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
May 20, 2026 • 60 mins
We read part of The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), specifically the parts about Homer's epic as an allegory for the merely apparent triumph of modernism (capitalism, instrumental reason) over myth (savagery, magical thinking).
Homer is odd for H&A because even stylistically, the epics present a mixture of cultures: They glorify violence, but their form is very ordered, and their very popularity makes them the first mass-cultur...
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May 1, 2026 • 59 mins
On Ch. 2 "The Honest Soul and the Disintegrated Consciousness" in Sincerity and Authenticity (1972). This chapter focuses on a reading of Diderot's Rameau's Nephew and what Hegel made of it in the Phenomenology, so it's essentially for us a second opinion re. what we've been talking about on The Partially Examined Life.
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April 9, 2026 • 60 mins
On "Against Narrativity" (2004), where Galen (son of P.F.) argues that the prevalent philosophical and cultural camp is wrong. This objectionable camp (the Narratives) says that we understand our lives by telling ourselves a story about ourselves. Moreover, this is how we make meaning out of our lives, and how we thus behave ethically, taking responsibility for our past and future: how we have integrity.
Galen rejects both the des...
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March 12, 2026 • 55 mins
Continuing on Concluding Unscientific Postscript, now beginning the section called "Subjective Truth, Inwardness; Truth Is Subjectivity."
K. slowly unravels his thoughts on why objective thought as Hegel (or anyone else) conceives of it is inhuman: We are persons changing over time, trying to know a world that is changing over time, so knowledge claims must not avoid mention of the position of the knowing subject.
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March 6, 2026 • 59 mins
On an excerpt from Soren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) that critiques Hegel's idea of logic (dialectic) and then argues for his own conception of "truth as subjectivity."
In this first part, he's mostly focusing on Hegel. First (along with the rest of the world), K. denies Hegel's idea that logic is equivalent to physics (or biology, or any other analysis of what actually exists). Furthermore, the idea ...
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February 5, 2026 • 63 mins
We're up to sec. 208 in The Phenomenology of Spirit, still trying to figure out how and why individual consciousness is related to "The Unchangeable," which could be the Kantian thing-in-itself, or perhaps specifically the human soul as a thing-in-itself, or maybe Platonic Forms or God or some other Parmenidean One.
Because this "part two" discussion was so enthralling, I'm sharing it on this feed, but to get parts 3 and 4, you'll...
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January 31, 2026 • 55 mins
We're within the Self-Consciousness chapter of The Phenomenology of Spirit, specifically starting at sec. 206, which is the transition between two sections we've already considered on this podcast: Stoicism (and Skepticism) and Reason. The more famous part of the self-consciousness portion of the book is on the Master-Slave conflict, and in this section, we've got a similar dividedness, but it's all within one psyche, like you're b...
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January 20, 2026 • 65 mins
Mark and Wes read and discuss the short 2007 article, "Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?" Here Bruno Latour complains that materialism as modern common sense conceives of it is actually idealist: It is a social construction. Instead, a "thick" concept of material things acknowledges and details their historical (i.e. material in the Marxist sense) origins.
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January 10, 2026 • 64 mins
On Franz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, ch. 7, B. "The Negro and Hegel." Hegel describes the abstract attainment of self-consciousness through recognition, but is this actually how it works in real slavery and its aftermath?
Read along with us, p. 216 (PDF p. 234).
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December 18, 2025 • 57 mins
While we modern folks have a generally clear distinction between law as in descriptive laws of nature and law as in ethical or civil commandments, these Medieval philosophers saw these as very much related if not actually the same thing, given that humans can ignore the dictates of their nature, i.e. reason, whereas the rest of nature just proceeds according to natural law, which for these theologians means God's dictates. So what ...
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December 12, 2025 • 68 mins
On "The Problem of Christianity," vol. 2, lecture 12, ch. 9, "The Will to Interpret."
The point is to help explain Royce's idea of a community of interpretation, and the idea is that in the very act of interpreting a single individual, I'm bringing in some kind of public lexicon, i.e. other people beyond us two. Even though other people are fundamentally separate from us, we make some sort of leap that is the foundation of communi...
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November 14, 2025 • 58 mins
On Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Part C (AA) Reason, V. The Certainty and Truth of Reason. This section comes right after the self-consciousness sections, and so its big puzzle is why? Why is full recognition by another self-consciousness necessary for Reason, and consequently what is Hegel's conception of Reason?
Read along with us, on PDF p. 175, i.e. section 231.
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November 6, 2025 • 57 mins
In this famous, impossibly ancient (ca. 1900 BC!) Egyptian text, a man negotiations with the part of his soul that's supposed to help him in the afterlife. Can he kill himself now and still get all the benefits of an honorable death? His ba says no. Is this actually philosophy, or just a glimpse into the strangeness of a long-gone culture? You decide!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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