Category: The Examined Life
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Belief and temperament
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: Over a century ago, the American philosopher and psychologist William James argued in his book Pragmatism that what he called “the present dilemma in philosophy” is that philosophers may not be as objective as they have long claimed to be. The ideal of rational inquiry has long been, particularly since the enlightenment, that we must…
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The banality of evil
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: The second chapter of Leo Tolstoy’s short story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” begins with the following sentence: “Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” I first read this story as a teenager and I can remember being more than a little struck by it; what…
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How do you become a philosopher?
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: It’s customary for people in my profession to answer this question in the following way: you become a philosopher by earning usually three degrees in philosophy from the best universities you can get into and for which you can afford the tuition; when you complete your Ph.D., you’re a philosopher and you have a license to “do” philosophy. This answer is a…
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The search for meaning
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: One of the questions that first attracted me to philosophy when I was a teenager is the perennial problem of the meaning of life. The search for meaning drove me to read widely in academic and popular philosophy, psychology, religion, and literature, and was implicit also to a great deal of the music…
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25 Rules For Life
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: I’ve always made it a point to listen to anyone who dispenses advice on how to live, whoever they are. Anything from ancient moral philosophy to clickbait headlines that read something like “Top ten habits of highly successful people”—all of it gets my attention. There’s always something to learn from this sort of…
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The individual against the mass
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: If you’re anything like me, when you see a large mass of humanity going in one direction your instinct is to go another way. I can’t say what this instinct is exactly, where it comes from, or why it has the force that it does, only that it’s deeply rooted and speaks with…
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Rural Royalty
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: On your next day off consider getting in your car and driving far out of the city and deep into the countryside. You’ll find some interesting things there. Some of them are funny and some are not. I do this often. It’s not hard for me because I already live outside of a…
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Philosophy As A Way of Life
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: When you see a philosopher staring out a window, they’re not daydreaming. They’re working. A philosopher is always working. We don’t keep regular hours. We don’t clock in and clock out, and we don’t take vacations. Well, we might, but we’re working then too. Philosophy understood not as a branch of the academic profession…
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Adversity IV: Flee The Cities, Work From Home
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: How will COVID-19 change our society, not only in the months ahead but over the longer term? Many are offering predictions about how our lifestyles might change as a result of the pandemic, all of it speculative and much of it dubious but some of it probably well-founded. I’m going to offer a…
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The Art of Living in Questionable Times
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: One of the oldest and most central questions of philosophy is, how should we live? What is the good life for human beings? Another has to do with understanding the times: what is the spirit of the times today? How do things stand, how did we get here, and where might or should…
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