The Partially Examined Life

The podcasters were all graduate students in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin back in the Clinton years. They all left the program at some point before getting their doctorates and have consequently since had time to get outside that whole weird world of academia and reflect on it and the various philosophical topics with a different, and probably much more lazy, perspective.

Mark Linsenmayer has lived in Madison, WI since 2000, has two little kids, and works from home writing about transportation research. He’s got a band (http://www.newpeopleband.com), a big catalog of work with previous bands, and dabbles in fiction (read this: http://marklint.com/World_6_2-19-09.pdf). When in grad school for philosophy, he mostly studied continental philosophy and philosophy of mind, with interests in phenomenology and explanations of consciousness. He more recently taught an ethics course for several semesters at Lakeland College.

After growing up as an Air Force brat, Seth Paskin went to Austin TX in 1992 for grad school and never left. After 10 years in various roles in the technology industry, he is now works as a business and marketing consultant. Seth is strongly committed to the Austin community and has spent 5 years on the Board of CPI, an area non-profit that serves ex-offenders (http://www.cpiaustin.org). In grad school he focused on German philosophy, particularly Martin Heidegger, and spent some time looking at the intersection of Jewish and Western thought.

Wes Alwan lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he works at home as a writer and researcher. In his spare time he takes classes in psychoanalysis, drinks bourbon, and tries to do a little writing. Born in Savannah, GA, he spent part of his childhood in England and Ireland, and has also lived in Maryland, Texas, Manhattan, Maine, and Virginia. In grad school he focused on Kant and Nietzsche, after a brief flirtation with ancient philosophy. For his undergraduate degree he attended a small liberal arts (“great books”) school in Annapolis Maryland, called St. John’s college, where he studied the history of science, philosophy, and comparative literature. His erstwhile political blog, ketchupandcaviar.com, will be back up and running shortly.