Episode 183: Mill on Liberty (Part Two)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2018
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Continuing on John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. For Wes Alwan's summary of this book, go here). We discuss "partial truths," whether "truth will out," whether we can discard some "experiments in living" as established failures, how Mill compares to Nietzsche, education, "barbarians," and more.
Listen to part 1 first, or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition. Please support PEL!
End song: "Flavor" by Tori Amos with strings by John Philip Shenale, interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #12.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Partially examine life relies on your support. To find out how to help, |
| 0:03.3 | in ways that are cheap or even free for you, check out partiallyexaminedlife.com-support. |
| 0:16.1 | Hey, you're listening to Partially Examined Life episode 183 on Mills, on Liberty from 1859. |
| 0:23.3 | Part two, we gave the basic principles of the text and got right into some heavy duty applied |
| 0:29.6 | discussion of how much censure of various kinds of speech that you might find objectionable or |
| 0:35.3 | you might want to engage in. I think maybe we should set aside for a little bit here. |
| 0:41.1 | Some of these very practical interesting issues just to make sure that we get at some of the very |
| 0:46.4 | rich and involved topics brought up by the text. Maybe we can talk a little bit more about the whole |
| 0:51.2 | question of partial truths and how they're important to the argument from Mills. So what's a central |
| 0:58.9 | quote about that that we want to start off with there? I think in its about page 40, |
| 1:05.3 | where he gets into that. So he says we have hitherto considered only two possibilities that the |
| 1:09.6 | received opinion may be false and some other opinion consequently true. Really though he says that |
| 1:16.5 | often it's the case that instead of one being true and the other false, they quote share the |
| 1:21.8 | truth between them and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth |
| 1:27.0 | of which would receive doctrine and bodies only apart. Popular opinions on subjects not |
| 1:32.4 | palpable to sense are often true but seldom or never the whole truth. Exaggerated, distorted, |
| 1:38.6 | disjoined from the truths by which they ought to be accompanied and limited. I think that's a |
| 1:43.3 | really important point. And then that last point I just think to elaborate, I think what people |
| 1:48.8 | often don't understand is that it's not just a particular truth that's important. It's whether |
| 1:53.4 | it has the right relations to the rest of our beliefs, whether it's functioning properly within our |
| 1:59.1 | network of beliefs. So I was trying to think whether his way of talking about this about partial |
| 2:04.7 | truth is better or worse than talking about things in terms of dialectical responses, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Mark Linsenmayer, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Mark Linsenmayer and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.