There’s a claim I laid out from Deleuze in the episode that I wanted to bring up for explicit discussion. I think it’s provocative and deserves some thought but is almost certainly wrong. It’s about the picture of science as producing concepts and not propositions. I gave the example of Descartes’s Cogito, and laid out Read more…
We briefly referred on the episode to the fact that, as for Marx, for Lacan, all ostensibly theoretical talk is really tainted in some way. Whereas for Marx, we’re really just repeating, or perhaps reacting to in some more complicated way, the ideology of those in power. Lacan, following Freud, looks for a psychological explanation, Read more…
[Editor's Note: Wayne here is currently leading one of our Not School groups on Deleuze. Being well-versed in this area and having made some helpful comments on this blog, we asked him to clarify what he took to be Lacan's ontology. Thanks, Wayne!] Jacques-Alain Miller once asked asked Lacan, “What is your ontology?” Lacan replied Read more…
I ended our episode bemoaning that I feel like I still don’t understand this talk of “subject” as opposed to “self.” A few of you have made some good comments on this, but I’m still not satisfied. Let me pull a few things out of the Fink book: 1. In chapter 2 about “The Nature Read more…
As is usual, I think, when we do a topic-oriented podcast as opposed to one that really focuses on a text (see also the ones on humor and fame), our episode on terrorism didn’t really do justice to all the readings we as a group all read. In particular, I feel like I need to Read more…
I have never shared the vitriol in Plato’s dialogues for rhetoric. I understand why he goes after people for holding what he considers to be untenable positions, particularly if they are teachers or otherwise influencers of others. But only insofar as they hold beliefs which don’t accord with his own or if they appear Read more…
A feature of Carnap’s system discussed in the episode was his his attempt to objectivize our talk of objects by removing any demonstrative or ostensive elements. Though the “elementary experiences” as I examine them are of course mine, and not analyzable in themselves according to Carnap’s account, the only way they become useful to science Read more…
I’ve released a new recording: me reading Bertrand Russell’s essay, “On Denoting”. It’s available free to members, or (since it’s public domain), anyone can purchase it here, for a suggested price of $2.99, but you can choose during checkout to pay as little as 99 cents or as much as you want if you’re feeling Read more…
Part of the goal of The Partially Examined Life is to pull ivory-tower philosophical theories out into the light of day and see if they hold water. If an academically lauded idea seems totally absurd when discussed in ordinary language, well, then either those presenting the idea aren’t doing a very good job explaining its Read more…
In this Washington Post editorial on Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog by Dylan Matthews, we get an attempt to connect philosophy to current political discourse, with the conclusion “…which is perhaps why, in general, politicians don’t spend a lot of time listening to philosophers.” The issue is desert, as in “do rich people deserve to keep their Read more…
Towards the end of the episode, I brought up MacIntyre’s thesis for chapter 8, “The Character of Generalizations in Social Science,” that the findings of a science like sociology can’t be scientific in the way that those in physics are. Now, laws in physics may be probabilistic, but they are so in a precise way, Read more…
I think during the episode we were too busy trying to understand After Virtue to just say straight out that the attempt to ground morality solely on cultural narratives just doesn’t work, at least not to any more determinate degree than some of the other moral theories that MacIntyre suggests. In the Kant episode, I Read more…
In the episode, I brought up Moore’s use of the non-mathematical character of the good (in that one good plus another good doesn’t necessarily make a whole with the good equal to the sum of the parts) by bringing up theodicy, i.e. the defense of the existence of evil in a perfectly good world by Read more…
At some point during the episode, Dylan and Wes were arguing about Moore and referred to the good as a ‘term’. I corrected them that Moore actually calls it a ‘concept’ as if something hung on that distinction. I guess it is incumbent upon me to explain. First off, Moore never uses the word “concept” Read more…
For those of you who didn’t get a chance to do the reading for our recent discussion with Owen Flanagan about his book The Bodhisattva’s Brain (and our soon-to-be posted follow up conversation without Owen), you can download my summary of the main points of the book here. – Wes Alwan
Yesterday I started trying to record a “Close Reading” on the Derrida essay we read for the podcast, and I just couldn’t get more than a few sentences into it before losing patience, so I thought I’d either as a substitution for that effort or possibly a warm-up do a few posts dissecting the essay Read more…
To wrap up my thoughts on this subject: Probably the most interesting part of this Pirsig immersion experience for me has been thinking about his stance as a lone philosopher, rebelling against academia. Like Ayn Rand’s, much of Pirsig’s attitude towards academia seems to be a direct result of some assholes he had to deal Read more…
If my notes here have gotten a bit dismissive sounding, it’s largely to provide a counterweight to Dave’s discipleship. This is not to diss Dave (or Bo or other Pirsig fans posting on our board here), but my approach, and the approach I see in enthusiasts like Katie re. Foucault or Matt Evans did for Read more…
In Pt. 2, I described Pirsig’s notion of dynamic vs. static quality, which should sound a lot like naturalistic moral intuitionism as discussed in our Hume/Smith episode. All there is is people (or, more widely for Pirsig, any being that is capable of reacting affirmatively or negatively to anything: judging agents, we might want to Read more…
The big distinction made in Lila is between dynamic quality and static quality. Dynamic quality is Quality in ZAMM, i.e. the immediate, moment-to-moment recognition of something’s awesomeness level, but also in ZAMM, he wants us to recognize quality in classical (as opposed to romantic) forms, for example, the quality of the structure of a motorcycle. Read more…
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