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 along! http://frank.mtsu.edu/~rbombard/RB/Spinoza/ethica-front.html

One place to read the earlier Spinoza book I refer to, A Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being (1660), is http://www.archive.org/stream/spinozasshorttre00spinuoft/spinozasshorttre00spinuoft_djvu.txt. 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).

What’s the relationship between culture and nature? Are savages really slavering beasts of unquenchable appetites, or probably more mellow, hangin’ about, flexin’ their muscles, just chillin’, eh?

Rousseau engages in some wild speculation about the development of humanity from the savage to the modern, miserable wretch. Association with other people corrupts us, especially association with Wes. Is there some form of government that will make things tolerable? Maybe that one where Oprah is our queen.

Read along with us! http://www.constitution.org/jjr/ineq.htm and http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon.htm.

End song: “Love Is the Problem” by New People from The Easy Thing (2009).

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? Does Wes’s laugh sound like Dr. Hibbert’s from the Simpsons?

Read along with us: http://falcon.jmu.edu/~omearawm/ph101willtobelieve.html, plus Pragmatism is at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5116 and The Meaning of Truth is at http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/James/James_1911/James_1911_toc.html (The most useful chapters for our purposes are 3, 5, 8, 9, 12, and 15.)

End song: “What Cares What You Believe” by Madison Lint (2001).

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.”

Some additional resources that we talk about: David Chalmers’s “Consciousness and its Place in Nature, “ Frank Jackson’s Epiphenomenal Qualia, Paul Churchland’s Matter and Consciousness, Jerry Fodor’s “The Mind-Body Problem,” Zoltan Torey’s The Crucible of Consciousness, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s long entry on the Chinese Room argument.

End Song: “No Mind” from 1998’s Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio; the whole album is now free online.

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?

The episode features guest podcaster Dylan Casey (previously from our quantum physics episode).

The readings are at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5116, http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html, and http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html. Another helpful link we talk about is the chapter from James’s book The Meaning of Truth where he responds to objections: http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/James/James_1911/James_1911_08.html

End Song: “Friend” from 1998’s Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio; the whole album is now free online.

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 along with us at http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant-prolegomena.txt. Seth also made some nice charts of the four-square we discuss:

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

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.

Plus, some discussion of recent blog activity here, like our Danto accolades and Wes’s comments on Jerry Fodor and Sam Harris.

Read along: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/plato_theaetetus.htm and http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/plato_meno01.htm.

If you don’t like the funky background on those pages, just look these up via Project Gutenberg. I notice that those versions have an extensive commentary before the selection, which serves as a useful refresher AFTER you’ve read it as to what happened, as the twists and turns can be difficult to keep in mind.

Oh, and 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).

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.

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.

Read with us: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9662.

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

I understand you may not have heard of Danto, and you may think modern art is goofy, but you’ll definitely enjoy this discussion and the reading anyway. Danto gives a picture of philosophy and art at war throughout history: philosophy says that art can’t get at truth and is otherwise useless, yet philosophers like Plato seem afraid of the power of art to corrupt. What’s the deal?

Also, Danto claims that art is over; the end of art has happened. So suck it, artists. (Actually, artists can keep on doing what they’re doing; they’re fine, yet art is still over.) Plus, can you stare at a urinal and thereby make it art? What if it’s in a museum? Danto loves them crazy ass post-modern artists, and thinks that their work shows that art was not what we thought it was.

Plus, Seth talks about the plane crashing into the IRS building near his house, and we respond some listener postings.

This work is unfortunately not available free on the Internet, but is worth your purchase. Try Amazon or your preferred bookseller. We also refer heavily to Calvin Tomkins’s “The Bride and the Bachelors.” For a summary of “The End of Art,” you can read this excerpt from one of Danto’s later books: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s5911.html. You could also check out the Amazon preview of Danto’s book “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” which we refer to a bit.

End song: “This Night Before the End,” by Mark Lint and the Simulacra, recorded mostly in 2000 but finished just now.

How should a philosopher approach the study of history? Is history just a bunch of random happenings, or is it a purposive force manipulating us to fulfill its hidden ends? If you have asked yourself this question in this way, then you, like Hegel, are mighty strange.

Here we talk about the unfolding of the world-historical spirit, world-historical individuals (hint: not you), dialectic, his alternative to the social contract, the formation of the self based on what others label you, the geist of America, why a constitutional monarchy is obviously the best form of government, and heaps more.

Read with us: Pages 14-128 of http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/hegel/history.pdf or, for a somewhat less intimidating experience (and to read the same translation I have), just pick up a paperback of just the part we’re concerned with: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0872200566/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used.

End Song: “Cold,” by Madison Lint (2004), described in my music blog.

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).

Plus: An inspirational speech to play at middle school assemblies across the land!

Skim the texts at http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince00.htm and maybe at http://www.constitution.org/mac/disclivy_.htm.

The Isaiah Berlin article we talk about a bit is “The Originality of Machiavelli,” which you read most of if you search for the essay title in this book preview: http://books.google.com/books?id=Zjv9fBU-YRoC&dq=berlin+the+proper+study+of+mankind&source=gbs_navlinks_s

End song: “Se Piangi, Se Ridi” (Mogol/Marchetti/Satti), recorded by Mark Lint in 2000.

What weird stuff about reality does quantum physics imply? Is Heisenberg (of the Uncertainty Principle fame) right that we need to reject “metaphysical realism” based on this very well established scientific framework? The discussion ranges over the uncertainty principle, relativity, wave/particle duality, Pre-Socratic metaphysics, why Kant is wrong about space, and lots of very weird things.

You can read along with us here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13499208/PHYSICS-AND-PHILOSOPHY-by-WERNER-HEISENBERG.

Plus, we spend far too much time talking about an article by Thomas Nagel about Intelligent Design; you can read that here: http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1172/papa_132.pdf. And the blog post by Brian Leiter that got us talking about it is here: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/12/thomas-nagel-jumps-the-shark.html.

End song: “Neutrino of Love,” written and sung by Dylan Casey, with backing and production by Mark back in 1997 or so (remixed and cleaned up just now). A different version appears on his Neutrino Sessions album.

It’s the second-most-famous Taoist text and the most humorous, with anecdotes about people singing at funerals and jumping out of moving coaches while drunk. What could it possibly mean to “make all things equal?” and how is the Taoist sage different from our other favorite paragons of virtue (hint: magical powers)?

Featuring special guest panelist Erik Douglas, another U. Texas philosophy grad school dropout now living in England, who knows more about Eastern philosophy than we do.

Read along at http://www.terebess.hu/english/chuangtzu.html.

The end song requires explanation: I had a “New Age” period where I investigated Eastern philosophy, tried to be cheerful all the time, and was generally insufferable. This song, “Pass Time Incorporeal,” is an artifact of that time, with lyrics from early fall 1989; the recording is from 1993. It finally slipped out on a 1996 album of similar goofiness rejected from my “real” albums called “Black Jelly Beans & Smokes.”

We go through Nietzsche’s convoluted and historically improbable stories about about the transition from master to slave morality and the origin of bad conscience. Why does he diss Christianity? Is he an anti-semite? Was he a lazy, arrogant bastard? What does he actually recommend that we do?

Online copies of the readings can be obtained at: http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/genealogytofc.htm and http://www.allphilosophers.com/nietzsche/nindex.html.

End song: “The Greatest F’in Song in the World,” from 1998’s Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio

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?

The Kant reading can be found at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5682. The Allen Wood article “Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational Nature” is here: http://www.stanford.edu/~allenw/papers/Nonrational.doc.

End song: “Stop” by Madison Lint (2003).

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.

Read along at http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/bentham01.htm, http://www.utilitarianism.com/mill1.htm, and http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1972—-.htm (Also, for some more information on Singer’s view of animal liberation, see http://www.utilitarian.org/texts/alm.html.)

End song: “So Whaddaya Think?” by Mark Lint and the Fake (2000).

Carnap interprets W as simply ruling out as unscientific most of the talk we’d consider philosophical, i.e. metaphysics, ethics, the self… Or is W really a mystic who just wants to distinguish these from science? Why doesn’t he just write more and explain himself? This tricky text inspires Seth to start a cult.

To follow along, read the Tractatus from the beginning through around 4.12, then skip to 6.3 and read to the end, skimming the more technical material in the middle. The text can be found at http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~luke_manning/tractatus/tractatus-jsnav.html, with the Carnap at http://www.philosophy.ru/edu/ref/sci/carnap.html.

Also, if you’re confused by the description of truth tables (which are hard to picture without seeing some), check out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_table.

End song: “The Last Time,” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the 2000 album So Whaddaya Think?

One online place to find the reading is http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~luke_manning/tractatus/tractatus-jsnav.html.

For a clearer explanation of fact-based ontology, see this short introduction by Bertrand Russell to his lectures on logical atomism: http://www.hist-analytic.org/RussellLAfacts.pdf.

End song: “Facts for a Moment (What You Are to Me),” recorded in 1992 and released on the Mark Linsenmayer album Spanish Armada, Songs of Love and Related Neuroses.

Leibniz thinks that the world is ultimately made up of monads, which are like atoms except nothing at all like atoms, because they’re alive, and mindful, and eternal, and windowless, placed in the best kind of harmony at the beginning of time by God. Is there a concept album in all of this?

Plus, does reading philosophy make you a better conversationalist, or just get you ostracized?

Get the reading at http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/GMR/hmp/texts/modern/leibniz/monadology/monadology.html

End song: The soothing “Healthy Song” by The MayTricks, from the 1994 album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down.

Why should you bother to go through the trouble of downloading and listening to one of the full length episodes? Who are we anyway? Why shouldn’t you just go listen to some philosophy lectures posted by university professors instead of this thing? Do you need to listen to the episodes in order? Do you need to already know a lot about philosophy to get anything out of this podcast? Should you listen to it while pleasuring yourself? Most of these questions will be answered here!

End song: “New People” by New People.

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?

You can read the text discussed at http://www.constitution.org/ari/ethic_00.htm.

End song: A newly recorded cover of Billie Jean by Mark Lint and the TransAmerikanishers. (Hear it by itself here.)

Discussing Camus’s “An Absurd Reasoning” and ”The Myth of Sisyphus.”

Does our eventual death mean that life has no meaning and we might as well end it all?  Camus starts to address this question, then gets distracted and talks about a bunch of phenomenologists until he dies unreconciled.  Also, let’s all push a rock up a hill and like it, okay?  Plus, the fellas dwell on genius and throw down re. the Beatles, the beloved Robert C. Solomon and Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers.

An abridged version of the reading covered with most of the good stuff in it is here: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jwp2/sisyphus.htm.  An unabridged version of “An Absurd Reasoning” is here:  http://www.scribd.com/doc/3223928/Albert-Camus-The-Myth-Of-Sisyphus.

End song: “My Friends” by Mark Lint and the Simulacra (2000). ]]> http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2009/06/22/episode-4-camus-and-the-absurd/feed/ 4 Beatles,Camus,genius,Gladwell,Greek myth,Nietzsche,phenomenology,philosophy,Robert Solomon,Sisyphus,suicide,the Absurd - Discussing Camus's "An Absurd Reasoning" and "The Myth of Sisyphus." - Does our eventual death mean that life has no meaning and we might as well end it all?  Camus starts to address this question, then gets distracted and talks about a bunch of phe... Discussing Camus's "An Absurd Reasoning" and "The Myth of Sisyphus." Does our eventual death mean that life has no meaning and we might as well end it all?  Camus starts to address this question, then gets distracted and talks about a bunch of phenomenologists until he dies unreconciled.  Also, let's all push a rock up a hill and like it, okay?  Plus, the fellas dwell on genius and throw down re. the Beatles, the beloved Robert C. Solomon and Malcom Gladwell's Outliers. An abridged version of the reading covered with most of the good stuff in it is here: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jwp2/sisyphus.htm (http://www.humboldt.edu/~jwp2/sisyphus.htm).  An unabridged version of "An Absurd Reasoning" is here:  http://www.scribd.com/doc/3223928/Albert-Camus-The-Myth-Of-Sisyphus (http://www.scribd.com/doc/3223928/Albert-Camus-The-Myth-Of-Sisyphus). End song: "My Friends" by Mark Lint and the Simulacra (http://marklint.com) (2000). Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin yes 1:37:18 http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2009/06/22/episode-4-camus-and-the-absurd/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThePartiallyExaminedLife/~3/8mgpYVIURuk/ http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2009/06/07/episode-3-hobbess-leviathan-the-social-contract/#comments Sun, 07 Jun 2009 06:51:39 +0000 mark@marklint.com (Mark Linsenmayer) http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/?p=56 Discussing Hobbes’s Leviathan, Chapters 13-15.

Have we implicitly signed a social contract whereby our native right to punch other people in the face is given to the President? Hobbes does things that eventually result in the U.S. Constitution and makes Wes nauseous. Plus: Star Trek and the Bible!

You can get the reading from http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-c.html

End song: “The Villa” by Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio (1998).

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!

To increase your enjoyment, download and read Descartes Meditations 1 and 2.

Here, also, is the Descartes chunk of Philosophy and the Matrix that Seth refers to.

End song: “Axiomatic” by New People (2009)

Incidentally, the “celibacy society” that Seth refers to at one point in here has a T-shirt.

This reading is all about how Socrates is on trial for acting like an ass and proceeds to act like an ass and so is convicted. Big surprise. On this our inaugural discussion, Mark, Seth, and Wes talk about how philosophers are arrogant bastards who neglect their children, how people of all political stripes don’t usually examine their fundamental beliefs (but probably should), why it might be better to know you know nothing than to only think that you know nothing, and how Plato was a super genius all of whose texts you should worship uncritically. Plus : podcaster philosophical origin stories, like when Wes was bitten by a radioactive Anaxagoras.

To increase your enjoyment, download and read Plato’s Apology.