On selected "moral epistles" (from around 65 CE) by Lucius Annaeus Seneca: 4. On the Terrors of Death, 12. On Old Age, 49. On the Shortness of Life, 59. On Pleasure and Joy, 62. On Good Company, 92. On the Happy Life, 96. On Facing Hardship, and 116. On Self Control. We're joined by Massimo Pigliucci of the How to Be a Stoic blog, who for a long time was on the Rationally Speaking podcast. How can one most profitably interpret weird-sounding Stoic recommendations about the emotions and about following nature?

End song: "I Lose Control" by The MayTricks from So Chewy! (1993).

Our second discussion of De Anima or On the Soul (350 BCE), this time on book 3. What is the intellect? We talk about its highest part/function: nous, which is a "form of forms," literally nothing until it thinks, survives death and is not actually yours or mine, but just the universal mind!

This continues the discussion from ep. 130 and includes a preview of the Aftershow featuring Rebecca Goldner.

End song: "Wonderful You" (live 2001) by Mark Lint.

On De Anima or On the Soul (350 BCE), books 1 and 2, after some listener mail. What can this ancient text tell us about biological life? What counts as a scientific explanation? A. describes life as "the first actuality of a natural body which has organs," so bodies express their nature only when they're growing and reproducing and all that stuff that bodies do. The body is potential, and life is its actuality. So what the heck kind of explanation is that, and how does it tie into Aristotle's convoluted metaphysics?

End song: "Intermission Song" by Mark Lint from Spanish Armada: Songs of Love and Related Neuroses (1993).

Nathan Gilmour (Christian Humanist podcast) and Rob Dyer (God Complex Radio) join Mark and Wes for to discuss the reasonableness of religious belief reading Antony Flew's "The Presumption of Atheism," Norwood Russell Hanson's “The Agnostic’s Dilemma," Steven Cahn's "The Irrelevance of Proof to Religion," Alvin Plantinga's “Is Belief in God Properly Basic?" Merold Westphal's "Sin and Reason," Basil Mitchell's “Faith and Criticism," Peter van Inwagen's "Clifford's Principle," William Alston's "Experience in Religious Belief," Richard Swinburne's "The Voluntariness of Faith" and “The World and Its Order," and Paul Helm's "Faith and Merit." Read synopses of all these at partiallyexaminedlife.com.

End song: "Let Us Meet" by Mark Lint, setting an old poem by Kim Casey Linsenmayer.