Discussing books 1 and 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics.

What is virtue, and how can I eat it? Do not enjoy this episode too much, or too little, but just the right amount. Apparently, if you haven’t already have been brought up with the right habits, you may as well give up. Plus, is Michael Jackson the Aristotelian ideal?

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Aristotle on Virtue - Partially Examined Life

Discussing Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation chapters 1-5, John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, and modern utilitarian Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”)

Going full tilt on the Greatest Happiness principle, with talk of gladiators, consensual cannibalism, and illegal downloads. How many Pleetons were in your last orgasm? Should animals count in the utilitarian calculus? What is Bentham’s skull up to nowadays? This extra long episode (patched together from two recording sessions, as Seth’s audio track got toasted for most of the first one) is disgustingly thorough and only occasionally internally redundant.

Bentham and Mill on Utilitarianism - Partially Examined Life

We try very hard to make sense of Kant’s major ethical principle, the Categorical Imperative, wherein you should only do what you’d will that EVERYONE do, so, for instance, you should not will to eat pie, because then everyone would eat it and there would be none left for you, so too bad.

Also, Kant on free will, “things in themselves,” our duties to animals, and prostitution! Plus: Should you go to grad school?

Kant on Ethics - Partially Examined Life

Discussing The Republic by Plato, primarily books 1 and 2.

This is a 31-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 37-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for "Partially Examined Republic" and look under "Albums."

What is justice? What is the ideal type of government? In the dialogue, Socrates argues that justice is real (not just a fiction the strong make up) and that it’s not relative to who you are (in the sense that it would always be just to help your friends and hurt your enemies). Justice ends up being a matter of balancing your soul so the rational part is in control over the rest of you.

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PREVIEW Plato on Justice - Partially Examined Life

Reading Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince and Ch. 1-20 of The Discourse on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy.

What’s a philosophically astute approach to political matters? What makes a government successful? Should you keep that fortress or sell it for scrap? If you conquer, say, Iraq, do you have to then go and live there for the occupation to work out? Is it OK to display the heads of your enemies on spikes, or should you opt for a respectful diorama?

Besides the famous Prince, Mr. M. wrote at about the same time the Discourses on Livy which focus on republics instead of princedoms, so the combined picture is less out of sync with our time than you might think, meaning we talk about G.W. Bush for a bit (sorry).

Machiavelli on Politics - Partially Examined Life

On Karl Marx’s The German Ideology, Part I, an early, unpublished work from 1846.

What is human nature? What drives history? How can we improve our situation? Marx thought that fundamentally, you are what you do: you are your job, your means of subsistence. All the rest, this culture, this religion, this philosophy, is just a thin layer over our basic situation. Ideas are not primarily what changes the world; it’s economics. In fact, you can’t even have an idea that doesn’t end up being in some way a product of your economic situation, and any given culture inevitably reflects and reinforces the interests of the rich within that culture. Marx saw history as following an inevitable progression driven by the division of labor and development of technology, which would inevitably lead to a situation so awful for the vast majority that we’ll have no choice but revolution leading to Communist paradise.

OK, so that last part is a pretty big stretch, but some of Marx’s diagnoses seem on point: our alienation from our jobs, the fact that our opinions really do more often than not reflect our situation and are not therefore the product of a wholly free intellectual choice, the fact that a lot of philosophy ignores our practical situation to its detriment (Marx really rips into the “Young Heglians” that were dominating German thought at the time), our general lack of self-knowledge (this idea among others being lifted from Hegel), and some of his analysis of past cultural advances (mostly lifted from Adam Smith). The original threesome of Mark, Seth, and Wes are back to hack into these issues and more

Marx on Social Organization - Partially Examined Life

Discussing Civilization and its Discontents (1930).

This is a 32-minute preview of our vintage 2 hr, 5-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for “Partially Examined Freud” and look under “Albums.”

What’s the meaning of life? Well, for Sigmund Freud, an objective purpose rises or falls with religion, which he thinks a matter of clinging to illusion, so to rephrase: what do we want out of life? To be happy, of course, yet he sees happiness as a matter of fulfillment of pent-up desires, meaning it’s by its nature temporary. Yet we can’t shake off its pursuit, and so we’re in a bind, and have a number of strategies for obtaining some satisfaction: some compensation for what we have to repress in order to live in a society that forces us to repress our innate desires.

PREVIEW Freud on the Human Condition - Partially Examined Life

Discussing Soren Kierkegaard’s “The Sickness Unto Death” (1849).

What is the self? For K. we are a tension between opposites: necessity and possibility, the finite and the infinite, soul and body. He thinks we’re all in despair, whether we know it or not, because we wrongly think we’re something we’re not, or we reject what we are, or we just don’t pay attention to this dynamic at all: we just go along with the crowd. So we need to keep self-examining and (he thinks) ultimately embrace our subservience to God.

This is a 32-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 56-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for “Partially Kierkegaard” and look under “Albums.”

Joined by guest podcaster/Kiekegaard’s lawyer Daniel Horne, we consider K.’s 3-step self-help program and whether there’s anything to be gotten here if you don’t subscribe to K’s Christianity.

PREVIEW Kierkegaard on the Self - Partially Examined Life

Reading David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. David Hume thinks that all we can know are our own impressions, i.e. what our moment-to-moment experiences tell us. Funny thing, though: he thinks that no experience shows us one event causing another event. We only experience one thing happening, then another, and these sequences tend to display a lot of uniformity. So, if we have any legitimate idea of causality at all, it must just be that: regular patterns of conjoined events.

This is a 31-minute preview of our vintage 2 hr, 5-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for “Partially Examined Hume” and look under “Albums.”

We discuss what Hume thinks this view implies for the free will question, belief in miracles, whether external objects are actually there, Seth’s experience of Towlie, and more.

Preview - Hume's Empiricism - Partially Examined Life

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.

Nietzsche on Truth - Partially Examined Life

Beste: Yalçın Tura
Güfte: Niyâzî-i Mısrî Hz.
İcra: Chatwyn A.
Neyler: Ferhat Özden, Cemil Baştürk
Kayıt Yeri: Vâlide-i Atîk Külliyesi, Üsküdar, İstanbul 
Kayıt Tarihi: Ağustos 2014

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