Thomas Sheehan (on Entitled Opinions) on Phenomenology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on January 27, 2012
Robert Harrison and Thomas Sheehan
Interviewer Robert Harrison starts the discussion expressing the excitement of applied, humanistic phenomenology, i.e. as it was used by existentialists like Sartre. Sheehan says that while there’s not much in the way of modern, creative phenomenology going on now, there are plenty of philosophers who use Husserl and Heidegger as a launching point for their own (apparently not phenomenological) philosophies, and that in particular you can’t understand Heidegger unless you understand him as a phenomenologist, as opposed to someone just concerned with ontology, i.e. metaphysics, which is what you might think given his discussions of the ancient Greeks and his emphasis on “Being.”
Here’s a little quiz for you to see if you got it: What does it mean to say that what Aristotle is to Plato, Heidegger is to Husserl?
Here’s the Entitled Opinions home page.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Cooking Philosophically
Posted by Dylan Casey in Things to Watch, Web Detritus on January 25, 2012
It is my firm understanding that while The Partially Examined Life tilts decisively toward philosophy generally understood — contemplations of being and nature and self and ethics and thought and morality and consciousness — the disposition we have of engaging texts for ourselves and talking about them thoughtfully and seriously (if occasionally irreverently) extrapolates well to a disposition regarding many endeavors, be them motorcycle maintenance (indeed, forthcoming in its own way) or cooking. These are activities of the senses and the mind, of manipulation matching art with know-how captured in the greek word techne. Thinking about them and doing them reveals to us the world and ourselves.
To that end, I point you to a very new blog written by a dear friend of mine called The Food of My People. By study and training he is a specialist in metaphysics (with much work on Thomas Aquinas). He’s a master teacher of language (particularly Greek and Latin, though I would happily sit in his French class) and a wonderful conversationalist. His blog captures some of my fondest memories of our friendship — sitting in his kitchen with a well-chosen glass of Italian wine while he cooked dinner and talked about the food, the preparation, and his life growing up in Brooklyn (and learning to cook). I’ve been privileged to have him teach me how to make frittata and Sunday Gravy. I point all of you cooks to a good read that will keep philosophy on your mind while directing you straight to the kitchen. Consider one small excerpt:
Salt is all important. In the old Catholic rite of baptism, it signified wisdom. Don’t be a fool and skimp on salt. The thing you need not only to understand but also to believe, if you are ever to be a good cook, is that salt has the wondrous power of making things more themselves. Other spices add flavor; salt brings it out. The self-same salt, used in due measure, makes broccoli taste more like broccoli, and steak like steak, and potatoes like potatoes. Salt is ready to do self-effacing service to one and all – its very humility merits its exaltation. Its hidden action is not so much causal as causative, i.e., it does not do something, but causes something else to do something, namely, to taste delicious. If something tastes salty, it means you have added too much salt (unless you meant it to, as with nuts and pretzels), but if something does not taste like itself, it likely needs the eductive agency of salt.
Shame on Plato for letting you think that cooking is mere cookery.
-Dylan
Rick Roderick on Foucault
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch, Web Detritus on January 24, 2012
Rick Roderick from larshjo.tihlde.org
Long time listeners and readers know that I’m a fan of Rick Roderick. For those who don’t know, he was from Texas, got his degree in philosophy from UT and taught at various places including Duke. He was a down home type who became famous to philosophiles through a couple of lecture series he published through The Teaching Company. (Home also to Mark’s crush Robert Solomon) They were filmed in the 90s and have subsequently been re-posted to various places on the web including youtube. He died way too young and had a checkered academic career (you can read more about that along with testimonials here) but as evidenced by his videos, was a great communicator and passionate about philosophy in society.
Roderick did a lecture series in 1993 called “The Self Under Siege: Philosophy in the 20th Century” covering Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Heidegger, Sartre, Marcuse and Ricoeur. Roderick sets the question as follows:
- Current professional philosophy is “deflationary” in that it gives no answers to our larger questions, in particular our questions concerning our selves, our projects, our place in society and in the world.
- We have lost a vast resource of cultural meaning upon which we could draw to construct meaning for our lives. Meaning, in this large sense, can no longer be drawn unproblematic from religion. We have information, but not knowledge.
- We all strive to have a “theory” or narrative about our selves., we want to have a meaningful story about our lives that affirms our humanity. In short, we want them to mean something.
- The complex systems under which we live (economic, technological, global) have put the self”under siege”, overloaded with information and images that offer no meaning for us. We have difficulty making any sense out of our lives. Read the rest of this entry »
History of the Prison
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on January 23, 2012
Check out this video. It is a brief history of prisons, but also focuses on the use of technology in and the architecture of prisons. It makes the indirect but clear point that surveiller goes hand in hand with technology. There’s a nice spot right at the beginning where the Commissioner of the NYC Dept. of Corrections talks about how military technology is being employed in prisons. They also trace the concept of the cell as a model for imprisonment from the monastic cell, adding a religious, meditative element to the Foucaultian thesis that systems of discipline in different types of institutions cross-pollinated.
–seth
Foucault on Discipline and Punish
Posted by Seth Paskin in Web Detritus on January 22, 2012
Here’s a video of Foucault talking about Discipline & Punish.
So the modern prison system is not the same as the ancient prison/dungeon, it is more like other institutions of discipline such as educational institutions and the military. In turn, the expansion of the application of discipline gives rise to the development of further techniques that spread to other areas of society like factories. In each case, the system of discipline gives rise to a field of knowledge specific to the subject to affected: the student, the soldier, the criminal, the worker.
[Note: The poster disabled embed, so this will take you to youtube]
Lest you despair, Foucault in the second part of the recording notes that structure of disciplinary systems is “rational”, not “totalitarian”. This was Katie’s point in the podcast that Foucault doesn’t see Power as bad in itself, but simply as a way in which society is ordered to influence people. Awareness of this ordering and influence is necessary to question and potential change or resist it.
–seth
Steven Fuller on Liberal Humanism vs. neo-Darwinism
Posted by Tom McDonald in Things to Watch, Web Detritus on January 21, 2012
I’m interested in this debate as a strictly philosophical observer, not as a theologian, humanist, scientist, or neo-Darwinist. And I entertain the possibility that the outcome of this dilemma may be that we have to abandon an unjustifiable confidence in the human intellect for neo-Darwinism.
The secular philosopher-sociologist Steven Fuller performs here the role of philosophical midwife to what I believe is arguably the next major conceptual revolution in modern intellectual culture: liberal humanists, who use neo-Darwinian theory in their fights with religion, having to abandon the massive, underlying contradiction between neo-Darwinian theory and the secularized theology or metaphysics of their belief in humanism. The Western metaphysics of liberal humanism — belief that the human intellect is special — has been taken on loan from theology for roughly 400 years. But now the contemporary debate between neo-Darwinism and Intelligent Design theory is critically uncovering the reasons why the time seems to be nearing for liberal humanists to stop living in denial of this loan and their debt.
Like a family intervention taken to stop an addict’s spiral into oblivion, Fuller articulates the sobering confrontation: either you can believe neo-Darwinian theory, or you can believe that the human intellect has the intrinsic motivation and capability to solve any problem humanity faces through reason and science, but you cannot rationally or coherently believe both of these propositions.
Tom McDonald
Commercials, Commercials, Commercials
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements, Things to Watch on January 18, 2012
With the Foucault episode, we entered into a strange new world of sponsorship. Now I hate commercials more than just about anyone on this earth, and see philosophy as, in part, a haven from irritating commercialism. So, in getting into this area, I’m going to do my best to keep the irritation to a minimum.
That Audible commercial I floundered through on the episode wasn’t too awful, was it? Well, whether or not they want to sponsor us further depends on how many of you folks check out www.audiblepodcast.com/PEL, so go do that if audiobooks interest you.
To get more sponsors, we need to provide our listeners’ demographics. Consequently, we need at least 250 people to go fill out this form. All questions are optional, and providing your email address there will not result in your getting spammed or otherwise inconvenienced. So take two minutes if you will and fill it out as a way of saying, “yes, PEL, we want appropriately tasteful business entities to give you money so that you can feel like you can spend more of your time recording!”
Foucault and Heidegger
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Podcast Episodes on January 17, 2012
Superman at the blackboard from learning3pointzero.com
So there was a longish (8 minutes) bit that I cut from the episode where I asked Katie whether Foucault’s notions of Power and Knowledge correlated in some way with Heidegger’s notions of Being and Truth. I was incoherent and Katie understandably treated the question as the nonsense that it was. She has since addressed the Heidegger/Foucault connection in the comments on the episode here. One of the papers she links to by Dreyfus is precisely on this topic: Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault.
In his usual straightforward style, Dreyfus sets the stage:
At the heart of Heidegger’s thought is the notion of being, and the same could be said of power in the works of Foucault. The history of being gives Heidegger a perspective from which to understand how in our modern world things have been turned into objects. Foucault transforms Heidegger’s focus on things to a focus on selves and how they became subjects. [You should read the paper, it's fun]
His stated goal in the paper is to push the correlation between the two as far as he can and see where it goes. He hits upon that in which I was interested in section II. Seinsgeschichte and Genealogy. Here Dreyfus shows the parallels between Heidegger’s History of Being and Foucault’s Genealogy of regimes of power. Dreyfus is concerned to show the structural similarities in the accounts, how they deal with historical epochs and then how that leads each thinker to their criticisms of the modern notion of subjectivity and human being. Read the rest of this entry »
Diet Soap (C. Dereck Varn and Doug Lain) on Epistemology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on January 16, 2012
I’ve been talking to Dereck (aka Skepoet) about coming on as a guest with us (on Saussure), and I noticed this new episode of Diet Soap features he and Doug Lain in a wide-ranging conversation on skepticism and its relation to phenomenology. One interesting point to add to the PEL deliberations on the growth of the self is from the post-structuralists (I guess) on consciousness itself being “built like a language.” I’m not clear from the discussion what this means yet but look forward to figuring it out.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Foucault and Deleuze on Drugs
Posted by Katie McIntyre in PEL's Notes on January 15, 2012
Deleuze compliments of uninvitedguest.com
This could be false.
This is one of those rumors you pick up gradually when you take a few classes in contemporary continental philosophy. You hear a lot of anecdotes of the dubious kind that always seem to begin, “I can’t remember where I heard this, but…”
Now here are some things we think we know about Deleuze and Foucault on drugs: Read the rest of this entry »
Episode 49: Foucault on Power and Punishment
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on January 11, 2012
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:42:23 — 93.8MB)
Discussing Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), parts 1, 2 and section 3 of part 3.
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.
This episode is sponsored by Audible; go there for your free audio book.
If you enjoy your listening experience, please donate at least $1:
Anesthesia and Consciousness
Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on January 10, 2012
Neuroscientists are using anesthesia to study consciousness in a way that seems related to higher order theories of consciousness. The conclusion so far: “consciousness emerges from the integration of information across large networks in the brain”:
Over the past few years, other EEG studies have supported the idea that anesthesia doesn’t simply shut the brain down but, rather, interferes with its internal communication. Mashour’s research, for instance, has shown that feedback between the front and back of the brain is interrupted during general anesthesia, leading to a disconnect between different brain networks. That feedback is thought to be important for consciousness.
…
“What we find is that the anesthetized brain is still very reactive to stimuli,” he says; both EEG and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), an indirect method of measuring brain activity, show response to light and sounds. But somehow that sensory information is never processed and integrated into the type of activity necessary for conscious awareness.
– Wes
We Know: Camus did not die in a motorcycle accident
Posted by Wes Alwan in Misc. Philosophical Musings on January 9, 2012
If you ever decide to start a podcast under the impression that your early efforts will be protected by a cone of anonymity, do yourself a favor and pretend that you already have an audience in the hundreds of thousands. And operating on that premise, diligently scrub your episodes for any trivial factual errors that — while they may seem harmless to you at the time — could return to haunt you to the end of your days.
In one of our early episodes I said that Camus died in a motorcycle accident. In fact, he died in an automobile accident. I know that now because I am periodically reminded of it by diligent listeners for whom this error seems to have ruined the whole show. What a difference two wheels can make. (These listeners seem unaware of the irony of their focus on factual trivia when listening to the more abstract musings of a philosophy podcast).
I’m publicizing this error now just so that those who feel tempted to correct it in the future will understand that after three years, we’ve already been made aware of the mistake. Several times. It’s just that Mark hasn’t gotten around to editing the episode and overdubbing an incongruently voiced “automobile” wherever anyone says “motorcycle.”
I am also thinking of incorporating a more profane version of this correction into my epitaph.
(P.S.: I also once said “per capita GDP” where I meant to say “GDP.” As far as I know that covers all sins of fact).
– Wes
Poetry v Philosophy, Round 2
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on January 7, 2012
Charles Simic from the Santa Barbara Independent
Still listening to Essential American Poets put out by The Poetry Foundation. I just listened to the latest episode on Charles Simic. He ends the episode by reciting his “The Friends of Heraclitus“. It is about the loss of beloved friend and companion with whom the referenced subject has had many philosophical discourses, walking around and getting lost, both literally and in thought.
The loss of a partner in dialogue made me think of Plato (and Xenophon), what a true sense of sorrow he must have in losing such a companion in Socrates. The Apology, the starting point for our Partially Examined journey, is itself a poem, an ode to a lost friend.
Simic’s character goes out for a walk playing both roles, himself and the lost companion. His sorrow, however, blurs his philosophical sensibilities
Read the rest of this entry »
Now Taking Questions on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on January 6, 2012
The bad news is that our discussion with Owen Flanagan has been postponed for a couple of weeks. The good news is that we were able to move up the discussion previously planned to come after that, on Robert M. Pirsig’sZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
If you’ve already read this book or are familiar with Pirsig’s philosophy, feel free to kick us some questions to consider in our discussion.
-Mark Linsenmayer
In Memoriam: Michael Dummett
Posted by Brad Younger in General Announcements, Misc. Philosophical Musings on January 5, 2012
Dummett in 2004
Last week, on December 27th, Michael Dummett passed away. Dummett was an important and influential British philosophy of the 20th century, probably most famous for his interpretations of Frege. Indeed it was his early work which helped to revitalize an interest in Frege’s work in the second half of the 20th century. (The PEL episode on Frege can be found here. An interview of Dummett talking about Frege on Philosophy Bites can be found here.)
Dummett was also important for his work in the philosophy of mathematics, logic, language, and metaphysics. His most original work involved the suggestion that we understand disputes in metaphysics over realism as disputes in logic. This turns on the principle of bivalence (the semantic principle which says that every statement is either true or false). Insofar as realists think that entities are mind-independent, they will accept bivalence. Truth is conceived as transcending our abilities to know. Anti-realists on the other hand don’t accept bivalence since they think that the entities in question are mind-dependent. They take truth to be epistemologically constrained.
There are unfortunately not a lot of videos of Dummett on the web, but if you want to join the Bodleian Philosophy Faculty Library, you can get a long interview of Dummett by Donald Davidson here. Dummett was undoubtedly a significant philosopher of the 20th century. And he will surely be remembered for many years to come.
-Brad Younger
PEL Gets Reviewed by Podthoughts (Colin Marshall)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts, Web Detritus on January 2, 2012
One of the better-written reviews of our podcast can be found here. I quote:
At least three hosts at a time trying to interpret, in their own natural and thus imprecise language, a philosophical text itself composed in its own natural and thus imprecise language, opens up infinite opportunity for purely semantic argument. The show’s discussions, as with so many philosophical discussions in life, sometimes careen inexorably toward thickets of seemingly endless loops circling around what the words being used could or should mean…
Don’t feel too bad if you lose the thread — especially if you listen, as I do, while performing entirely non-philosophical database work. But you’ll find fascination and even intellectual beauty in hearing human minds collectively grapple with concepts even as the concepts crumble under scrutiny.
Marshall is a podcaster too, with a very NPRish demeanor: The Marketplace of Ideas podcast. Listen to him interview Sarah Bakewell about Montaigne. (After, of course, listening to our Montaigne episode; plus, here’s a past post on Bakewell).
-Mark Linsenmayer
Open Culture Goodness
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on January 2, 2012
If you don’t subscribe to this blog, this roundup should convince you to do so:
The Best of OpenCulture, 2011.
Heaps of online lectures, video, and other stuff, with the occasional post from me if I actually make time to submit one. (Neil Gaiman apparently retweeted the post I wrote on him.)
-Mark Linsenmayer
On New Year’s Resolutions
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings on January 1, 2012
That's Glitchy has something to say about the subject
A couple of years ago, I made a public New Year’s resolution to be more unreasonable and unrealistic. While I am not sure whether I truly ‘achieved’ either of those, it certainly took more than one year (2010) to really start pushing into that way of being. Which led me to consider why I should resolve to do anything in 2012 and what that would be.
Think about what a resolution is (from dictionary.com):
- a formal expression of opinion or intention made, usually after voting, by a formal organization, a legislature, a club, or other group. Compare concurrent resolution, joint resolution.
- a resolve or determination: to make a firm resolution to do something.
- the act of resolving or determining upon an action or course of action, method, procedure, etc.
- the mental state or quality of being resolved or resolute; firmness of purpose.
- the act or process of resolving or separating into constituent or elementary parts.
New Year’s resolutions seem to have the character of #3 – we resolve to do something. Normally, this is something different or new compared to our past/current behavior. And usually it is intended to correct or improve something that we find lacking or displeasing in ourselves. This, in turn, suggests that we have done some kind of self-assessment or examination and determined that, we are falling short according to some standard or goal by which we measure ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »
A Short Story to Kick Off Your New Year
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on January 1, 2012
I submit for your consideration this story I wrote a couple years back: “World #6“, that’s all about reconceptualizing as you age and the rewards that brings. Enjoy your New Year.
-Mark Linsenmayer
"I’ve never before heard my work discussed like that, and rarely as intelligently ... I listened to the whole podcast, and felt exalted afterward." -- Arthur Danto
The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
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