Archive for category PEL’s Notes
“Prima Facie Weirdness?”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, PEL's Notes on June 20, 2011
During the episode I made a comment about the seeming weirdness of Christianity that I feel it would be helpful for my thinking to try to elaborate.
I’ve said in several posts here that I think that the new atheist movement is primarily political: it’s not about advancing new arguments to philosophers, but about shifting the tide of opinion so that, for instance, an atheist could have some shot at winning an election in this country.
In the heat of conversation on the episode, I articulated something like this by saying that all I want is for Christianity to be acknowledged as, on the face of it, really weird. I’m wondering now whether I actually believe that and whether it makes any sense as a goal.
Schleiermacher on Miracles and Revelation
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on June 19, 2011
We talked a bit on the episode towards the end about S’s take on immortality. His take on miracles and on revelation is similar. In short, miracles are all around us, and all creativity is inspiration. It takes a pious person to recognize our ordinary environment as full of magic and wonder.
From his second speech:
The more religious you are, the more miracle would you see everywhere. All disputing about single events, as to whether or not they are to be called miraculous, gives me a painful impression of the poverty and wretchedness of the religious sense of the combatants. One party show it by protesting everywhere against miracle, whereby they manifest their wish not to see anything of immediate relationship to the Infinite and to the Deity. The other party display the same poverty by laying stress on this and that. A phenomenon for them must be marvellous before they will regard it as a miracle, whereby they simply announce that they are bad observers.
What is revelation? Every original and new communication of the Universe to man is a revelation, as, for example, every such moment of conscious insight… Every intuition and every original feeling proceeds from revelation… If nothing original has yet been generated in you, when it does come it will be a revelation for you also, and I counsel you to weigh it well.
Comparing Kant with Schleiermacher on God and the Soul
Posted by Daniel Horne in PEL's Notes on June 16, 2011
On the Schleiermacher episode, we spent some time comparing On Religion to Kant’s religious arguments, particularly citing Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Kant did not try to prove God’s existence or the soul’s immortality. Rather, he postulated those concepts as helpful ways to help realize the summum bonum, the highest good. “Postulate” is defined as a “a hypothesis advanced as an essential presupposition, condition, or premise of a train of reasoning.”
With that in mind, read along as you listen to this passage from the Critique of Practical Reason. Reviewing it may help highlight what Schleiermacher was rejecting:
The Immortality of the Soul as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason
The realization of the summum bonum [highest good] in the world is the necessary object of a will determinable by the moral law. But in this will the perfect accordance of the mind with the moral law is the supreme condition of the summum bonum. This then must be possible, as well as its object, since it is contained in the command to promote the latter.
Eric Reitan in the Atheism Debates: A Pox on Both Your Houses
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on June 15, 2011
On the Schleiermacher episode, we referred tangentially to Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers, 
He stated that his working title for the book was “How the Religious Right Gets Religion Wrong,” and that it was only upon reading Dawkins’s The God Delusion that he felt he should change his approach. He says that a colleague suggested he should call it “A Pox on Both Your Houses,” and even though the book is an attempt to rebut point by point Dawkins’s arguments (which Reitan summarizes nicely in this introduction), Reitan is also very critical of the very beliefs Dawkins attacks (from p. 7):
I will not be defending the doctrine of biblical inerrancy because I think it is both mistaken and dangerous. I will not be defending the doctrine of hell because I think that it is mistaken and (at least in its most traditional formulations) dangerous. I will not be defending the divine command theory of ethics… because I think it is both mistaken and dangerous. I will not be defending the legitimacy of “faith” understood as stubborn belief without regard for evidence because faith in that sense is a dangerous and inappropriate basis for forming one’s convictions…
Russell’s Atomistic Metaphysics
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on June 10, 2011
Some information about Russell’s atomism was discussed in in our Wittgenstein’s Tractatus podcast.
For a bit more information, here’s his essay “The Ultimate Constituents of Matter,” pointed out to us (dismissively) by frequent blog discussion contributor Burl and mentioned on our recent episode.
I leave it to you all to explore this essay as you like, but let me give you a taste, which aligns well with what what we’ve seen previously of Russell, i.e. that perception grasps (by definition, it seems) something non-mental, that he believes in sense data, and (stressed more in our Wittgenstein discussion) he gives those sense data a primary place in the ontology:
Read the rest of this entry »
Russell’s Epistemology: “The Problems of Philosophy”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on June 8, 2011
I wanted to follow up on a reference I made on the episode for folks who want to know more about Russell’s epistemology:
His book The Problems of Philosophy
One element of his epistemology which will sound familiar to fans of British empiricists is his distinction between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance (from chapter 5):
Read the rest of this entry »
Correction re. Episode 34′s Account of Russell on Denoting
Posted by Matt Teichman in PEL's Notes on April 1, 2011
At one point in Episode 34 (around 79:10), I made a mistake. Oops. Might as well set it right on the blog!
We were talking about Bertrand Russell’s classic 1905 article, ‘On Denoting.’ Russell is trying to do many different things in that article. But for now, we only need to concern ourselves with one in particular, which is that he wants to give an accurate account of what sentences with words that fail to refer mean.
OK; so what’s all this stuff about referring and failing to refer? The basic idea here is that words typically stand for things. The name ‘Matt’ refers to me, and the noun phrase ‘the Grand Canyon’ refers to the grand canyon, and the phrase ‘Rowan Atkinson’s favorite car’ stands for Rowan Atkinson’s favorite car.
Now, you might think that words always referred to things. And in most ordinary situations, they do. But upon further reflection, it turns out that sometimes, when we make mistakes, a word can fail to refer to anything. For instance, imagine that I see two people walk into a party: a friend of mine, and someone who I mistakenly take to be her sister. Furthermore, imagine that this friend of mine doesn’t even have a sister. In that scenario, if I said ‘Can I get your sister anything to drink?’ then my friend would be quite confused. Why? Well, because one of the noun phrases I was trying to use was messed up. Specifically, the noun phrase ‘your sister’ would fail to refer to anything.
Notes on Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell,” Part 1
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes, Reviewage on March 31, 2011
For our atheism episode (which has, incidentally been pushed back to be recorded in late May or possibly June… sorry, Russ!), I’m trying to read through the most popular of the “new atheist” books, and I’m sure we’ll only end up discussing some select portions of the books in any detail, so as I’m going through these, I’m going to generate a few blog posts to fill readers in on some additional points and help myself remember what I’m reading. My point here is primarily to give points from the books, not to cast judgment upon them, so don’t take this as an endorsement (or rejection).
Daniel C. Dennett is the only actual philosophy professor among the most popular of these folks. (Sam Harris was a philosophy undergrad when he wrote his major works and has just recently earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience; Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and Hitchens is a “columnist and literary critic.” I know Peter Singer also argues for atheism, and he’s as famous a philosopher as they come, but he’s not been considered part of this movement for some reason.) We read a little bit of him and devoted maybe 10 minutes of our discussion to him in our philosophy of mind episode, which didn’t go very well, in that Wes at least really dislikes him, yet we didn’t go into enough detail on the arguments of his article to clearly convey why Wes dislikes him. To sum up the critique, he’s not known for, say, clearly and charitably presenting the views of past philosophers and saying exactly how his position differs from them. Instead, he uses a popular style to make his points, with a heavy emphasis on specifically citing scientific work
Frege’s Notion of the True
Posted by Seth Paskin in PEL's Notes on March 30, 2011
When we did the Frege episode, we read “The Thought”, which was a new text to me and I found it quite interesting. Even though we were supposed to be talking about other things, we got caught up on Frege’s notion of ‘The True’. Specifically, we were asking ourselves what kind of ontological status ‘The True’ or ‘Truth’ had for Frege and why he didn’t seem to care.
To walk myself through his reasoning, I did my usual note taking and then tried to recreate his argument. As I am a visual person and a corporate tool, I did so in PowerPoint. Please to enjoy:
Frege’s The Thought – The PowerPoint
Basically, Frege gives a pretty good critique of a correspondence theory of truth, and then makes Truth linguistic: that is, he claims that truth is always referring to a sentence, not to things. In fact, he says, Truth is the truth of the sense of a sentence, which is what he calls a thought. I’ll skip to the punchline and tell you that thoughts are not wholly subjective (like ideas), but also not part of the material, external world. They are, however, how meaning gets conveyed through language in that two people can share one thought, which is expressed linguistically. Check out the PPT, which I now realize has way more text than I remember, but uses colors and big fonts so it’s not too bad.
Cheers,
–seth
Yet More on Logic: Quantification
Posted by Seth Paskin in PEL's Notes on March 26, 2011
Against both my better judgment and the hue and cry of many, I will continue my semi-informed-by-past-years-of-studying “exposition” of predicate logic which I started here. If I accomplish nothing else, I will give Burl something to complain about for the next week or so.
In the previous installment, we talked about how syllogistic statements about “all x’s” assert the truth of a conditional statement. “All dogs bark” asserts that for all x’s, if x is a dog, then x barks. Formally expressed, that’s:
∀x(Dog(x) –> Barks(x))
or something similar. It doesn’t say anything about whether there actually are any dogs. Additionally, the ‘For all…’ symbol – ∀ – doesn’t allow you to say anything about only some dogs. Let us address that issue.
Some more on logic
Posted by Seth Paskin in PEL's Notes on March 20, 2011
So Matt Teichman was kind enough to post a primer on basic logic, showing with syllogisms how informal logical inference was turned into formal notation by Frege and thus predicate calculus was born. There is a wealth of stuff to learn about the predicate calculus and many serious logicians (as well as frustrated mathematicians) have developed and extended systems in a number of different ways.
One of the things that was interesting about developments before and around the time we were in grad school was how people got wrapped around the axle on the implications of formalism for ‘the real world’. Mark pointed this out in his post about ‘The True’ and we discussed it when talking about Frege: what kind of object was Truth in his ontology and why didn’t he seem to care that much?
What happened in the 20th century was that you had people that continued with the formal endeavor without regard to ontology, metaphysics and epistemology. You also had people that would call out the ‘philosophical’ consequences of formal systems, which some of the formalists cared about and some didn’t. Then you had people like David Lewis who thought that the fact that we could create formal systems implied that the corresponding ontologies must exist. Witness the birth of possible world semantics!
Michael Dummett on Frege: Is “the True” an entity?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on March 16, 2011
I made heavy mention on the Frege episode of this book by Michael Dummett.
I want to try to give a couple of textual references over a few posts here to elaborate points from Dummett I was trying to make during the discussion. For instance, one of the pieces we picked on Frege about was his designation of “the True” and “the False” as objects in his ontology, which was done to make sense of the idea that concepts are functions: e.g. “is green” is a function that maps green objects to “the true.” Here are some bits from pages 183-185:
It is generally agreed that, if Frege had to ascribe reference to sentences at all, then truth-values were by far the best thing he could have selected as their referents: at least, he did not go down the dreary path which leads to presenting facts, propositions, states of affairs or similar entities as the referents of sentences…
Logic: A Quick Remedial Lesson
Posted by Matt Teichman in PEL's Notes on March 16, 2011
Editor’s Note: Matt Teichman, our guest on the Frege episode, has been good enough to provide this primer on logic for our listeners who’ve not already had to sit through a class on it or who might need a refresher:
One of the things we said at the beginning the episode on Frege was that he is the father of modern logic. But what is logic, anyway? For those of you who never heard of logic before, here is a quick primer.
Logic is the study of what philosophers call valid reasoning. In everyday conversation, valid just means ‘good’ or ‘appropriate.’ But in logic, valid has a special technical meaning. To see what it means, let’s look at an example of an argument:
Argument 1:
All people drink water.
Matt is a person.
—————–
Therefore, Matt drinks water.
Argument is also a term we’re going to use in a special technical sense. Here, rather than referring to e.g. a dispute between me and my wife about whether to get a new car, it refers to a line of reasoning meant to convince someone of something. More specifically, we’ll think of an argument as a sequence of sentences broken down into two parts: first come the premises, then comes the conclusion. (You can also have an argument with just one premise, or even an argument with no premises! But all arguments need to have a conclusion.) In the above example, the premises are All people drink water and Matt is a person, and the conclusion is Matt drinks water.
Anyway, let’s get back to validity. An argument is valid just in case it is impossible for its premises to be true and for its conclusion to be simultaneously false. Consider the above example: if all people drink water, and Matt is a person, then there’s simply no way that Matt could fail to drink water. It’s absolutely, positively guaranteed.
Consciousness (Intentionality) as Transcendent
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on January 13, 2011
An important point on the Husserl episode that I was trying to get across was his notion that “intentionality” as he uses it doesn’t just mean that all conscious acts have a target, i.e. something you’re conscious of, but that this content is not itself something subjective. When we grasp something in consciousness, we’re not just contemplating our own sensations (as Schopenhauer describes our inner sense checking out and making sense of the data fed in by our outer sense). Rather, consciousness is a connection between us and something objective: you and I in general can experience the same objects, whether they be physical objects or even the notion “Santa Claus.” If you and I think about that, we’re thinking about the same thing, which of course raises the question of what this thing is. Frege considers this “sense” that we both contemplate to be an objective entity that we have to admit into our ontology: we can’t take intentionality seriously and be materialists.
In reading Martin Heidegger’s The Basic Problems of Phenomenology,
Intentionality is said to be a character of experiences. Experiences belong to the subject’s sphere. What is more natural and more logical than to infer that, consequently, that toward which immanent experiences are directed must itself be subjective? But however natural and logical this inference may seem and however critical and cautious this characterization of intentional experiences and of that toward which they direct themselves may be, it is after all a theory, in which we close our eyes to the phenomena and do not give an account of them themselves.
My Wish for the New Year
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, PEL's Notes on January 3, 2011
I hope that this celebration of the rotation of the calendar finds all PEL listeners/readers in good cheer, looking with unbridled optimism and hope at a vast array of positive opportunities in front of them. As it is customary to reflect upon the past and project into the future on this occasion, I propose to do just that and ask you to indulge me.
When Mark first contacted Wes and I almost two years ago with the idea for PEL, I said ‘yeah, sure’, thinking nothing would come of it, or at best, we’d struggle to do an episode in a couple of months and maybe it would work out, maybe it wouldn’t. Instead, three weeks later we were recording the first of what would be 30 episodes (and counting). 30 doesn’t sound like a lot in almost two years, but when you consider that we actually read the texts and prepare for each podcast, coordinate the schedules of three otherwise employed and occupied people, record around 3 hours of stuff per episode, edit out at least an hour and a half (usually), maintain a blog and try to respond to feedback – it’s fucking amazing.
Schopenhauer on Euclid’s Geometry
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on December 29, 2010
One point on our Schopenhauer episode that we didn’t take much time to get into was his attitude towards geometric demonstration, which was of course the model for all philosophy for thinkers like Descartes. Here’s a short selection from section 39 of the Fourfold Root, which illustrates his idea that our knowledge of geometry is founded on our intuition of space (“knowledge from the reason of being), not deduction (“knowledge of the reason of knowing”):
When once the reason of being is found, we base our conviction of the truth of the theorem upon that reason alone, and no
longer upon the reason of knowing given us by the demonstration. Let us, for instance, take the sixth proposition of the first Book of Euclid :“If two angles of a triangle are equal, the sides also which subtend, or are opposite to, the equal angles shall be equal to one another.” Which Euclid demonstrates as follows:
Read the rest of this entry »
The Sickness Unto Death, the PowerPoint!
Posted by Daniel Horne in PEL's Notes on December 2, 2010
I mentioned on the Kierkegaard episode having prepared a PowerPoint on The Sickness Unto Death, so I submit to you, the morbidly curious, TSUD: The PowerPoint! (Warning, it’s over 700KB, and might take a while to download on slower connections.)
I believe Seth made some minor corrections and improvements, but any errors in spelling, interpretation, or insight are mine. Feel free to use, read, mock, or submit for a high school class project as you deem fit.
-Daniel Horne
What is Despair, Anyway?
Posted by Daniel Horne in PEL's Notes on November 23, 2010
[Editor’s note: If you’ve listened to the Kierkegaard episode, then you’ve heard plenty of felicitous exposition and argumentation by Mr. Daniel Horne, whom we’ve consequently invited to post some follow-up thoughts and resources over the next weeks:
Yes, we know Kierkegaard thought of despair as sin, but is despair “a” sin? Is it “sin” writ large? Despair is prohibited by no Biblical commandment, so what was Kierkegaard getting at? In The Book of Dead Philosophers,
Kierkegaard scholar Gordon Marino gave a similarly opaque description of despair with his unsatisfying New York Times op-ed. Marino correctly describes several different aspects of despair presented by The Sickness Unto Death. But not only did Marino avoid summarizing Kierkegaard’s concept of despair, he ignored Kierkegaard’s proffered cure, which would have gone a long way toward explaining the sickness. The resulting confusion to NYT readers was clear in the comments following his editorial. In response, Marino conceded that Kierkegaard’s proposition was fundamentally religious, and not merely psychological. Marino also belatedly provided a useful insight: Despair is best classified as one of the seven deadly sins, that of acedia, a kind of spiritual sloth.
Yukio Mishima and St. Sebastian
Posted by Seth Paskin in PEL's Notes on November 7, 2010
When I was in college, I came across the work of Japanese Author Yukio Mishima. He was a brilliant, if conflicted, soul who ultimately committed ritual suicide. There’s no point in me trying to encapsulate him in this post – check him out on the web. Certainly one of the more interesting characters you are likely to come across.
For some reason during the Goodman podcast, which was just posted, I recalled that as a boy, Mishima (or a character of his – I’m kind of confused on this point*) sees a picture of a painting of St. Sebastian and experiences his first sexual arousal, which leads to masturbation and awareness of his homosexuality. I cut out the discussion because I couldn’t coherently make my point, but I wanted to follow up with a post.
Goodman poses the question ‘When is Art?’ as opposed to ‘What is Art?’ The point being that anything can become a work of art or cease to be a work of art, depending on time and circumstances. It’s a nifty end-run around aesthetics and, I think, gets at something essential in the ‘experience’ of art. Instead of creating a mandate that such and such is art, leaving it up to the observer to either acknowledge or shrug, Goodman creates a context where one asks, ‘Is this art for me, now? And why?’
Nelson Goodman on Induction (Grue and Bleen!)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on November 6, 2010
On our Goodman episode, I start out by trying to give a short explanation of Goodman’s “New Riddle of Induction.” When we’re presented with evidence for a general claim, how do we tell which general claim the evidence is in support of? Goodman contrasts the predicate “green,” which we might think we can project to future cases when we see that all current emeralds are green, with “grue,” which is defined as green previous to this moment and blue after this moment. He argues that our past observations don’t tell us which predicate should be projected into the future; we have to give an explanation why we intuitively want to project green and not grue, even though we haven’t yet had an experience running counter to the hypothesis that all emeralds are grue. Giving an account of this is more difficult than you might think, and this essay shows Goodman in full-bore analytic mode: very methodical, but still readable and actually fun if you’re into that sort of thing, as opposed to his mathematical philosophy, which I think is no fun under any circumstances.
Read the rest of this entry »
-
You are currently browsing the archives for the PEL’s Notes category.
"I’ve never before heard my work discussed like that, and rarely as intelligently ... I listened to the whole podcast, and felt exalted afterward." -- Arthur Danto
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.
Subscribe, rate, and read reviews on iTunes. 
Five Stars after 200+ iTunes Ratings.
"Intelligent and funny -- a rare combo. The best philosophy podcast on iTunes. In fact, one of the best podcasts on iTunes." More Reviews.
Recent Comments