Lectures & Talks

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.

Buy the full episode

PREVIEW Foucault on Power and Punishment - 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.)

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Structuralism - Partially Examined Life

"Nothing will come of Nothing" (Eyre)

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

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

Transcript, context, and related artwork: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/17/dfw-leadership-debbie-millman/

TRANSCRIPT / DETAILS

David Foster Wallace on leadership, read by Debbie Millman

Excerpts from PEL podcaster & listener discussions on Sartre’s Nausea, Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” Slavoj Zizek’s Year of Dreaming Dangerously, Marx and Engels’s “Communist Manifesto,” Peter Schaffer’s play Equus, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form. Plus an interview with Hillary Sydlowski, leader of the Not School Introductory Readings in Philosophy Group.

This Digest (our first since last August) is jam-freakin’ packed, with folks moaning over difficult texts and crooning over easy ones. We’ve got good microphones side by side with terrible microphones so you can learn the difference! Wacky sound effects! A song (“Messed Up People” by The MayTricks, from 1994′s Happy Songs Will Bring You Down) spread out over two places but yet still not adding up to one whole song! The first minutes of several conversations, you know, before everyone got warmed up and comfortable! A commercial that sounds like real content, and some real content that sounds like a commercial! Such a thing is to be missed only if you have an ear infection! (We do that so you get the summary: you still learn what these works are about even just listening to these little bits, and you don’t have time to get bored.)

Please support our sponsor Squarespace: Go to squarespace.com/examine and use the offer code Examine to get a free trial offer and 10% off.

Not School Digest: Sartre, Heidegger, Marx, Zizek and Theater - Partially Examined Life

Linda Rottenberg, co-founder and CEO of Endeavor Global, shares smart lessons for cutting an entrepreneurial path in a turbulent world. Touching on elements from her upcoming book, Crazy is a Compliment, Rottenberg unpacks insights from Endeavor's work driving entrepreneurship in emerging markets around the world.

Linda Rottenberg - Crazy is a Compliment

Seth Godin in conversation with Debbie Millman about courage, anxiety, change, creative integrity,  how to dance with the fear, and more. Background and transcribed highlights: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/05/20/seth-godin-debbie-millman-interview/

Seth Godin in conversation with Debbie Millman

Author and leadership educator Liz Wiseman shares why cultivating a "rookie mindset" is an advantage in a rapidly changing world. Wiseman presents insights from her books, Rookie Smarts and Multipliers, including frameworks and techniques for how entrepreneurs, leaders and employees can embrace a life of constant learning and build a passion for multiplying the genius of those around them.

Liz Wiseman - The Power of Not Knowing

"I began my literary career with short stories," A.L. Kennedy wrote recently. "I banged together my first anthology … and a publisher actually inflicted it on a waiting world." Since the publication of that first collection in 1990, Kennedy has produced five more – her most recent, All the Rage, published earlier this year – and six novels, including the Costa Prize-winning Day. The Sunday Telegraph has called Kennedy "one of the most brilliant writers of her generation" and her prose has been described in the Observer as “pure, full of tenderness and courage". In conversation with Paula Johnson, who runs the RSL's prizes, Kennedy reads from her work, and explores the craft of the short story. The V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize is awarded for the best unpublished short story of the year. After the announcement and presentation of the V.S. Pritchett Prize for 2014, the winning entry will be read by its author.

We are grateful to ALCS for supporting this event, to Christopher and Jennie Bland for sponsoring the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, and to Prospect for publishing the winning entry.

A.L. Kennedy on the craft of the short story

Context, transcript, and Strayed's expanded advice: http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/04/13/cheryl-strayed-write-like-a-motherfucker-advice/

Excerpted from the New York Public Library podcast: http://www.nypl.org/voices/blogs/blog-channels/podcast

Photograph by Graeme Mitchell for The New York Times

MORE/TRANSCRIPT

Cheryl Strayed on how to write like a motherfucker

Serial entrepreneur and investor Chinedu Echeruo shares lessons from starting multiple companies, including HopStop, which was acquired by Apple in 2013. Echeruo discusses the beneficial attributes of founders, learning from his missteps, and why he sees creativity as a tool for unleashing value for the world.

Chinedu Echeruo - Creativity Unleashes Value for the World

In this talk, she asks how Eliot tested  a variety of lives in his masterpiece, Four Quartets. How do writers, or risk-takers like his ancestor Andrew Eliot, or Londoners during the Blitz, or members of a religious community, hold up against Eliot's pattern of the perfect life: 'a lifetime burning in every moment'?

TS Eliot and the search for perfection (Lyndall Gordon)

Originality in science is synonymous with being first; originality in the arts is somewhat different.  At what point do these two creative endeavours overlap?

Originality (Ian McEwan)

Two well established poets, David Harsent and Lavinia Greenlaw, and two younger poets, Emma Jones and Ahren Warners, reflect on who and what first drew them to poetry, and ask tough, practical questions: how does a young poet go about getting work published? How important is it to have an agent? What are the pros and cons of self-publishing? And is it possible to make a living from poetry?

Being A Poet (Lavinia Greenlaw, David Harsent, Emma Jones & Ahren Warner)

Dicing with darkness (Hilary Mantel & James Runcie)

Novelist and critic Margaret Drabble, psychotherapist Jane Haynes, and poet and translator Ian Patterson, discuss their love of Proust with Christopher Prendergast, who recently oversaw the major new translation of Proust's 'À la recherche'.

What's so great about Proust? (Margaret Drabble, Jane Haynes & Ian Patterson)

Teresita Fernandez Commencement Speech, delivered at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, May 11, 2013

Teresita Fernandez Commencement Speech

Socrates famously said "the unexamined life is not worth living." But he also said "actions are more reliable evidence than words." In his new book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Examined-Lives-Nietzsche-James-Miller/dp/0374150850">"Examined Lives,"</a> <a href="http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/faculty.aspx?id=10346">James Miller</a> examines the lives of 12 Philosophers who attempt to talk the talk and walk the walk.


Lectures & Talks

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