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.

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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:

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,”or read it online. Buy World of Perception,or read online.

End song: “Write Me Off” by Mark Lint and the Simulacra. Read about it.

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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 bookor try this version online.

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:

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 bookor read it online. Read more about the topic.

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.

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).Read more about the topic and selections.

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.

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(2004)
-The last three chapters of Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything(2007)
-Ch. 4, and some of ch. 2, from Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion(2006)
-Ch. 8 (and skimming 3 and 7 to get context) of Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon(2006)
-Chapter 14 of Anthony Kenny’s 2008 book From Empedocles to Wittgenstein: Historical Essays in Philosophy(which we read as a response to Dawkins).

End song: “Goddammit” by Mark Lint and the Simulacra, recorded partly in 2000 and partly just now.

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.

Buy the book.For more detail on Swinburne, read Is There a God?(1996).

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.

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.

Buy Herlandor read it online. Buy In a Different Voice

End song: “Mother’s Day” by Mark Linsenmayer (2007). Read about it.

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.You can find the Hume selections here and here.

End song: “Bring You Down” from the 1994 album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down by The MayTricks.

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?

Buy the bookor read the cheesy, old translation online.

End song: “Manager,” from the 2011 New People album, Impossible Things (song written in 1997).

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.We compared this to Kant’s Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason.

End song: “Remembrance” by Fingers (read more about it).

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).

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).

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. Milleror read this online translation by Terry Pinkard.

End song: “I Die Desire,” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000).

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,or you look at this alternate translation by Terry Pinkard online. I highly recommend having one of these open to read along, as the text is very hard to follow.

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.

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.

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)

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!

Read online or buy it.

End song: “Find You Out,” from the brand new New People album, Impossible Things.

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).

What kinds of explanations are legitimate? S. thought that causal and logical explanations are often confused, resulting in philosophical errors. In laying out the four types of explanation — the four versions of the principle of sufficient reason — he clearly elaborates his modernized Kantian epistemology. We also discuss his strange notion of “will” that was so influential on Nietzsche and Freud. Plus, we discuss “Action Philosophers!”and “Walking Dead.”

Read the book online here or purchase it.We also read this chunk of The World As Will and Representation.

End song: “The Answer,” from the forthcoming album Impossible Things by New People.

What is the self? For K. we are a tension between opposites: necessity and possibility, the finite and the infinite, soul and body. He thinks we’re all in despair, whether we know it or not, because we wrongly think we’re something we’re not, or we reject what we are, or we just don’t pay attention to this dynamic at all: we just go along with the crowd. So we need to keep self-examining and (he thinks) ultimately embrace our subservience to God.

Joined by guest podcaster/Kiekegaard’s lawyer Daniel Horne, we consider K.’s 3-step self-help program and whether there’s anything to be gotten here if you don’t subscribe to K’s Christianity.

Read the text free online or buy the book.We also devote some discussion to Fear and Trembling.

End song: “John T. Flibber,” from Happy Songs Will Bring You Down by the MayTricks (1994).

What’s the relationship between art and science? Does understanding works of art constitute “knowledge,” and if so, how does this relate to other kinds of knowledge? Goodman describes art as a symbol system (including art like instrumental music that doesn’t seem representative), which can symbolize successfully or not. While there is no one set of concepts by which to judge all art (different types of art and other descriptive endeavors establish incommensurable “worlds”), neither is art an anything goes endeavor where the individual spectator is the only determinant of quality.

We’re joined by painter Jay Bailey to bring up lots of amusing artwork examples (The Monkees! Thomas Kinkade! Self-mutilation as art!) and tell us how well Goodman’s account accords with his understanding of artistic practice (his answer: not so well).

Read the text online or buy it.

End song: “Staple Gun” by Mark Lint and Stevie P (1999).

Is the world of our experience ultimately real? If not, does it have something metaphysically basic underlying it? For Nagarjuna, the answers are “no” and “no… well… not that we can talk about.”

Mark and Seth (Wes was sick) are joined by guest Erik Douglas to discuss metaphysics, causality, the possibility of remaking your perceptual habits, why someone who believes that all is empty might still want to act ethically, and how to deny a claim without affirming its equally dubious opposite.

Look at this document for our primary texts plus a couple of others that we mention; we also skimmed Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way. Secondary sources are discussed here.

End song: “Nothing in this World” by by Mark Lint and the Simulacra, recorded partly in 2000 and partly just now.

What’s the meaning of life? Well, for Sigmund Freud, an objective purpose rises or falls with religion, which he thinks a matter of clinging to illusion, so to rephrase: what do we want out of life? To be happy, of course, yet he sees happiness as a matter of fulfillment of pent-up desires, meaning it’s by its nature temporary. Yet we can’t shake off its pursuit, and so we’re in a bind, and have a number of strategies for obtaining some satisfaction: some compensation for what we have to repress in order to live in a society that forces us to repress our innate desires.

Read the book online or purchase it.

End song: “The Easy Thing” by New People from The Easy Thing (2009).

What is the relation between mind and body? How do we know things? What are the emotions? Is there an ethical ideal for us to shoot for? What is our relationship to God?

Our rational nature prevails over urges to scream, sleep, or slap each other as we plow to the end of this strange and thorny text.

Read a free version online or purchase the book.

End song: “When I Think of You” from The MayTricks’ Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (1994).

We mostly discuss his weird, immanent, non-personal conception of God: God is everything, therefore the world is God as apprehended through some particular attributes, namely insofar as one of his aspects is infinite space (extension, i.e. matter) and insofar as one of his aspects is mind (our minds being chunks or “modes” of the big God mind).

Also, if you’re not going to sell out and go for a university position in philosophy, should you instead grind lenses in your attic without adequate ventilation? (Hint: no) Plus, the Amsterdam of yesterday, whose heady aroma drove people to write like Euclid, property dualism rears its ugly head, and Mel Gibson as Rousseau!

Read a free version online or purchase the book.

One place to read the earlier Spinoza book I refer to, A Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being (1660), is here. The Karen Armstrong book I keep referring to is The Case for God,and at the end Wes recommends Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and the Heretic. Seth also brings up Giles Deluze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.
The dumbed down, non-geometric presentation of the Ethics that I talk about is here.

End song: “Spiritual Insect,” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000).

What’s the relationship between culture and nature? Are savages really slavering beasts of unquenchable appetites, or probably more mellow, hangin’ about, flexin’ their muscles, just chillin’, eh?

Rousseau engages in some wild speculation about the development of humanity from the savage to the modern, miserable wretch. Association with other people corrupts us, especially association with Wes. Is there some form of government that will make things tolerable? Maybe that one where Oprah is our queen.

Read along with us! http://www.constitution.org/jjr/ineq.htm and http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon.htm.

End song: “Love Is the Problem” by New People from The Easy Thing (2009).

Does pragmatism give ground for religious belief, like if I say it feels good for me to believe in God, is that in any sense a legitimate grounds for that belief? Is belief in science or rationality itself a form of faith? Is religious belief a “forced choice,” or does it just not matter what you believe?

Also, we sort further through James on truth: truth is created by us, but what does that mean? That only statements actually verified or otherwise useful are true, or can have a truth value (true of false) at all? In saying that we create truth, does that make James a relativist, and if so, is that bad?

Read “The Will to Believe,” Pragmatism, and The Meaning of Truth (the most useful chapters for our purposes are 3, 5, 8, 9, 12, and 15).

End song: “Who Cares What You Believe?” by Madison Lint (2001).

What is this mind stuff, and how can it “be” the brain? Can computers think? No? What if they’re really sexified? Then can they think? Can the mind be a computer? Can it be a room with a guy in it that doesn’t speak Chinese? Can science completely understand it? …The mind, that is, not the room, or Chinese. What is it like to be a bat? What about a weevil? Do you even know what a weevil is, really? Then how do you know it’s not a mind? Hmmmm? Is guest podcaster Marco Wise a robot? Even his wife cannot be sure!

We introduce the mind/body problem and the wackiness that it engenders by breezing through several articles, which you may read along with us:

1. Alan Turing’s 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”

2. A chapter of Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 book The Concept of Mind called “Descartes’ Myth.”

3. Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

4. John Searle’s Chinese Room argument, discussed in a 1980 piece, “Minds, Brains and Programs.”

5. Daniel C. Dennett’s “Quining Qualia.”

Some additional resources that we talk about: David Chalmers’s “Consciousness and its Place in Nature, “ Frank Jackson’s “Epiphenomenal Qualia”, Paul Churchland’s Matter and Consciousness,Jerry Fodor’s “The Mind-Body Problem,” Zoltan Torey’s The Crucible of Consciousness,and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s long entry on the Chinese Room argument.

End Song: “No Mind” from 1998’s Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio; the whole album is now free online.