Closereads: Philosophy with Mark and Wes
Reading through difficult philosophy texts line-by-line to try to figure out what’s really being said.
Episodes
October 30, 2025 • 65 mins
From Disputed Questions in De Anima (1269) as presented in Thomas Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings (Oxford 1993), "Passage 18: Soul in Human Beings."
The question is how Aquinas, as an Aristotelian who therefore thinks the mind is the form of the body, can agree with the Christian doctrine that the soul exists after death. The answer is surprisingly weird: The body-less soul is incomplete, so we'd need to have the end-of-t...
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October 16, 2025 • 62 mins
On Leviathan (1651), ch. 21, "On the Liberty of Subjects." Thomas Hobbes is known for defending absolute monarchy, so as you'd predict, he's not going to say we have a lot of "natural" liberties.
We do always have the right to self-defense, but that doesn't mean that the sovereign can't with complete justice command you executed (even if you're innocent). Yet Hobbes wants to say that even under a repressive regime we all have lots...
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October 9, 2025 • 69 mins
On Aristotle's Physics, book 2, ch. 8 on "final causation," i.e. purposiveness as a natural explanation. Modern science doesn't much like this kind of explanation, but Aristotle found it essential, and here's his argument for it.
Read along with us.
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September 18, 2025 • 63 mins
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...
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September 8, 2025 • 58 mins
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 tak...
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August 22, 2025 • 56 mins
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.
Learn more ab...
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July 22, 2025 • 62 mins
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...
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July 2, 2025 • 58 mins
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 ...
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June 19, 2025 • 60 mins
On Derek Parfit's "Prudence, Morality, and the Prisoner's Dilemma" (1978). What is a "prisoner's dilemma" and what is its relevance to ethics? In general, it's better for me if I break norms so long as others in general follow them, but if we all try to be free riders in this way, then no one gets to ride at all. Parfit considers variations of this situation and lays out legislative and ideological/psychological strategies for addr...
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June 5, 2025 • 57 mins
On Spinoza's Ethics, Third Part, "Concerning the Origin and Nature of the Emotions."
We want to see how emotions ground ethics, but first, we have to explain what emotions are, which means explaining how mind and body (and causality) work together on Spinoza's account. A passion is being affected by something that we don't understand, whereas reason (which will yield ethical behavior) involves grasping a cause clearly and distinct...
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May 29, 2025 • 67 mins
On "Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values" (1916), Ch. 6 "Formalism and Person," sec. 3, "Person and Act."
While you may want to listen to part one, we're more or less starting fresh, as parts one and two (the latter only available to paying supporters at patreon.com/closereadsphilosophy), were mostly about how Scheler rejects Kant's idea of the transcendental ego. We're skipping several pages here to start with sect...
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May 5, 2025 • 61 mins
We discuss "On the Problem of Empathy," ch. 4 "Empathy as the Comprehension of Mental Persons," starting with section 2, "The Mental Subject" and into section 3, "The Constitution of the Person in Emotional Experiences."
We're trying to figure out what these early 20th century German phenomenologists think a "person" is as someone we're able to empathize or sympathize with and which is morally worthy of respect. Stein does this by...
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April 16, 2025 • 59 mins
On Ch. 6 "Formalism and Person," in Max Scheler's most famous work, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (1916). Ethical Formalism is Kant: What makes something ethically correct is just something about the type of act and willing involved. Non-formalism pays attention to the content, e.g. our sentiments (a la Hume).
As we've been studying on The Partially Examined Life, phenomenologists starting with Brentano sough...
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April 2, 2025 • 64 mins
On The Basis of Morality (1840), Part III: "The Founding of Ethics," Ch. 5: "Statement and Proof of the Only True Moral Incentive."
Everything up to this point in the book has been negative: Morality can't be founded on pure reason as Kant thinks, or on the idea of the good life (eudaimonia) per Aristotle. Schopenhauer tells us that all actions are motivated by someone's "weal" or "woe." We are naturally self-interested (motivated...
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March 24, 2025 • 66 mins
On Edmund Husserl’s Ideas, Vol. 2 (1928), Section 3, “The Constitution of the Spiritual World,” Ch. 1, “Opposition Between the Naturalistic and Personalistic Worlds."
Given Husserl’s method of “reduction” whereby he sets aside the metaphysical status of objects in the natural world (are they mind-independent or merely ideas?), we wanted to see how he accounts for our ability to directly perceive other people’s minds. We don’t just...
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February 18, 2025 • 70 mins
Mark and Wes read through and discuss the beginning of Felix Guattari's "Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist" (1973). Guattari was a Lacanian psychotherapist, and he argues for explaining fascist tendencies via a "micropolitics of desire," i.e. looking at the individual psychology of fascism instead of merely focusing on sociological, material causes of the rise of fascism.
Read along with us.
You can choose to watch this on video.
...
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January 28, 2025 • 63 mins
Mark and Wes read through and discuss Karl Marx's "The German Ideology" (1846), delving deep into the middle of his critique of Max Stirner's "The Ego and Its Own" (recently covered on The Partially Examined Life ep. 358). Marx articulates and criticizes Stirner's attempt to distinguish the mere common egoism of an unthinking person from the enlightened egoism that Stirner is recommending.
Read along with us, starting on p. 259 (P...
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December 29, 2024 • 67 mins
Mark and Wes read through and discuss Edmund Husserl's Ideas (1913), ch. 1, "Matter of Fact and Essence" in First Book, "General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology," Part One, "Essence and Eidetic Cognition."
This is the book that basically designed phenomenology as a movement, and this part of the reading lays some groundwork by describing what these "essences" that phenomenology studies are, and how they differ from matters of ...
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December 6, 2024 • 59 mins
We're discussing John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic (1843), specifically from Book III, "Of Induction," ch. 8, "Of the Four Methods of Experimental Inquiry." What is induction, and why is it part of logic? Science doesn't just observe regularities, but tries to isolate what is connected with what through a combination of experiments and observations.
Read along with us, starting on p. 278, i.e. PDF p. 284.
To get future parts, su...
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November 14, 2024 • 66 mins
We continue reading Part One of Being and Nothingness, with ch. 2, "Negations." We get some context and then jump into the classic question of whether existence in itself is just pure being, such that nothingness is just a result of human judgments on it, or whether nothingness is something objective that we grasp. We end by introducing the famous "absent Pierre in the café" example.
Read along with us, starting on p. 36, i.e. PDF ...
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