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.
Is Nietzsche a philosopher or an anti-philosopher? Is Western philosophical thought one monolithic tradition? Sean Kirkland (DePaul Philosophy) joins us to discuss the position of such "threshold" thinkers as Plato and Aristotle on one hand and Heidegger and Nietzsche on the other. He also relates what he learned by translating Nietzsche for the new Stanford translation of the Complete Works. (This includes Nietzsche's punctuation habits: Sean counts 13 colons in one sentence from Nietzsche's drafts and 91 exclamation marks in The Birth of Tragedy.) Along the way, we return to the Greeks and the tragic vision of the world captured in Aristotle’s philosophy.
In this episode of Invasive Thoughts, we’re joined by Jon Cogburn, Chair of Philosophy at Louisiana State University. Jon sketches a history of the Continental–Analytic divide in American philosophy and suggests what it might take to bridge it today. Jon explains how more than one metaphysics could be true at the same time, and how even a self-contradictory metaphysics could be true. We go on to discuss contemporary philosophy’s attraction to set theory; the flat ontologies of Graham Harman and Tristan Garcia; ancient and contemporary forms of panpsychism; and, along the way, why philosophers so often find themselves at odds with administrators. We talk about the religion of Silicon Valley, philosophy’s relationship to popular culture (Jon has co-authored a book on philosophy and Dungeons & Dragons), and finally Jon’s Buddhism and how it informs his philosophical outlook.
David Wellbery (UChicago German, Social Thought) joins us to discuss Goethe's work, life, and milieu. He describes Goethe's position at the center of an intellectual and artistic world which included Schiller, Hölderlin, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, the Schlegels, the Humboldts, and many other intellectual and scientific figures of the period. He also explains some of Goethe's administrative responsibilities, carried out with incredible energy and efficiency: from the oversight of the University of Jena to the directorship of a mining operation in Weimar. This episode will give listeners a sense of Goethe's astonishingly various achievements in literature and natural philosophy. David also describes his own hopes for the humanities via an idea of world literature.
Richard Strier (UChicago English, emeritus) recites the poem that changed his career, explains why formalism and historicism should be friends, offers us a way of reading George Herbert’s “Love” (III) and lets us in on a current argument with a friend about a Bob Dylan song.
Terry Pinkard, renowned Hegel scholar and translator of the Phenomenology of Spirit (2018) sits down with us to discuss his own intellectual career; the challenges of reading, translating, and understanding Hegel; when and how Hegel found a home in America and his relation to American democracy; and American pragmatism.
We return to Peirce for an exploration of his more speculative, systematic essays ("A Guess at the Riddle", "Evolutionary Love”, and others). What should all systems of thought have in common? What would it mean to privilege spontaneity, chance, and even love in a philosophical worldview? What is “agapasm”? What happens to philosophy after Darwin? And what mystical meaning do the numbers 1, 2, and 3 have for an antimetaphysical thinker like Peirce?
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.