Closereads: Philosophy with Mark and Wes

On "The Concept of Enlightenment" (1944), the first essay in this Frankfurt School book of critical theory, The Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Our authors lay out what they take The Enlightenment to consist of, including some quotes from Francis Bacon, and some ultimately fatal tensions within it that make it no longer serve the humanistic purposes it was created for.

Read along with us on PDF p. 22.

You can choose to watch this on video.

To get future parts, subscribe at ⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy⁠⁠⁠.

On "The Concept of Enlightenment" (1944), the first essay in this Frankfurt School book of critical theory, The Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Our authors lay out what they take The Enlightenment to consist of, including some quotes from Francis Bacon, and some ultimately fatal tensions within it that make it no longer serve the humanistic purposes it was created for.

Read along with us on PDF p. 22.

You can choose to watch this on video.

To get future parts, subscribe at ⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy⁠⁠⁠.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discussing the section on Stoicism in Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit," which is under "Freedom of Self-Consciousness," "Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness."

This comes right after his famous lordship and bondage chapter, and explains how in reaction to being defined by the gaze of another person, we assert our independence, but in an immature and ultimately unsustainable way. So this is not a very charitable take on Stoicism; he's just focusing on this assertion of freedom that's at the heart of the philosophy, and you can think yourself about the degree to which this pollutes more thoughtful, developed versions.

Follow along with us.

You can choose to watch this on video.

To get future parts, subscribe at ⁠⁠patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy⁠⁠.

Discussing the section on Stoicism in Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit," which is under "Freedom of Self-Consciousness," "Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness."

This comes right after his famous lordship and bondage chapter, and explains how in reaction to being defined by the gaze of another person, we assert our independence, but in an immature and ultimately unsustainable way. So this is not a very charitable take on Stoicism; he's just focusing on this assertion of freedom that's at the heart of the philosophy, and you can think yourself about the degree to which this pollutes more thoughtful, developed versions.

Follow along with us.

You can choose to watch this on video.

To get future parts, subscribe at ⁠⁠patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy⁠⁠.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Concluding our treatment of Peter Railton's "Moral Realism" (1984).

This is our eighth discussion of this reading, but don't worry if you haven't listened to the paywalled parts. This discussion can serve as a standalone summary of not only Railton's view, but of our efforts to actually figure out what a plausible naturalistic, empirical account of ethics could amount to.

Read along with us, starting on PDF p. 42.

Get all of the parts of our treatment of this at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy.

Concluding our treatment of Peter Railton's "Moral Realism" (1984).

This is our eighth discussion of this reading, but don't worry if you haven't listened to the paywalled parts. This discussion can serve as a standalone summary of not only Railton's view, but of our efforts to actually figure out what a plausible naturalistic, empirical account of ethics could amount to.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What? Part Four? Yes, we're jumping back into a 1984 paper that we began a couple of years ago in light of our recent PEL activity on contemporary ethics. You should be fine just starting here, but all three previous parts have been made public on our Patreon page, which is where you'll eventually find parts 5, 6, and possibly more.

So far, Railton has been giving us an account of our objective individual interests: What you would want for your current you if you had all the relevant knowledge. He had given an example of a dehydrated person who wants and enjoys milk, even though milk does not help with dehydration in the way that water does. If he had the relevant knowledge, he would water. More precisely, he would want his current self in the state of dehydration to want water, because who knows what such an all-knowing person would even be like or what his wants for himself would be?

We're still picking at the complexities of this as we resume progress in this essay; it's not until the end of this hour that we can even predict where he's going in terms of setting up actual morality, beyond mere objective self-interest.

Read along with us, starting on PDF p. 15.

Get all parts of this reading at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy.

What? Part Four? Yes, we're jumping back into a 1984 paper that we began a couple of years ago in light of our recent PEL activity on contemporary ethics. You should be fine just starting here, but all three previous parts have been made public on our Patreon page, which is where you'll eventually find parts 5, 6, and possibly more.

So far, Railton has been giving us an account of our objective individual interests: What you would want for your current you if you had all the relevant knowledge. He had given an example of a dehydrated person who wants and enjoys milk, even though milk does not help with dehydration in the way that water does. If he had the relevant knowledge, he would water. More precisely, he would want his current self in the state of dehydration to want water, because who knows what such an all-knowing person would even be like or what his wants for himself would be?

We're still picking at the complexities of this as we resume progress in this essay; it's not until the end of this hour that we can even predict where he's going in terms of setting up actual morality, beyond mere objective self-interest.

Read along with us, starting on PDF p. 15.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" (1912). Prichard claims that we feel certain actions to be obligatory, and that we have no justification for doubting those raw intuitions. The situation, he claims, is comparable to epistemology: We have no grounds for doubting globally a la Descartes, but only in particular circumstances where science demands we should go back and check again, but more carefully.

Likewise, we can be wrong about particular moral judgments, but the process of refining them is just to put ourselves (really or imaginatively) in the ethical situation and gauge the intuitions more carefully. So the only legitimate task of moral philosophy is to establish that global doubt is not warranted, and to get us to observe our intuitions more carefully and discuss them with others.

Read along with us.

You can choose to watch this on video⁠. To get future parts, subscribe at ⁠patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy⁠.

On "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" (1912). Prichard claims that we feel certain actions to be obligatory, and that we have no justification for doubting those raw intuitions. The situation, he claims, is comparable to epistemology: We have no grounds for doubting globally a la Descartes, but only in particular circumstances where science demands we should go back and check again, but more carefully.

Likewise, we can be wrong about particular moral judgments, but the process of refining them is just to put ourselves (really or imaginatively) in the ethical situation and gauge the intuitions more carefully. So the only legitimate task of moral philosophy is to establish that global doubt is not warranted, and to get us to observe our intuitions more carefully and discuss them with others.

Read along with us.

You can choose to watch this on video⁠.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices