[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 Read more…
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, Read more…
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 Read more…
[Editor's Note: Hillary S. has been good enough to lead the Not School "Introductory Readings in Philosophy Group" earlier this year and then again this month, and will be doing so again for June, so we asked her to write a little something about it. Maybe you might want to join up?] Introduction classes, done Read more…
We’ve come again to a new month, which means it’s time to figure out what you want to read next, and the best way to read is with company, so go join Not School (read about it!) to have some people to read with. There are a few proposals on the table, for instance one Read more…
In the first week of the “Not School” group devoted to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, it’s clear that a tension runs through the book that – with only a little bit of investigation – can be seen running through Postman’s entire career. It’s a function of what he called the “thermostatic view.” “In Read more…
Does anything lie beyond a text? Can we understand being outside of writing? Last month, Paul Harris and I met up via Google+ to discuss the third essay in Derrida’s Writing and Difference entitled “Edmund Jabés and the Question of the Book.” One of the shorter essays in this book, it provides a great example Read more…
PEL’s Not School Fiction Group read Don DeLillo’s novel The Body Artist, and Paul Harris and I recorded our discussion of the unique relationship between Lauren and Mr. Tuttle, the ghostly being that arrives after her husband’s suicide. You can get it on the Citizen Free Stuff page. [Spoiler]‘Mr. Tuttle’, as Lauren decides to call Read more…
April is on us, and if you’re not in Not School, you’re missing out on the big Spring Thing. Read here if you don’t know what this is. We seem to have established several stable groups, many of which are starting new books, so there’s plenty of opportunity for new people to jump on board. Read more…
We’re now into March, with the shortest month behind us and in general a lot of continuing momentum in our online discussion groups. However, there are still some golden opportunities for new people to join up right now to add some philosophy reading to their lives: 1. The Intro Readings in Philosophy group has started Read more…
A complaint I often hear from people averse to the subject of philosophy is that, as interesting as it can often be, it’s really sort of irrelevant to our daily lives. In such conversations Rick Roderick is always the guy who comes to my mind. It’s a criticism he himself made of certain philosophers from Read more…
We’ve got a lot of good Not School groupsgoing that dig into pretty thorny texts, but I notice that for January, our purposefully introductory “What Is Philosophy?” group didn’t continue. In December, the group read Descartes’s Meditations, and in November, Plato’s “Apology,” Russell’s Problems of Philosophy and Locke’s “Of Enthusiasm.” All of these are readings Read more…
[Editor's Note: OK, here's the last writeup on the current batch of Not School group discussions. In this case, you actually get to hear (and see!) the full discussion without being a member, but of course, we're still trying to seduce you to join up so that you can join into these fun discussions, so Read more…
On of our most frequent requests for coverage on the podcast is Deleuze, a name I don’t even recall hearing in my grad school days. PEL proper will cover him in 2013, but our listeners were impatient and formed a Not School study group to get a jump on the effort. More concrete and flavorful Read more…
[Editor's Note: Here's a guest post from Evan Gould, who was good enough to record the second discussion of the Not School Philosophy of Mind group for your pleasure. Go sign up to be a PEL Citizen so you can listen to the discussion now.] Within roughly the first half of his 2004 book Mind: Read more…
Merleau-Ponty! Buber! Lacan! Physics! Aesthetics! The Residents! Derrida! Deleuze! Searle! Pynchon! DeLillo! The holidays have definitely made it more difficult for me at least to be on top of my Not School activities, but nonetheless the new month is immanent, and I thought I should convey to those not currently monitoring the Citizens’ Forum what Read more…
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of discussing P.W. Anderson‘s famous 1972 article More is Different as part of a PEL Not School study group on emergence with Not Schoolers Bill Burgess, Casey Fitzpatrick, Ernie Prabhakar, and Evan Gould. Anderson argues that the sciences don’t form a reductive whole — that chemistry isn’t applied physics and psychology Read more…
Just wanted to kick out a question to you folks: do you most enjoy academic research when you’re focusing on just one thing, or pursuing multiple lines at once? I at some points in grad school thought that I would much more enjoy it if I only had to take one class at a time. Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:39 — 28.2MB)
Excerpts of discussions about David Chalmers’s The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, and Paul Auster’s City of Glass. What’s the relation between mind and brain? What is consciousness? Can science study consciousness, and can evolution really account for it? What is the self and how does this Read more…
Today I had the pleasure of discussing Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False as part of a PEL Not School study group on the book. Joining me were Not Schoolers Neil Earnshaw and Jon Turner. We discussed our dissatisfaction with with Nagel’s argument that evolutionary naturalism fails to Read more…
Recent Comments