The Partially Examined Life

Hey guys,

I love your podcast. I’m impressed with your textual/linguistic analysis. You treat, very honestly and sincerely, the method of finding the meaning or intention of the texts as an integral part of your dialog, and it creates a very thoughtful, and funny, podcast.

I would like to see you all try some other things. Drop the no name dropping rule for an episode or two, and embed philosophy in the outgrowths of it.

For instance, I’d like to hear a history/evolution of logic episode that emphasizes the drastic way in which clarifying the idea of logic as it was passed from philosopher to philosopher resulted in the computer – this will perhaps redeem some philosophers you give short thrift too, and could lead to interesting speculations about what the future might hold as we continue evolve logic. This topic may as well present, to a public who doesn’t always see it, why philosophy is one of the most important endeavors of humanity to achieving ‘prosperity’.

I like to see more philosophy of specific ideas, rather than just philosophizing about the ideas of specific philosophers. I think it’d be alright to take twenty minutes at the start for all speakers to outline the context they bring to a discussion of the philosophy of an idea, and so not feel like your leaving us listeners out of the loop.

And, maybe you could touch on hot button issues going on now, and philosophize on them, and name drop like hell to support your thoughts and feelings. Is what Anonymous is doing right now morally right? Are they terrorists? Are all terrorists bad (ie, the Weather Underground, Black Panthers, Occupiers, Abolitionists, Nazi Resistors, the Bolsheviks, the FBI, the CIA, etc…)? This would be a nice counter point to the analysis of specific philosophers grand systems of morality.

Finally (there’s actually a thousand other suggestions I’d like to offer, but this is only cause I like listening to you all so much), an idea that would just make me happy if you spent hours talking about it from every different perspective, but I haven’t noticed that any of you have a really deep interest in math/logic/linguistics; what is the difference between functions, algorithms, objects, relations, and formal systems, and why do we accept the historical notions that go along with these ideas? Is the vagueness/inconsistency in natural language not useful? What would be wrong with creating a formal system that is inconsistent, if there were a way to differentiate between how an expression was deconstructed to either of it’s binary values – ie, the number of deductive steps it takes to show an expression is 1 or 0? And, when humans make a linguistic expression to another person, should we be trying to understand their intention in making that expression, or trying to parse ‘literal’ meaning from it?

I only offer all this ‘criticism’ cause I’ve listened to nearly all your episodes at least one time through now, and want to listen to them a second time through, but feel I’ll eventually tire of the method you employ, and I’d rather listen to you all forever.

Sincerely,
Rob

PS – Do some stuff on George Lakoff, Douglass Hofstader, Lynn Margulis…some modern people with absolutely monumental idea – if not in the idea itself, but in the cultural response to their speaking. Hofstader is more popular than he is contributory, imho, but I’d so love to hear what you all think of him when you really try and get to the root of what he wants to say, do both Godel, Escher, Bach and I Am A Strange Loop when you analyze him.

Are you guys going to do any more Schopenhauer? I really liked your episode on the Fourfold Root, even though I disagreed with some of your criticisms.