44: Cartesian Dualism

44: Cartesian Dualism

In this episode, I'm reading a chapter of my book, Unconscious Correspondences. I considered an episode on Cartesian Dualism, but realized I'd already said everything I needed to say, in a chapter in this book. Rather than repurposing the same content into a new form, why not just read directly from the book? As Nietzsche tended to do when introducing his own earlier works, I shall do the same. I will introduce this essay: "Body and Mind: The Life and Meditations of Rene Descartes - A Polemic" with, "An attempt at self-criticism".

This essay has its flaws, and belabors the point a bit too stringently at places. In retrospect, I made some very overgeneralized claims about academia and modern attitudes towards Descartes that one could easily challenge. I should also say that these claims derived from personal experience with my own professors, and the professors of many of my friends. Descartes was always taught as being "basically a secret atheist who didn't believe the religious stuff at all and included it just to please the church." Not only did one of my own professors say some version of this, I heard this from others, attending different universities. This always struck me as odd, because the central premises of his Meditations on First Philosophy are completely derived from Christian presuppositions, which are simply taken from theology and put into philosophical language. Thus, I challenged: whether Descartes was truly a departure from past philosophy (Plato, of course, sets up figures to raise assertions and Socrates to raise skeptical objections/doubts); whether Descartes was actually an atheist or a deist (or whether we could understand him within the assumption he was a Christian, perhaps a Rosicrucian); whether our own interpretations of Descartes have to do with our embrace of the "mind as self" ego-consciousness (thus leading us to be confused and embarrassed by Descartes' invocation of God as the ultimate certainty). While I wrote in a way that was somewhat clumsy in my eyes now, and while I may have spent too much time in a detour talking about the background historical context in which Descartes emerged, I feel these challenges are raised in a forceful and meaningful enough way to be useful for people to think about. https://app.thebookpatch.com/BookStore/unconscious-correspondences/3fe82dc3-d4ac-4d61-81c3-9ce9a7abe483

Jaksot(229)

117: Max Horkheimer & Theodore Adorno - Dialectic of Enlightenment, Part 1

117: Max Horkheimer & Theodore Adorno - Dialectic of Enlightenment, Part 1

Foundations of Critical Theory, and an exploration of the chapters, "The Concept of Enlightenment", "The Culture Industry". We analyze how myth and enlightenment both contain one another, and why enlightenment negates itself. We explore what this means in concrete terms by examining the culture industry and how the apparent democratization of culture leads to its dissolution. Part one of two.

15 Heinä 2h 3min

Special Episode: Nietzsche Podcast Reading Guide

Special Episode: Nietzsche Podcast Reading Guide

Don't worry, we're still doing Dialectic of Enlightenment next week, but my tour schedule and personal demands on my time (I'm moving) prevented me from finishing a full episode before departing for another week. Thankfully, I had this reading guide finished and decided to release it now. Back next week with a full length episode. Cheers!

8 Heinä 16min

116: Nietzsche’s Inaugural Address - Homer & Classical Philology

116: Nietzsche’s Inaugural Address - Homer & Classical Philology

Nietzsche's inaugural lecture at Basel, given in 1869, provides an insight into the young Nietzsche's mind. Surprisingly, even here we find the groundwork laid for his later philosophical project. Nietzsche takes on the issue, rather esoteric and focused on the internal debates of classical philology, of whether or not Homer really existed, and what this means the discipline of philology if he did not exist.

1 Heinä 1h 33min

Untimely Reflections #36: Tony of 1Dime - The Neoliberal Zeitgeist

Untimely Reflections #36: Tony of 1Dime - The Neoliberal Zeitgeist

I met up with Tony of 1Dime to discuss the neoliberal moment in American culture. We discuss what neoliberalism means, why there is a general discontent with it, the advantages of neoliberalism, and the potential of a vision for a future beyond neoliberalism as it inevitably comes to an end. We also psychologically analyze the left and the right from the Nietzschean standpoint, consider how many of the alternatives are magical thinking, and finally discuss the history of revolutionary movements and how they always have to draw upon the past.

24 Kesä 2h 1min

115: Martin Heidegger, pt 3 - Will to Power as Knowledge & Metaphysics

115: Martin Heidegger, pt 3 - Will to Power as Knowledge & Metaphysics

Finally, we reach the conclusion of our exploration of Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche. This time we consider another lecture on will to power, from Volume II of Heidegger's collected lectures on Nietzsche, in which will to power is considered instead as a framework for knowledge, and the principle of a new valuation.

17 Kesä 1h 51min

114: Martin Heidegger, pt 2 - The Will to Power as Art

114: Martin Heidegger, pt 2 - The Will to Power as Art

Continuing with Heidegger, we consider his first lecture on Nietzsche, "The Will to Power as Art", in which Heidegger gives an unorthodox but very enlightening reading of will to power, then hinges the second half of his argument on a passage where Nietzsche describes art as will to power's most perspicuous manifestation.

10 Kesä 1h 34min

113: Martin Heidegger, part 1 - On Nietzsche & Dasein

113: Martin Heidegger, part 1 - On Nietzsche & Dasein

In this episode, we begin a three-part series on Martin Heidegger and his reading of Nietzsche. The episode begins with a discussion of the background of Heidegger's life and ideas, as well as a brief tour of the content of Being & Time in which we look at Dasein, temporality, care, being-towards-death among other core concepts. In the latter half of the episode, we turn towards an introductory discussion of how Heidegger sees Nietzsche & his place within the Western philosophical tradition, as well as his comments about the necessity of the interrelation between will to power and the eternal return.

3 Kesä 1h 58min

Untimely Reflections #35: Uberboyo - Politics as Neuro-Physiology

Untimely Reflections #35: Uberboyo - Politics as Neuro-Physiology

An Irishman named Stef visited Austin recently. We met for a discussion about the revaluation of values, strange brain experiments with magnets, Gnosticism and its relation to the politics of castration, the brain's threat detection matrix as creating the "hard times strong men" cycle, the possibility of neuro-physiological centrism, and how this all relates to Dionysus v/s the Crucified.

27 Touko 1h 53min

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