Archive for category Podcast Episodes
Episode 50: Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on February 3, 2012
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:26:18 — 79.1MB)
On Robert M. Pirsig’s philosophical, autobiographical novel from 1974.
What’s the relationship between science and values? Pirsig thinks that modern rationality, by insisting on the fundamental distinction between objects (matter) and subjects (people), labels value judgments as irrational. Society therefore largely ignores aesthetic considerations in the buildings and machines that litter our landscape.
People rebel against this ugly commercialism by rejecting technology altogether, and Pirsig thinks this is a mistake. If we realize that value judgments (where we sense “Quality”) are fundamentally a part of experience, that they drive what what we consider “rational” (e.g. a “good” scientific explanation) in the first place, then we can stop with the hippie rebellion and more sensibly and peacefully co-exist with technology. Though the book is not about historical Zen, it is about keeping centered, connected, and in the moment.
Featuring guest participant David Buchanan. Read more about the topic and get the book.
End song: “Freeway” by Mark Lint and Stevie P. Read about it.
If you enjoy the episode, please donate at least $1:
Episode 49: Foucault on Power and Punishment
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on January 11, 2012
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:42:23 — 93.8MB)
Discussing Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), parts 1, 2 and section 3 of part 3.
Are we really free? Kings no longer exert absolute and arbitrary power over us, but Foucault’s picture of the evolution from torture and public executions to rehabilitative, medical-style incarceration is not so much a triumph of liberty but a shift to more subtle but more pervasive exertions of power. Read more about the topic and get the book.
Featuring guest participant Katie McIntyre, doctoral candidate at Columbia.
End songs: Two short, stinky tunes from the Mark Lint album, Black Jelly Beans & Smokes, “The Zoo Song” and “Solitary Drama,” both from 1991.
This episode is sponsored by Audible; go there for your free audio book.
If you enjoy your listening experience, please donate at least $1:
Episode 48: Merleau-Ponty on Perception and Knowledge
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on December 17, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:41:47 — 93.3MB)
Discussing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “Primacy of Perception” (1946) and The World of Perception (1948).
What is the relation of perception to knowledge? In M-P’s phenomenology, perception is primary: even our knowledge of mathematical truths is in some way conditioned by and dependent on the fact that we are creatures with bodies and senses that work the way they do. Science is great, but it doesn’t discover the truth of things hiding behind perception: it is an abstraction from certain kinds of perceptions. Other modes of approaching things, e.g. art, can equally well give us knowledge, though of a different kind.
Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan argue over whether this thesis is just a bunch of truisms and despair over not having read The Phenomenology of Perception, the longer work which what we did read was meant to summarize. Is M-P just saying that scientific knowledge is defeasible, which scientists already believe? Read more about this topic.
Buy “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences,”
End song: “Write Me Off” by Mark Lint and the Simulacra. Read about it.
If you enjoy this episode, please donate at least $1:
Episode 47: Sartre on Consciousness and the Self
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on November 30, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:01:28 — 111.3MB)
Discussing Jean-Paul Sarte’s The Transcendence of the Ego (written in 1934).
What is consciousness, and does it necessarily involve an “I” who is conscious of things? Sartre says no: typical experience is consciousness of some object and doesn’t involve the experience of myself as someone having this consciousness. It’s only when we reflect on our own conscious experiences that we posit this “I.” The ego is our own creation, or more precisely a social creation. This means that far from being some primordial structure of all experience, this transparent thing inside us that we have more immediate knowledge of than anything else, the ego is an object: it has parts we don’t see, and we can be wrong when we make judgments about it. Other people might even know us better than we know ourselves.
This is a difficult text, and we spend lots of time bickering about what Sartre might mean by terms like “transcendent” or “non-positional consciousness,” so surely you will love that. Read more about the topic.
Buy the book
End song: “Thing in the World,” by Mark Lint. This song was begun around 1996 but mostly written and wholly recorded just now, with Mark playing all the instruments, with lyrics actually motivated by this Sartre reading.
Read more about the Close Reading product on Sartre described at the end of the episode. We’ll post an announcement if Wes’s Sartre notes are ever actually finished.
If you enjoy your listening experience, please donate at least $1:
Episode 46: Plato on Ethics & Religion
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on November 16, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:52:05 — 102.7MB)
Discussing Plato’s “Euthyphro.”
Does morality have to be based on religion? Are good things good just because God says so, or (if there is a God) does God choose to approve of the things He does because he recognizes those things to be already good? Plato thinks the latter: if morality is to be truly non-arbitrary, then, like the laws of logic, it can’t just be a contingent matter of what the gods happen to approve of (i.e. what some particular religious text happens to say).
We’re joined by Matt Evans, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan to discuss the text, which seems to be not as directly related to modern debates regarding the Divine Command Theory as we thought going into this. Ah, well. We cover all the angles and Seth spends the last bit going on about Judaism. Oy!
Buy the book
End song: “False Morality” by The MayTricks, from the album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (1994) Read about it.
The suggested donation if you like this episode is $1. Donate via the button and you’ll get a free download of a high-bitrate mp3 of this episode’s song. After paying on the PayPal site, click the yellow “Return to the Partially Examined Life” box there, and you’ll be sent to a page with the download link. If this doesn’t happen, please email me.
Episode 45: Moral Sense Theory: Hume and Smith
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on October 29, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:45:33 — 96.7MB)
Discussing parts of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1740) and Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).
Where do we get our moral ideas? Hume and Smith both thought that we get them by reflecting on our own moral judgments and on how we and others (including imaginary, hypothesized others) in turn judge those judgments. Mark, Wes, Seth, and guest Getty Lustila, a phil grad student at Georgia State University, hash through the Scottish stoicism to lay out the differences between these two gents and whether their views constitute an actual moral theory or just a descriptive enterprise.
Read along: We read the sections from the Treatise and from Smith in D.D. Raphael’s collectionBritish Moralists (Vol. 2).
End song: “Honest Judge” by New People from the 2010 album “Impossible Things,” written and sung by Nate Pinney.
The suggested donation if you like this episode is $1. Donate via the button and you’ll get a free download of a high-bitrate mp3 of this episode’s song: After paying on the PayPal site, click the yellow “Return to the Partially Examined Life” box there, and you’ll be sent to a page with the download link. If this doesn’t happen, please email me.
Episode 44: New Atheist Critiques of Religion
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on October 11, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:50:03 — 100.8MB)
Discussing selections from Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel C. Dennett.
Should we be religious, or is religion just a bunch of superstitious nonsense that it’s past time for us to outgrow? Does faith lead to ceding to authority and potential violence? Can a reasonable person be religious? We say lots of rude things about these authors, and at times about their targets in this listener-requested episode featuring Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan. Read more about the topic.
Buy/read what we did:
-Ch. 1-2 of Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
-The last three chapters of Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
End song: “Goddammit” by Mark Lint and the Simulacra, recorded partly in 2000 and partly just now.
Episode 43: Arguments for the Existence of God
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on September 15, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:42:49 — 94.2MB)
Discussing the arguments by Descartes, St. Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, William Paley, Kant, and others, as analyzed in J.L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1983), chapters 1-3, 5-6, 8, and 11.
Are the ontological, cosmological, and teleological (argument from design) arguments for God’s existence any good? Mackie, a very sharp analytic philosopher well hooked into recent advances in philosophy of science, says no. He’s chiefly responding to his Oxford colleague, Richard Swinburne, who takes a very rationalist approach to God, taking the concept of God to be wholly simple and intelligible and providing a superior scientific explanation for, e.g. the beginning of the universe than the brute fact of an ultimately uncaused physical universe. Read more about the topic.
Mark, Seth, and Wes are joined by groovy South African theist blogger Robert Scott.
End song: “I Believe,” by Mark Lint (2011). Read about it.
Episode 42: Feminists on Human Nature and Moral Psychology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on September 5, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:35:13 — 87.2MB)
Discussing Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian novel Herland (1915) and psychologist Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1983).
How does human nature, and specifically moral psychology, vary by sex? Charlotte Perkins Gilman claims that when philosophers have described human nature as violent and selfish, they have in mind solely male nature. Females, left to themselves in an isolated society, would be supremely peaceful, rational, and cooperative.
Carol Gilligan says accounts of “normal” moral development have not taken into account observations of women: instead of judging women my male standards and finding them wanting, she hypothesized a trajectory specific to women that acknowledged their emphasis on concrete care as opposed to abstract moral principles.
Featuring the return of Seth and guest podcaster Azzurra Crispino, whom you might recall from our Kant epistemology episode. We wanted this to be an introduction to feminist philosophy, and so talk a bit about exploitation and whether heterosexual sex is inherently oppressive, and other fun topics, but mostly it’s just a discussion of two books. But they’re good ones! Read more about the topic.
End song: “Mother’s Day” by Mark Linsenmayer (2007). Read about it.
Episode 41: Pat Churchland on the Neurobiology of Morality (Plus Hume’s Ethics)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on July 18, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:44:57 — 96.1MB)
We spoke with Patricia Churchland after reading her new book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality. We also discussed David Hume’s ethics as foundational to her work, reading his Treatise on Human Nature (1739), Book III, Part I and his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Section V, Parts I and II.
What does the physiology of the brain have to do with ethics? What bearing do facts have on values? Churchland thinks that while Hume is (famously) correct in saying that you can’t deduce “ought” from “is,” the fact that we have moral sentiments is certainly relevant to figuring out what our ethical positions should be, and it’s her main goal to figure out what the mechanisms behind those moral sentiments are: What brain parts and processes are involved? How and when did these evolve? How did cultural factors come into play, building on top of our biological capacity to care for others?
Pat spoke with Mark and Dylan Casey here about topics ranging from the war on drugs to the rationale of punishment to Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape. Read some more initial thoughts (and some substantial discussion in readers’ comments) here.
To read along with us, buy Pat’s book.
End song: “Bring You Down” from the 1994 album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down by The MayTricks.
Episode 40: Plato’s Republic: What Is Justice?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on July 11, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:36:59 — 88.9MB)
Discussing The Republic by Plato, primarily books 1 and 2.
What is justice? What is the ideal type of government? In the dialogue, Socrates argues that justice is real (not just a fiction the strong make up) and that it’s not relative to who you are (in the sense that it would always be just to help your friends and hurt your enemies). Justice ends up being a matter of balancing your soul so the rational part is in control over the rest of you.
The Republic is Plato’s utopia, described by analogy with justice in the individual: In the ideal state, the rational people will be in charge, and these leaders should go through rigorous conditioning and live communally (spouse sharing!) in order for them to serve the state effectively.
You’ll hear Wes and Dylan Casey talk about their St. John’s experiences (the “Johnny” discussion-only format provides a chief model for P.E.L.’s). Plus, Gay Girl from Damascus, which music degrades your character, and does suffering make people morally worse?
End song: “Manager,” from the 2011 New People album, Impossible Things (song written in 1997).
Episode 39: Schleiermacher Defends Religion
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on June 10, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:43:12 — 94.5MB)
Discussing Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “On Religion; Speeches to its Cultured Despisers” (1799, with notes added 1821), first and second speeches.
Does religion necessarily conflict with science? Schleiermacher says no: the essence of religion is an emotional response to life; it doesn’t give knowledge or even tell us what to do exactly. Moreover, this attitude is a necessary to fully enter into life, to be a whole and fulfilled person. Yes, he’s of the “romantic” school, but his approach can still be seen today in liberal Protestant churches.
Featuring guest podcaster and blog contributor Daniel Horne.
Read the text online or buy the book.
End song: “Remembrance” by Fingers (read more about it).
Episode 38: Bertrand Russell on Math and Logic
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on May 25, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:30:30 — 82.9MB)
Discussing Russell’s Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), ch. 1-3 and 13-18.
How do mathematical concepts like number relate to the real world? Russell wants to derive math from logic, and identifies a number as a set of similar sets of objects, e.g. “3″ just IS the set of all trios. Hilarity then ensues.
This book is a shortened and much easier to read version of Russell and Whitehead’s much more famous Principia Mathematica, and given that we can’t exactly walk through the specific steps of lots of proofs on a purely audio podcast (nor would we want to put you through that), we spend some of the discussion comparing analytic (with its tendency to over-logicize) and continental (with its tendency towards obscurity) philosophy.
Featuring guest podcaster and number guy Josh Pelton, filling in for Seth.
Read with us online or buy the book.
End song: “Words and Numbers,” by Madison Lint (read more about this tune).
Episode 37: Locke on Political Power
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on May 6, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:34:26 — 86.5MB)
Discussing John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government (1690).
What makes political power legitimate? Like Hobbes, Locke thinks that things are less than ideal without a society to keep people from killing us, so we implicitly sign a social contract giving power to the state. But for Locke, nature’s not as bad, so the state is given less power. But how much less? And what does Locke think about tea partying, kids, women, acorns, foreign travelers, and calling dibs? The part of Wes is played by guest podcaster Sabrina Weiss.
Read along with us with online or buy the book.
End song: “Lock Them Away,” by Madison Lint (2003).
Episode 36: More Hegel on Self-Consciousness
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on April 10, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:31:54 — 84.1MB)
Part 2 of our discussion of G.F.W. Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit,” covering sections 178-230 within section B, “Self-Consciousness.” Part 1 is here.
First, Hegel’s famous “master and slave” parable, whereby we only become fully self-conscious by meeting up with another person, who (at least in primordial times, or maybe this happens to everyone as they grow up, or maybe this is all just happening in one person’s head… who the hell knows given the wacky way Hegel talks)? Then the story leads into stoicism, skepticism, and the “unhappy consciousness” (i.e. Christianity). We are again joined by Tom McDonald, though Wes is out sick. Wild speculation and disagreements of interpretation abound!
Buy the peach translation by A.V. Miller
End song: “I Die Desire,” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000).
Episode 35: Hegel on Self-Consciousness
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on April 2, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:27:42 — 80.4MB)
Discussing G.F.W. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Part B (aka Ch. 4), “Self-Consciousness,” plus recapping the three chapters before that (Part A. “Consciousness”).
This is discussion one of two: here we only get as far as “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” i.e. sections 166-177. This is plenty, though, as this may be the most difficult text in the history of philosophy.
We discuss Hegel’s weird dialectical method and what it says about his metaphysics, in particular about ourselves: not static, pre-formed balls of self-interest, but something that needs to be actively formed through reflection, which in turn is only possible because of our interactions with other people. Featuring guest podcaster Tom McDonald.
Buy the book,
End song: “Ann(e)” by Mark Lint, written in late 1991 shortly after my exposure to this book and completed in 2010 for the music blog.
Episode 34: Frege on the Logic of Language
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on March 13, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:47:51 — 98.8MB)
Discussing Gottlob Frege’s “Sense and Reference,” “Concept and Object” (both from 1892) and “The Thought” (1918).
What is it about sentences that make them true or false? Frege, the father of analytic philosophy who invented modern symbolic logic, attempted to codify language in a way that would make this obvious, which would ground mathematics and science. Applying his symbolic system to natural language forced him to invent strange entities like “thoughts” and “senses” that are neither physical nor psychological, and we pretty much spend this episode kvetching about the metaphysical implications of this and the fact that Frege didn’t care about them.
Featuring guest podcaster Matt Teichman, who also hosts Elucidations.
Read along: “The Thought,” “On Sense and Reference,” “On Concept and Object,” and we also read
Frege’s introduction (p. 12-25) to his book The Basic Laws of Arithmetic: Exposition of the System (1904), or just buy this book.
End song: “The Great Forgotten Lover,” from the 2011 New People album, Impossible Things.
Episode 33: Montaigne: What Is the Purpose of Philosophy?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on February 18, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:40:47 — 92.3MB)
Discussing Michel de Montaigne’s Essays: “That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die,” “Of Experience,” “Of Cannibals,” “Of the Education of Children,” “Of Solitude,” and “Of Solitude” (all from around 1580) with some discussion of “Apology for Raymond Sebond.”
Renaissance man Montaigne tells us all how to live, how to die, how to raise our kids, that we don’t know anything, and a million Latin quotations. Montaigne put the skeptical fire under Descartes and both draws upon and mocks a great deal of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Plus, he’s actually fun to read.
The role of Seth is played this time by our guest podcaster Dylan Casey.
Read along here; the translation we all read is available for purchase.
End song: “I Like Life” from Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio (1998)
Episode 32: Heidegger: What is “Being?”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on February 7, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:51:38 — 102.3MB)
Discussing Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), mostly the intro and ch. 1 and 2 of Part 1.
When philosophers try to figure out what really exists (God? matter? numbers?), Heidegger thinks they’ve forgotten a question that really should come first: what is it to exist? He thinks that instead of asking “What is Being?” we ask, as in a scientific context, “what is this thing?” This approach then poisons our ability to understand ourselves or the world that we as human beings actually inhabit, as opposed to the abstraction that science makes out of this.
This is Seth’s big episode: this was his primary concentration in his later grad school years. Plus: Nazis, trying to figure out things by free associating about their origins in ancient Greek, and whoopee cushion record breaking news!
End song: “Find You Out,” from the brand new New People album, Impossible Things.
Episode 31: Husserl’s Phenomenology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on January 10, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:49:58 — 100.7MB)
Discussing Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (1931).
How can we analyze our experience? Husserl thinks that Descartes was right about the need to ground science from the standpoint of our own experience, but wrong about everything else. Husserl recommends we “bracket” the question of whether the external world exists and just focus on the contents of our consciousness (the “cogito”). He thinks that with good, theory-free observations (meaning very difficult, unnatural language), we can give an account of the essential structures of experience, which will include truth, certainty, and objectivity (intersubjective verifiability): all that science needs. We’ll find that we don’t need to ground the existence of objects in space and other minds, because our entire experience presupposes them; they’re already indubitable.
Plus “Personal Philosophies” for Seth and Wes!
Read the text online or purchase it.
End song: “Sleep,” from the Mark Linsenmayer album Spanish Armada, Songs of Love and Related Neuroses (1993).
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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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