[editors note: Daniel was our guest on the Deleuze episode recently and will be posting a bit in our blog over the next couple of weeks] Since I discovered Deleuze in grad school, he has pervaded in various ways my teaching, writing and thinking. My dissertation proffered a model of rhetoric and specifically the trope; Read more…
In our “Why Do Philosophy?” episode, we give a sales pitch for philosophy: for being interested in reading this stuff (and what makes it appeal to us more than popular science or history or literature, though those are all great too). I recently got the chance to make this pitch to an audience of liberal Read more…
Here’s my report on what I listened to in preparation for our episode. -Rabbi Joshua Haberman held a retreat in 2008, seemingly for a bunch of other Rabbis, but I’m not clear on this, and so gave four interactive lectures on Buber that provided a lot of the background I was drawing on. (Itunes link; Read more…
I referred in the episode to a number of lectures on Marx that helped me to put the German Ideology into perspective with Marx’s other texts and filled me in on few of the Young Hegelians that he criticized. These were from Yale’s Foundations of Modern Social Theory course by Iván Szelényi. (Get them from Read more…
[Editor's Note: Thanks for Doug Lain of the Diet Soap Podcast for weighing in here with his extensive experience with Marxism.] Mark, Seth and Wes finally arrived at the philosopher who matters most over at the pinko podcast Diet Soap. While I plan on writing a response to their comments, and most especially to respond Read more…
Our Gorgias episode, included Plato’s claim that the purpose of punishment is reformative, i.e. to build character, either in the punished (reformation) or in observers (deterrence). That someone who does injustice should not then be rewarded for it is on Plato’s account the natural order of things, true by definition, as it were, and is Read more…
I’m generally skeptical when someone proclaims that “rationality” itself should get us to throw out 90%+ of philosophy. So I was a bit puzzled when someone on our Facebook group pointed at some articles by Luke Muehlhauser (specifically “Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline” and “Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant“), host of Read more…
In our Quine episode, I mentioned a religious podcast where the participants used Quine’s undermining of verificationism to argue that any secular-based knowledge is groundless, and thus that we need revelation in order to have knowledge at all. The podcast in question was this Philosophy for Theologians episode on “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” (I’ve blogged Read more…
As part of the run-up to our Federalist Papers episode, I listened to this interview on the Paul Revere Radio podcast interviewing Mary E. Webster, who published a couple of volumes of The Federalist Papers in “modern English.” I can think of few texts with which this podcast is in contact which is less in Read more…
For your weekend podcast-listening pleasure, a friend of the podcast pointed me to the most recent episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast in which the hosts take up science fiction and chew on what kinds of philosophical insight might garnered from such speculative fiction. (Beware those who, like Seth, abhor the thought experiment!) In the Read more…
A Stanford course on iTunes U, “Literature in Crisis,” includes two lectures on Candide: here and here. These are by Martin Evans, Chair of the English Department. As a literature guy, he has a bit to say about satire: why it flourished in this age in particular (because of the relative peace and stability, which Read more…
Dan Mullin is a philosophy grad student and part-time teacher who runs a blog called The Unemployed Philosopher’s Blog. His mission statement is to challenge the view that a philosophical education isn’t of much value for employment. As he says: My name is Daniel Mullin and I’m a philosophy grad student and part-time teacher. The other Read more…
This post is a follow-up on my Dallas Willard post from a few days ago. A couple of reader comments on that (on the blog and Facebook) shamed me into re-listening to the second half of Willard’s lecture and newly listen to the Q&A afterwards. I can now say that his positive story is not Read more…
Here’s another Nietzsche lecture, from Stanford’s Veritas forum, which you can listen to as a podcast (iTunes link) or watch a video: Watch it on Vimeo. Dallas Willard is an unapologetic Christian, and pursues a post-modern tack similar to the one I cited in my review of the Philosophy for Theologians podcast: Modern philosophy tried Read more…
We’ve done two Nietzsche episodes (here and here), yet neither of them has been on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is arguably Nietzsche’s most famous work, and certainly one of his most fun to read. Well, Robert Harrison’s Entitled Opinions podcast out of Stanford has filled that gap, with a great, long interview with Andrew Mitchell Read more…
Stony Brook University’s Templeton Research Lectures series features several lectures from early 2007 by David Burrell, an Emeritus Professor in philosophy and theology from Notre Dame University, as well as a Catholic Priest. His specialty appears to be Medieval Studies, focusing on the ties between the various Abrahamic religions, and the lectures on Maimonides and Read more…
Jessica in our Nietzsche on truth episode did a good job making Nietzsche sound nice and sane. On this episode of the Dead Authors Podcast (a Paul F. Tompkins vehicle performed live on stage), comedian/impressionist James Adomian portrays him as certifiably insane. It appears that some research went into this faux interview (which also features Read more…
In preparation for our Aristotle Politics episode, I checked out a new semi-philosophy podcast called the Mile High Sanity Project, as they had an episode on Aristotle’s ethics. I say “semi-philosophy,” because the podcast is made up of three guys in different disciplines. They trade off being the lead guy on episodes, so the philosophy Read more…
The Philosopher’s Zone is now publishing repeats in light of Alan Saunders’s passing, but one of the most recent of these is more or less on target for us: “Aristotle on Aristotle,” an interview with Han Baltussen that gives a quick overview of his life, the preservation of his works (i.e. most of the best-written Read more…
As mentioned in the episode, Mark Vernon recorded a series of lectures on Aristotle’s philosophy of friendship (listen to the lectures on iTunes). These were published in 2006 in conjunction with his book, The Meaning of Friendship. As stated in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s account of Aristotle’s view, the source material in Aristotle seems Read more…
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