Archive for category General Announcements
Now Taking Questions on Semiotics and Structuralism (Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Derrida)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on February 1, 2012
For episode #51, we’re reading Part I of Ferdiand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics
(read it online here), published posthumously in 1916 (it’s basically lecture notes by his students; Saussure didn’t write it down himself in full). This text sharply distinguishes structural analyses of a particular language at a particular time with analyses of linguistic changes over time.
This was read by French structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss as a blueprint for talking about structures in other cultural creations, so we’re reading a short essay by him: “The Structural Study of Myth” (1955), which you can find online here.
Finally, we’re reading a short essay by Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), which you can read here, where he discusses Levi-Strauss and characterizes the limitations of structuralism, thereby laying out his own post-structuralism.
So, keeping in mind that we’re not going to be doing a full-on Derrida analysis but trying to keep focused on this particular line of development through these three thinkers, feel fee to throw out your questions/comments/suggestions here.
Note that I’ve now rewritten my previous announcement on Pirsig to help keep that discussion going as the episode nears its point of release.
In other news, Owen Flanagan has not yet rescheduled with us, so that planned episode has been tabled until he chooses to do so.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Commercials, Commercials, Commercials
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements, Things to Watch on January 18, 2012
With the Foucault episode, we entered into a strange new world of sponsorship. Now I hate commercials more than just about anyone on this earth, and see philosophy as, in part, a haven from irritating commercialism. So, in getting into this area, I’m going to do my best to keep the irritation to a minimum.
That Audible commercial I floundered through on the episode wasn’t too awful, was it? Well, whether or not they want to sponsor us further depends on how many of you folks check out www.audiblepodcast.com/PEL, so go do that if audiobooks interest you.
To get more sponsors, we need to provide our listeners’ demographics. Consequently, we need at least 250 people to go fill out this form. All questions are optional, and providing your email address there will not result in your getting spammed or otherwise inconvenienced. So take two minutes if you will and fill it out as a way of saying, “yes, PEL, we want appropriately tasteful business entities to give you money so that you can feel like you can spend more of your time recording!”
Topic for #50: Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on January 6, 2012
[Note: This article has been updated post-discussion; I didn't want to create a new post when we've had all this great discussion on this one that I want people to continue. The episode itself should be up w/in the next day or two.]
Mark, Seth, Dylan, and guest David Buchanan have recorded a conversation on Robert M. Pirsig’sZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
It’s an autobiographical novel describing (in part) Pirsig’s encounters with the idea of “Quality.” In trying to teach this to freshman composition students, he decided that it’s a fundamental, immediate, and undefinable part of our experience. We don’t, on his account, first consciously analyze things, and then decide based on that analysis what’s better than what. Quality (or more precisely, “dynamic quality,” a term he comes up with in his 1991 book Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals)
In Memoriam: Michael Dummett
Posted by Brad Younger in General Announcements, Misc. Philosophical Musings on January 5, 2012
Dummett in 2004
Last week, on December 27th, Michael Dummett passed away. Dummett was an important and influential British philosophy of the 20th century, probably most famous for his interpretations of Frege. Indeed it was his early work which helped to revitalize an interest in Frege’s work in the second half of the 20th century. (The PEL episode on Frege can be found here. An interview of Dummett talking about Frege on Philosophy Bites can be found here.)
Dummett was also important for his work in the philosophy of mathematics, logic, language, and metaphysics. His most original work involved the suggestion that we understand disputes in metaphysics over realism as disputes in logic. This turns on the principle of bivalence (the semantic principle which says that every statement is either true or false). Insofar as realists think that entities are mind-independent, they will accept bivalence. Truth is conceived as transcending our abilities to know. Anti-realists on the other hand don’t accept bivalence since they think that the entities in question are mind-dependent. They take truth to be epistemologically constrained.
There are unfortunately not a lot of videos of Dummett on the web, but if you want to join the Bodleian Philosophy Faculty Library, you can get a long interview of Dummett by Donald Davidson here. Dummett was undoubtedly a significant philosopher of the 20th century. And he will surely be remembered for many years to come.
-Brad Younger
Now Taking Questions for Owen Flanagan on Buddhism and Science
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on December 26, 2011
We are currently scheduled to talk with Owen Flanagan about his book The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized. I’ll put up the formal “topic announcement” when I have a better idea what the discussion will focus on (i.e. after we actually interview him). For now, anyone who is already familiar with the book, or his work, or this topic in general is welcome to weigh in here and try to steer us through this. If you post some questions for him that strike us as particularly cogent, we’ll try to bring them up with him.
Read Seth’s earlier post about this. I highly encourage you to listen to the episode of The Secular Buddhist podcast that Flanagan is on; that will likely give you enough material to post some questions here.
Topic for #49: Foucault on Power and Punishment
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on December 15, 2011
We don’t live in a totalitarian state, we’re not slaves, and most of us are not so desperately poor that our power of choice has been effectively snuffed out, so we’re free, right?
Michel Foucault says no. In his book, Discipline and Punish, he tells a story reminiscent in style of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals about how techniques of punishment in Europe quickly changed from public torture and execution in the 18th century to incarceration with an intent to reform by the early 19th. While the old method was brutal and clumsy, we shouldn’t, he thinks, see the new method as solely a matter of government becoming more humane. The old ways weren’t given up out of compassionate reform; they evolved because they had problems that made them unsustainable given changes in demographics and economics. The state did not simply give up its absolute power; instead, power became diffused, more subtle, and more effective. The strategy was no longer to intimidate the populace into behaving with a show of force against transgressors, but to preventively train us all to behave.
Foucault is fascinated with the mechanisms of power, and sees power relations as much more pervasive in our lives than you might think: pretty much, any time you’re caused, motivated, or influenced into doing something, there’s a power relation being expressed, so all of the institutions we interact with, all our friends, our professional associates: dealing with any of these means dealing with power issues, and even if we feel free, we might on further examination decide that the things exerting power on us are ones that we would much rather shake off.
The most famous chapter of the book concerns Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which is a model for a prison where all the inmates are easily visible from a central point, yet the observer can’t be seen by them. So the inmates know they could be watched at any time, and so behave, yet it isn’t necessary to actually watch them even most of the time. Bentham saw this as a useful model for improving organization and increasing productivity in businesses, schools, and other institutions, and Foucault argues that the influence of this idea was crucial in building our current society. Today’s surveillance technology makes this even more relevant, and the fields of cubicles, rows of school desks, various virtual spaces (Facebook, for one) used to present us: all this would conform very well to Foucault’s expectations. Read more about panopticism. This site has some nice panopticon pictures.
Buy the book,
“Close Reading” of Being and Nothingness Now Reduced to 99 Cents
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on December 9, 2011
My prototype “Close Reading” of Being and Nothingness has now been reduced in price to 99 cents. If you want to get a handle on the epistemology points we were making in the episode, this will help you out.
Now Taking Questions/Input on Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on December 2, 2011
For several months now, I’ve held off on posting topic announcements until we’ve actually completed the recording. This helps me know what I’m talking about, and it still ends up going up 2-3 weeks before the episode does due to editing time.
However, one of our supporters gave me the good suggestion that I should post these earlier to allow readers to submit questions to us to potentially answer during the episode. So here’s my first shot at a pre-announcement announcement. I’m not going to attempt to introduce you to the reading here, but if you’re already familiar with it or read quickly and want to post some comments or questions here for us to consider going into this recording, please be my guest: post here or e-mail me submissions by December 14th.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Philosophy and Religion: What I’ve Learned Through Our Episodes
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements, Misc. Philosophical Musings on November 26, 2011
Given that the next episodes are about phenomenology and not about religion any more, I wanted to give a few parting thoughts to the topic of religion for the moment and refer new listeners to some old episodes they may not have been aware of. I’ve created a Podcast Topics page that includes a Philosophy of Religion section that I’ll keep updating as we do more episodes. These particular comments are just meant to get my own thinking in order; I don’t pretend to speak to the other guys on the ‘cast.
1. Kant is right: we can’t know with certainty what the world is “really” like, so ruling out a metaphysical creator is simply not something that science or reason can do. (See our agnostic streak on Episode 43 about arguments for the existence of God.)
2. At the same time, I just don’t see invoking a divine creator as at all explanatorily helpful. Contra Swinburne (also from Ep. 43), I don’t find the concept of God simple (see Dawkins’s argument in Episode 44), i.e. a component of the simplest explanation for anything.
3. Though I can’t vouch for Hume’s entire epistemology, I do buy in outline his argument against miracles: see our description of his epistemology in Episode 17: whether there are miracles or not, we’re not epistemically justified in believing in them. Were God to come up and turn into a burning bush in front of me personally, that would change matters.
4. Though Swinburne has lessened my conviction that the concept of a God is just plain nonsensical (e.g. via problems with the notion of omnipotence), I definitely still find the concept of a personal God incoherent. Per Spinoza (in Episode 24), if God is everything (and this is how I interpret His infinite, omnipresent nature; He wouldn’t be simple in the way Swinburne thinks if He weren’t), then creation is part of God, not a separate thing. God is One and inseparable, whereas consciousness, which is involved in any kind of personal relationship, requires separation, which the universe qua God just doesn’t have.
Black Friday Reminder About Purchasing Through Amazon via Our Site
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on November 25, 2011
Hey, I know we’re entering the shopping season and all, and I wanted you to keep in mind: If you’re gift-shopping via Amazon, whatever you happen to be buying, please get there via one of the Amazon links on our site, like this one here. This will donate a percentage of your purchase to us without costing you anything extra.
Happy Thanksgiving and all!
Topic for #48: Merleau-Ponty on the Role of Perception in Knowledge
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements, Things to Watch on November 23, 2011
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus–his equivalent to Being & Nothinginess or Being & Time–is The Phenomenology of Perception.
So the Phenomenology of Perception is a very fat book that purports to give an existential phenomenology, from an analysis of perception (attention, judgment, “the phenomenal field”), to the various aspects of having a body (its spatiality, sexuality, expression, and how mechanistic psychology and classical psychology teat it), to a consequent analysis of time and freedom. …All stated with much less of the horrific made-up terminology of Heidegger or B&T-era Satre than you’d expect.
However, that book is much too long, and takes a long time to get around to saying much, so instead, we chose to read a sort of presentation of that work to a lay audience.World of Perception,
Get a Jump on Sartre with a Close Reading of Being & Nothingness
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on November 19, 2011
Our Sartre episode will still take a couple of weeks probably to edit and post, but you needn’t wait for that brain-crushing Sartre experience.
To supplement the episode, I’ve recorded a new kind of podcast file: half an hour of guided reading through the opening pages of Being and Nothingness. This also marks the first for-sale audio product made specifically for this this site, and I’m very interested in your thoughts on its utility. If enough people are interested, I’m prepared to start cranking these out, but I can’t justify putting the time in to do it unless I can sell at least 100 of these.
It’s not going to be for every PEL fan, I know. My primary audience for this are those who are interested in tackling the most difficult books but feel a bit lost in doing so. Just like in a graduate seminar, I’m going line by line, page by page in this thing, inching forward and trying to get all the nuances instead of just glossing over them to get the gist.
In addition to the product itself (for sale for a mere $1.50), I’ve put up a 6-minute sample file so you can get a better idea what I’m talking about and see if this is something for you.
Read more, sample, and perhaps buy your P.E.L. Close Reading file.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Topic for #47: Sartre on the Self
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on November 11, 2011
Jean-Paul Sartre is best known for his 1960′s existentialism and Marxist activism, but before he was a big celebrity, he was a phenomenologist who spent a lot of time grappling with Heidegger (his book Being and Nothingness
On this episode, we discuss Sartre’s 1934-written book The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness,
When we reflect, however, we create the me, i.e. “the ego.” So instead of the ego being transcendental, i.e. this big structural part of all experience, it becomes a thing in the world, constituted out of the different experiences that we and others have of ourselves: I can reflect upon myself as being a dead-mouse-lover, and like the experience of the dead mouse itself, which may on further examination prove to be a rat, or not dead, or an optical illusion, I could likewise be wrong about these self-apprehensions. Per Hegel, other people might even have more accurate views about us than we do ourselves.
Consciousness itself, though, according to Sartre, is not a thing in the world. It’s not identical to this ego that we find as an object. It’s not personal at all; consciousness is apprehended as wholly free, wholly uncaused, and aware of itself as a consciousness, though not, again, aware of a “self” sitting behind consciousness having these conscious experiences. Confused? So were we, during this recording that took place last Sunday and which will be posted some weeks from now. The core of four was present on this one, with no guest: Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan.
Read along with us by buying the book
Topic for #46: Plato’s Euthyphro
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on October 25, 2011
Does morality depend on religion? In Plato’s early and fun (and short!) dialogue Euthyphro, Socrates questions Euthyphro (who’s on his way to go and file murder charges against his own father) about the meaning of “piety.” Is an action (like turning in your dad) pious because it’s the kind of thing that the gods love? In modern terms, are pious actions justified just because of the commands (or, more in the absence of specific commands, the attitudes) of God? Socrates argues that this isn’t the case: conceptually, “good” doesn’t depend on these commands or attitudes of God; it’s rather that God (or “the gods,” taken together re. whatever they might all agree about) desires of us the actions He does because those actions are good.
Mark and Seth are joined by Dylan and by our former U. of Texas classmate Matt Evans, currently an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, to lay out the dialogue and discuss the extent to which it actually bears on this more modern debate about the relation of morality and religion. A divine command theorist argues, contra Plato, that since God is omnipotent, there’s no sense in which morality can be metaphysically prior to his commands (or his disposition, or his nature). On the other side (which is, you should note, also a theist side, Swinburne being a good example), to avoid morality being an arbitrary matter depending on God’s whims (meaning he could have declared child torture to be good), a Platonist would argue that like the laws of logic, fundamental moral truths have to come first in some sense: God only commands right actions because He recognizes them to be right; they don’t magically become right just because he says so.
Is this just a dispute internal to religion? No. If Plato is right, then this means we can legitimately theorize about moral truths independent of reference to God; we don’t even have to assume there is (or isn’t) a God. Theists and atheists are thus able to have a productive ethical discourse based on a common ground, and religious people who claim that atheists aren’t or can’t be moral are stymied good and hard.
Buy the book (this translation by G.M.A. Grube is the one Matt recommended)
Seth recommends the Wikipedia entry on the Euthyphro dilemma. Some of the last part of our discussion focused on the place of the dilemma in Judaism. For a good, Swinburne-esque discussion, listen to this Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot interview with David McNaughton.
Introducing Our Topics-by-Category Page
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on October 17, 2011
We’ve completed a new Podcast Topics page that lays out our progress and prospects in the various philosophic streams: how are we doing on ethics? (great!), in metaphysics (spotty), in philosophy of science (uh… what?), etc.
If you’re newish to PEL and/or haven’t had the stomach to go back and listen to every episode chronologically, this page will help you key in on other episodes related to the one you just listened to and enjoyed. If you just tuned in for the new atheists, for instance, you’re missing a key part of the discussion: our Schleiermacher episode. And who can keep track of all those pesky social contract episodes?
I’ll doubtless be revising this continually; let me know if it’s helpful.
-Mark Linsenmayer
This is a call to all my PEL peeps (ATX representing)
Posted by Seth Paskin in General Announcements on October 10, 2011
Dear PEL adherents–
I’d like to put together a philosophy discussion group here in Austin. Thinking monthly, maybe related to our episode content, maybe not, but definitely face-to-face. Casual, social with some fun as well as philosophy involved.
Question: anyone out there either in the area and interested or know someone who is? It would only take about 5 of us to get it going. Let me know by responding to this thread and I’ll mirror it on FB as well. If you are on FB and haven’t joined our group, please do so as I’ll probably be using that to set up events and communicate if this gains any traction.
–seth
P.S. If you aren’t in Austin now but will be coming by for any reason, let me know when and I’ll do my best to meet you and say “hi!”.
Topic for #44: “New Atheism”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on September 7, 2011
We have long promised to more systematically cover these guys who generate so much fun sniping on our blog here, and as of last Sunday, the full as-of-now-regular podcaster lineup (myself, Seth, Wes, and Dylan; we will still have some guests on, though) recorded a discussion of:
-The first two chapters of Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
-The last three chapters of Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
These fellows do not so much answer the question “is there a God?” as the question “should we be religious?”
Harris claims that faith, defined as believing something without evidence, is morally irresponsible: it leaves us open to believing all sorts of destructive things, and there are portions of all the major Western religious texts that, if taken literally and without the need for rational justification, command abominable things. Religious moderates, by extension, are on Harris’s view in the awkward position of not being able to condemn the extremists in the way that would be necessary to quash them: the extremists are, after all, just acting out fully the principles commanded by the faith that the moderates profess to embrace.
Hitchens presents a big book of anecdotes about terrible things done in the name of religion. Like Freud, he thinks the fundamental tenets of the worlds religion are superstitions that adults in the modern age have any business believing and thinks religious leaders to be for the most part a bunch of power-grabbing phonies.
Topic for #43: Arguments for the Existence of God
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on August 9, 2011
On many episodes we’ve mentioned in passing, or given some author’s criticism of, the classic arguments for the existence of God:
-The ontological argument, whereby some quality of the idea of God itself is supposed to necessitate that such a being exists. The most famous versions are by Descartes and St. Anselm.
-The cosmological argument, which deduces from the fact that everything has a cause (or everything is contingent, or everything moves… there are several variations of this) that there must be a first cause, i.e. God. This argument dates at least back to Aristotle but was given its most famous formulations by Thomas Aquinas.
-The teleological argument, or argument from design, which says that since nature looks designed (i.e. uniformity, complicated structures that achieve impressive results), there must be a designer, i.e. God. This was given its most famous formulation in William Paley’s metaphor about finding a watch on the beach: of course, we’d assume that had a designer.
We’d planned an episode on these arguments from the very beginning of the podcast, but merely reading the source materials linked above would take us about 10 minutes. Well, we found (recommended in both theist and atheist sources) a book that does a pretty exhaustive job analyzing these major arguments: J.L. Mackie’sThe Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God
Neurobiology and Criminal Justice
Posted by Seth Paskin in General Announcements on July 29, 2011
Criminal minds indeed!
At about 30 minutes into the most recent episode with Pat Churchland, the discussion touched on how the neurochemistry of people who are well socialized differs from those who aren’t. More specifically, there was a point made about how people who are well socialized and have the Humean (as we will soon discover, actually Smithian) moral sentiment have different brains than people who don’t. Representative of that latter group are criminals. Dylan made a point mentioning that this poses a challenge – or at least something to think about – relative to our notions of justice and punishment.
At one level, we want to hold someone accountable for their actions, regardless of whether we think they were made to do what they did by virtue of their brain chemistry. At another level, if someone’s brain chemistry affects how they act, it doesn’t make sense to punish them for it. Punishing a criminal who was not properly socialized and doesn’t have the same moral sentiment as most others won’t engender that moral sentiment in him/her. If it’s true that criminals don’t have or have a weakened moral sentiment and this is evidenced in their brain chemistry, we might consider as a society trying to socialize and address the brain chemistry, rather than simply punishing them. Additionally, there is the thorny issue of testing for this pre-disposition: doing tests on children to determine their proclivity for anti-social and criminal behavior, for example.
All interesting topics that made me recall a recent episode of Philosophy Bites, where Nigel interviewed David Eagleman, a neuroscientist. Eagleman’s understanding of philosophy has the typical scientific naivete, but he didn’t make outrageous and unfounded moral claims, as many scientists do. Instead, he seemed genuinely interested in how discoveries in neuroscience would complicate our understanding of criminal justice and punishment. Worth both a listen and a read of the comments to the podcast, which seem to mirror the tone and content on our site (but I still like all of you better). Or you can go read this article about an Indian court using a brain scan to determine guilt…
–seth
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The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
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