Invasive Thoughts

What would it mean to remember the beginning of consciousness? Tim Harrison (English and Social Thought, UChicago) takes us through moments when literary and philosophical authors portray the beginning of experience. From Milton's Adam and Eve to the late-discovered poems of Thomas Traherne to the political-philosophical thought of Locke and Rawls to the concerns of our AI age, we discuss the implications of this exciting thought experiment. Tim also treats us to a reading from Traherne's poem "The Preparative".

Join us as we ask distinguished poet, critic, and translator Rosanna Warren about her literary autobiography, the state of literary criticism, and the role of the poet-critic. Rosanna discusses her literary and painterly childhood in France and her unusual path through the academy; the capaciousness of English in particular; past literary movements like deconstruction and New Criticism, as well as the eclecticism of our current moment; and the "sacred cannibalism" of literary influence. Rosanna concludes by reading her poem "A New Year" (a "train poem", as she explains).

In this episode of Invasive Thoughts, we speak with Miguel de Beistegui (ICREA Research Professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra) about crisis as one of the basic conditions of contemporary life. Our present is labelled with crises of almost every kind: financial, ecological, democratic, geopolitical, migratory, public-health, economic, and technological. Moving from the financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID pandemic of 2020 to Heidegger, Mallarmé, neoliberalism, and non-Western thought, we ask what these crises reveal about the world we inhabit and the forms of thinking still prevalent among us. Beistegui invites us to think more deeply about what it means to live and act when the shared and fragile ground of our lives—the Earth itself, or Gaia—has entered into crisis.

Emily Riehl (Johns Hopkins, Mathematics) joins us to discuss the power of abstraction in mathematics. Is category theory the mathematics of mathematics? What is infinity category theory? How has the form of a mathematical proof changed over time? Can AI execute mathematical proofs? Check out Emily's game, Reintroduction to Proofs: https://adam.math.hhu.de/#/g/emilyriehl/reintroductiontoproofs

Peter Fenves (Northwestern) poses some unexpected questions relating to Immanuel Kant’s thought. How does politics emerge from a shortage of space? Should we understand humans as two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional creatures? Why do we so often desire to fly? Is the moral destiny of humanity to give way to a new species of rational beings on Earth? Is Nicholas delusional? (Listen at minute 53.) Finally, we consider what disappointed Walter Benjamin in Kant’s writings on history and how Benjamin’s critique reframes the Enlightenment conception of science.