Ep 35 Ch 14 "Why are Flowers Beautiful?"

How do the Four Strands of the Fabric of Reality - Quantum Physics, Computation, Epistemology and Evolution by Natural Selection hold together? What does taking them each seriously and all of them together seriously? Is it possible to construct a worldview without one of them or ...  Show more

This episode is heavily focussed on Dawkin's "Selfish Gene" explanation of Darwin's evolution by natural selection. Obviously there are readings from the relevant part of this chapter from The Fabric of Reality but I augment that with sections from "The Selfish Gene" itself as we ...  Show more

Continuing on Beauty (2009), ch. 1-4. Does apprehending beauty really have to involve reason, or can it be merely sensory? If you're not hearing the full version of this part of the discussion, sign up via one of the options described at partiallyexaminedlife.com/support. 

How are we taught to look at art, and why does it get everything wrong? In this episode I look at conventional ways of teaching students to look at art, and offer an alternative that allows for more intuition, experiementation, and a familiarity with the medium. 

In this episode, I discuss the duality of the human approach, the straw man fallacy, the simplifying of complex matters, and going in-depth with things that matter. Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTYAsjAVa3I&t=1078s 

In this episode I'll be talking to Sir Roger Scruton about beauty, what it is, where it comes from and what it means. We'll be talking about beauty in relation to art, religion, biology, philosophy, music and of course architecture. We talk about architectural style ...