podcast

Partially examined life

podcasts (science, philosophy)

science and technology

anything funny

PEL on Religion

Religion

Learning

Reporting in Science, researchers write of discovering four radio bursts from outer space. Physicist Duncan Lorimer, who detected the first such explosion in 2007, discusses what could be causing these radio signals.

Mysterious Radio Bursts, Sent From Deep Space

Discussing the arguments by Descartes, St. Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, William Paley, Kant, and others, as analyzed in J.L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1983), chapters 1-3, 5-6, 8, and 11.

This is a 33-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 43-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 Existence God" and look under "Albums."

Are the ontological, cosmological, and teleological (argument from design) arguments for God’s existence any good? Mackie, a very sharp analytic philosopher well hooked into recent advances in philosophy of science, says no. He’s chiefly responding to his Oxford colleague, Richard Swinburne, who takes a very rationalist approach to God, taking the concept of God to be wholly simple and intelligible and providing a superior scientific explanation for, e.g. the beginning of the universe than the brute fact of an ultimately uncaused physical universe.

Buy the full episode

PREVIEW Arguments for the Existence of God - Partially Examined Life

Discussing Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “On Religion; Speeches to its Cultured Despisers” (1799, with notes added 1821), first and second speeches.

This is a 33-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 43-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 Schleiermacher" and look under "Albums."

Does religion necessarily conflict with science? Schleiermacher says no: the essence of religion is an emotional response to life; it doesn’t give knowledge or even tell us what to do exactly. Moreover, this attitude is a necessary to fully enter into life, to be a whole and fulfilled person. Yes, he’s of the “romantic” school, but his approach can still be seen today in liberal Protestant churches.

PREVIEW Schleiermacher Defends Religion - Partially Examined Life

On Buber’s 1923 book about the fundamental human position: As children, and historically (this is his version of social contract theory), we start fully absorbed in relation with another person (like, say, mom). Before that point, we have no self-consciousness, no “self” at all, really. It’s only by having these consuming “encounters” that we gradually distinguish ourselves from other people, and can then engage in what we’d normally consider “experience,” which Buber calls “the I-It relation,” wherein we can reflect on and manipulate the world.

Buber thinks that unless we can keep connected to this “I-Thou” phenomenon, through real, mature relationships (dialogue!), and maybe also through art and the appreciation of nature (we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how, as he says, you can really have an I-Thou encounter with a tree), you’re spiritually dead, treating everyone as objects and sporting a thin, pissy sense of self to boot. If you get get in the groove, on the other hand, you’ll come off all shiny and ethical and ready to transform the world. Sweet! Oh, and by the way, the “Thou,” every thou, ends up also being a direct line to God, so all you “spiritual but not religious” folks are theists after all. Nyah nyah!

Mark, Seth, and Wes are rejoined by verbose lawyer Daniel Horne to hash through this difficult and possibly mystical text.

Go to blog

Martin Buber's I and Thou - Partially Examined Life

Discussing William James’s “The Will to Believe” and continuing our discussion from Episode 20 on James’s conception of truth as described in his books Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth, again featuring guest podcaster Dylan Casey.

This is a 31-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 38-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 Pragmatism faith” and look under “Albums.”

Does pragmatism give ground for religious belief, like if I say it feels good for me to believe in God, is that in any sense a legitimate grounds for that belief? Is belief in science or rationality itself a form of faith? Is religious belief a “forced choice,” or does it just not matter what you believe?

Also, we sort further through James on truth: truth is created by us, but what does that mean? That only statements actually verified or otherwise useful are true, or can have a truth value (true of false) at all? In saying that we create truth, does that make James a relativist, and if so, is that bad?

PREVIEW William James Will to Believe - Partially Examined Life

Primarily discussing “Reasoning: The Sixty Stanzas” and “Emptiness: The Seventy Stanzas,” by the 2nd century Indian Buddhist Nagarjuna.

Is the world of our experience ultimately real? If not, does it have something metaphysically basic underlying it? For Nagarjuna, the answers are “no” and “no… well… not that we can talk about.”

This is a 32-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 44-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 Nagarjuna” and look under “Albums.”

Mark and Seth (Wes was sick) are joined by guest Erik Douglas to discuss metaphysics, causality, the possibility of remaking your perceptual habits, why someone who believes that all is empty might still want to act ethically, and how to deny a claim without affirming its equally dubious opposite.

PREVIEW Nagarjuna on Buddhist Emptiness - Partially Examined Life

Discussing selections from Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel C. Dennett.Should we be religious, or is religion just a bunch of superstitious nonsense that it’s past time for us to outgrow? Does faith lead to ceding to authority and potential violence? Can a reasonable person be religious? We say lots of rude things about these authors, and at times about their targets in this listener-requested episode featuring Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan. 

This is a 32-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 50-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get it for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for "Partially Examined Atheists" and look under "Albums."

Buy/read what we did:
-Ch. 1-2 of Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004)
-The last three chapters of Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)
-Ch. 4, and some of ch. 2, from Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006)
-Ch. 8 (and skimming 3 and 7 to get context) of Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006)
-Chapter 14 of Anthony Kenny’s 2008 book From Empedocles to Wittgenstein: Historical Essays in Philosophy(which we read as a response to Dawkins)

PREVIEW New Atheist Critiques of Religion - Partially Examined Life

Discussing Descartes’ Meditations 1 and 2.

Descartes engages in the most influential navel gazing ever, and you are there! In this second and superior-to-the-first installment of our lil’ philosophy discussion, we discuss what Descartes thinks he knows with certainty (hint: it is not you), the Matrix, and burning-at-the-stake.com. Mark and Wes agree to disagree about agreeing that they disagree. Seth had a long day and is very tired. Plus: Some listener feedback; whom is this here podcast aimed at? Why, you, of course!

Descartes' Meditations - Partially Examined Life

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).

This is a 34-minute preview of our vintage 2 hr, 18-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 Plato” and look under “Albums.”

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.

Preview - Plato on Knowledge - 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

Discussing Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), mostly the intro and ch. 1 and 2 of Part 1.

This is a 33-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 52-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 Heidegger" and look under "Albums."

When philosophers try to figure out what really exists (God? matter? numbers?), Heidegger thinks they’ve forgotten a question that really should come first: what is it to exist? He thinks that instead of asking “What is Being?” we ask, as in a scientific context, “what is this thing?” This approach then poisons our ability to understand ourselves or the world that we as human beings actually inhabit, as opposed to the abstraction that science makes out of this.

This is Seth’s big episode: this was his primary concentration in his later grad school years. Plus: Nazis, trying to figure out things by free associating about their origins in ancient Greek, and whoopee cushion record breaking news!

PREVIEW Heidegger on Being - Partially Examined Life

Discussing Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), parts 1, 2 and section 3 of part 3.

This is a 33-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 42-minute episode which you can buy at partiallyexaminedlife.com/store or get it for free with PEL Citizenship (see partiallyexaminedlife.com/membership). You can also purchase the full episode in the iTunes Store: Search for "Partially Danto" and look under "Albums."

Are we really free? Kings no longer exert absolute and arbitrary power over us, but Foucault’s picture of the evolution from torture and public executions to rehabilitative, medical-style incarceration is not so much a triumph of liberty but a shift to more subtle but more pervasive exertions of power. 

Featuring guest participant Katie McIntyre, doctoral candidate at Columbia.

PREVIEW Foucault on Power and Punishment - Partially Examined Life

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?

Bergson on Humor - Partially Examined Life

On Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (1991).

How is philosophy different from science and art? What’s the relationship between different philosophies? Is better pursued solo, or in a group? Deleuze described philosophy as the creation of new concepts, whereas science is about functions that map observed regularities and art is about creating percepts and affects. Just reading or writing about past philosophers is not enough; you have to actually create concepts, and to create or understand a concept requires a “plane of immanence,” which is something like a set of background intuitions that is not private to a particular mind. Such a plane constitutes an image of what thought is and determines what questions will be considered legitimate, so trying to evaluate a past philosophy without grappling with the plane means you’ll inevitably misunderstand the philosopher and your critiques will just talk past him or her. Likewise, if you yank a philosophical concept out of its plane and try to turn it into a proposition that you can evaluate, it’s inevitably going to seem weak, like “just an opinion,” because propositions are not what philosophy creates. As for a pragmatist, “truth” for Deleuze is something defined within a plane, not some transcendental standard used to judge planes or concepts.

Mark, Seth, and Dylan are joined by “sophist” (PhD in rhetoric) Daniel Coffeen to try to figure this out.

Deleuze on What Philosophy Is - Partially Examined Life

Performance artist Marina Abramovic wants to build a laboratory devoted to arts and science. [Photo by Maxim Lubimov, Garage Center for Contemporary Culture]

Marina Abramovic: Experimenting on Consciousness, Through Art

On Carl Jung’s “Approaching the Unconscious” from Man and His Symbols, written in 1961.

What’s the structure of the mind? Jung followed Freud in positing an unconscious distinct from the conscious ego, but Jung’s picture has the unconscious much more stuffed full of all sorts of stuff from who knows where, including instincts (the archetypes) that tend to give rise to behavior and dream imagery that we’d have to call religious. We neglect this part of ourselves at our psychological peril, and Jung also attributes the ills of the age (like nihilism and WWII) to being out of touch with our larger, unconscious selves.

Sound like goofy pop psychology? Well, Jung’s book was written specifically for the populace, and many have run with his emphasis on spiritual self-knowledge and his openness to talk of the paranormal to conclusions less well founded than Jung would have liked. Mark, Seth, and Wes keep trying to make the text speak to other philosophical works but eventually get sidetracked and occasionally personal on this very special episode.

Jung on the Psyche and Dreams - Partially Examined Life

Grace Helbig, creator of the web series Daily Grace and the 2013 Streamy Awards' Personality of the Year drops by the table of dim lighting to talk with the guys about her mom…and more. Grace shares what it was like growing up, how she got her start with comedy, and what it takes to make her consistently hilarious daily show.  If you don't know what a "poof" is, that's about to change.


Ep. 1 Grace Helbig - Ear Biscuits

YouTube personality Shane Dawson, known best for his blunt sense of humor and brutal comedic honesty, joins Rhett & Link to talk about both literal and figurative ghosts from his past. From childhood struggles in obesity, getting fired over a YouTube video, and becoming one of the most iconic teen stars in current-day pop culture, Shane shares his story- gory details and all. 

*NOTE: This conversation contains adult themes and language.

Ep. 3 Shane Dawson - Ear Biscuits

Hannah Hart, well-known for her weekly YouTube series, My Drunk Kitchen, joins Rhett & Link to discuss her unusual childhood with a Jehovah's Witness preacher as a father, how she came to terms with her sexuality, and why her fame has allowed her to give back to people in need.

*NOTE: This conversation contains adult themes and language.

Ep. 5 Hannah Hart - Ear Biscuits

Tyler Oakley, one of the Internet's most acclaimed vloggers, sits down with Rhett & Link to discuss his adolescent struggles with anorexia, coming out to family and friends at a young age, and his recent surge in popularity that has shot him to the top of the YouTube charts.

*NOTE: This conversation contains adult themes and language.

Ep. 8 Tyler Oakley - Ear Biscuits

Chester See, who has won the hearts of more than a million teen girls throughout the world with his smooth, soulful voice, extraordinary musical talent, and emotionally drenched original songs featured on his popular YouTube channel, joins Rhett & Link this week to discuss his journey from an energetic Disney Channel host to a shirtless bartender in a Korean club to one of the internet's most famed musicians. The guys also hit on his recent high profile heartbreak, and how a new crush and a thirst for innovation in the new media industry has brought him both personal and professional success.

Ep. 14 Chester See - Ear Biscuits

‘I don’t get the feeling that nothing is happening,’ replied the father of Cyberpunk. ‘I just get the feeling that more and more of it is happening on a different field.’

This Intelligence Squared event at Cadogan Hall in London saw the coming-together of two great believers in the vibrancy and power of the present: William Gibson and Cory Doctorow. Despite the discussion covering topics unrestrained by time - reaching back to the age of the Victorians and stretching, via 1940 and our ‘increasingly interesting’ present, to 2060 - or location (we were taken from the Far East to western Canada, with stop-overs in Shoreditch and Brooklyn), Gibson repeatedly underlined the centrality of the present in his work. He stressed that good science fiction writing is based on looking at ‘all the things around you’ and finding ‘the ones with the most obvious legs to carry you into the future.’

What sort of a future that will be, however, remains a mystery to Gibson. There are simply ‘too many wild cards in play,’ he said, for us to casually erect accurate futures. One thing that seemed certain was the sustained threat to any genuine subculture. We are now left, he lamented, with only ‘splinters of Bohemia,’ the violation of which seems almost complete in a world where ‘the way D. H. Lawrence looked is … much more important than what D.H. Lawrence wrote.’

http://iq2.podbean.com/2010/10/04/william-gibson-on-zero-history/

William Gibson & Cory Doctorow on 'Zero History'

William Gibson, author of NEUROMANCER and father of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction, reads the introduction from his new collection of essays, DISTRUST THAT PARTICULAR FLAVOR.

William Gibson: Distrust That Particular Flavor | Oct 19, 2012

I've indexed most of the pivots in this discussion. Hover them if you're looking for something specific. To skip to an index point, start playing the recording, then click near the vertical stripe in the waveform above the section of interest.

At around 1hr22min, Gibson reads a few sample pages from his in-progress book, THE PERIPHERAL.

WILLIAM GIBSON AT NYPL 4/19/13 READS FROM NEW BOOK, 'THE PERIPHERAL'

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion.