PREMIUM-PEL Back-to-School Nightcap 2025
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 September 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mark, Seth, and Dylan add some more detail and thought to our recent episodes, including more about Steven Pinker and re-litigation of the utility of Irigaray's second-wave feminism in light of the distinction between philosophical and political speech.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're about to hear a preview of partially examined life supporter exclusive content. |
| 0:10.4 | To learn how to get the whole thing, check out partially examined life.com slash support. |
| 0:16.3 | But I do want to hear about your ongoing journey. |
| 0:19.2 | I was very happy to, A, to, you know, have done my part in editing, listening carefully, writing the summary of your Lincoln et al discussion, but also fine that I wasn't on there. |
| 0:31.6 | But I did want to ask you more about the Stephen Pinker. |
| 0:34.7 | So I had read my first Stephen Pinker when we did our Tomasello. There's a |
| 0:38.9 | 1994 book, The Language Instinct, and I thought it was fine, but my overall impression sort of |
| 0:45.3 | in secondhand or what little of interviews I've heard with him, and, you know, he's another guy that |
| 0:50.0 | Sam Harris seems to like a lot, is that he is sort of in the scientific class, you know, |
| 0:56.1 | seems like very much sort of a lightweight as far as philosophers would take him. |
| 1:01.3 | And you guys had very little to say about him, but I was hoping that you would have given me |
| 1:05.9 | more information so that I wouldn't have to read him. |
| 1:08.5 | But like, you really just kind of brushed him aside in two sentences. |
| 1:11.6 | Did you have any more notes that you wanted to... |
| 1:14.9 | Any more points from him that you wanted to explain to me and the people? |
| 1:19.1 | Well, the reason I grabbed the Pinker was I literally was talking about this topic of kind of cultural |
| 1:26.6 | confluence of science and liberal democracy |
| 1:29.7 | and the relationship with my dad. |
| 1:33.6 | And he said, well, what you're saying is exactly what is in Pinker's book. |
| 1:37.3 | And so I picked it up and I read the first chapter and putting aside lightweight or not |
| 1:43.8 | lightweight, his summary and extolling the power and virtues of the Enlightenment, they did align with what I was interested in talking about and interested in having us engage with about the importance of our institutions and the importance of, I'm getting tired of the word norms |
| 2:01.9 | because it feels like it's been like deflated and we need a new word for the ways in which |
... |
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