Posts Tagged rationalism

Episode 24: Spinoza on God and Metaphysics

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on August 24, 2010

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:36:01 — 88.0MB)

Discussing Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), books 1 and 2.

We mostly discuss his weird, immanent, non-personal conception of God: God is everything, therefore the world is God as apprehended through some particular attributes, namely insofar as one of his aspects is infinite space (extension, i.e. matter) and insofar as one of his aspects is mind (our minds being chunks or “modes” of the big God mind).

Also, if you’re not going to sell out and go for a university position in philosophy, should you instead grind lenses in your attic without adequate ventilation? (Hint: no) Plus, the Amsterdam of yesterday, whose heady aroma drove people to write like Euclid, property dualism rears its ugly head, and Mel Gibson as Rousseau!

Read a free version online or purchase the book.

One place to read the earlier Spinoza book I refer to, A Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being (1660), is here. The Karen Armstrong book I keep referring to is The Case for God,and at the end Wes recommends Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and the Heretic. Seth also brings up Giles Deluze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.
The dumbed down, non-geometric presentation of the Ethics that I talk about is here.

End song: “Spiritual Insect,” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000).

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Episode 19: Kant: What Can We Know?

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on May 14, 2010

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:05:31 — 115.0MB)

Reading Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, which is sort of a post-publication Cliff’s Notes to his Critique of Pure Reason.

Do we have any business doing metaphysics, which is by definition about things that we could not possibly experience?

Kant says that yes, we can, to a limited extent, but that everyone before him did it wrong, because they didn’t understand how our minds interact with the world to create experience. He insists that once you read his book, you’ll never be satisfied with such “twaddle” again!

LEARN about the faculties of Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason! THINK about whether geometric truths are justified by our intuition of space (maybe) and arithmetic is grounded in our intuition of time (probably not). DOUBT whether we actually impose causality on our experience as Kant says! MARVEL at our guest participant, Azzurra Crispino, as she augments the number of speakers on this episode to a PERFECTLY SQUARE number! GAWK as your world is turned up-flicking-side down by Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” (a term we neither use nor explain in this episode)!

Read the book online or buy it.

End song: “Subjectivity” from the 1994 album “Happy Songs Will Bring You Down” by The MayTricks.

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Episode 18: Plato: What Is Knowledge?

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on April 20, 2010

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:17:56 — 126.3MB)

Discussing the Theaetetus and the Meno, two dialogues about knowledge.

We’re returning to Plato for a somewhat more thorough treatment than we gave him in Episode 1. This should be considered part two (Hume being #1) of three discussions intended to convey the main conflict in the history of epistemology between the empiricists (like Hume) and the rationalists (like Plato).

We slog through most of the Theaetetus, where Plato considers and rejects a series of mostly very lame conceptions of knowledge and replaces them at the end with… NOTHING. Seth is crushed. In the Meno, knowledge is “remembrance” (maybe), like anything worth knowing can’t be learned but only elicited out of the depths of your unconscious.

Read along: The Theaetetus and The Meno, or if you don’t like the funky background on those pages, look them up via Project Gutenberg. You could also purchase

Seth did this diagram to express his love of the Meno.

End song: “Obvious Boy” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000). Listen to the whole album online.

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