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  • Do you need black skin to be Black? How might concepts such as white privilege be limiting our understanding of how racism works? In Episode 117 of Overthink, Ellie and David chat with philosopher Lewis Gordon about his book, Fear of Black Consciousness. They talk through the history of anti-Black racism, the existential concept of bad faith, why Rachel Dolezal might have Black consciousness, and Frantz Fanon’s experience of being called a racial slur by a white child on a train. From the American Blues to the Caribbean movement of Negritude, this episode is full of insight into Black liberation and White centeredness. In the bonus, Ellie and David go into greater detail about how Black liberation is connected to love.

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed:
    Steve Bantu Biko, I Write What I Like
    W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
    Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
    Edouard Glissant, Introduction à une Poétique du Divers
    Jane Anna Gordon, “Legitimacy from Modernity’s Underside: Potentiated Double Consciousness”
    Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack racism
    Lewis Gordon, Fear of Black Consciousness
    Rebecca Tuvel, “In Defense of Transracialism”

    Support the show

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  • Dinosaurs, mammoths, ibexes, frogs: a great deal of animals have gone the way of the dodo. Are we next? And would the world be better off without us? In Episode 116 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about extinction, from Christian eschatology, to the perils of Anthropocene, to cutting-edge de-extinction technology. They turn to animal ethics and scientific dilemmas in search of the ethical approaches that might equip us to think about the extinction of animals, and perhaps even our own. Plus, in the bonus, they talk love, cyborgs, tech bros, and the ethics of the future.

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed
    Thom Van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction
    Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
    Todd May, Should We Go Extinct?
    Jacob Sherkow and Henry Greely, “What if Extinction is not Forever?”
    Émile Torres, Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation
    Children of Men (2006) dir. Alfonso Cuarón
    Episode 46. Anti-Natalism

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  • It’s the one you’ve been hoping for. In episode 115 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss the meaning of hope, from casual travel plans, to electoral optimism, to theological liberation. They discuss how hope motivates action, and how its rosy tint might be paralyzing. They explore Kant’s ambitions for perpetual peace, and discuss the Marxian imperative to transform the world. They ask, is it rational to hope? How does hoping relate to desire and expectation? And should we hope for what seems realistic, or reach for impossible utopias? Plus, in the bonus, they discuss chivalry, the future, agency, tenure, burritos, and capitalist realism.

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed
    Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love
    Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
    Joseph J. Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope
    Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Religion Within The Limits of Reason Alone, Perpetual Peace
    Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation
    John Lysaker, Hope, Trust, and Forgiveness: Essays in Finitude
    Adrienne Martin, How We Hope: A Moral Psychology
    Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach
    Anthony Steinbock, Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart
    Baruch Spinoza, Short Treatise
    Katja Vogt, “Imagining Good Future States: Hope and Truth in Plato’s Philebus”

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  • Even with endless social scripts around romance, we hardly know what it means to be a good friend. In episode 114 of Overthink, Ellie and David reflect on the highs and lows of friendship, from their own bond to Montaigne’s intimate connection to Étienne de La Boétie. From Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics to today’s loneliness epidemic, they question what friends do, how they hold each other accountable, and the deep ways in which our vices and virtues are shaped by our friends. Plus, in the bonus, they talk Ralph Waldo Emerson, intimacy, dyadic relationships, high school friends, and… pluralectics?

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed
    Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
    Francis Bacon, “Of Friendship”
    Lydia Denworth, Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond
    Elijah Milgram, “Aristotle on Making Other Selves”
    Michel de Montaigne, “Of Friendship”
    Lawrence Thomas, “The Character of Friendship”

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  • Clogged toilets, odious jokes, difficult condolences… awkward moments are everywhere you look. In episode 113 of Overthink, Ellie and David invite philosopher Alexandra Plakias to talk through her research on awkwardness. They discuss everything from hasty clean-ups to snap decisions, from oversharing online to uncomfortable silences, as they explore the ways that awkwardness is bound up with power, morality, and the core scripts of our social expectations. Where does cringe end and awkwardness begin? Are we living through especially awkward times? Who gets to decide what is awkward? And, what if awkward people… don’t exist at all? Plus, in the bonus, they discuss The Office, weddings, weird eye contact, and more.

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed
    Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness
    Adam Kotsko, Awkwardness
    Alexandra Plakias, Awkwardness: A Theory & “Awkward? We’d Better Own it”
    Thomas J. Spiegel, “Cringe”
    YouGov poll, "Awkwardness"

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  • Why is there a Parthenon… in Nashville? Jean Baudrillard might have the answer. In Episode 112 of Overthink, Ellie and David pick apart hyperreality: the provocative suggestion that our reality today is so inundated by signs that the gap between reality and simulation has all but broken down. Your hosts talk through the history and experience of hyperreality, from its presence in Superman and Bridgerton to its uncanny role in legitimizing presidential power. And they wonder: does the idea of hyperreality motivate political action, or does it slide into complacent provincialism?

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed
    Jean Baudrillard, America
    Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
    Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
    Don DeLillo, White Noise
    Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality
    Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
    Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture
    Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

    An American Family (1973)
    Superman (1978)
    Love Island (2023)
    Bridgerton (2005)

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  • Why are you so obsessed with me!? In episode 111 of Overthink, Ellie and David untangle envy, jealousy, and admiration, in everything from Sigmund Freud to Regina George. They think through the role of envy in social media and status regulation alongside Sara Protasi's The Philosophy of Envy, and investigate the philosophical lineage of this maligned emotion. Does the barrage of others’ achievements on social media lead to ill-will or competitive self-improvement? Why do we seek to deny our own envies? And how might Freud's questionable theory of 'penis envy' betray the politics of how we assign and deflect desire?

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed
    Aristotle, Rhetoric
    Basil of Caesarea, On Envy
    Christine de Pizan, City of Ladies
    Justin D'arms, Envy in the Philosophical Tradition
    Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”
    Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One
    Plato, Philebus
    Plutarch, Moralia, “Of Envy and Hatred”
    Sara Protasi, The Philosophy of Envy
    Max Scheler, Ressentiment
    Genesis 4, Exodus 20

    Snow White (1937)
    Mean Girls (2004)

    Overthink epiosdes
    60. Influencers
    82. Regret
    98. Reputation

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  • What do skydiving, guitar-playing teenagers, and deep-seated psychic states have in common? They're all intense! In episode 110 of Overthink, Ellie and David untangle the role of intensity in shaping our aspirations, cultural tropes, and political goals. They trace the concept’s history from its tricky roots in Aristotle's theory of change, passing through medieval science and princely romanticism, to the thrills of skydiving and breathwork today. They turn to Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze’s accounts of consciousness and emotion to explore how intensity looks beyond the scientistic impulse to categorize and quantify, and question if intensity is of any help in addressing capitalist acceleration today.

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed
    Aristotle, Categories
    Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life
    Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
    Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
    Gustav Theodor Fechner, Elements of Psychophysics
    Tristan Garcia, The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession
    Mary Beth Mader, “Whence Intensity? Deleuze and the Revival of a Concept”
    Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative
    Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics”
    The Bachelorette
    Inside Out 2 (2024)

    Mentioned Overthink episodes
    61 - Self Knowledge
    32 - Paradox
    107 - Organisms

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  • Phantom phone buzzes? Painless mosquito bites? Toy masks flipped inside-out? It might be your brain bringing order to its complex world. In episode 109 of Overthink, Ellie and David interview cognitive philosopher Andy Clark, whose cutting edge work on perception builds off theories of computation to offer an intriguing new model of mind and experience. He explains why the predictive processing model promises a healthier relation to neurodiversity, and they all explore its real-world applications across placebos, road safety, chronic pain, anxiety, and even the accidental success of ‘positive thinking.’ Plus, in the bonus, Ellie and David discuss depression, plasticity, qualia, zombies, and what phenomenologists can bring to the cognitive table.

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed:
    Thomas Bayes, An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances
    Anjali Bhat, et al., "Immunoceptive inference: why are psychiatric disorders and immune responses intertwined?"
    Andy Clark, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality
    Sarah Garfinkel, et al., "Knowing your own heart: distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness"
    Hermann von Helmholtz, Treatise on Physiological Optics
    David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
    Alva Nöe, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness
    Anil Seth, Being You
    This Might Hurt (2019)

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  • Cooked, slayed, delivered, ate. In episode 108 of Overthink, Ellie and David break down what it means to succeed, and why this sneaky word pervades our society today - in everything from the ambitions of classic American stage figures, to the refined effortlessness in Zhuangzi’s tales, to the corporate world of buzzwords. Your hosts discuss party planning, tenure tracks, inspirational quotes, haters, why science seems so successful, and the pitfalls of thinking we’ve got it all figured out. Plus, in the Patreon bonus, they reflect on the interpersonal tensions of sharing successes, and making the best of our mishaps.

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed
    Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
    Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
    William Desmond, “Philosophy and Failure”
    Ralph Waldo Emerson, What is Success?
    Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
    Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, Matter and Method
    Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
    Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
    Tim Wu, “In Praise of Mediocrity”
    Zhuangzi, “The Secret of Caring for Life”

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  • In episode 107 of Overthink, David and Ellie take up a philosophical perspective on biology’s squirmiest concept: the organism. From Kant’s distinction between organisms and mechanisms, to Deleuze and Guattari’s infamous call for ‘bodies without organs,’ they uncover and question the ontological and metaphorical baggage behind the concept. Their exploration takes them from the bottom of Sea of Naples to the heights of Romantic Idealism, passing through the tensions of contemporary genetics. Plus, in the Patreon bonus, they discuss the unexpected relations between organisms, politics, and reason through the thought of Lukács and Canguilhem.

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed
    Georges Canguillhem, Knowledge of Life
    Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
    Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
    Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment
    Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason
    Jennifer Mensch, Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy
    Friedrich Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature
    Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail
    D. M. Walsh, Organisms, Agency, and Evolution

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  • Even philosophers need downtime. In episode 106 of Overthink, Ellie and David take a break and chase down fun’s place in today’s world — from its aesthetic opposition to the highbrow realm of beauty, to its peculiar absence from philosophical discourse. What role does fun play in the good life? How does fun relate to art, play, and ritual? Can you really have fun by yourself? And what happens when the lines blur between the fun and the political?

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed
    Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
    Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target
    Erna Fergusson, Dancing Gods
    Michel Foucault, The History of Madness
    Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Plato to Foucault
    Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
    Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment
    Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow
    Alan McKee, Fun!: What Entertainment Tells Us About Living a Good Life
    David Peña-Guzmán and Rebekah Spera, "The philosophical personality"
    Jen D’Angelo & Mariana Uribe, Mamma Mia! But Different

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  • Do political subjects have a default obligation to obey the law? In episode 105 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss civil disobedience in the present context of university activism for divestment from genocide in Gaza. They chart the genealogy of the concept of disobedience in political theory, from Thoreau and MLK through to today. Together with guest Noëlle McAfee, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory University, they reflect on the relationship between legal protest, civil disobedience, and political dialogue, and think about why activism must be part of any healthy democracy. Focusing on the psychoanalytic concept of ‘breakdown’, McAfee discusses the disproportionate administrative and militarized crackdown on student organizing that we are witnessing across American campuses today.

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail
    Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
    Noëlle McAfee, Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis
    Noëlle McAfee, Democracy and the Political Unconscious
    John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
    Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government
    Donald Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown”
    Iris Marion Young, “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy”

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  • This is one for the books. In episode 104 of Overthink, Ellie and David consider what makes reading so rewarding, and, for many people today, so challenging! How did society shift toward inward silent reading and away from reading aloud in the Middle Ages? How have changes in teaching phonics and factors of classism, accessibility, and educational justice made it harder for the young to read? Why is reading philosophy so hard, and how can we increase our reading stamina?

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed

    Marcel Proust, Journée des Lecteurs
    Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
    Julie Andrews, Mandy
    Adam Kotsko, “The Loss of Things I Took for Granted,” Slate
    Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
    David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
    Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid

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  • We’re taking it easy! In episode 103 of Overthink, Ellie and David take a leisurely dive into laziness, discussing everything from couchrotting to the biology of energy conservation. They explore Devon Price’s idea of the ‘laziness lie’ in today’s hyperproductive society and search for alternatives to work through Paul Lefargue’s 19th century campaign for ‘the right to be lazy.’ They also look into the racialization of laziness in Ibn Khaldun and Montesquieu’s ideas on the idle tropics, and think through how the Protestant work ethic punishes laziness, even when technology could take care of the work.

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed
    Devon Price, Laziness Does Not Exist
    Roland Barthes, “Let us dare to be lazy”
    Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
    Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
    Christine Jeske, The Laziness Myth
    Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah
    Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy
    Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
    Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws
    Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

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  • In episode 102 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss diverse ideas of racial mixedness, from family-oriented models of mixed race to José Vasconcelos’ and Gloria Anzaldua’s idea of the ‘mestizo’ heritage of Mexican people. They work through phenomenological accounts of cultural hybridity and selfhood, wondering how being multiracial pushes beyond the traditional Cartesian philosophical subject. Is mestizaje or mixed-race an identity in its own right? What are its connections to the history of colonialism and contemporary demographic trends? And, how can different relations to a mixed heritage lead to flourishing outside of white supremacist categories?

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!


    Works Discussed

    Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self
    Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
    Rosie Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory
    Elisa Lipsky-Karasz, “Naomi Osaka on Fighting for No. 1 at the U.S. Open”
    Mariana Ortega, In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self

    Naomi Osaka, “Naomi Osaka reflects on challenges of being black and Japanese”

    Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude
    Adrian Piper, “Passing for White, Passing for Black”
    Carlin Romano, “A Challenge for Philosophy”
    José Vasconcelos, La Raza Cósmica
    Naomi Zack, Race and Mixed Race

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  • Welcome your robot overlords! In episode 101 of Overthink, Ellie and David speak with Dr. Shazeda Ahmed, specialist in AI Safety, to dive into the philosophy guiding artificial intelligence. With the rise of LLMs like ChatGPT, the lofty utilitarian principles of Effective Altruism have taken the tech-world spotlight by storm. Many who work on AI safety and ethics worry about the dangers of AI, from how automation might put entire categories of workers out of a job to how future forms of AI might pose a catastrophic “existential risk” for humanity as a whole. And yet, optimistic CEOs portray AI as the beginning of an easy, technology-assisted utopia. Who is right about AI: the doomers or the utopians? And whose voices are part of the conversation in the first place? Is AI risk talk spearheaded by well-meaning experts or investor billionaires? And, can philosophy guide discussions about AI toward the right thing to do?


    Check out the episode's extended cut here!


    Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence
    Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking
    Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality
    Mollie Gleiberman, “Effective Altruism and the strategic ambiguity of ‘doing good’”
    Matthew Jones and Chris Wiggins, How Data Happened
    William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future
    Toby Ord, The Precipice
    Inioluwa Deborah Raji et al., “The Fallacy of AI Functionality”
    Inioluwa Deborah Raji and Roel Dobbe, “Concrete Problems in AI Safety, Revisted”
    Peter Singer, Animal Liberation
    Amia Srinivisan, “Stop The Robot Apocalypse”

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  • Overthink goes meta! In the 100th episode Ellie and David reflect on the podcast’s journey and the origins of its (flawless!) title. They take up the question, “What is overthinking?” Is it a kind of fixation on details or an unwanted split in the normal flow of ideas? Then, they turn to psychology to make sense of overthinking’s highs and lows, as the distracting voice inside your head and a welcome relief from traumatic memories. Through the philosophies of John Dewey and the Frankfurt School, they look at different ways to understand the role of overthinking in philosophy and the humanities. Is overthinking a damper on good decisions, or perhaps the path to preserving the possibility of social critique?

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed

    John Dewey, How We Think
    Max Horkheimer, “The Social Function of Philosophy”
    Herbert Marcuse, “Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture”
    Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, “Responses to depression and their effects on the duration of depressive episodes”
    Charles Orbendorf, “Co-Conscious Mentation”
    Suzanne Segerstrom et al., “A multidimensional structure for repetitive thought”
    Stephanie Wong et al., “Rumination as a Transdiagnostic Phenomenon in the 21st Century”

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  • Who’s afraid of zombification? Apparently not analytic philosophers. In episode 99 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk all about zombies and their unfortunate legacy in the thought experiments of academic philosophy. Their portrait as brain-eating and consciousness-lacking mobs is a far cry from their origins in the syncretic sorcery at the margins of Haitian Voodoo. This distance means that the uncanny zombie raises provocative questions about the problematic ways philosophy integrates and appropriates nonwestern culture into its canon. Your hosts probe beyond limits of the tradition when they explore zombification in animals, in reading, in Derrida, and beyond.

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed

    Ellie Anderson, “Derrida and the Zombie”
    David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind
    Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow
    Descartes, Meditations
    Leslie Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods
    Daniel C. Dennett, "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies" & Consciousness Explained
    Zora Neale Hurston, Tell my Horse
    Edgar Allan Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”
    Justin Smith-Ruiu, “The World as a Game”

    The Last of Us (2023)
    Night of the Living Dead (1968)
    Get Out (2017)

    Overthink, Continental Philosophy: What is it, and why is it a thing?

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  • They say this one is the real deal. In Episode 98 of Overthink, Ellie and David untangle the philosophy behind the way we compare, judge, and defend our reputations. From Machiavelli’s advice to despots looking to stay popular, to disgruntled students venting on their professors online, reputation can glide you to victory or trigger your fall from grace. Exploring concepts like the Matthew effect, the homo comparativus, and informational asymmetry, your hosts ask: Why do both Joan Jett and Jean-Jacques Rousseau refuse reputation’s fickle pleasures? Does David actually have a good work-life balance, or is everyone else hoodwinked? And, what is the place of quantified reputation in an increasingly digital world?

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!


    Works Discussed

    Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code

    Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, Bad Reputation

    Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

    Louise Matsakis, “How the West Got China’s Social Credit System Wrong,” Wired Magazine

    Gloria Origgi, Reputation: What It Is and Why It Matters

    Gloria Origgi, "Reputation in Moral Philosophy and Epistemology"

    Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker

    Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego

    Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

    Jordi Xifra, “Recognition, symbolic capital and reputation in the seventeenth century”

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