The entirety of my band’s recent (3/23/13) CD Release Party is now posted on YouTube: Watch on YouTube. This combines footage from two stationary cameras plus a couple of iPhones that my friend Glenn walked around with. He did some editing to remove the dead air. The audio is open-air in the club, so it’s Read more…
Things to Watch
![Zizek! - The Elvis of Cultural Theory [Review]](http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/wp-content/uploads/zizek-poster-101x150.jpg)
Zizek! is one of those documentaries centered around one really, really interesting person. For that reason it’s more like Crumb or Bukowski - Born Into This than more famously philosophical movies like Waking Life. Zizek!’s structure is simple: The director and a small crew simply follow Slavoj Zizek as he goes about his daily business, which pretty Read more…
[DISCLAIMER: Although I am using a conceptual distinction I got from the embedded Simon Baron-Cohen TEDx talk (where ever he got it from), I am not taking a position on his stance on Autism or Psychopathy. I have no point of view about Autism and have reflected on empathy and psychopathy in this blog before, Read more…
Mar 292013
One of the groovy things about our new “open” society is how venerated institutions of higher learning like Yale are being strong-armed into sharing their course content online with the unwashed masses (aka you and me). This means you don’t have to go to The Interwebs or TedX to get quasi scholarly ramblings about your Read more…
Mar 252013
Over the past hundred years Constructivists and Traditionalists have enjoyed an uneasy truce in the world of education practitioners. Constructivism “says that people construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world, through experiencing things and reflecting on those experiences.” [thirteen.org] Traditionalists were more influenced by the “scientific management” of Taylorism, seeing schools on the industry model. Read more…
Mar 112013
I expect YouTube will have some good sources for us about terrorism and philosophy. Here’s my first bit unearthed, a 4min lecture from Dena Hurst that appears to be part of a longer ethics class. Watch on YouTube. The video gives a definition that, like Corlett’s, tries not to decide the moral issue beforehand: “Using Read more…
Mar 052013
A dialogical relation will show itself also in genuine conversation, but it is not composed of this. …On the other hand, all conversation derives its genuineness only from the consciousness of the element of inclusion—even if this appears only abstractly as an “acknowledgement” of the actual being of the partner in the conversation; but this Read more…
Feb 282013
Walter Mignolo, semiotician and literary theorist, weighs in on the relative strengths of Eurocentric and non-Eurocentric (colonial, not occidental) philosophy in this article on Aljeezera. In literary theory, most new studies are centered around Eurocentrism and its effect on natives via Postcolonial theory. Heavy minds in Postcolonial Theory include Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Edward Said. These Read more…
Feb 102013
On Tuesday, February 12, Simon Crichtley will be giving a free lecture in Troy, NY at the EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Crichtley is widely regarded for his work in continental philosophy, ranging from religion to politics. His philosophy tends towards existential ethics, a topic covered in Episode 4 and Episode 63, also a possible Read more…
Feb 052013
I referred in the episode to a number of lectures on Marx that helped me to put the German Ideology into perspective with Marx’s other texts and filled me in on few of the Young Hegelians that he criticized. These were from Yale’s Foundations of Modern Social Theory course by Iván Szelényi. (Get them from Read more…
Feb 042013
A complaint I often hear from people averse to the subject of philosophy is that, as interesting as it can often be, it’s really sort of irrelevant to our daily lives. In such conversations Rick Roderick is always the guy who comes to my mind. It’s a criticism he himself made of certain philosophers from Read more…
Jan 102013
[Editor's Note: OK, here's the last writeup on the current batch of Not School group discussions. In this case, you actually get to hear (and see!) the full discussion without being a member, but of course, we're still trying to seduce you to join up so that you can join into these fun discussions, so Read more…
On 12/4 we spoke with David Chalmers about his new book, Constructing the World. The book explores a series of related positions that attempt to generalize and improve upon Carnap’s project of logical construction in the Aufbau, the subject of our episode 67 (which will be posted soon). Carnap’s project was problematic mainly because first, Read more…
Nov 022012
As part of the run-up to our Federalist Papers episode, I listened to this interview on the Paul Revere Radio podcast interviewing Mary E. Webster, who published a couple of volumes of The Federalist Papers in “modern English.” I can think of few texts with which this podcast is in contact which is less in Read more…
Oct 192012
Following my thread of “if something feels weird, let’s call it some kind of existentialism,” I’ve been listening a lot to Badfinger lately. See who I’m talking about on YouTube. Of course there’s something a little disconcerting about the passage of time itself, and the fact that, if you’re listening to anything from a few Read more…
Sep 292012
In Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, Iris Murdoch claimed that “[a]rt is far and away the most educational thing we have…” Here she is discussing this notion, among many others, with the philosopher Bryan Magee. Part One: Watch on YouTube.
The New York Public Library hosts regular live events (details here), and one of these was held in April 2010 to celebrate Candide’s 250th Anniversary. Read about it, watch/listen to it, and get the transcript here. Here’s the video (95 min): You can also download just the audio from iTunes U. Though some parts of Read more…
Sep 032012
Here’s another Nietzsche lecture, from Stanford’s Veritas forum, which you can listen to as a podcast (iTunes link) or watch a video: Watch it on Vimeo. Dallas Willard is an unapologetic Christian, and pursues a post-modern tack similar to the one I cited in my review of the Philosophy for Theologians podcast: Modern philosophy tried Read more…
Aug 242012
For another take on Nietzsche’s theory of truth, here’s a lecture from Prof. Robert Solomon, one of the stars of The Great Courses series. Solomon describes Nietzsche’s concept of truth as perspectivist rather than relativist. (Though, unlike Rick Roderick, Solomon is willing to concede that other Nietzsche interpreters have — rightly or wrongly — gone farther.) Read more…
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