The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

Mark and Al share their mutual interest in fantasy novels. Is "high fantasy" fundamentally different than what enjoyed as kids? Did Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and HBO's Game of Thrones show us that these big books are adaptable, or were they exceptions?
We're anticipating the upcoming Mistborn/Cosmere adaptations, as we're both into Brandon Sanderson. We also talk about The Wheel of Time, Rings of Power, Earthsea, Shannara, Joe Abercrombie, Robin Hobb, Stephen R. Donaldson, Patrick Rothfuss, Tad Williams, and of course Harry Potter.
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On Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), sec. 527-73, i.e. "Faith and Pure Insight" and "The Struggle of Enlightenment with Superstition."
Picking up where we left off in this book, an intangible part of us ("pure consciousness") escapes the attempts of culture to define us. This spiritual part has two sides: pure insight, which is the destructive critical faculty popularized by The Enlightenment which sees through all hypocricy and unwarranted belief; and faith, which Enlightenment either dismisses as superstition or chases into a little corner isolated from the real, empirical world. Eventually, the tension between these leads to a conception of faith that Hegel finds more congenial: Awareness of God is just a function of self-consciousness itself, though we don't typically recognize this.
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Don't miss the PEL Live show in Madison, WI on Saturday afternoon, July 11. See partiallyexaminedlife.com/live for details.
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What would PvI be with zero masculine energy? This episode features your usual co-host Mary Hynes and our frequent guest Jennifer Hansen (philosopher at St. Lawrence University). They chat about being hot in a hostile world, interacting with AI, fighting with parrots, and they act out scenes involving the f*cks store and the actress who is too perfect.
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We conclude our treatment for the moment of the Spirit section of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, sec. 527-73.
Hegel's diagnosis: The Enlightenment and faith only seem to be in conflict because they are two sides of "pure consciousness," i.e. thought as a retreat from the actual world. So yes, if you see faith as mere belief, as a thought about some unprovable matter of fact, that is not going to stand critical scrutiny. Hegel's conception of faith will instead be an involved, behavioral, social engagement with the world.
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Concluding our treatment of Ch. 2 of Hegel's Faith and Knowledge (1802). Hegel wants to connect various ideas in Kant: The idea of an "intuitive, achetypal intellect" which we have to refer to in explaining biology, the synthesizing imagination that makes experience possible, and the unknown agency that makes things-in-themselves suitable for processing by our knowledge faculties and vice versa.
For Hegel, these things all point to Reason as both the way we know God and the activity of God Himself: Hegelian Reason is the bringing together of seemingly opposite things, and so underlying our minds must be some greater kind of mind that brings together mind and world to create experience.
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