Archive for category Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts
Historyish Podcast Profile of Foucault
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on February 1, 2012
In looking for Foucault supplementary audio, I ran across a fairly new podcast, “Historyish,” which appears to be run by people involved with the University of Warwick and the Postgraduate Forum for the History of Medicine.
Their October 2011 episode on Foucault can be found here; the page itself includes some of the biographical information read on the episode.
The first 20 min of the episode are not about Foucault, but instead a “this day in history” segment, sharing fun facts. From this, I had hoped that we’d get some clarity re. how accurate a historian Foucault was (a topic which we decided on our Foucault episode was rather beside the point for our purposes). Instead, you get a decent overview of Foucault’s life and work, which made a few points that I hadn’t really considered:
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
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
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 »
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
Brian Leiter’s New Philosophical Categories
Posted by Daniel Horne in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts, Web Detritus on December 24, 2011
A really good interview with Nietzsche scholar and opinionator Brian Leiter appears in 3:AM Magazine, where he drops pithy quotes on Obama, Nietzsche, Marx, and Foucault.
But he also appears to have a new argument to sell. Leiter advocates a new way to divide the philosophical canon, not into “contintentals” or “analytics,” but rather into “naturalists” and “anti-naturalists”. You can also listen to Leiter’s argument on the latest Philosophy Bites episode, where Nigel Warburton thankfully pushed back a bit.
It seems to me that Leiter focuses too much on outlier examples to deny the boundaries of the “continental” and “analytic” camps. Sure, perhaps Marx wouldn’t have thought much of Derrida (though who can say, and what kind of an argument is that, really?). But that doesn’t mean they weren’t both united as students of Hegel, and therefore assignable to a certain intellectual camp. I mean, Heidegger didn’t think much of Sartre, either, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t more similar than different when compared to Frege and Russell. Not all Republicans agree on all points with their fellow Republicans, but they can still sense when a Democrat has entered the room; there’s a reason these camps evolved in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »
Ed Creeley on Phenomenology and Theater Performance
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on December 20, 2011
It’s a strange but established fact that a number of strains in continental philosophy are most readily found in university departments other than philosophy: post-modernism, critical theory, semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, etc. I’d not previously thought, though, that this extended to phenomenology. Here is at least one example of this happening:
It’s a podcast (not sure why it isn’t under iTunes U instead of podcasts) by the “School of English, Communications and and Performance Studies, Monash University,” that features (in this episode) Ed Creeley presenting a paper on using phenomenology to analyze theater performance. The lecture is the “April 6″ entry here, under “The trials and tribulations of phenomenological analysis in performance studies.”
In the first part of the lecture, Creeley gives a few of the variations in phenomenological method, and name drops some entries that we’ve not yet brought up. Interestingly, he describes A. N. Whitehead as a “process phenomenologist,” as if regular phenomenology (like, say, Being and Time) doesn’t take into account change over time (with all the talk of essences in Husserl, this illusion is understandable). This all seems a helpful enough introduction, but by the middle of the lecture, he gets down to the business of how this can be applied to theater performance, and here’s where it seems to go wrong insofar as I understand the scholarship he’s invoking. He describes Husserl’s phenomenological reduction as, in this case, boiling down the usual complexity by which a performance is analyzed (in terms of the text involved, though I was unclear on exactly what he had in mind here) to the emotional experience of the actors doing the scene. As useful (I suppose) as this might be for Creeley’s project, it has next to nothing to do with what Husserl meant by reduction, which was the suspension of ontological attribution to the contents of experience (i.e. during reduction, you’re not a realist or idealist; you just describe the phenomena and don’t care whether they have any correlate beyond experience). The only analogy for applying this to theater that I can think of is something like judging a performance seen on TV without regard to whether there were real actors or just CGI creations doing it, or whether it’s a dream in my head for that matter.
Sebastian Gardner (via Philosophy Bites) on Sartre and Bad Faith
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts, PEL's Notes on December 8, 2011
This Philosophy Bites episode focuses on concisely focuses on a key practical implication of Sartre’s picture of the self as a fiction as described on our episode: bad faith, which is a matter of identifying one’s free consciousness as that fiction, or more precisely, denying that the self is a fiction, that we each have a fixed nature that constrains our future choices.
Sebastian Gardner gives some of the examples of bad faith from Being and Nothingness (which has a chapter toward its beginning called “Bad Faith”), leading up to Sartre’s claim that human nature is paradoxical: we both are and are not defined by our past behavior and characteristics.
Daniel Coffeen on Bergson’s Matter and Memory
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts, Web Detritus on December 6, 2011
One of the name-drops on the Sartre episode is Henri Bergson, a philosopher who was in vogue in France at the time Sartre wrote, famous among other things for promoting and anti-atomic epistemology. Kant, for instance, thought that we get our idea of number out of time, meaning that time is essentially something we can count. For Bergson, time is a flow: if we break it up for analysis, that’s an abstraction; it’s epistemically subsequent to the primal flow. This goes well with Sartre’s (and moreso Mereleau-Ponty’s) excitement about gestalt psychology as part of the phenomenologist’s project of taking experience as it comes without falsifying it with some theory, like Hume’s empiricism, imposed upon the data.
With a little research I found this podcast/lecture on Bergson by Daniel Coffeen, focusing on Bergson’s book Matter and Memory.
Quassim Cassam (via Elucidations) on Skepticism
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on December 5, 2011
I’ve been listening of late to more Elucidations (which we’ve written about before), which features Matt Teichman from our Frege episode.
Their episode 23, “Quassim Cassam discusses transcendental arguments,” serves as a nice point of re-engagement with epistemology in light of our touching on that in our Sartre episode (and moreso in my Close Reading).
Sartre, following Heidegger and possibly Husserl, thinks that Descartes’s skeptical challenge is a non-starter. We can’t coherently doubt the existence of the external world because we’re already always engaged with it: consciousness (or in Heidegger’s case “care,” though I recall at least one listener objecting to my analogizing between the two terms) has is intentional: the “external” world is something we’re directly in contact with (at least an aspect of it; the entirety of even an individual object is transcendent).
In this very clear and well-conducted Elucidations interview, Cassam talks a bit about an analytic version of this response, which is one given by G.E. Moore in (among other places) his essay “A Defense of Common Sense.” In short, it’s a matter of epistemic priority. Moore and Sartre say we have to start philosophy with what we know, which includes things like “there is a hand in front of me.” The task becomes figuring how what this claim really means and how knowledge must work such that we can and do know it, and by extension how we might in some circumstances be wrong about this sort of claim (such as when on drugs or dreaming) but yet we are in general, correct about this. To the skeptic, starting at this point utterly begs the question, but for Sartre, at least, to even ask the skeptical question requires abstracting from the concrete situation of knowledge as something like self-evident presentedness to imagine some greater kind of knowledge which, it turns out, we just don’t have.
The interview is frustratingly short, of course, but very thought provoking. In the wake of our Sartre recording, I’d suggested to my fellows that we do a little epistemological review episode with some Berkeley on idealism and then Kant’s and Moore’s attempts to refute it. If you second this suggestion (or contrarily think it would be boring), speak up!
Note that Elucidations has now added a blog giving some additional episode description and follow-up (though not on the Cassam interview).
-Mark Linsenmayer
The Personal Philosophy of (i.e. for) Chris Hardwick in Early 2010
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts, Personal Philosophies on November 25, 2011
Ah, success. Fame. Money. A little of it whets our appetite for more, twists our priorities, and like your clothes in a public dryer that you have to sit there and watch lest they get stolen, it’s a source of stress.
When we started this podcast, it was just a leisure time activity, something primarily for us, the podcasters, but even as the first episode was being prepared, we felt a sense of responsibility to make the thing worth others’ time, resulting in some rigorous editing, whose current bar makes each episode cost us hours and hours of post-production time while we digitally add in “ideas,” “thoughts,” and “guest podcasters” (typically, as with Getty, created via application of choice noise-addition algorithms).
But now, as the donations waft in and a few influential people have said some nice things about us, and the number of total downloads marches incrementally towards the 1 million mark (OK, it’ll be a a while still for that; believe me, we’ll let you know!), we feel the hunger. Can make enough money off of this to actually recompense our time (likely not, but we’ll see)? Can we become the #1 philosophy podcast in terms of popularity (we’re certainly in the top 5 at this point)? Can we annex a small city-state and call it PELyville where we attempt to implement our dark utopian visions? And most importantly, can we get celebrities to come on the show?
I’m declaring a moratorium on Nazi examples in moral philosophy
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on November 14, 2011
Anti Nazi spraylogo from Gamebanana by --HunteR--
OK, I was listening to the latest episode of Philosophy Bites, where Nigel “Daddy Warbucks” Warburton is interviewing Sean Kelly about Homer and Philosophy. I have documented elsewhere my love and admiration of Warburton and the podcast, so this is not in any way to be construed as a criticism. But a couple of things pushed my buttons.
At the beginning, David Edmunds says that philosophers haven’t regarded the epic poems of Homer as worthy of philosophical investigation. I think Nietzsche did. Small quibble. What really annoyed me was that during the discussion, Kelly and Warburton are talking about group think/mob mentality (listen to the episode if you want to know how they got there from Homer) and Nigel uses the Nuremberg rallies as an example (pejoratively, of course).
Really Nigel? The Nuremberg rallies? You couldn’t come up with a more recent, more topical, non-Nazi example? I get it, I agree: Nazi = bad. And if it seems like I’m picking on Nigel, I apologize. But it’s painful to see, hear and read philosophers using National Socialism and the Holocaust as their ‘go-to’ examples to make points about moral theories.
Paul Boghossian (via Philosophy Bites) on Moral Relativism
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on November 8, 2011
We’ve discussed Paul Boghossian and his book against relativism
a bit in our Nelson Goodman episode. See my blog post on this from last year.
In this interview on the Philosophy Bites podcast, Boghossian talks about moral relativism, giving some shades of the view: e.g. you could be a relativist about manners but not really about the underlying principles girding them (“be polite!”). This accords with Smith’s version, in which the most important moral points–e.g. generosity is good–are going to be universal, but lots of cultural factors are going to go into when and how much generosity is considered appropriate in a given circumstance.
Read Wes’s post from August on the Boghossian/Stanley Fish exchange that the Philosophy Bites page refers to.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Buddhism Naturalized?
Posted by Seth Paskin in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts, Reviewage on November 7, 2011
Sweater vests increase rigor
Given our recent exploration of moral theory, the excitement around our announcement of a Euthyphro episode and my own current interest in Buddhist thought, I guess it was inevitable that I would stumble across and then buy this book. Or perhaps it was that Mark mentioned it in an email which I had overlooked. In any case, the author, Owen Flanagan (pictured to the right), is a philosopher at Duke University. Pat Churchland also thinks highly of him and I guess that’s good enough endorsement for me.
As a self-proclaimed analytic philosopher, Flanagan is a fan of science. And he’s a fan of being a moral person. He’s just published a book called The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized in which he argues that all of the major ‘wisdom traditions’ (read: religions) are incompatible with science. Since the traditions are where we get ‘being a moral person’ stuff, it’d be great if we could find one (or find a way to make one) that was compatible with science so that people who prioritize the scientific world view could also have a moral system to lean against. [This is my characterization, I don't think he'd put it that way]
Poetry Fights Back
Posted by Seth Paskin in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on November 3, 2011
Allen Tate from Wikipedia
If you’ve listened to our Danto episode, our Republic episode or read any Plato yourself you know that the Big P didn’t have a high regard for poetry. If you’ve listened to anything we’ve done over the last year, you know Mark doesn’t have a high regard for my blog posting efforts. I do start posts, but often times find the zeitgeist has passed before I’m done (I think and write really really slowly). So here’s something to hit on both sore points: a poem about Plato’s cave!
I am listening to a podcast called Essential American Poets put out by The Poetry Foundation. I just listened to a past episode on Allen Tate. I heard there the following of his poems:
More Sonnets At Christmas IV
Gay citizen, myself, and thoughtful friend,
Your ghosts are Plato’s Christians in the cave.
Unfix your necks, turn to the door; the nave
Gives back the cheated and light dividend
So long sequestered; now, new-rich, you’ll spend
Flesh for reality inside a stone
Whose light obstruction, like a gossamer bone,
Dead or still living, will not break or bend.
Thus light, your flesh made pale and sinister
And put off like a dog that’s had his day,
You will be Plato’s kept philosopher,
Albino man bleached from the mortal clay,
Mild-mannered, gifted in your master’s ease
While the sun squats upon the waveless seas.
I won’t pretend to have grasped the meaning but it is cool to hear him read it in his old school southern accent. Better than reading it on the page for sure. The same series has a prior episode on Billy Collins, who was Poet Laureate for the United States from 2001-2003, reading his poem Aristotle. Also very much worth a listen.
–seth
Rationally Deferring to Bob Price on Empirical Christianity
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on November 2, 2011
I’d promised myself I was going to move on to ethics and stop posting about religious issues, but due diligence requires me to relay this follow-up to my discussion of Mike Licona claiming empirical support for the Resurrection.
As I alluded to in my exchange with Ernie P. about empirically grounding Christianity, arguing about historical evidence is, at least when it occurs between non-historians, pretty dodgy. Anyone who rejects the arguments of the religious is typically accused of not sufficiently engaging them, i.e. being ignorant of their positions and arguments, and not having reviewed all the evidence, etc. Categorically writing off claims of miracles as simply superstition that we modern people should have long grown beyond is considered a crass dismissal. And it’s true: to actually engage in religious debates requires more research than I have time and tolerance for. Personally, I can handle the philosophical disputes: the coherence of the concept of God, the classical arguments, the problem of evil. Re. the empirical issues, such as alleged Biblical archaeology, the historical questions about the writing of the Bible and the events it depicts, textual analysis of the Bible itself: for that, all I can promise is to read a few books on the topic at some point, and that’s purely to feel educated about it, much as I want to learn more about the Roman Empire or the current political climate in Japan or any number of other cultural and/or historical issues.
Does Post-Modern Skepticism Support Religious Belief?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on October 27, 2011
One of our listeners (and contributors! Thanks again!) Ernie P. has posted on our Facebook page:
You all (on the podcast) seem to assume that ‘belief in the irrational’ is a strongly correlated with religious belief; I would argue that (depending on how you define it), it is a factor in all human belief, and the only real irrationality is to think our own beliefs fully rational…
Now, I see that Ernie and another blogger Alan Lund have a whole back-and-forth going about the justification for Christianity, so you can check that out if you want; I’m not going to attempt to inject myself into that (and honestly don’t have time to read it all right now).
Greg Ganssle (via Pale Blue Dot) on Dawkins’s “Fitness” Argument
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on October 21, 2011
Yale Professor Greg Ganssle provides in this Pale Blue Dot episode what is perhaps a more charitable response to the new atheists than we did.
First, he points out something I hadn’t quite considered in this way before: We at PEL complain about how difficult and tedious it is (or would be) to write something fit for a peer reviewed journal. On the one hand, there’s no substitute for a qualified professor to kick your ass and make you revise something 90 times until it’s right. But the sheer amount of second-guessing involved, of making sure you’ve read and incorporated anything anyone ever has written about what you’re trying to express: it makes it nearly impossible to express anything and surely saps the passion out of the endeavor. Ganssle points out that even in the case of the only bona fide philosopher among the group, Dan Dennett, all of these guys are taking the role of “public intellectual,” taking their message directly to the people instead of putting through the academic publishing process (Dennett is a well established philosopher, but does not publish in academic philosophy of religion journals). For some reason this way of phrasing it makes me like them a bit more, maybe because it’s comparable to what we’re trying to do with the podcast.
Eric Reitan (via Pale Blue Dot) Refereeing the Atheism Debates
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on October 21, 2011
I’ve written before about Eric Reitan, a modern follower of Scheleirmacher, and on this episode of Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot, Reitan gives I think a great explanation of the disagreement between the new atheists and humanistic, liberal Christians: they may agree on nearly all of the same principles (being against Biblical inerrancy and other implausible and morally pernicious parts of fundamentalist Christianity) but still have a different overall assessment of religion because they’re “playing different language games.” His explanation of religion as an essentially contested concept (a new term to me, though certainly a familiar concept in outline) is alone sufficient to make the episode worth a listen. The concept “religion” is not just a categorization of various things, but it has, like “work of art,” a normative judgment built into it. It’s just that at this point in history, some folks have a positive evaluation built into the concept, and some have a negative evaluation. So Hitchens and a liberal theologian, according to Reitan, can both agree about nearly everything, but while the theologian holds up some historical fruits of religion and say “see, isn’t religion great,” Hitchens will respond that that isn’t really religion; while Hitchens will point out horrible crimes associated with religion and the theologian (like Scheiermacher) will deny that these are part of the essence of religion. So it’s largely an argument over words at that point, though we’d have to be more specific about the particular points of remaining disagreement to determine whether they’re really worth arguing over.
Andrei Buckareff’s (Pale Blue Dot) Response to the Problem of Faith
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on October 16, 2011
I’ve continued barreling double speed through episodes of Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot (I’ve got a new puppy who needs like 8 long walks a day.) and continue to be impressed with how consistently good Luke’s guests are. Unlike many interview shows or lecture series where topics may be disconnected, I’m seeing a steady progression through the various interviews further into various positions and figures in the philosophy of religion. Luke’s done the world a great service getting these talks together, and at such an alarming rate (around 100 episodes since the beginning of 2009, sometimes recording more than one per day)!
To follow up on my post yesterday about Sam Harris on faith, I wanted to post this interview with Andrei Buckareff, who distinguishes between belief (holding a proposition to be true) and acceptance (holding a proposition for some practical purpose). He says faith can and should be the latter of these. As I often insist, you can’t make yourself believe something; faith can’t be actually deciding to believe something when you just plain don’t; that would involve blatant self-deception. However, Buckareff points out that you can certainly willfully accept a proposition to be true for the purposes of action, and action (he thinks) is largely the point of Christianity.
I find this solution much too easy. He uses the analogy of taking a role in a play, which is clearly pretending: on the least pretext (say, if I as an actor felt physically threatened), I’d break character and abandon the “beliefs” I was holding as that character. If the problem with faith (according to Kenny, who we discussed near the end of our new atheists episode) is that the faithful base their actions too firmly (killing or dying for their faith) on these propositions that they have insufficient evidence for, then Buckareff’s solution utterly fails to engage that. Either we have to interpret his analogy such that we’d drop our faith when it became inconvenient (which might be OK with Kenny but doesn’t seem to capture what faith is about) or we get the perverse picture of people doing extreme things on the basis of a admittedly heuristic strategy (which is exactly what Kenny is complaining about). What do you think?
Toward the end of the discussion Buckareff responds sympathetically to my complaint about the Christian hell, and he spends a lot of his time here talking about making religion and metaphysical naturalism (typically considered the presupposition of natural science) compatible and what this has to do with pantheism and panentheism: this serves as a great follow-up to our Spinoza discussion on God.
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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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