The Partially Examined Life

We’ve done a lot of episodes now, and even we lose track of where we’ve been. We aim (among other things) to present the equivalent of an introductory course in all the major areas of philosophy. Here’s where I’ll periodically comment on our progress. Feel free to weigh in on our direction suggest additional topics as comments to this page (we’ve got a long list on our Facebook group too).

Jump to a Category:
Ethics
Political Philosophy
Epistemology
Metaphysics
Philosophy of Art
Philosophy of Religion
Other Topics

Ethics
We’re doing pretty well here, with the three main types covered:
-Consequentialism (episode 9 on Bentham and Mill), which starts ethics by determining what’s the optimal state of affairs.
-Deontology (episode 10 on Kant), which starts ethics by determining principles for right action.
-Virtue ethics (episode 5 on Aristotle, and also episode 40 on Plato).

With those basics out of the way, the next step is meta-ethics: how can moral commands exist in a natural universe? We covered Nietzsche (episode 11) and one on moral sense theory (Hume and Adam Smith). For the sake of completeness, I’ll include Spinoza’s deterministic ethics (episode 25) in this context. On the flip side, Plato in the Euthyphro (episode 46) argues that morality can’t be just be reducible to the attitudes of God.

Related to this is moral psychology: how do we smooth-skinned animals come to think about moral considerations? We recently interviewed Pat Churchland in episode 41 about the neurobiology of ethics and discussed moral development patterns according to Carol Gilligan in episode 42.

More broadly, the fundamental question of philosophy, “how should I approach the world” yields approaches that aren’t quite ethics but are closer to that than to epistemology. Though you’ll get some of this in many of our readings, those most conforming to this picture that we discussed are:
-Plato’s Apology and the unexamined life (episode, 1 part 1 and part 2)
-Taoism (episode 12 on Chuang Tzu)
-Montaigne (episode 33)
-Camus on existentialism (episode 4)

Looking ahead, I hope to get to G.E. Moore before too long. We’ll read more existentialism and will delve more into the ancient Greeks eventually (stoicism, epicurianism).

Political Philosophy
We’ve provided a decent historical survey:
-Plato’s Republic (episode 40), the original Utopian vision that asks us what would be the optimal society?
-Machiavelli (episode 14)
-Hobbes on the social contract (episode 3)
-Locke on the social contract (episode 37)
-Rousseau on the social contract (episode 23)
-With Hegel, we got both a wide-angle view with his account of the progression of history (episode 15) a close-up of the “master-slave” dialectic, which is his version of the social contract in episodes 35 and 36.
-For more on the relation of the individual to society, we discussed Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents in episode 26.
-A feminist utopian vision came out in our discussion in episode 42 of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel Herland.
-We made some attempt to discuss the cross section of politics and religion in episode 44 on the new atheists (e.g. Christopher Hitchens’s view of the religious character of totalitarianism and Sam Harris on how religion leads to violence)

The last major steps in the history for us are Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and some Karl Marx, which we’ll get through by spring 2012, at which point the ground will be set for more contemporary readings (e.g. Rawls vs. Nozick), as well as some more work specifically in economics.

Epistemology
We’ve put out the basic array of views:
-Empiricism (episode 17 on Hume, plus we get a good idea of Bertrand Russell’s view in episode 38)
-Rationalism (episode 18 on Plato as well as episode 2 on Descartes)
-Pragmatism (episode 20 on C.S. Peirce and William James, continued on episode 22, plus a dash of contemporary pragmatism in episode 28′s Nelson Goodman discussion)
-Logical Positivism, an early-mid 20th century development of empiricism and pragmatism, is discussed in episode 8 on Wittgenstein and Carnap.
-Kantianism (episode 19, with even more detail on Kant’s view in episode 20 on Schopenhauer)

Much of our reading in continental philosophy is following up on Kantianism, retaining Kant’s view that perception is not a mind apprehending an independent reality while getting rid of his notion of the “thing-in-itself” independent of our experience.
-In episode 35, we provided an overview of Hegel’s view, which I think established the view that persisted through most more recent continental philosophy
-Edmund Husserl (episode 31) established the modern enterprise of phenomenology that attempts to describe “the structures of experience,” i.e. doing empiricism in a way that corresponds what we actually experience.
-Heidegger (episode 32) similarly thinks that skepticism is a non-issue; we’re already indubitably engaged with the world prior to any kind of inquiry.
-We’ll get to Sartre’s phenomenology in episode 47, and Merleau-Ponty is on the scheduled for 48.

What else is ahead? More pragmatism. Philosophy of science. Yet more phenomenology, moving towards structuralism and post-modernism.

Metaphysics
We’ve been shamefully scattershot on this and plan to start a concerted effort to fill out a historical survey on this starting in probably mid-to-late 2012. Our efforts have included:
-Leibniz’s Monadology (episode 6), which actually laid out a full metaphysical system.
-Spinoza’s attempt (episode 24) to reconcile naturalism and the existence of God (by defining God as nature itself). A primary question of metaphysics is the existence of God; we considered the classical arguments in favor of this in episode 43.
-The early Wittgenstein’s picture (in episode 7) on “facts” as the ultimate logical components of the universe. For an analytic philosopher, discussions of metaphysics often turn on what metaphysical commitments are supposedly made by our practices in language and logic/math. We discussed Gottlob Frege’s view in episode 34 that the referents of even terms like unicorn refer to something that our ontology (list of things that exist) has to take into account.
-For a phenomenologist, metaphysics gets more or less replaced by descriptions of the world of our experience. In this vein, we discussed Heidegger on “Being” in Heidegger (episode 32).
-Our episode 13 on quantum mechanics (Werner Heisenberg, with some discussion of Einstein) gave a quick overview of the Pre-Socratics (“everything is water!” “no, everything is fire!”).
-A Buddhist challenge to metaphysics is presented in episode 27 on Nagarjuna.
-The mind-body problem is arguably metaphysical: if “mind” isn’t a substance like Descartes thought, then how can we best understand it? We discussed this in episode 21 on Turing, Ryle, Nagel, Searle, and Dennett.

We’ll be doing more “metaphysics proper;” we’ve had an Aristotle episode planned for a long time and hope to work our way through the history up to process philosophy. We’d also like to look more into modern cosmology, i.e. the findings of recent science, and much more into the philosophy of mind.

Philosophy of Art
Arthur Danto (whose ideas about modern art are discussed in episode 16) has personally prohibited me from calling this category “aesthetics.” We’ve only done Danto and the Nelson Goodman episode (#28 on art as a symbol system)in this area, but these are a heap of fun, and I’ve long been planning a third 20th century installment in this area. We’ll likely get back to the historical material on this eventually (Kant’s Critique of Judgment, for instance). We have long-term plans to go into more specific areas of art: philosophy of literature, film, etc., but those are not high on the list.

Philosophy of Religion
-Episode 43 considers the major historical arguments for the existence of God (Aquinas, Anselm, Paley, with some discussion of Plantinga and Swinburne; we read a book by J.L. Mackie.
-Episode 39 on Freidrich Schleiermacher gives a picture of faith that is largely non-cognitivist: it doesn’t make claims that could conflict with those of science.
-Episode 22 covers William James’s “The Will to Believe.”
-Episode 44 discusses “new atheist” critiques of religion.
-Episode 46 considers the relationship between religion and ethics according to Plato.
-Episode 27 presents the fundamentals of Mahayana Buddhism.
-Episode 12 on the Chuang Tzu goes into the fundamentals of Taoism.
-Our episode 29 on Kierkegaard focused more on psychology than faith per se, but still gives a vivid picture of an existentialist breed of religion.

We’ve got a few more planned: one on Martin Buber (connecting existentialism and religion), and another non-Western one (on the Upanishads or Confucius) on the horizon. For episode #50, we’ve booked Owen Flanagan to talk about Buddhism with us.

Other Topics
I’ll expand this page to include separate topics for some of the items listed above as we generate more material. I’ve tried to avoid creating topics that will be totally redundant of what’s already listed other other categories above. For example, we’ve done several on psychology/human nature/the self, but you can find those above under the ethical and political categories.

We’ve only barely started with the philosophy of language (with Frege) and hope to go further into that story from both the analytic (e.g. later Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke) and continental (Saussure) sides.

As I mentioned above, we’d like to do more in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and the more philosophically relevant findings of contemporary science. We also have plans for more topic-as-opposed-to-thinker-focused episodes, e.g. re. humor, free will, personal identity.

Our immediate concern for the rest of the year through 2012 is telling more of the story of the analytic and continental traditions up to recent times, but these tracks will surely be broken up with historical sources and other intrusions: we’ve been particularly bad about the Middle Ages and surely owe the Greeks (and maybe Romans) a bit more of our time.