Closereads: Philosophy with Mark and Wes

We discuss "On the Problem of Empathy," ch. 4 "Empathy as the Comprehension of Mental Persons," starting with section 2, "The Mental Subject" and into section 3, "The Constitution of the Person in Emotional Experiences." We're trying to figure out what these early 20th century German phenomenologists think a "person" is as someone we're able to empathize or sympathize with and which is morally wor...

On Ch. 6 "Formalism and Person," in Max Scheler's most famous work, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (1916). Ethical Formalism is Kant: What makes something ethically correct is just something about the type of act and willing involved. Non-formalism pays attention to the content, e.g. our sentiments (a la Hume). As we've been studying on The Partially Examined Life, phenomenolo...

On The Basis of Morality (1840), Part III: "The Founding of Ethics," Ch. 5: "Statement and Proof of the Only True Moral Incentive." Everything up to this point in the book has been negative: Morality can't be founded on pure reason as Kant thinks, or on the idea of the good life (eudaimonia) per Aristotle. Schopenhauer tells us that all actions are motivated by someone's "weal" or "woe." We are na...

On Edmund Husserl’s Ideas, Vol. 2 (1928), Section 3, “The Constitution of the Spiritual World,” Ch. 1, “Opposition Between the Naturalistic and Personalistic Worlds." Given Husserl’s method of “reduction” whereby he sets aside the metaphysical status of objects in the natural world (are they mind-independent or merely ideas?), we wanted to see how he accounts for our ability to directly perceive o...

Mark and Wes read through and discuss the beginning of Felix Guattari's "Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist" (1973). Guattari was a Lacanian psychotherapist, and he argues for explaining fascist tendencies via a "micropolitics of desire," i.e. looking at the individual psychology of fascism instead of merely focusing on sociological, material causes of the rise of fascism. Read along with us. You can...

Mark and Wes read through and discuss Karl Marx's "The German Ideology" (1846), delving deep into the middle of his critique of Max Stirner's "The Ego and Its Own" (recently covered on The Partially Examined Life ep. 358). Marx articulates and criticizes Stirner's attempt to distinguish the mere common egoism of an unthinking person from the enlightened egoism that Stirner is recommending. Read al...

Mark and Wes read through and discuss Edmund Husserl's Ideas (1913), ch. 1, "Matter of Fact and Essence" in First Book, "General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology," Part One, "Essence and Eidetic Cognition." This is the book that basically designed phenomenology as a movement, and this part of the reading lays some groundwork by describing what these "essences" that phenomenology studies are, a...

We're discussing John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic (1843), specifically from Book III, "Of Induction," ch. 8, "Of the Four Methods of Experimental Inquiry." What is induction, and why is it part of logic? Science doesn't just observe regularities, but tries to isolate what is connected with what through a combination of experiments and observations. Read along with us, starting on p. 278, i.e....

We continue reading Part One of Being and Nothingness, with ch. 2, "Negations." We get some context and then jump into the classic question of whether existence in itself is just pure being, such that nothingness is just a result of human judgments on it, or whether nothingness is something objective that we grasp. We end by introducing the famous "absent Pierre in the café" example. Read along wi...

We skip the introduction of Being and Nothingness (1943) and start with Part One, "The Problem of Nothingness," Ch. 1, "The Origin of Negation." Read along with us, starting on p. 33, i.e. PDF p. 84. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We begin Bradley's argument for idealism: The world as we perceive it is appearance, not reality. In ch. 1, "Primary and Secondary Qualities," we see him give Locke's arguments for the distinction and Berkeley's response that both alike are in the mind, not the world. We try to make sense of this given our recent reading for The Partially Examined Life of Thomas Reid, who argued for realism agains...

Bradley was a prominent British Hegelian, best known now for being the springboard for Bertrand Russell, who was initially a follower but then rejected idealism entirely to co-create what is now known as analytic philosophy. Today we read just the Introduction to this massive 1893 tome, where Bradley argues that metaphysics is possible and worthwhile. Read along with us, starting on PDF p. 5. Lear...

We move from the discussion of the four types of causes, to "disclosure," to an environmental critique. Read along with us starting on p. 10. To get parts 3-5, subscribe at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is technology, REALLY? People think of it as neutral, as something that can be used for good or misused, but what is it really to be a TOOL in such a way? Heidegger analyzes causality itself, arguing that our modern emphasis on the mechanical (efficient) cause of something is impoverished as compared to Aristotle's. Read along with us starting on PDF p. 38: (p. 4 in the text). Learn more abou...

On "The Varieties of Religious Experience," the conclusion of lecture 15. Why do some saintly types engage in ascetic practices like voluntary poverty? James thinks we could all do with some self-discipline of this sort, as extreme as the examples of literary saints may be. Self-denial is a less destructive way of expressing a martial character than actually going to war. Read along with us, start...

On "The Intelligence, The Ideas, and Being," starting on section 6. What is "The Intelligence" anyway? How does its storehouse of Forms get into the material world? Read along with us, starting on p. 51. To get part 3, subscribe at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On "The Intelligence, The Ideas, and Being" from the Enneads (270 C.E.), about the various elements of Neo-Platonist cosmology: You've got The One, which is so awesome that it has literally no properties (so you can't even say it's awesome), then The Intelligence, which is the repository of the Forms (these first two together serve the same function as Aristotle's Unmoved Mover), then The Soul (th...

We begin a long series on Maurice Merleau Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" (1945), focusing on Part I, "The Body": "Experience and Objective Thought." M-P talks first about what seeing an object (like a house) in the world involves. It pre-supposes a relation to us as perceivers, which involves our situatedness in a body. Yet when we make our own body into an objective object in space and tim...

Continuing on "Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge," with the "Experience and Meeting" section, whereby we try to make sense of the theory that the self is metaphysically a relation to other people. How does a model of philosophy based on the cogito (first person perception) necessarily objectify other people? How does speaking "to" someone provide a break from this intentional (objectifying)...

We read the first pages of Emmanuel Levinas' 1958 article, "Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge." In these initial sections, subtitled "The Problem of Truth" and "From the Object to Being," he's recounting how Heideggerian phenomenology argued that being (including our unarticulated awareness of being) is more fundamental than knowledge (a verbalized, objectifying attitude toward the world at...

We discuss the fact-value distinction, both with regard to ethics but also epistemology, i.e. how the search for facts depends on what we're looking for. Read along with us, starting on p. 6. To get part 3, subscribe at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're reading a 1984 essay by Mark's U. of Michigan undergrad advisor, included among the most cited philosophy papers in some list that Wes found. Railton's goal is to give a naturalistic account of ethics (i.e. ethics within a framework of natural science) that both connects tightly to observed empirical facts and also makes moral facts real parts of our world, not merely reducible to non-moral...

Continuing on this text about the mechanics of how mind and body work together. Is this schematically useful or hopelessly archaic? You decide! Read along with us, starting at article 22. To get parts 3 and 4, subscribe at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're reading the final text by René Descartes, published in 1649, about how mind and body relate to each other. Read along with us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Continuing on "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1969), we finish up the negative conception ("freedom from") and give Berlin's strange account of positive freedom ("freedom to"), which involves an identification of some part of you (e.g. for Plato, your rationality), the obeying of which makes you free, even if what you "want" goes against this. Read along with us, starting on p. 20. To get parts 3 and 4...