Episode 63: Existentialist Heroes in Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men”

Sep 212012
 
Cormac McCarthy

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:49:49 — 100.6MB)

On philosophical issues in McCarthy’s 2005 novel about guys running around with drug money and shooting each other, and about fiction as a form for exploring philosophical ideas.

What can morality mean for people who have witnessed the “death of God,” i.e. a loss in faith in light of the horrors of war? For both the protagonist and antagonist in “No Country for Old Men,” morality is about being satisfied with your own actions, even if what you’ve done is set in stone forever, and even if it were to be the last thing you do before death. This is not purely subjectivist, though, seemingly not just dependent upon our whims. In McCarthy’s sort-of Nietzschean world, we have duties toward the dead, and duties towards ourselves. It’s clear that this sort of “ethic” is not coincident with “ethics” as we’re familiar with it, as it’s something shared by both the risk-taker-with-a-heart-of-gold hero and the I’ll-kill-you-like-cattle baddie.

What does McCarthy himself think? Who knows? Like many good philosophical novelists, he puts philosophies in the mouths of his characters to try them out as world views, to see how they hang psychologically and what fate they lead to, in the author’s best estimation. Another peculiarity of the novel as ethical philosophy is that is provides a full-blown concrete ethical situation to analyze instead of a classroom abstraction.

We discuss these issues and more with Eric Petrie, Professor at Michigan State University, who’s an old friend and teacher of Dylan’s. Read more about the topic and get the book.

End song: “My Grandfather” by Dylan Casey (2001).

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Martin Evans on “Candide”

Sep 202012
 

A Stanford course on iTunes U, “Literature in Crisis,” includes two lectures on Candide: here and here. These are by Martin Evans, Chair of the English Department.

As a literature guy, he has a bit to say about satire: why it flourished in this age in particular (because of the relative peace and stability, which explains why it’s rampant now too). He also has some interesting points to make about Voltaire’s biography. The bulk of the lectures is taken up by a consideration of the various positions on the problem of evil:

Continue reading »

Topic for #64: Celebrity, with guest Lucy Lawless

Sep 122012
 

Lucy LawlessIt has occurred! On the evening of 9/10, we talked with actress Lucy Lawless about fame. She’s been a great supporter of the Partially Examined Life, and if she is to be believed (and her piercing stare will make you believe it), our little discussion group product inspired her to go back to school and study philosophy, in between flying back from New Zealand to the states to film things, saving the arctic, and tweeting. She was a great sport, and regular listeners will be pleased that the recording came off much more like a regular PEL episode than a fawning celebrity interview. Much as when we have had a comedian or artist on in the past, Lucy was there to provide a reality check on our wild speculations about that divide between the numinous and the civilians.

Continue reading »

Seth’s Interview with Dan Mullin

Sep 082012
 

Being the wife of an unemployed philosopher might be worse than being the unemployed philosopher from worstjobs.com

Dan Mullin is a philosophy grad student and part-time teacher who runs a blog called The Unemployed Philosopher’s Blog.  His mission statement is to challenge the view that a philosophical education isn’t of much value for employment.  As he says:

 My name is Daniel Mullin and I’m a philosophy grad student and part-time teacher. The other part of the time, I’m unemployed and/or looking for work. I’ve been relatively successful in finding work in the traditional job market for philosophy — teaching at universities — but that market consists mainly of contract positions that don’t really provide a liveable wage. Continue reading »

Episode 62: Voltaire’s Novel “Candide”

Sep 052012
 
Voltaire

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:27:48 — 80.4MB)

On Candide: or, Optimism, the novel by Voltaire (1759).

Is life good? Popular Enlightenment philosopher Leibniz argued that it’s good by definition. God is perfectly good and all-powerful, so whatever he created must have been as good as it can be; we live in the best of all possible worlds.

Voltaire loads this satirical adventure story up with horrific violence to demonstrate that Leibniz’s position is just silly. Life is filled with suffering, and human nature is such that even in peace and prosperity, we’re basically miserable. Yet we still love life despite this. Voltaire’s solution is to “tend your garden,” which means something like engaging in meaningful work, whether personal or political.

This is a very special episode for us, as it’s our first with all of us recording in the same room, as part of a weekend of fun and frolic in Madison, WI. Read more about the topic and get the book.

End song: “Woe Is Me,” from Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio (1998). Download the album for free.

Sign up now for the first PEL online seminar, scheduled for 9/23/12. Please help us out by taking the listener survey. Also, please check out the transcriptions for this and other episodes, and support us through your donations, at partiallyexaminedlife.com/shopdonate.

Robert Solomon on Nietzsche on Truth

Aug 242012
 


For another take on Nietzsche’s theory of truth, here’s a lecture from Prof. Robert Solomon, one of the stars of The Great Courses series. Solomon describes Nietzsche’s concept of truth as perspectivist rather than relativist. (Though, unlike Rick Roderick, Solomon is willing to concede that other Nietzsche interpreters have — rightly or wrongly — gone farther.) Solomon’s argument sources the origin of Nietzsche’s critique to his rejection of the “thing-in-itself,” which so consumed Kant and Schopenhauer. Once one is cured of the concept of a “thing-in-itself,” then we are all left to determine truth based on upon the world of appearances. But of course, once we are left to determine truth based upon experience — there is no “God’s eye view” by which ultimate truth can be established. In fact, even God could not have a “God’s eye view” of the world, in the sense of pure omniscience:  there is always context; there is always aspect. Solomon wants to make clear that this is not the same thing as saying that all truths are “relative,” if one means by “relative” there are no criteria by which we can judge the relative merits of fact or value statements. But it does mean that truth is complex, not simple, and requires an ability to interpret answers, rather than merely “discovering” them. For more on this subject, perhaps review this thesis submitted by one of Jessica Berry’s students.

-Daniel Horne

Rick Roderick on Nietzsche on Truth and Lie

Aug 202012
 

As usual, Rick Roderick proves to be a great go-to guy on Nietzsche.  In this series of videos (one lecture put together by Daniel Horne), he takes on the accusation that Nietzsche is taking a relativist stance towards truth, or as it can be labeled, a ‘perspectivist’ stance.  Roderick does an (as usual excellent) exposition of Nietzsche’s.

It starts with ideas about one’s belief about one’s beliefs.  Nietzsche is attacking the idea that one usual thinks that one’s beliefs should be held by everyone else – your belief about your belief is that it should be everyone’s belief.  That’s dogmatism, not universal truth.  But it parades around as truth.

Continue reading »

Episode 61: Nietzsche on Truth and Skepticism

Aug 152012
 
Friedrich Niezsche

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:49:53 — 100.7MB)

On Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873).

What is truth? This essay, written early in Nietzsche’s career but unpublished during his lifetime, is taken by many to make the extreme claim that there is no truth, that all of the “truths” we tell each other are just agreements by social convention.

The regular foursome are joined by a U. Texas grad school classmate, Jessica Berry from Georgia State University. She argues that Nietzsche is really just being a skeptic here: our “truths” don’t correspond with the thing-in-itself, i.e. the world beyond our human conceptions. He wants us to understand that all knowledge is laden with human interests. Taken this way, the essay won’t undermine itself; if he isn’t saying “there is no truth,” then that claim won’t apply to itself.

What Nietzsche for sure does say is that the “will to truth” that philosophers so prize is puzzling, given how beneficial to our survival many mutually held illusions are: we’re safe, things are stable, we understand our environment. When philosophers declare truth to be the most valuable thing, they’re going beyond the mundane purposes for which the will to truth developed (e.g. communicating in a consistent way to our mutual benefit) and massively overestimating our capability to know the world as it “really” is.

Read more on the topic and buy the book. Wes has also created a guide to this episode that you’ll find here. You can also purchase a transcription of this episode (and read a big chunk of it for free).

End song: “Stupidly Normal,” from Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio (1998). Download the album for free.

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Nietzsche and the “Death of God.”

Aug 092012
 
and those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who couldn't hear the music Nietzsche

Surely only Brits and Americans get tattoos of Nietzsche quotes

In connection with Episode 61, I submit the following discussion by The Big Ideas podcast concerning Nietsche’s famous but often misunderstood claim that “God is dead.”

The several participants in the discussion each address Nietzsche’s pronouncement from different angles. Giles Fraser argues that the “God is dead” revelation is that humanity can only become free if it rejects the idea of the divine.” Lesley Chamberlain sees Nietzsche’s “death of God” as “an attack on the tight association of reason and divinity, which had begun with Plato and carried through the Christian tradition until René Descartes in the 17th century.”
Continue reading »

Steven B. Smith on Aristotle’s Politics

Jul 242012
 

Given how helpful Steven B. Smith (of Yale) was on the Republic, I had to check him out this time around for Aristotle’s Politics.

Watch the first Aristotle lecture on YouTube.
Get the audio from iTunes.

In Smith’s three lectures, you can learn:
Continue reading »

Topic for #61: Nietzsche on Truth

Jul 152012
 


Listen to the episode.

We discussed Nietzsche’s conception of truth as presented in his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” written in 1873 but unpublished until after his death with guest Jessica Berry of Georgia State University, who published Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition just last year.

This Nietzsche essay has been extremely influential for postmodernists, and argues that truth is:

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

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Episode 59: Alasdair MacIntyre on Moral Justifications

Jul 052012
 
Alasdair MacIntyre

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:44:19 — 95.6MB)

On Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981), mostly ch. 3-7 and 14-17.

What justifies ethical claims? MacIntyre claims that no modern attempt to ground ethics has worked, and that’s because we’ve abandoned Aristotle. We see facts and values as fundamentally different: the things science discovers vs. these weird things that have nothing to do with science. In Aristotle’s teleological view, everything comes with built-in goals, so just as a plant will aim grow green and healthy, people have a definite kind of virtue towards which we do and should naturally strive. Though MacIntyre doesn’t want to bring back Aristotle’s biology, he does want to put the goal-directedness, i.e. the normativity, back into our conception of the facts of our lives.

His new take on virtue has two components: the excellence involved in any established practice, like physics, cooking, or playing guitar; and the need to live a coherent life story given your particular culture and commitments. You might have bought into the aim to be a great chess player, for instance, which requires not only intellectual virtue, but being social enough to keep the enterprise of chess in business (i.e. no murder when you lose). To get from great chess player to great person means integrating your various practices into one fulfilling life, and MacIntyre thinks that this effort is sufficient to give you objective moral standards, given your particular practices and, moreso, your cultural traditions. Unlike the existentialists, MacIntyre thinks that for an individual in a real situation, having moral standards is not a matter of some free choice or “leap,” as if morality was nothing in itself that we humans are bound to. No, morality is real, and fully justified, for an individual embedded in his culture and commitments. Just like you can’t, yourself, decide to win at chess by changing the rules, you can’t “create values” as Nietzsche might recommend by denying or re-interpreting your duties as parent, neighbor, citizen, etc.

The regular four continue the discussion started in ep. 58, giving some of MacIntyre’s dismissal of dozens of major figures in philosophy and trying our best to make sense of his proposals. Buy the book.

End song: “Indefensible,” by Mark Lint, 1998.

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Topic for #60: Aristotle’s Politics

Jun 212012
 

Aristotle’s Politics (from around 350 B.C.E.) is presented as a follow-up to his Nichomachean Ethics (which we discussed in a previous episode). Actually, we’re not sure in what order these were composed, and the Politics is internally repetitious enough that it is probably itself mashed together from different original sources; those that are into that kind of thing can read more about the troubles of interpreting the form of those of Aristotle’s works that have reached us at Aristotle’s Stanford Encyclopedia page.

The distinction between ethics and politics for Aristotle (as for Plato) is tenuous, as part of “virtue” is how one acts as a citizen (man being a political animal and all), and the form of government will define what citizenship entails. Aristotle thought that a person can only really achieve his potential (his telos) when in a well-structured society, and that society is a natural outgrowth of the human need for association. What makes for a well-structured society? Aristotle is a realist, unlike Plato (if you take Plato’s Republic to be a serious political text and not just an allegorical account of the human soul; it’s clear that Aristotle did take Plato’s suggestions about education and ordering social classes seriously), so he recognizes that there’s not one kind of government that will be the best of the available options for all peoples at all times and in all social situations, but he does think that we can examine the experience of the many city-states with different constitutions (a constitution is not necessarily a document; it’s just Aristotle’s way of referring to the arrangement of political offices) to come up with a plethora of insights into what makes a state work (i.e. fulfill its own telos). What’s important overall is that the best rule, meaning those with good judgment, which for Aristotle amounts to a sense of justice.

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Episode 58: What Grounds Ethical Claims? (Moore, Stevenson, MacIntyre)

Jun 202012
 
GE-Moore

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:02:09 — 111.9MB)

On G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, ch. 1 (1903); Charles Leslie Stevenson’s “The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms” (1937), and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, ch. 1-2.

Is there such a thing as moral intuition? Is “good” a simple property that we all recognize but can’t explain like yellow? G.E. Moore thinks that any attempt to define good in terms of properties like “pleasure,” “interest,” or “happiness” are doomed. Even if all pleasurable things were good, the word “good” still wouldn’t mean “pleasant;” you could always sensibly ask, “but are those pleasant things really good?” This is Moore’s “open question” argument, which expresses his objection to the “naturalistic fallacy,” i.e. deriving an “ought” from an “is.”

Stevenson agreed that “good” isn’t reducible to any natural property; saying something is good is not to express a property about it at all. Instead, moral terms are tools we use to convince other people to like things that we like. This tendency of the word “good” to elicit such a response is part of what Stevenson calls its “emotive meaning.”

MacIntyre thinks that this emotivism now pervades our current uses of ethical language. Because Moore is successful in debunking all the ethical theories that rely on natural facts (and supernatural ones too) to ground morality, we’re left with no grounding at all, and people like Moore who pretend to be using intuition to discover primal moral facts are really just expressing their own preferences. The same goes for ethical theorists whose key terms don’t hold up to scrutiny: when someone justifies an action by referring to a fiction like “greatest happiness,” “natural rights,” or “the dictates of reason,” he is just, again, expressing his preferences; these bogus theories just serve to mask what’s really going on. We’ll give MacIntyre’s positive account of how to ground morality (which is derived from Aristotle’s) in episode 59.

Read more about the topic and get the readings. Dig our new web site layout!

End song: “When I Was Yours,” by Mark Lint, 1997.

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Episode 57: Henri Bergson on Humor

May 312012
 
Henri Bergson

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:43:45 — 95.1MB)

On Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900).

What is humor? Bergson says that, fundamentally, we laugh as a form of social corrective when others are slow to adapt to society’s demands. Other types of humor are derivative from this: just as the clown falls on his face because of a (pretended) physical flaw, as if he’s a machine that doesn’t work and so becomes noticeable as a machine, in satire, we poke fun at society’s breaking down, and in wordplay it’s as if the language is breaking down, and in a sit-com featuring unlikely coincidences, it’s like fate itself is breaking down into senseless patterns of repetition.

Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan are joined by comedienne Jennifer Dziura, using Bergson as a jumping-off point to throw around lots of theories and questions: is it the unexpected that makes something funny (which would make timing key), or our identification with the funny situation, which would go against Bergson’s notion that you need some distance from the person you’re laughing at, or else you grasp him as an individual and get sucked into the breakdown as tragic? Can deformities be hilarious, as Bergson thinks? What about dark humor, or self-deprecating humor, or the laughter of delight or being tickled? Read more on the topic and get the book.

End songs: Another two lo-fi, quickly recorded driblets from the Mark Lint album, Black Jelly Beans & Smokes: 1991′s “The Nipple Song” and a song written by the Gerber Brothers (Ken Gerber being the guy who drew our PEL icon) performed with Mark from 1990, “Come On, Lady.” Between these is a snippet of Jen’s standup. No puppets, though. Sorry.

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Topic for #58/#59: Is vs. Ought (G.E. Moore, C.L. Stevenson, Alasdair MacIntyre)

May 172012
 

These two episodes cover some related approaches in 20th century ethics:

First, we read Chapter 1 of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica(1903), which argues against utilitarianism and other ethical philosophies by exposing the “naturalistic fallacy,” which equates “good” with some natural property like pleasure or people’s actual desires. This error, says Moore, also extends to equating good with what God wants or what we would choose upon calm reflection on social norms and our own innermost desires. It may well be that the good coincides with one of these categories, but that’s not what the word “good” means, as it’s always a sensible question to ask “but is pleasure good?” or “is God’s will good?” for any alleged equivalent. No, says, Moore, good is a basic, indefinable, non-natural quality of the world. Buy the book or read it online. You can also listen to it.

Continue reading »

Episode 56: More Wittgenstein on Language

May 142012
 
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:53:01 — 103.5MB)

Continuing discussion of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Part I, sections 1-33 and 191-360.

Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Philosophy Bro talk about “family resemblances” in concepts, including the concept “game” as used by Wittgenstein: is there really no theory that can capture all and only instances of games, e.g. do all games have rules? Also, what does Wittgenstein mean by characterizing philosophical problems as mistakes of grammar, and how might that apply to the mind/body problem? Finally, we get to the private language argument, where W. argues that we don’t talk about our pains and things by pointing at and naming our inner states. Language is inevitably public, and our language about pains grows out of observable pain behaviors. Does this make Wittgenstein a behaviorist, and so hopelessly antiquated? Probably not.

Listen to Part 1. Read more about the topic and get the text.

End song: “Not a Woman,” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000). Download it free.

If you enjoy the episode, please donate at least $1:

Topic for #57: Henri Bergson on Humor

May 032012
 

Here’s the episode.

What is humor? Henri Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900) states that humor is a social tool by which we mildly scold each other for being insufficiently adaptive and flexible. On this account, the paradigm of humor is the absent-minded person, but any form of idiocy or freakishness or social ineptness also works: what’s funny is the disconnect between the logic of the clown’s behavior and what’s actually called for socially in the situation.

One key way such a disconnect can be brought about is through the divergence of body and spirit, or more generally between one’s intent and an opposing material reality. So a minister farting while giving a sermon would be especially funny.

Much of the book is taken up with stretching this theory to show how different types of humor relate to it. While he sees character humor as I’ve described above as central, there are derivative types: a funny coincidence mirrors the disconnect we see in character humor. Dramatic irony likewise involves the characters’ intent clashing with circumstances of which they are unaware.

Continue reading »

Episode 55: Wittgenstein on Language

May 022012
 
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:53:07 — 103.1MB)

On Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Part I, sections 1-33 and 191-360 (written around 1946).

What is linguistic meaning? Wittgenstein argues that it’s not some mysterious entity in the mind, but that it is a public matter: you understand a word if you can use it appropriately, and you know the context in which it’s appropriate to use it and how to react when you hear it in that context. W. calls such a context a “language game,” and sees language as big heap of these games, spanning a wide range of human activity. Words don’t just name objects; they could be commands, or variables, or exclamations, or even meaningless when considered outside of a particular game. When philosophers pull words out of the kinds of settings in which they originated and try to figure out what they really mean, that creates bogus philosophical problems.

This discussion is part 1 of 2; we only get through the first sections of the book in detail, and you’ll have to listen to part 2 for a good explanation of the famous “private language” argument. Read more about the topic and get the text. The foursome is joined by Philosophy Bro (the two posts of his we read part of are here and here).

End song: “Kite,” by New People from The Easy Thing (2009), written and sung by Matt Ackerman.

If you enjoy the episode, please donate at least $1:

Our Texas Profs Revisited

Apr 302012
 

We have on occasion had reason to call attention to our former professors and colleagues from UT.  Yesterday I was hit with a blast from the past when I heard R.J. “Jim” Hankinson interviewed on The History of Philosophy podcast.  He was, of course, talking about Galen.  I’m pretty sure he’s the world expert on Galen (he was already 15 years ago I think) and he sounds every bit the unbelievably knowledgeable and amusing guy he was back then.  Hankinson was quite a character – tall, lean with thick glasses and a crazy wizard beard – super educated and smart but funny and down to earth.  I recall distinctly his complimenting me on my understanding of ‘football’ (the European kind) because of my appreciation for a particularly deft 30 yd outside foot pass in a game I was describing.

I took one seminar from him, I think on Ancient Phil but I’m sure we mostly read Galen, and we always retired to the pub afterwards for extended discussions.  In a sense, that seminar represents the epitome of what we set out trying to do here at PEL.  The conversation rarely stayed on philosophy and rarely lasted less than two pitchers.  It was striking to me at the time that Hankinson studied ancient philosophy and could be so fun to hang with, particularly when contrasted with the other ancient folks – nice guys, but not who you would pick to fill a seat at your dinner party (Mourelatos, Woodruff).  I house sat for him and his totally cool wife Jennifer one summer as well.  I categorically deny throwing any parties.

It’s too bad there aren’t any good picture of Jim on the web that I could find and the picture on the HoP podcast page is too dark to be of any use, cause he’s what you think of when you think ‘crazy philosophy professor’.  In any case, listen to what he has to say about Galen, learn something and be amused.  Good to see he’s still kicking around and having fun.

–seth

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