The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast Partially Examined Life

On selections from the Enneads (270 C.E.), as presented by Elmer O'Brien as the first four essays in The Essential Plotinus: "Beauty," "The Intelligence, Ideas and Being," "The Descent of the Soul," and "The Good or The One." Featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, Seth, and guest Chris Sunami.
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We're concluding our treatment of the Daoist sage, focusing on the relation between metaphysics and ethics. Is a "wu wei" (non-action) philosophy compatible with fighting for justice? Does it even necessitate kindness?
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Listen to Mark's new band, including the ending song to this episode, "I Insist," at marklint.bandcamp.com.

Mark, Lawrence, Sarahlyn and Al discuss the new Amazon TV show based on on the video game series that launched in 1997. How does one best adapt a sandbox game? How dark is too dark for comedy? We talk world-building and exposition dumps, narrative structure and character revelation, and morality in a ruined world.
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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 attributed to a tradition initiated by Descartes).

Read along with us (starting on p. 60): https://monoskop.org/images/f/f9/The_Levinas_Reader_1989.pdf

For more about Levinas, you can listen to PEL eps. 145 and 146, plus ep. 71 on Buber.

This is the first of at least three Closereads episodes going through this text. You can hear them all by signing up to support Closereads at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy. Sign up for the public Closereads feed at closereadsphilosophy.com, and please leave Closereads a nice rating and review on Apple Podcasts if you like the show.

More on the Zhuangzi, books 1-6 and 17-19 with guest Theo Brooks.
We discuss epistemology (Can we know the mind of someone else? How can virtue make truth more accessible?), metaphysics (Is the world constantly changing such that we can't actually refer to anything? Does each thing somehow contain its opposite in virtue of being defined by its contrast with all that it is not?), and ethics (What constitutes the Utmost Person, i.e. the sage?).
Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion.
Learn about our new book at partiallyexaminedlife.com/book.

Kim has recorded about ten meticulously recorded country-evolving-to Americana albums out of Nashville since 1995. We discuss "Joy Rider" (and listen at the end to "Floating on the Surface") from Every New Beginning (2024), "A Place Called Home" from Rise (2002), and "I’m Alright" from Bitter Sweet (1997), which is also the home of the intro, "Every River." More at kimrichey.com.
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