Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:10:55 — 119.9MB)
On Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (1991). How is philosophy different from science and art? What’s the relationship between different philosophies? Is better pursued solo, or in a group? Deleuze described philosophy as the creation of new concepts, whereas science is about functions that map observed regularities and art is about creating Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:05:14 — 114.7MB)
On Jacques Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” (1956), Jacques Derrida’s “The Purveyor of Truth” (1975), and other essays in the collection The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. How should philosophers approach literature? Lacan read Edgar Allen Poe’s story about a sleuth who outthinks a devious Minister as an illustration of his model Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:14:47 — 123.5MB)
On Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject (1996) and Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949). What is the self? Is that the same as the experiencing subject? Lacan says no: while the self (the ego) is an imaginative creation, cemented by language, the subject Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:14:55 — 68.7MB)
Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan share what drove them into philosophy and keeps them there. How is philosophy different than (or similar to) science? Than religion? Art? The consensus seems that philosophy, to us, is inevitable for the curious. It’s just inquiry, unbounded (in principle at least) by any fixed assumptions. While scientific and religious Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:46:27 — 97.5MB)
We’re joined by an international terrorism expert to discuss how to define terrorism and whether it can ever be ethical. We read: -Donald Black’s “The Geometry of Terrorism” (2004) -J. Angelo Corlett’s “Can Terrorism be Morally Justified?” (1996) -Igor Primoratz’s article on terrorism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2007, revised 2011) -Karl Heinzen’s Murder Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:58:21 — 108.4MB)
On Buber’s 1923 book about the fundamental human position: As children, and historically (this is his version of social contract theory), we start fully absorbed in relation with another person (like, say, mom). Before that point, we have no self-consciousness, no “self” at all, really. It’s only by having these consuming “encounters” that we gradually Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:01:19 — 111.1MB)
On Karl Marx’s The German Ideology, Part I, an early, unpublished work from 1846. What is human nature? What drives history? How can we improve our situation? Marx thought that fundamentally, you are what you do: you are your job, your means of subsistence. All the rest, this culture, this religion, this philosophy, is just Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:17 — 46.1MB)
Excerpts of discussions about Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, an article on emergence called “More Is Different” by Nobel Prize Winning physicist P.W. Anderson, John Searle’s Mind: A Brief Introduction, and Italo Calvino’s trippy science fantasy novel Cosmicomics. How does the world fit together, with its different layers of organization, each with its different Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:59:59 — 109.9MB)
On Plato’s Dialogue, “Gorgias” (380 BCE or so). Why philosophize? Isn’t it better to know how to persuade people in practical matters, like a successful lawyer or business leader? Plato (speaking as usual through Socrates) thinks that the “art” of rhetoric (persuasive speeches) isn’t an art at all, in the sense of something that requires Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:23:58 — 76.9MB)
Three podcasters and two listeners join to read Plato’s fabulous dialogue, which is discussed in PEL Episode 69. Listening to this will be MIGHTY good preparation for listening to that discussion. We are freely sharing the first half of this unabridged work of profound genius, in which Socrates (Mark) and his pal Chaerephon (Eileen), at Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:34:03 — 86.2MB)
On his book Constructing the World (2012). How are all the various truths about the world related to each other? David Chalmers, famous for advocating a scientifically respectable form of brain-consciousness dualism, advocates a framework of scrutability: if one knew some set of base truths, then the rest would be knowable from them. What sort Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:39 — 28.2MB)
Excerpts of discussions about David Chalmers’s The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, and Paul Auster’s City of Glass. What’s the relation between mind and brain? What is consciousness? Can science study consciousness, and can evolution really account for it? What is the self and how does this Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:47:35 — 98.6MB)
On Rudolph Carnap’s The Logical Structure of the World (1928). What can we know? Carnap thinks that all the various spheres of knowledge (e.g. particle physics, attributions of mental states, moral claims, the economy) are logically interrelated, that you can in fact translate sentences about any of these into sentences about sets of basic, momentary Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:57:11 — 107.3MB)
On W.V.O. Quine’s “On What There Is” (1948) and “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951). What kind of metaphysics is compatible with science? Quine sees science and philosophy as one and the same enterprise, and objects to ontologies that include types of entities that science can’t, even in principle, study. In these two highly influential essays, Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:14 — 13.3MB)
Thanks to all you listeners who have brought us to the milestone of approximately two million downloads. In celebration, we thought we’d share our highlight reel, our clip show, our demo for various business uses, our oeuvre gougé, if you will. Will you? You will not. This was edited together by Erik Jourgensen, with a Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:06:08 — 115.5MB)
On Alexander Hamilton/James Madison’s Federalist Papers (1, 10-12, 14-17, 39, 47-51), published as newspaper editorials 1787-8, plus Letters III and IV from Brutus, an Anti-Federalist. What constitutes good government? These founding fathers argued that the proposed Constitution, with its newly centralized–yet also separated-by-branch–powers would be a significant improvement on the Articles of Confederation, which had Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:03:11 — 112.8MB)
On Fame: What the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity by Tom Payne (2010). What’s the deal with our f’ed up relationship with celebrities? Payne says that celebrities serve a social need that’s equal parts religion and and aggression. TV’s Lucy Lawless (Xena, Spartacus, Battlestar Galactica) joins us to discuss the accuracy of Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:49:49 — 100.6MB)
On philosophical issues in McCarthy’s 2005 novel about guys running around with drug money and shooting each other, and about fiction as a form for exploring philosophical ideas. What can morality mean for people who have witnessed the “death of God,” i.e. a loss in faith in light of the horrors of war? For both Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:27:48 — 80.4MB)
On Candide: or, Optimism, the novel by Voltaire (1759). Is life good? Popular Enlightenment philosopher Leibniz argued that it’s good by definition. God is perfectly good and all-powerful, so whatever he created must have been as good as it can be; we live in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire loads this satirical adventure Read more…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:49:53 — 100.7MB)
On Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873). What is truth? This essay, written early in Nietzsche’s career but unpublished during his lifetime, is taken by many to make the extreme claim that there is no truth, that all of the “truths” we tell each other are just agreements by social Read more…
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