On 5/16 the regular foursome recorded a discussion of The Sense of Beauty (1896) by George Santayana. What is “the beautiful?” Do we have a “sense” by which we grasp it comparable to what Hume describes as the moral sense? Where most pre-Humean philosophers considered beauty an objective quality in objects that people then can Read more…
As mentioned at the end of one of the recent episodes, Genevieve Arnold, who’s been good enough to do art for us both in last year’s PEL site redesign (like this and this) and for all of our recent episodes, is available if you’d like to hire her to do some art. For instance, she Read more…
As folks probably know, we’re an Amazon affiliate, which means that one easy, free-to-you way to support PEL is, whenever you’re buying anything off of Amazon, to start on an Amazon page linked to through this site, like the one in the sidebar. This routes around 6% of the cost of whatever you put in Read more…
On Sunday, 4/21/13, we recorded our discussion on chapters 1-3 of What Is Philosophy? (1991). Gilles Deleuze was a recent French philosopher (he died in 1995) who has probably been requested as much or more than any other figure by our listeners. His style is highly idiosyncratic: difficult somewhat in the manner of the other Read more…
What can philosophy get out of literary criticism? We’ve had some past episodes (like this and this) where we discussed some philosophical issues brought up by a piece of fiction, but that’s different then the act of doing philosophy through literary criticism, which is supposed to reveal something about our relationship to language, to ideas, Read more…
Last week Being spoke through me in the saying of Martin Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism as part of a PEL Not School study group. Joining me were Marilynn, Daniel, Rian and Alyson. We worked through Heidegger’s idea that Humanism as a concept was inextricably tied to the history of western metaphysics that sees man as Read more…
What is that thing I call “I?” While most of your grade-A philosophers of the past hundred years or so agree that it’s not a Cartesian Cogito, i.e. an immortal soul characterized by continuous consciousness, the alternatives are many and varied. With Hegel, we got the idea that the self is built, and this through Read more…
We’ve had requests in the past for a general discussion of what philosophy is, without focusing on any particular text, and I’ve always swatted these aside, as I was afraid that the conversation would be too unmoored, too bullshitty. Well, last Sunday, 3/3/13, we recorded just such an episode, by accident as it were. See, Read more…
Apparently Jonathan R. White, international terrorism expert and author of many books on the subject, is a big fan of P.E.L., and he contacted us a while back and agreed to come on the show and talk about some articles on philosophical issues involving terrorism with us. We recorded this on the evening of 2/19/13. Read more…
I’ll be giving a public lecture entitled “Surprises and Sweet Spots” on Friday night, February 8th, at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland if you’re pining for something to do and are in the neighborhood. The lecture starts at 8pm and is followed by an extended “conversation period” for those that want to hang around. Read more…
On Feb. 1 we up again with previous guest and PEL blogger (and Twitter/YouTube master) Daniel Horne to discuss Martin Buber. Buber is known as a religious existentialist, much like Kierkegaard, which means he’s concerned with our fundamental relation to reality, and thinks that our individual attitude has some impact on our being, on whether Read more…
I received such a response to my post on needing helpers for Not School that I thought I should go ahead and express this need as well: I’ve long envisioned this blog as fulfilling two purposes beyond being just a communications platform for announcements about the podcast: First, for every episode, I’d like to have Read more…
We’ve got a lot of good Not School groupsgoing that dig into pretty thorny texts, but I notice that for January, our purposefully introductory “What Is Philosophy?” group didn’t continue. In December, the group read Descartes’s Meditations, and in November, Plato’s “Apology,” Russell’s Problems of Philosophy and Locke’s “Of Enthusiasm.” All of these are readings Read more…
At the beginning of the Gorgias episode, we read a few listener emails. I ended up cutting out a section of that where we responded to this email, which I wanted to answer specifically, and then address a related thread that’s been going on our Facebook group. This is abridged from “Layne,” with the subject Read more…
On 1/13 we recorded a discussion of an early work of Carl Marx, from about 20 years before the publication of his famous Das Capital, The German Ideology. We read just part 1 of the work, which was written in 1845-6 but not published until 1932 (with some portions of it coming out earlier in Read more…
Don’t miss our full-cast recording of Plato’s dialogue, featuring Mark, Dylan, Seth, and listener volunteers Evan and Eileen. Get it here, or be in tears!
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of discussing P.W. Anderson‘s famous 1972 article More is Different as part of a PEL Not School study group on emergence with Not Schoolers Bill Burgess, Casey Fitzpatrick, Ernie Prabhakar, and Evan Gould. Anderson argues that the sciences don’t form a reductive whole — that chemistry isn’t applied physics and psychology Read more…
Back in ancient Athens, the big-name intellectuals were not the philosophers and proto-scientists we remember today, but the sophists, who taught people how to argue and make speeches in front of courts of law and groups of people. Plato (speaking as usual through his teacher Socrates) thought this to be a vastly overrated skill, because Read more…
I’ll let the cat out of the bag now that our planned reading for ep. 69 will be Plato’s dialogue “Gorgias.” I have in mind to record a full-cast audio version of this (there are 5 speaking parts) and am looking for some folks (men or women; I don’t care that they’re all dudes in 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…
Recent Comments