Episode 180: More James's Psychology: Self and Will (Part One)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 January 2018
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Psychology, the Briefer Course (1892), chapters on "The Self," "Will," and "Emotions."
Continuing from ep. 179, we talk about the "Me" (the part of me that I know) vs. the "I" (the part of me that knows), including personal identity. James thinks that emotions are just our experience of our own physiology. Finally, we tackle will, veering into ethics, free will, and more.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Partially examine life relies on your support. |
| 0:02.3 | To find out how to help, in ways that are cheap or even free for you, check out partiallyexaminedlife.com slash support. |
| 0:08.3 | You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who had one point said on doing philosophy for living with them thought better of it. |
| 0:22.1 | Our question for episode 180 is something like, what is our moral psychology or what is the self or what is freedom? |
| 0:28.7 | We read some more chapters of William James, the Principles of Psychology from 1890, its abridgment psychology, the Brief Recourse from 1892. |
| 0:36.1 | For more information and links to the readings, please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com. |
| 0:39.6 | This is Mark Linson-Mayer, morally consisting solely of effort in medicine Wisconsin. |
| 0:43.8 | This is Seth Pascon, dropping all of his super-numerary consciousness in Austin, Texas. |
| 0:49.3 | Very sexy. This is Wes All-One, entering the Lonson Moral Wilderness, that is my decision to do this podcast while sick with the food in Cambridge, Massachusetts. |
| 1:00.7 | This is Dylan Casey, suffering from Neural inertia in middle-term Wisconsin. |
| 1:06.3 | So yeah, we were excited about reading more of this book. |
| 1:10.0 | We didn't get to the self-chapter last time, so we're going to do that. |
| 1:14.0 | We're going to talk about there's a separate chapter on the will and one of the things William James is most famous for in this book is ideas of emotions. |
| 1:22.2 | So those are the main topics and also there were separate chapters on instinct and attention that are perhaps less important for us but good to get the full picture of the psyche here. |
| 1:31.0 | How y'all doing? |
| 1:32.5 | Fantastic. |
| 1:34.0 | Doing good. |
| 1:35.0 | Besides the sick Wes. |
| 1:36.5 | Lousy. |
| 1:39.0 | Yeah, we already pushed this off one day. We were supposed to do this several days ago and I might be worse tonight actually than I was. |
| 1:48.0 | I was feeling none too good that day. |
| 1:50.0 | So this is an exciting way to end the year feeling vaguely sick. |
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