The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

With Emily Wilson

Homer's Odyssey continues with translator Emily Wilson, examining the oikos or estate built on violence, its link to xenia or hospitality that forges military alliances, plus status distinctions and the role of the gods.

With Emily Wilson

Homer's Odyssey, an epic poem from around 750 BC, is discussed with translator Emily Wilson, whose eighty-page introduction frames hospitality as a political tool while the episode asks whether that story teaches anything about ethics.

With John Castro

Friedrich Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy argues that ancient Greek tragedy achieved a perfect synthesis of the formal and orderly with the intuitive and chaotic, a civilization's vitality shown by its art, until Socrates ruined it, with guest John Castro.

With Mark Lint, Philosophy Bro

With Adam Rose

Plato's Phaedrus has Socrates and his friend Phaedrus discuss Platonic love in the countryside, where Socrates critiques a speech by the orator Lysias claiming that love is harmful, then delivers a myth about the spiritual benefits of loving.

With Ana Sandoiu

Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics closes with books eight through ten on friendship, asking with guest Ana Sandoiu what friendship has to do with living an ethical life.

Aristotle's De Anima or On the Soul, from around 350 BCE, turns in book three to the intellect's highest part, nous, a form of forms that is literally nothing until it thinks and survives death as a universal mind.

Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, from around 350 BCE, covers books six and seven, distinguishing several faculties of intelligence to explain Plato's puzzle of how a person can see the good clearly yet fail to pursue it.

With Lucy Lawless, Paul Provenza

Sophocles's Antigone, an ancient Greek tragedy, gets a philosophical discussion alongside a performance PEL also did with Lucy Lawless and Paul Provenza.

Aristotle's De Anima or On the Soul, from around 350 BCE, opens with books one and two, defining life as the first actuality of a natural body with organs, so bodies express their nature only when growing and reproducing.

Plato's Sophist has a character called the Eleatic Stranger, not Socrates, use a method of division to work out what a sophist really is, after describing sophists as teachers of philosophy and rhetoric in Ancient Greece.

The fifth episode discusses Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, Books I and II, the only part of that text this episode takes up.

With Lucy Lawless, Paul Provenza

An unrehearsed, fun read-through of the Greek tragedy from 441 BCE with Lucy Lawless and Paul Provenza, plus some discussion with the cast of Greek drama and of the selected translation.

With Lucy Lawless, Emily Perkins, Erica Spyres

With Walter Bobbie, Bill Youmans

Broadway performers Walter Bobbie and Bill Youmans perform Plato's Crito, where Socrates awaits execution and decides against escaping the city, since that would be ungrateful to the city whose benefits he has enjoyed.

Plato's Apology gets discussed under the claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, asking whether studying philosophy actually makes a person better.

Plato's Parmenides asks whether forms exist for every adjective, whether a form of a property itself has that property, how Forms connect to particulars, and how mortals can relate to Forms at all.

Plato's Protagoras continues as Socrates argues that Protagoras does not really know what virtue is, since he treats courage and the other virtues as distinct, a claim Socrates refutes in several suspect ways.

With Lucy Lawless, Emily Perkins

Discussion of Aristophanes's Lysistrata concludes with Lucy Lawless and Emily Perkins, asking whether Lysistrata's victory shows a feminine spirit rising over warlike values, and how that connects to women's struggles for power today.

With Peter Adamson

Parmenides's fragments, known as On Nature from around 475 BCE, are discussed with guest Peter Adamson of the History of Philosophy without Any Gaps podcast, presenting the Way of Truth that only Being exists and talking of Non-Being is nonsense.

Aristotle's Categories, from around 350 BCE, tries to describe every type of entity that exists, focusing on substance and asking how quality, quantity, and relative categories depend on substances actually existing.

Aristotle's Poetics continues on plot structure, where every element must be essential, the moral status of heroes, Homeric poetry, the difference between tragedy and history, and whether his formula still applies to modern media.

More of Epicurus's ethical fragments are considered alongside Martha Nussbaum and Tim O'Keefe, asking what a purely therapeutic philosophy would consist of, and whether philosophy as pursuit of pleasure means giving up political action and other substantial goals.

Plato's characters plan the laws for a new state called Magnesia, starting in Book 4, covering marriage rules, a nocturnal council, and the argument that everyone has to believe in gods.

Aristotle's Metaphysics, still in book four or Gamma, relates the logical and metaphysical versions of non-contradiction, and explains how Aristotle brands relativists such as Protagoras as violators of that same principle.

Aristotle's Rhetoric, from around 335 BCE, argues against Plato that persuasion can and should be used for good in law courts, political debates, and public speeches, and it names enthymemes as the argument forms rhetoric relies on.

Aristotle's Metaphysics, book four or Gamma from around 340 BCE, claims that studying being means treating beings as distinct individuals and not an undifferentiated flux, subject to non-contradiction, which Aristotle defends against objectors.

Jonathan Lear's Open Minded essays connect Plato's Republic and Symposium to psychoanalysis, comparing Socrates' questioning to psychotherapy and asking whether Plato's analogy between mind and state in the Republic truly holds.

With Peter Adamson

Parmenides and guest Peter Adamson reach fragment eight, arguing that Being must be singular and eternal since the notion of Non-Being is nonsense, then ask how individuals could question this at all, and whether the Way of Seeming explains appearances.

Aristotle's Rhetoric finishes on enthymemes, maxims, and signs, then turns to emotions and anger, asking whether anger always tracks a status injury or whether frustration is just as foundational a cause.

Aristotle's Poetics, from around 335 BCE, gives a formula for what moves an audience, drawn from Sophocles's tragedies, describing tragedy as an imitation of human action that reveals what it is to be human.

With Lucy Lawless, Emily Perkins

Actresses Lucy Lawless and Emily Perkins rejoin to discuss Aristophanes's bawdy play Lysistrata, drawing on Jeffery Henderson's introduction to his 1988 translation and readings including Sexual Humor and Harmony in Lysistrata by Jay Semel.

Plato's Laws argues that a just state's laws should aim at making people virtuous, with each law preceded by a rational prelude persuading people to obey it.

Epicurus's ethical fragments, including the Letter to Menoceus and the Principal Doctrines, are read alongside Tim O'Keefe's Epicureanism, asking how a person should act once nature is understood as atoms bouncing and swerving in the void.

Aristotle's Metaphysics opens with book one or Alpha, from around 340 BCE, asking what counts as a basic explanation of the universe, arguing that practical knowledge alone is not enough without theoretical wisdom.

Plato's Cratylus continues on language, asking whether naming resembles a craft such as carpentry or sewing that can go wrong, and whether a name's letters can capture what it names, with Socrates offering examples.

Plato's Parmenides, from around 350 BCE, asks whether properties are real in the world or only in the mind, and uses Parmenides talking to a young Socrates to raise objections that seem aimed at Plato's own theory.

Aristotle's Metaphysics, in books nine and twelve, contrasts being-at-work or actuality against mere potency, then presents his famous argument for the existence of God.

Aristotle's Metaphysics turns to Book seven, called Zeta, asking what type of being is the chief reason anything counts as being, and answers that it is the substantial form present in an individual animal or plant.

Plato's Cratylus, a mid-period dialogue from around 388 BCE, has Socrates argue that words represent what they name, so etymology can teach philosophical truths, before he seemingly reverses his own position.

Aristotle's Metaphysics, still in Book seven or Zeta, argues against Plato that some changing, visible substances do have forms, inherited the way a child receives a form from its parents.

Aristotle's Metaphysics closes potency by taking up the Meno problem of potential learning, arguing that actuality has priority over potential, and that an Unmoved Mover motivates all primary beings to strive toward full actualization.

Aristotle's Metaphysics, still in book one, works through his four types of causation and argues earlier philosophers erred by leaving out one or most of them, then critiques Platonic forms as unable to explain change.

Plato's Phaedo, a middle dialogue from 390 BCE, depicts the death of Socrates, asking whether philosophers should fear death, and builds arguments for the soul's immortality that expand the Meno's recollection theory into Plato's first full account of Forms.

Plato's Timaeus, a late dialogue from around 360 BCE, has the character Timaeus give a likely story about the universe, physics, and biology, describing a Craftsman who built everything on the model of the Forms.