The Partially Examined Life Podcast: Philosophy Outside Academia

Here’s my routine for the last nine years: Every two or three weeks, I read some philosophy, take some notes, and talk for two or so hours with my friends about it. A couple of weeks later, the recorded discussion reaches more people than that book you worked on for years probably ever will, and more students than you’ll likely teach in a lifetime of work. And I never actually completed my Ph.D. or had to compete for an academic position.

Believe me, I’m as surprised as you are at this turn of events. I and my two initial co-hosts for The Partially Examined Life—Wes Alwan and Seth Paskin—were all doctoral candidates at the University of Texas at Austin in the ’90s. We all did well there, but for one reason or another didn’t finish the program and left academia for jobs in the highly overrated “real world.” Not being able to fully get out of the fly-bottle, however, we rejoined over Skype in 2009 to discuss our shared experience and revisit some of the texts that we loved (and/or loathed). The idea was to approximate the experience of the graduate seminar—or more accurately, the experience of going out for a beer with fellow students after the seminar and continuing to talk about the material—and share this with the world.

Since then, Partially Examined Life episodes have been downloaded over 25 million times. We added a fourth host in 2011: Dylan Casey of St. John’s College, who has a doctorate in particle physics. What began as somewhat casual has become much more rigorous, with some multipart episodes on longer books, and we have featured guests like John Searle, Pat Churchland, Peter Singer, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Sandel, David Chalmers, and Simon Blackburn. We’ve also had guests from Hollywood (Lucy Lawless, aka Xena, the Warrior Princess) and figures from comedy, rock and roll, and the art world. We’ve made our way through much of the canon, studied philosophy-adjacent books like Homer’s Odyssey, The Origin of Species, and The Wealth of Nations, and discussed philosophical issues in politics and pop culture. Through our members-only subscription site, much more so than through advertising, we’ve managed to bring in an income for each of us that is more than double the starvation-level wages we received as TAs, while still retaining our day jobs.

Since I don’t quite understand how this happened, I can’t necessarily recommend it as a career alternative for disgruntled academics, but am grateful to have been asked to recount some of the issues we consider in performing this labor of public philosophy.

Who is our audience? There is a growing group of “philosophy fans” out there: people who took a philosophy class (or dozens of them) but then had to get a “real job,” students who want to learn more than what their particular courses are focusing on, and a great mass of people who never had the opportunity to study philosophy formally but are hungry for it–hungry to understand the world, open to the idea that this might just not be a matter of absorbing scientific facts about it, and wanting to live intelligent, well-directed lives without believing that some particular religion has all the answers already.

We do our best to make our discussions accessible to everyone, but this is in constant tension with the necessarily cumulative character of what we’ve been doing. We just can’t keep redefining “epistemology” every time we utter the word, though we try to synonymize oft-mentioned notions like “teleology” or “hermeneutics.” After referring to Kant’s distinction between appearance and the thing-in-itself for the thirtieth time, we have to keep explanatory digressions short, if they’re there at all. Luckily, we have short enough memories ourselves that just having a discussion with each other necessarily involves enough recap to hopefully carry most of the audience.

Of course, when discussing the current episode’s text, we co-hosts can’t well serve as proxies to each other for our audience, because we’ve all read the work, and most of our audience has not. We make every effort not to dumb down the topic, not to distill the readings to an easy-to-understand essence, but to take them on in all their messiness, just as we would in a graduate-level seminar. So we’re constantly engaged in a balancing act between the slow pace that would be ideal when introducing difficult material to students and the gestures of a lively conversation between friends. Interestingly, we’ve received recurrent feedback to the effect of “I don’t generally understand exactly what you’re talking about, but listening to your conversation enlivened me to think through the issue myself.” I suspect that this is the way education works much more often than teachers would like to think.

What is our relationship to academia? Many of our listeners are working professors or graduate students, and some of our episodes have appeared on several dozen syllabi. Our work is largely parasitic on what happens in universities: We will use published course syllabi to help us pick reading selections, we typically use the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and other secondary sources to guide us through the various historical interpretations of a work, and we draw in expertise from our academic listeners and associates whenever possible. However, we’re not primarily an interview podcast, and we seldom have “experts” on to explain the readings to us. We want to engage in authentic conversation and show thinking as it happens. We want to exemplify the direct engagement with texts that liberal education recommends. We serve as proxies to show listeners that they, too, can make sense of difficult texts and relate them to their own lives. We offer our personalities, our ongoing growth as thinkers, and our humor and camaraderie, to listeners as a hook to join us on a shared exploration of the history and current landscape of philosophical ideas. Luckily for us, we have no academic reputations at risk: We can talk outside of our comfort zones, make wild speculations (and sometimes dirty jokes), and can always redirect course over future episodes after listener feedback has come in.

What books do we cover? Because we’re largely commenting on the tradition as we’ve received it, we tend to keep to “canonical” texts. As we’ve covered more foundational works over the years, we’ve felt more comfortable getting into more contemporary debates, which include more works that are not by dead white men. Given the state of the culture (and the Internet more so), we are under constant pressure to diversify, and insofar as the issue of diversification is itself a philosophical issue, we’re happy to engage in that thread of current intellectual history. This concern is still balanced against the many other historically prominent philosophical concerns, so, for example, we tend to return to Plato once a year, and Nietzsche nearly as often. We are still concerned with hitting all the highlights in the timeline characterized by the debates surrounding rationalism vs. empiricism, culminating with Kant and by the twentieth century, breaking into “analytic” vs. “continental” traditions. We try to cover the figures we revere, but also read certain figures who have acquired a large current following, not necessarily with the intention to debunk, but we pull no punches.

What guides our presentation? In most cases, we’re engaging with a specific book or part of a book, preferably not more than 50–100 pages. In some cases, we read three articles on a topic. We attempt to relate what’s in the text and typically tussle over different ways of interpreting it. Depending on the text, we often allow ourselves to digress, to get into what current political issue or movie the point reminds us of, or to figure out how the topic relates to our lives. In our initial episodes, I in particular really wanted to convey to our non-philosopher audience that they shouldn’t be intimidated by texts: it matters less what Heidegger or whoever actually meant than what ideas they come away with from the experience. They can always go back later to a text or read more secondary literature to get a richer, more charitable interpretation (or otherwise more accurate take on that text), so they should never let reverence for ancient geniuses get in the way of developing their own thinking.

With our increased listenership, and increased attention among academics, we have tried harder to reflect the scholarly work on what we read instead of just confronting it personally, but what we are doing remains fundamentally different in this respect than what we would have to do in a classroom.

Another difference from what academics may be used to is our style of discussion: the unmoderated panel. This is by no means rare in the podcasting world, though interview-based shows are much more common, and most shows have only one or two hosts rather than four. We take many of our cues here from the liberal arts model used in all classes at St. John’s College. In fact, we discussed this explicitly on our recent episode with its current president. It can be difficult for us to retain this format when we feature an academic author-guest; things sometimes devolve into an interview, which can further result in repetition of book-tour stump speeches. While being able to present the thoughts of eminent authors directly to our audience is certainly a privilege, we often supplement this with additional conversations about the work after the guest has left, so that the guest lecture doesn’t occlude our usual show.

For a stretch in 2015, we experimented with having an academic come on after our hosts’ discussion of the text, to more or less tell us what we got wrong. We have settled at this point for using our show notes to point to academic lectures and other sources on the internet that listeners can turn to for further insight.

How does the process actually work? We’re happy to share our technical and logistical secrets with anyone considering starting a philosophy podcast. Our secret sauce is post-discussion editing, not so much to remove whole unproductive branches of the conversation (we rarely do that), but word-to-word, sentence-to-sentence cosmetic editing to make thinking aloud more tolerable to listen to. Each of us records locally so that before editing, the tracks can be cleaned up individually, disambiguating all the places where we interrupt each other, and silencing our typing, coughing, etc. While you can simply record your colloquia or lectures and call that a podcast, that may not produce the optimal presentation for your listeners.

Because we’re not teaching classes, we have time (some of us more than others) to engage with listeners, to research future potential topics, to talk about the future of this cooperative business we’re engaged in, and to constantly analyze what we’re doing to try to improve. Best of all, we get to be students forever, always learning some new area within philosophy, some text we were never able to get to during our school years, or maybe have never heard of. We do put ourselves through some pretty painful readings, but it’s at our own behest, not through an obligation to stay current on the literature in our area of professional specialty or otherwise play an expert role in the profession. Plus, no grading papers!

We see ourselves as cooperating with other philosophy podcasters, bloggers, and the academic community in a shared endeavor to spread philosophy into every nook and cranny of the English-speaking world. We would absolutely welcome your engagement with us, with our podcast, our podcast network, or our blog. Please see partiallyexaminedlife.com to read more, listen to what we’re about, and we’d be happy to speak with you about how you could lend your enthusiasm and expertise to this effort.

Mark Linsenmayer

Mark Linsenmayer received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and his M.A. from the University of Texas. He currently hosts two podcasts, The Partially Examined Life and Nakedly Examined Music, is an active musician with over a dozen albums, and is a managing consultant supporting research communications efforts at state departments of transportation.