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Episode 77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty

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On George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty (1896). What are we saying when we call something “beautiful?” Are we pointing out an objective quality that other people (anyone?) can ferret out, or just essentially saying “yay!” without any logic necessarily behind our exclamation? The poet and philosopher Santayana thought that while aesthetic appreciation is an Read more…

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Why can’t life always be beautiful?

by Philip C. on June 16, 2013 | 4 Comments

Hans Baldung Grien – Three Ages of Woman and Death (1510)

[A blog post from friend of PEL Phillip C. It's a bit longer than our normal posts and is heavy with the name drops but I'm going to let it go because it's on art, is related to a discussion group and I make the editing decisions around here - Seth]

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?” —Michel Foucault ^[1]

If life is beautiful, why can’t we always experience it as such? Is it not in moments of beauty that we find life most engaging? Anything could be beautiful. Beauty is an excess: the latent, frivolous, life-affirming power (eros), lurking around every corner, waiting to be noticed by anyone with the sufficient leisure to do so. And it’s not even necessarily a luxury of leisure, for even (or especially) in the face of death, the reality of beauty smacks us in the face and takes us by surprise. I’m reminded of observations recorded by the holocaust survivor and psychologist, Viktor Frankl:
Continue reading…

Topic for #78: Ayn Rand on Living Rationally

by Mark Linsenmayer on June 14, 2013 | 87 Comments

Bowing to repeated listener requests for an Ayn Rand episode, on the eve of 6/9/13 the regular PEL foursome started our discussion, got tired after a couple of hours, and recorded some more on 6/13. We plan to edit the result heavily enough to reduce the amount of frustrated kvetching (“Is that actually supposed to be an argument? Why does she think just saying that and moving on is in any way adequate?”), but it’s not going to make objectivism fans happy, I can tell you. Know that we did make an honest attempt at engaging the material, though it was hard going, and not in the way that difficult passages in Heidegger are.

Rand offers up a foundationalist system that is is supposed to be in accord with modern science and based on empirically evident premises and clear reasoning from those that anyone who isn’t being self-deceptive or otherwise dense should be able to reproduce. Every perception we have reveals to us that the world exists (thus skepticism is incoherent and impossible as a practical matter), and a properly scientific understanding of concepts will show us that all legitimate tools of thought are based on abstractions from perceptual experience of concrete objects.

Is Experimental Philosophy Bad Science?

by Seth Paskin on June 12, 2013 | 5 Comments

Wikipedia tells us that Experimental Philosophy (X-Phi) is:

an emerging field of philosophical inquiry that makes use of empirical data—often gathered through surveys which probe the intuitions of ordinary people—in order to inform research on philosophical questions. This use of empirical data is widely seen as opposed to a philosophical methodology that relies mainly on a priori justification, sometimes called “armchair” philosophy by experimental philosophers.

So what makes X-Phi experimental is the use of data rather than (presumably) data-less a priori reasoning. This is confusing. Even when employing ‘pure reason’, philosophers use data – if only the data of their senses, experience and consciousness. Would anyone deny that Descartes used data when he came up with the Cogito? That it was the data of his own experience doesn’t make it less valid qua data. Continue reading…

Come Join My Heraclitus Not School Group

by Mark Linsenmayer on June 9, 2013 | 2 Comments

For Episode #79 (to be recorded in late June and released in July), we’ll be reading Eva Brann’s The Logos of Heraclitus and interviewing her about it. She was a colleague of Dylan’s at St. John’s, and her book exhibits that love of etymology that has come up recently on PEL whenever Heidegger is mentioned, for which St. John’s is notorious. This is pretty much what you have to do to talk about Heraclitus, as there are no surviving full texts by the guy. He’s just quoted by other ancient writers. You can view all of his fragments here along with where they were quoted, but Eva really goes all out to weave a narrative out of this, bringing in Pythagoras and others whose work she thinks Heraclitus was responding to. The “logos” is about meaning, about patterns: she sees Heraclitus as the first real philosopher of science, who noted that nature performs according to regularities and asked about the relation between that lawlike behavior and the regularities themselves.

Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog: “Sense of Beauty”/Call for Musicians

by Mark Linsenmayer on June 7, 2013 | 2 Comments

Listen to “Sense of Beauty.”

Eventually, I’ll run out of songs to put at the end of episodes, so I’m trying to write some fresh tunes while actually reading the work in question. For ep. 77, I wrote this song that at least has the same title as the book we read.

The Self and Selfishness (and Aesthetics and “The Fountainhead”)

by Mark Linsenmayer on June 2, 2013 | 20 Comments

Selfishness I’m continuing to try to get some Rand thoughts related to The Fountainhead out of my system so that I won’t feel the need to bring them up while on the episode devoted to her more straightforwardly philosophical works. I also feel the periodic need for synthesis, to try to recap some ongoing themes in our episodes in a way that would require an overly long monologue if I tried to do this on the podcast itself. We’ve had a number of episodes now that weigh in on the development of the self. What I’ve often called the naive view of self is that advocated by Hobbes, who claimed that everyone is selfish, that all actions proceed from selfish motives.

Not School Fiction Group Reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

by Nathan Shane on June 1, 2013 | 16 Comments

This May, PEL’s Not School Fiction Group read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, the author of No Country for Old Men (which PEL covered) and The Road. Blood Meridian is a dark masterpiece set in 1849 where a runaway kid joins a gang of scalp-hunters led by the Judge, a philosophizing warmonger. The Judge’s views on existence come out in several stories and fire-side conversations about witness, will, and war, though if you want to hear him, there is plenty of violence between his sermons which makes the book notoriously hard to read. Not gratuitous violence, though, as Harold Bloom says, “The violence is the book. The Judge is the book, and the Judge is, short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature. The Judge is violence incarnate.”

Here, the kid sees the Judge enter a city in Mexico:
Continue reading…

Philosophy as “Literary” (or “Is the Sky So Very Big?”)

by Mark Linsenmayer on May 30, 2013 | 19 Comments

Following up on my recent post skeptical of a strong formulation of the difference between philosophy and science, I’ve been thinking about the character of many philosophical claims, particularly in light of my current reading of Rand.

In addition to the readings for the podcast proper (which I’ll post about within the next week, but I can tell you right now that we’re covering these two books), I’ve been choking down as an audiobook The Fountainhead, the earlier (and shorter) of her two main novels; she wrote it in the late 30s/early 40s (published 1943) before Atlas Shrugged or her expository philosophical pieces.

The Moral Uselessness of Moral Outrage

by Wes Alwan on May 26, 2013 | 18 Comments

Andrew Sullivan has accused Glenn Greenwald of “justifying” terrorism for a post that is largely about the inconsistent use of the word “terrorism.” Greenwald’s response is a thorough and decisive debunking of Sullivan’s accusations, but I wanted add something as a follow-up to my discussion of Sullivan’s incoherence on these issues. In this latest piece, he doubles down on the completely irrational notion that such incidents as the killing of a soldier in London are “terrorism in its most animal-like form, created and sustained entirely by religious fanaticism which would find any excuse to murder, destroy and oppress Muslims and non-Muslims in the name of God.” That’s my emphasis on the entirely by religious fanaticism clause, because I think it’s telling that Sullivan feels compelled to make such an unworkable generalization, despite hinting in the past that he is aware of the idea that any such act must the result of multiple causal factors working together.

“Conceptual Primaries” (Rand vs. Deleuze)

by Mark Linsenmayer on May 24, 2013 | 27 Comments

When I start responding to a comment on a previous post and find that my answer is getting longer than a paragraph, that means it’s time to either stop or to make a proper blog post out of it. This morning a newish (I guess) listener named Lewis posted a comment on a post I wrote last summer on “reason” as used by Ayn Rand and others. We’ll be covering Rand in episode #78, which we’ll be recording in less than two weeks. By that point, I should have my thoughts together; this is just some initial spitballing that I wouldn’t mind hearing some of your reactions to.

Objectivism identifies three “conceptually irreducible primaries” that are the stopping point of inquiry. They are supposed to be epistemically basic and sufficient to found (and they’re the only possible basis for founding) the rest of Rand’s system. This idea of unavoidable, basic starting points and a Descartes-like justification of a system runs directly counter to the picture that Deleuze gives of a multiplicity of possible planes of immanence each of which encourages a set of philosophical concepts. I say “encourages” because it doesn’t logically entail them, but is compatible with them and does contain the problems that the concepts are then designed by the philosopher to address. The analytic philosopher in me has trouble really understanding Deleuze’s picture, and it sure would be nice if instead something more like Rand’s (or Descartes’s, or Russell’s) picture with experientially and logically undeniable starting points were instead correct.

Current Episode

Episode 77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty

From the Blog

Why can’t life always be beautiful?

Topic for #78: Ayn Rand on Living Rationally

Is Experimental Philosophy Bad Science?

Come Join My Heraclitus Not School Group

Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog: “Sense of Beauty”/Call for Musicians

The Self and Selfishness (and Aesthetics and “The Fountainhead”)

Not School Fiction Group Reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Philosophy as “Literary” (or “Is the Sky So Very Big?”)

The Moral Uselessness of Moral Outrage

“Conceptual Primaries” (Rand vs. Deleuze)

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