Partially Examined Life #1: "The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living" (from 2009, re-edited 2022) 

yayyyyy, tyler hysslop!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The chemistry between you all is terrific. All the best and may you continue on as long as you wish.

It has been a privilege listening to all of you the last 6 months. I have had time to listen to many teachers, professors on philosophy. Not being well and time on my hands I embarked journey of a passion of reading. I am a vociferous reader and writer. Thank you.❤️Your chuckles have made my day at times. Divisions in society has made people not a community especially with religious divisions, political. We are walking in seas of madness with sick societies, nuclear war may end this life as we know it today. These are concerns of mine to examine why. Governments and powers of GREED has a large part to do with how people are relating to one another. I see people homeless, people hungry in America everyday. I live in Alabama so I have great understanding of the racism that is still here. Unnecessary wars for profits , military contractors selling weapons on all sides. Political science, economics. Research is important, there are those I have immense respect for. People should take an interest. Masses are kept in the dark on purpose. It has been set up that way. An individual choice to be open minded. As for for being a good person, the golden rule is a good one. Empathy. As for philosophers throughout the ages one experience them at different spaces at different times in our lives. The Greek philosophers, I would have enjoyed living in those days. Not much has changed except for those that want gold, diamonds, rubies, copper, tin, uranium, lithium, land, resources. Millions are dying daily of hunger, we have 20 to 30 million children here in America going hungry at night. No health care. We are 33RD in the world in education. I wonder what Socrates would have thought. I believe these were the truths Socrates was exploring. I don't know I may be wrong, but I shall keep pondering and learning.❤️

If so ever there were one thing that philosophizing has taught me, it is how to write clearlier…

Love your programs. Socrates has been a favorite of mine. My $0.02 worth is that y’all need to reread him, this time believing what he says. Also, something that leads to a LOT of confusion about Socrates, IMHO, is that we read him through European eyes, as a European. The Greeks were the westernmost Eastern philosophers. Not the, “first European philosophers”. (See T. McEvilley) I’d recommend, for example, the fable of the two birds, as described in Mundaka Upanishad. It is daunting and difficult to learn the philosophy that undergirds Indian (mistakenly called Hindu) philosophy. In part it is because by this time the Indians have already sorted through (their version) of the key questions that would later remerge in Europe- nature of knowledge (Can we know anything at all?), nature of free will, nature of death, nature of reality, virtue- the difficulty of being good, for people and societies. The “theory” of “sat chit ananta”, it’s equation with human (and all other) consciousness, the description of a knowledge mechanism (which is “un-selfaware”- as in artificial intelligence), and the falsity of free will. If you can, please interview Sarvapriyananda, from Vedanta New York. Your podcast will explode. And I’ll donate $108 to your project. Note that Alexander, desirous of “world conquest”, heads East. Past Persia and the Hindu Kush, via Kashmir, the supposed abode of Hermes, to the Indus. Why I bring this up is, because “virtue”, “good life”, “self” are better understood seen from a non-modern, non Western perspective. The podcasters really really really double down on a values-neutral, purely academic, super skeptical treatment of the sage. It is acerbic and trenchant, not the “feat of reason and the flow of soul” that Socratic readings produce (for me 😁). It’d be great if you all read contemporary (to Socrates) Orphic philosophy- of the Self, for example- and do so with “faith” (, as in non skeptically). Ideally, you all can put on the believers hat, and then the skeptics hat, and then summarize with balance. Philosophy, the tradition as inherited by the American academe, is not essentially an exercise in creating solid humans and sustainable societies. The Greek project was exactly that- social normative, not purely academic. The late night soirées and drunken symposia not withstanding, these savants measured the value of philosophy in terms of arete and eudaemonia, not publications and citations and claims of “originality” for the sake of originality.