait for part two! Get the ad-free Citizen Edition now by becoming a PEL Citizen. You can also support the podcast by making a donation, setting up a recurring micro-donation via Patreon, or buying some merch. Have you checked out Mark's new podcast Nakedly Examined Music yet? Sponsors: Visit casper.com/pel (enter promo code PEL for $50 off your mattress,

Continuing with Massimo Pigliucci on selected "moral epistles" by Seneca: 4. On the Terrors of Death, 12. On Old Age, 49. On the Shortness of Life, 59. On Pleasure and Joy, 62. On Good Company, 92. On the Happy Life, 96. On Facing Hardship, and 116. On Self Control. With the preliminaries out of the way, we really get into the essays to see what Seneca has to say about love and other emotions, facing loss and other hardships, fear of death, desire, pursuing your goals, keeping company with ancient sages, and wearing nice clothes. Seneca, like Fritz Beer, thinks we're on a leash. All you have to do to be happy is have "a complete view of truth!" That's all! Listen to part one first, or get the Citizen edition. Please support PEL! End song: "I Lose Control" by The MayTricks from So Chewy! (1993), which you can listen to in full.