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The Old Spice campaign did everything so well up until the last point where they totally missed the boat.

What Old Spice Did Wrong

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.

Buy the full episode

Preview - Plato on Knowledge - Partially Examined Life

Reading Pragmatism by William James and “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” by Charles Sanders Peirce.

This is a 31-minute preview of our vintage 2 hr, 8-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 Pragmatism” and look under “Albums.”

Is truth a primitive relation between our representations and things objectively in the world, or is it an analyzable process by which propositions “prove their worth” by being useful in some way, like by fitting well with other portions of our experience or being delicious?

Peirce, the inventor of pragmatism, focuses on the philosophy of science and thinks of inquiry as a way for us to just settle on any belief we can stomach. James, who popularized pragmatism, has a wider view that applies not only to science but to religious beliefs. If it makes you feel nice to believe in Hogwarts, should you do so?

Preview - Peirce and James on Pragmatism - 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.

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Nietzsche on Truth - Partially Examined Life

Discussing G.F.W. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Part B (aka Ch. 4), “Self-Consciousness,” plus recapping the three chapters before that (Part A. “Consciousness”).

This is a 30-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 28-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 Hegel" and look under "Albums."

This is discussion one of two: here we only get as far as “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” i.e. sections 166-177. This is plenty, though, as this may be the most difficult text in the history of philosophy.

We discuss Hegel’s weird dialectical method and what it says about his metaphysics, in particular about ourselves: not static, pre-formed balls of self-interest, but something that needs to be actively formed through reflection, which in turn is only possible because of our interactions with other people. Featuring guest podcaster Tom McDonald.

PREVIEW Hegel on Self-Consciousness - Partially Examined Life

Part 2 of our discussion of G.F.W. Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit,” covering sections 178-230 within section B, “Self-Consciousness.” Continuing from Part 1.

This is a 32-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 32-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 Hegel" and look under "Albums."

First, Hegel’s famous “master and slave” parable, whereby we only become fully self-conscious by meeting up with another person, who (at least in primordial times, or maybe this happens to everyone as they grow up, or maybe this is all just happening in one person’s head… who the hell knows given the wacky way Hegel talks)? Then the story leads into stoicism, skepticism, and the “unhappy consciousness” (i.e. Christianity). We are again joined by Tom McDonald, though Wes is out sick. Wild speculation and disagreements of interpretation abound!

PREVIEW Hegel on Self-Consciousness Part 2- 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

Discussing Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (1931).

This is a 32-minute preview of our vintage 1 hr, 50-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 music section of theiTunes Store: Search for "Partially Examined Husserl's" and look under "Albums."

How can we analyze our experience? Husserl thinks that Descartes was right about the need to ground science from the standpoint of our own experience, but wrong about everything else. Husserl recommends we “bracket” the question of whether the external world exists and just focus on the contents of our consciousness (the “cogito”). He thinks that with good, theory-free observations (meaning very difficult, unnatural language), we can give an account of the essential structures of experience, which will include truth, certainty, and objectivity (intersubjective verifiability): all that science needs. We’ll find that we don’t need to ground the existence of objects in space and other minds, because our entire experience presupposes them; they’re already indubitable.

PREVIEW Husserl's Phenomenology - Partially Examined Life

Discussing articles by Alan Turing, Gilbert Ryle, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and Dan Dennett.

This is a 31-minute preview of our vintage 2 hr, 20-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 Turing” and look under “Albums.”

What is this mind stuff, and how can it “be” the brain? Can computers think? No? What if they’re really sexified? Then can they think? Can the mind be a computer? Can it be a room with a guy in it that doesn’t speak Chinese? Can science completely understand it? …The mind, that is, not the room, or Chinese. What is it like to be a bat? What about a weevil? Do you even know what a weevil is, really? Then how do you know it’s not a mind? Hmmmm? Is guest podcaster Marco Wise a robot? Even his wife cannot be sure!

We introduce the mind/body problem and the wackiness that it engenders by breezing through several articles, which you may read along with us:

1. Alan Turing’s 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”

2. A chapter of Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 book The Concept of Mind called “Descartes’ Myth.”

3. Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

4. John Searle’s Chinese Room argument, discussed in a 1980 piece, “Minds, Brains and Programs.”

5. Daniel C. Dennett’s “Quining Qualia."

Preview - Philosophy of Mind - Partially Examined Life

On Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916) (Part I and Part II, Ch. 4), Claude Levi-Strauss’s “The Structural Study of Myth” (1955), and Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966).

What is language? What is the relation between language and reality? Saussure argued that a language at a given time has a structure, where you can only really understand the meaning (or “value”) of a word by contrasting it with other words. Structuralists like Levi-Strauss generalized this to all of culture, and Derrida, while rejecting the structuralist project, takes the notion of “difference” between words to uproot all meaning from any non-linguistic reality. (Probably… even our guest C. Derick Varn who’s read the Derrida essay dozens of times isn’t sure what it means.)

Structuralism - Partially Examined Life

On his book Constructing the World (2012).

How are all the various truths about the world related to each other? David Chalmers, famous for advocating a scientifically respectable form of brain-consciousness dualism, advocates a framework of scrutability: if one knew some set of base truths, then the rest would be knowable from them. What sort of base? Well, there may be many principles bases, and what’s important for Chalmers is not the details of which is picked but of the scrutability framework as a whole. The base he discusses the most in the book is PQTI, for Physical, Qualia (mental), “That’s all,” and Indexical (like “I’m here now). Being able to derive the rest of reality from PQTI has implications, Chalmers thinks, for the philosophy of language, mind, and metaphysics.

Mark tries to draw Chalmers into speculating outside his areas of expertise. Dylan asks about physics, of course. Wes has technical issues and drops off half way through (listen for the “ping” as he texts Mark to that effect).

Chalmers on Scrutability (with Chalmers as guest) - 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 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.  The foursome is joined by Philosophy Bro.

Wittgenstein on Language (Philosophical Investigations) Part 1 - Partially Examined Life

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.

Wittgenstein on Language (Philosophical Investigations) Part 2 - Partially Examined Life

On Martin Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” (1949).

What’s our place in the world? What is it, really, to be human? Heidegger thought that being human hinges on having a proper relationship to Being. What is Being? Well, it’s something more basic than particular beings like people and tables and such, yet it being so close, Heidegger thinks it’s hardest to see, and that we too often get sucked exclusively into engagement with particular beings: into worldly goals and temptations.

He wrote this essay as a response to a question about whether his philosophy was a type of humanism, meaning an ethics based on relieving suffering and other evidently human interests. He responds that humanism is based on bad metaphysics that ignores Being in favor of beings, and it’s in fact that humanistic viewpoint that enables so much inhumanity in the first place. If you’d just get right with Being, you’d have wisdom and ethics and the rest of it would come naturally to you. But of course, most of us won’t do that, because we’re too corrupted by modern society and philosophical history starting with Plato to even understand what in blazes he’s talking about. Bah!

Heidegger on our Existential Situation - 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

On Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (1882, with book 5 added 1887).

What is wisdom? Nietzsche gives us an updated take on the Socratic project of challenging your most deeply held beliefs. Challenge not just your belief in God (“God is dead!”) but uncover all your habits of thinking in terms of the divine. Question the motives behind relentless inquiry: the “will to truth.” Realize how little of your life is actually a matter of conscious reflection, and the consequent limits on self-knowledge. The very act of systematization in philosophy overestimates what we can know; instead, we need a “gay” (in the sense of cheerful, carefree, and subversive) science (in the sense of organized knowledge; this is not about modern experimental science) that chases after fleeting insights and is able to question, i.e. laugh at, the pretensions of its own activity. This is the position from which one can then artistically create one’s own character and one’s values, and this “creation” is not whimsical in the sense of arbitrary, but is a matter of rigorous and careful discernment, an exercise of one’s “intellectual conscience.” Hear Mark, Wes, and Dylan frolic through this field of aphorisms and short essays.

Nietzsche's Gay Science - Partially Examined Life

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

On John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), most of ch. 1-4.

What makes for a just society? Rawls gives us a thought experiment: Imagine you don’t know whether you’re rich or poor or any of the other specifics of your situation (he calls this going behind “the veil of ignorance” into the “original position”). Now what principles would you pick to determine basic social institutions? Would you choose a caste society where you might be born an untouchable and be screwed? Rawls thinks that in this position you would instead support his basic rules of justice, which are (in short) to make sure everyone has basic liberties, and, more controversially, to allow only such inequalities as bring up the fortunes of those least well off. So you can allow super riches so long as doing so means that the poorest will be less poor than with any other arrangement; the default position is everyone getting an equal share of society’s wealth unless you can demonstrate that letting some have more will benefit all.

This theory has been massively influential, and you can easily read it into Obama’s speeches. Even many defenders of free-market capitalism do so on basically Rawlsian grounds. The founding fathers (Mark, Seth and Wes) and an especially energetic Dylan debate whether this original position is really coherent and whether it yields the principles that Rawls wants it to.

John Rawls' on Social Justice - Partially Examined Life

Mark Linsenmayer lays out some themes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism” and the “Bad Faith” chapter (Part 1, Ch. 2) of Being & Nothingness.

Precognition of Episode 87: Sartre on the Human Condition

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'

Are you hearing voices? You're not alone. Performed by Christian Paluck, Carly Monardo, Tom Stephens, Louis Kornfeld, Jon Keller, Kerry Kastin, Nick Mykins, Aina Rapoza, and Ashley Wilson. With special musical guest Elizabeth Ziman (of Elizabeth and the Catapult). Written by Louis Kornfeld, and produced by Jonathan Mitchell.

You're Not Alone

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.