Invasive Thoughts

How do advances in neuroscience disrupt our intuitive notions of the self? Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel brings together philosophy and the science of the brain to offers a novel redefinition of what it means to be an individual in the world. Direct brain manipulation, psychopharmacology, induced out-of-body experiences—all of these pose new political and philosophical challenges for humanity.

For our sixth episode, we talk about the writings and social work of Jane Addams, American pragmatist philosopher, founder of Hull House in Chicago, and co-founder of the ACLU. For her peace advocacy, Addams (1860-1935) was the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize. She bantered with Tolstoy and became Chicago's first female garbage inspector. Tune in to hear more about her ideas and activities.

What distinguishes human beings from animals? The question has been a mainstay of philosophy for over two thousand years. Is it our bipedalism? Our rationality? Or could it be our capacity for boredom? Giorgio Agamben takes up this question and its consequences in The Open: Man and Animal (2002).

What is literary criticism? What concept of literature underlies it? Northrop Frye's 1957 Anatomy of Criticism sketches a vast and comprehensive map of the literary universe and shows us what it would look like to entertain a total order of literature. We discuss aspects of Frye's visionary project as well as literary criticism's status today.

Quentin Meillassoux's 2006 After Finitude seemed like it was going to revolutionize philosophy. It didn't. We talk about its radical implications and why it may still have traction today.

Around the time he was finishing the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel almost became director of Goethe's botanical gardens in Jena. We play around with affinities between Goethe's botany and Hegel's idealism.

"Certainly the greatest American thinker ever." - Bertrand Russell. A foray into the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, father of pragmatism, largely through six classic essays.