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If you previously subscribed to the Partially Examined Life via e-mail, or use a feed reader, or have this feed streaming to your site:

The blog feed address has now changed. It used to be http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThePartiallyExaminedLife, but that feed will now have only our podcast episodes.

The new feed, with all the blog content, is http://feeds.feedburner.com/partiallyexaminedlife/blog, so RSS subscribers can go there and add this new stream to your feed.

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This was due to my shortsightedness in initially setting our blog and our podcast using one and the same feed, which caused feed size issues that caused our feed to not be updated for the last 5 days or so before this.

Twitter subscribers should be unaffected; everything’s flowing there correctly now.

We’ll be finishing our discussion of the Ethics, which gives his comprehensive account of human nature, including the mind/body problem, his epistemology, and most centrally, his account of the passions, whereby external objects interact with our bodies, creating a composite which, seen through its mental aspect, is an “inadquate idea” that can overwhelm us, so that we act not out of our rational nature, but due to these external causes.

This will be a direct continuation (well, recorded two weeks later) of episode #24.

You can get the reading at http://frank.mtsu.edu/~rbombard/RB/Spinoza/ethica-front.html.

As I’ve been checking out various philosophy podcasts, it struck me that I’ve neglected looking into online philosophy blogs. There’s good reason for this, of course: if I’m at a computer (or iPhone or whatever) reading philosophy, I’m probably doing research for one of our episodes. If podcasting weren’t such a new medium, and you all had ready access to a myriad of recordings of, e.g. Rousseu and Hume mixin’ it up over drinks, then no doubt we’d have a harder time getting an audience for our little recorded study group.

So, I’m requesting your help in telling us what philosophy blogs out there provide you with some entertainment value, as opposed to self-important Nietzsche-wannabes putting up cryptic treatises that could not stand up to peer review or polemically charged screeds documenting the author’s ongoing battle with the forces of ignorance.

On second thought, go ahead and link me to the terrible blogs you know about as well, so we can all feel uncomfortable together.

I recently blogged about the glory of goobers posting one-star reviews of things.

Well, we got our own first one-star iTunes rating, though, alas, with no accompanying review. Now, I had thought that this was actually a good thing, that we were finally getting big enough that hostile people were actually getting tuned into us, i.e. no one bothers to rate anything that they don’t care anything about.

However, on further review, I see that a lot of the other podcasts on the “featured” list also have a single one-star rating, with no two-star ratings at all, even “Philosopher’s Zone,” which is a very professional, soothing podcast that could not possibly actually offend anyone (whereas I can at least picture someone being totally turned off by our attitudes).

So, I’m forced to conclude that someone is gaming the iTunes rating system, likely because these determine in no small part which podcasts appear in the “featured” section of the philosophy category in the iTunes store. Now, we’ve been in there quite a bit, and this explains quite a lot of the growth in our listenership (i.e. more people stumble across us on iTunes than via this blog).

The only way to cancel out negative ratings like this is for you, our loyal readers/listeners, to go to our page at the iTunes store and give us a nice (5-star, if you think we deserve it) rating… and a text review wouldn’t hurt either, if you feel so inspired.

So, if you’ve been enjoying multiple hours of us, I ask you to kindly go take the two minutes or less that this will require, and nudge your friends/roommates/spouses/pets to do likewise, and that’ll actually do more to spread the gospel of PEL than nearly anything else. For those of you that don’t use iTunes, if you’re actually motivated to download and install it JUST so you can go to the store and give us a nice rating, well, let us know and we’ll be extra grateful (which along with fifty cents will buy you… well… a gun, I think, but not a very good one).

I see we have a meager 27 total ratings there now; I’ll check back in a few days to see if this here request gets us the goods. Thank y’all for your continued support; the encouragement we’ve gotten from you has determined us to keep doing this and strive to make it at least somewhat listenable, with a minimum of celebrity impersonations and wacky morning-zoo-type sound effects.

Sincerely,

-Mark

On Episode 16, we discussed some work by Arthur Danto and joked that he would certainly never listen to us.

Well, I sent him a link to the episode via Facebook, and he not only listened that day to it, but put the link on his page, complimented us there to his many friends, and said it was OK for us to quote his correspondence. His initial response to us was this (edited down a bit):

Dear guys

I was really thrilled by the podcast you sent. It was a unique experience, seeing philosophy living in our culture. I’ve never before heard my work discussed like that, and rarely as intelligently. What was wonderful were all the digressions, but then everyone got back to the issues, and usually you came out right -or right enough, given where I was in the path of my thought when I wrote those essays.

…So thanks for the stupendous honor you have done me here. I enjoyed every minute, including the song at the end.

In a follow-up communication, he gave his this quote:

I think the way you address philosophical issues inspiring, including the kind of horseplay that Plato edited out of the dialogues, which had, after all, to be transcribed by hand.

…And on his FB page he said:

I was pleased and surprised by this discussion. Three former philosophy students took on the task of discussing different texts, and though there is a lot of irreverent comments on professional philosophy, it is very high level. I listened to the whole podcast, and felt exalted afterward.

At my request, he sent us some follow-up readings to consider. Some of the issues we discussed in the podcast, he says, were addressed in “The Abuse of Beauty, my Carus lectures, which were delivered not long after 9/11; the insight is directly connected with 9/11 – argues that beauty is indispensible to human life, but not essential to the concept of art” and also that we might enjoy Lydia Goehr’s book comparing Danto with Theodor Adorno: “She is in music aesthetics, and a lot more continental and at the same time more academic than I ever was, but she is very smart.”

As for future readings that will potentially feed our future episodes, here’s his list of suggestions:

Jerry Levinson writes on music in a highly intelligent way. Stanley Cavell is first rate on movies and literature. I love his book on screwball comedies. Noel Carroll’s book Mass Art raises a lot of important issues. Nelson Goodman was a towering thinker and also an art dealer, and his work is full of challenging ideas, even if stretches of it are highly technical.

Needless to say, we are thrilled and grateful for all of this and will get to more philosophy of art (which according to Danto, we should stop calling “aesthetics,” which has to do specifically and solely with “beauty”) as soon as we can fit it in.

A surprising number of people google “partially examined life.” And then we get quite a bit of traffic from searches like “philosophy podcast” and “wittgenstein podcast.” But we also get hits from “grandpa bought a rubber.” Here are few more of my favorites:

• District 9 and Nietzsche
• Chuang Tzu Pronunciation
• Half examined life
• Partially good life

And last but most:

• did you bullshit today? did you try to bullshit today?

If you’d like to have links to our postings sent to you via Twitter, you can now do that; follow us at http://twitter.com/PartiallyExLife.

If you re-Tweet our episode posts to the millions of Twitter followers you undoubtably have, then you’ll have our eternal gratitude.

While I’m on the subject of spreading the word, why don’t you scroll ALL the way to the bottom of this page and hit the “Stumbleupon” or “Digg” icons at the bottom under “Share with your friends on…” This will nominate our page for wider circulation via those sites and will also make you cool. Note that you can do this with any one of our blog posts here as well; just click on the title of the post, and when a page comes up with just that post on it, then click the sharing icon. You’ll have to sign up for an account with those sites, but they’re kind of cool regardless.

More importantly, if you’ve not already gone onto iTunes and given us a steamin’ hot awesome rating (a review is nice too), go do that! I’m unclear re. what rating resources are available to you Zune users and other non-traditionals, but I encourage you people to do something as well… perhaps just stand in the street holding a sign with our URL on it. …Or better yet, buy a freakin’ T-shirt already!

The Partially Examined Life now offers a fine selection of overpriced T-shirts and a mug. Who will be cooler than you when you are sporting one or all of these on your person? Who? Tell me, please, as I’m honestly curious as to your no doubt mistaken apprehension on this topic. You having failed to give a satisfactory answer, I will provide one for you per my nature and/or perogative: No one, that’s who.

create & buy custom products at Zazzle

In addition to our Facebook page, we now have dedicated forum/discussion space on UrbanPhilosophy.net: http://urbanphilosophy.net/pel/. Participating there requires registering for an account, but it’s a simple and quick procedure that doesn’t cost anything or require to enter any more personal information than your e-mail. Also, Seth has posted an article there on Judaism, if you’re interested in that.

If you’re new to the podcast/blog or just wanted to know a bit more about who we are and why we’re doing this, check out the expanded “about the podcast” and the new “about the podcasters” pages. (Wes took a while to get his biography text to me, so I had exerpts from Hitler’s biography up there as a placeholder for a bit, but it should be mostly accurate now, except for the part about Seth being an intelligence spontaneously emerged from the Internet itself existing simultaneously in all of the Earth’s computers.  (…this is not quite true because, of course, not all computers are connected to the Internet.)

You can now find us in the podcast section of iTunes. Go subscribe!