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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”

    Overthink Episodes

    Ep 28, Cancel Culture

    Ep 19, Genius

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  • The village is aglow! In episode 97 of Overthink, Ellie and David guide you through the ideas that make a metropolis tick. From Plato’s spotless Republic to Saudi Arabia’s futuristic The Line, they talk the foul and the vibrant of what it means to live in a city. Why are there so few public plazas in Brasilia? Why did David lose his wallet in Mexico City? How do gridded street layouts reflect colonial fantasies? And how did a medieval woman writer, Christine de Pizan, beat Greta Gerwig to the punch in imagining a Barbie-like City of Ladies?

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed

    Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
    Don T. Deere, “Coloniality and Disciplinary Power: On Spatial Techniques of Ordering”
    Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
    Jane Jacobs, The Life and Death of Great American Cities
    Quill R. Kukla, City Living
    Christine de Pizan, City of Ladies
    Plato, Republic
    Angel Rama, The Lettered City
    Georg Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life”
    Iris Marion Young, "City Life and Difference"

    Blade Runner (1982)
    Parasite (2019)
    Barbie (2023)

    Overthink ep. 32, Astrology

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    Website | overthinkpodcast.com

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    Email | [email protected]

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  • “They find our bodies repulsive.” On episode 96 of Overthink, Ellie and David bring on Dr. Kate Manne, philosopher and author of Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia. She explains the moral failures and biomedical perils of our fatphobic culture and its misleading imperative to diet. This look at the politics of fat, fatness, and fatphobia in the philosophical canon and beyond to reveal rich links to questions of accessibility, justice, and intimacy. Should we trust the BMI (Body Mass Index) as a measure of health? Is the future in Ozempic? Why are we encouraged to see our body’s biological need for nutrition as “food noise”? And what might it take to hear the music of our human bodily diversity?

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed

    Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth
    Ancel Keys, et al., “Indices of relative weight and obesity”
    Adolphe Quetelet, On Man and the Development of His Faculties
    Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body
    Audre Lorde, A Piece of Light
    Thomas Nagel, “Free Will”
    Kate Manne, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia
    Overthink ep 27. From Body Positivity to Fat Feminism (feat. Amelia Hruby)

    Follow Dr. Kate Manne on Substack!

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  • Night vision. Superhuman strength. And… kale salad? In episode 95 of Overthink, Ellie and David explore the weird world of biohackers, who leverage science and technology to optimize their bodies. The movement raises rich philosophical questions, from the blurry ethics of self-experimentation, to the consequences of extreme Cartesian dualism, to the awkward tension in our technological nostalgia for a pastoral paradise. If biohacking taps into the basic human desire to experience and investigate, it perhaps also pushes too far toward transcending our bodies. The stakes are political, metaphysical, and ethical — and your hosts are here to make philosophical sense of it all.

    Works Discussed

    Dave Asprey, Smarter Not Harder
    Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby
    Mirjam Grewe-Salfeld, Biohacking, Bodies, and Do-It-Yourself
    Michel de Montaigne, "Of Experience"
    Max More, The Transhumanist Reader
    Joel Michael Reynolds, "Genopower: On Genomics, Disability, and Impairment"
    Smithsonian Mag, “200 Frozen Heads and Bodies Await Revival at This Arizona Cryonics Facility”
    Baruch de Spinoza, Ethics
    Washington Post, “The Key to Glorifying a Questionable Diet? Be a tech bro and call it ‘biohacking'"
    Patricia J. Zettler et. al., “Regulating genetic biohacking”

    Austin Powers (1997)
    If Books Could Kill Podcast
    Overthink ep 31. Genomics feat. Joel Michael Reynolds

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  • You owe this one a listen. In episode 94 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss everything debt, from student loans and bank bailouts to the importance of honoring one’s intellectual forebears. Did Shakespeare’s Antonio really pay Shylock with “a pound of flesh”? Why does Nietzsche say that the Christian God is a creditor of infinite debt? Who really benefits from bailouts under capitalism today? And might it be time to bring back good old “jubilees,” i.e., sanctioned acts of collective debt cancellation? As they talk through these questions, your hosts explore how debt has structured social, family, and religious bonds across history, from Vedic India, to Plato’s Athens, and how the notion of being “indebted” to one’s cultural past conditions the experience of immigrants in America today.

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed

    Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism
    Jeffery R. Di Leo, "Corporate Humanities in Higher Education"
    David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
    Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings
    Geoffery Ingham, The Nature of Money
    Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
    Plato, Republic
    Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
    Shatapatha Brahmana
    Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
    HEROES act

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  • Tell us who you pity and we’ll tell you who you are! In episode 93 of Overthink, Ellie and David guide you through the philosophy behind this “well-meaning” emotion. From Aristotle’s account of pity in theater, to problematic portrayals of disability in British charity telethons, pity has had an outsized role our social and cultural worlds. But who is the object of our pity, and why? Your hosts dissect various archetypes of pity, such as Father Mackenzie (a character in Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles) and the elusive Corn Man (a figure invented by Ellie while in Greece!). Where is the line between pity and compassion? How does pity interact with our social responsibilities and power structures? And, is pity a meaningful part of the good life, or is it an emotion we would all be better off without?

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed

    Aristotle, Poetics & Rhetoric
    The Beatles, Eleanor Rigby
    David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
    Kristján Kristjánsson, “Pity: A Mitigated Defense”
    Martha Nussbaum, “Tragedy and Self-Sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on Fear and Pity”
    Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew
    Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
    Joseph Stramondo, “How an Ideology of Pity is a Social Harm for People With Disabilities”
    Bernard Whitley, Mary Kite, and Lisa Wagner, Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination

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    Website | overthinkpodcast.com

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    Email | [email protected]

    YouTube | Overthink podcast

    Special thanks to Alexandra Peabody for her support in researching this episode!

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  • Let a thousand flowers bloom! In episode 92 of Overthink, Ellie and David have a panoramic conversation on love beyond monogamy with philosophy professor, podcaster, and author of Why It's OK To Not be Monogamous, Justin L. Clardy. They envision relations of love and special attachment that aren't bound to the notion of sacrifice. They also turn to personal stories and question the role of marriage in consumer capitalism and its nonstop pressure to find the One and Only. Together, they find in non-monogamous pathways to reimagine agency, identity, and community — and a nudge toward a richer philosophy of our relations with the world around us.

    Note: Ellie misspeaks when she mentions that married couples have lower satisfaction levels than unmarried ones. The correct claim, based on this study, is that they have fewer social ties. We apologize for the mistake!

    Works Discussed
    Marina Adshade, "The Origins of the Institutions of Marriage"
    Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay
    Elizabeth Brake, Minimizing Marriage
    Justin Clardy, Why It’s OK to Not Be Monogamous
    Carrie Jenkins, What Love Is
    Robert Nozick, "Love's Bond"
    Pages The Reading Group

    Related Overthink episodes
    15. Marriage
    16. Monogamy
    17. Open Relationships
    18. Polyamory

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

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  • Is mom still doing your laundry!? In episode 91 of Overthink, Ellie and David explore the twisty world of mommy issues, from the OG mother Mary to today’s seducing MILFs. They look into psychonalytic theories of the mom-child bond, paying close attention to ways these theories have been challenged and expanded in the 20th century. They also discuss Simone de Beauvoir’s critique of maternal devotion by diving into some its most extreme, and problematic, manifestations. Your hosts ask: Is it true that mothers identify more easily with their children of the same gender? Do macho men and wimpy boys sexualize their mothers in similar ways? And of course: who’s the biggest mama’s boy of them all?

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed
    Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity
    Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering
    Michelle Dean, "Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, …"
    Jacques Derrida, Reflections on the Mother Tongue
    Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader
    Donald Winnicott, The Good Enough Parent
    Don Jon (2013)
    MILF Manor (2023)

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  • Who’s your daddy? Episode 90 is all about daddy issues. Ellie and David investigate father-child relations and the sexual, emotional, and familial worlds they create. From summer zaddies and sexy dad bods to hero feminist dads, your hosts travel from psychoanalysis all the way to theology to explore the expansive world of father figures. Do we all, as Julia Kristeva says, harbor unconscious fantasies of seeing our fathers “beaten”? Could civilization itself, as Freud suggests, be rooted in an archaic act of patricide for which we still feel guilty without realizing it? Ellie and David tackle hard questions about how parenthood, gender, and vulnerability interact. They even wonder whether they might have “daddy issues” of their own!

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!


    Works Discussed

    Katherine Angel, Daddy Issues
    Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, and "A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men"
    Carl Jung, A Theory of Psychoanalysis
    Julia Kristeva, A Father is Being Beaten
    Jenn Mann, "Think You Have Daddy Issues?"
    Father of the Bride (1991)
    The Golden Bachelor (2023)


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  • No, you’re not hallucinating! In episode 89 of Overthink, Ellie and David investigate the loopy world of psychedelics. Did you know that after doing psychedelics Jean-Paul Sartre went through a “lobster phase” during which he hallucinated lobsters everywhere he went? Once paraded as mind-opening gateways to the nature of reality, psychedelics are back in the conversation today as tools of therapy and neuroscience. Your hosts take a crack at the philosophy of these puzzling substances, from their implications for phenomenology and the nature of consciousness, to the ethics of their medicinal use, in light of their risks and long-lasting effects. If a trip can transform our mind and senses, it might be that our everyday perception really is far weirder than we think.

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed

    Robin Carhart-Harris, et al. “The Entropic Brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs”
    Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby
    Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
    Mike Jay, “Sartre’s Bad Trip”
    Chris Letheby and Jaipreet Mattu, "Philosophy and Classic Psychedelics: A review of some emerging themes"
    Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
    Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind
    Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
    Dana G. Smith, “What Does Good Psychedelic Therapy Look Like?”
    Simeon Wade, Foucault in California

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  • Ellie and David are serving… dinner! In episode 88 of Overthink, your favorite podcasters explore the philosophy of food, discussing everything from Glaucon’s plea for fancy meals in the Republic, to the rich ways in which food is intertwined with our individual and cultural identities. They welcome food critic and philosophy professor Shanti Chu for a lively conversation about the gendering of meals, the ethics of food systems (lab-grown meat, anyone?), the future of restaurants, and much more. Bon appetit!

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!


    Works Discussed

    Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat
    Shanti Chu, “Nonviolence through Veganism” and “Public Philosophy and Food: Foodies, Ethics, and Activism”
    Claude Fischler, "Food, Self, and Identity"
    A. Breeze Harper, Sistah Vegan
    Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity
    Plato, Republic
    Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation

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    Website | overthinkpodcast.com

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    Email | [email protected]

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  • Time to be real! In episode 87 of Overthink, Ellie and David go back and forth about authenticity. They explore its deep roots in existentialist philosophy and Romanticism, and grapple with the paradoxes of being authentic in the era of reality TV, social media, and friendly-branded megacorps. They dive into philosophical critiques of authenticity, and explore how Heidegger’s writings on “Eigentlichkeit” (often translated as “authenticity” or “actuality”) stand up today. Is authenticity the same thing as sincerity? Can you be authentic and insincere, or sincere and inauthentic? Who do we try to be authentic for: ourselves or other people? And might drag queens be the greatest example of postmodern authenticity?

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed

    Taylor Carman, "The Concept of Authenticity"
    Skye Cleary, How to Be Authentic
    Brit Dawson, “Buying and selling authenticity: a decade of reality TV”
    Alessandro Ferrara, The Critique of Authenticity
    Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
    Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio, You and Your Profile
    Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity
    Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity
    Drag Race Spain S2
    The Bachelor

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  • Give us a listen, and we’ll give you the world! In Episode 86 of Overthink, Ellie and David ask: what does it mean to live in a world? From animal spirit masters in Labrador to the foundations of climate science, they discuss why the concept of "world" is so contentious, and even at the brink of collapse. They navigate our entangled concepts of nature, culture, and the idyllic nurturing earth through the work of Hannah Arendt and Arturo Escobar. Is the world of animals the same as our own? And, what could it mean to imagine a world where many worlds fit? In times of deep planetary transformation, philosophizing our place in this world has never been more important.

    This episode was produced by Emilio Esquivel Marquez and Aaron Morgan as part of their Summer Undergraduate Research Program at Pomona College.

    Check out the episode's extended cut here!


    Works Discussed

    Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism
    Mario Blaser, “Doing and undoing Caribou/Atiku”
    Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Planetary Humanities”
    Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World
    Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics
    Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
    Travis Holloway, How to Live at the End of the World
    Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia
    Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects
    Conservation International, Mother Nature (2015)

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    Email | [email protected]

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  • This episode gets an enthusiastic yes from us. In episode 85 of Overthink, Ellie and David dive into the crux of sexual consent. They work through some of the earliest attempts on the part of American universities at developing a sexual consent policy, before unpacking the fiery debates surrounding consent today — ranging from complex legal cases as well as instances of “gray rape.” They probe the limits of popular understandings of consent with cases involving intense physical pain, and cases which undo the very stability of our idea of consent. (Can one meaningfully consent to one’s own murder?) They explore Ellie’s own proposal for rethinking our idea of consent. Is consent contractual? Performative? Magic? And, should it really be the central tenet of our sexual ethics?

    Content warning: this episode contains graphic discussions of sexual violence and bodily harm.
    Check out the episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed

    Linda Martín Alcoff, Rape and Resistance
    Ellie Anderson, “A Phenomenological Approach to Sexual Consent” and “The Limits of Consent in Sexual Ethics”
    Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
    Ann Cahill, Rethinking Rape
    Heidi Hurd, “The Moral Magic of Consent”
    Jonathan Ichikawa, “Presupposition and Consent”
    Joseph Fischer, Screw Consent
    Joan McGregor, Is it Rape?
    Caleb Ward and Ellie Anderson, “The Ethical Significance of Being an Erotic Object”
    Bari Weiss, “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader”
    Is It Date Rape? (1991 SNL Skit)

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  • What does it mean to be marginalized? Does marginalization give some people more epistemic authority than others? And, if so, what should we all do with this information? In episode 84 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about standpoint theory, its complex intellectual history, and its relationship to W. E. B. DuBois’ concept of double consciousness. They welcome an expert on the subject: Dr. Briana Toole, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. In their conversation, they chat about how standpoint theory makes sense of electoral politics, educational policy, bizarre reality TV, and much more. They also discuss Corrupt the Youth, a philosophy outreach program founded by Dr. Toole that brings philosophy to high schools in the U.S.

    Check out this episode's extended cut here!

    Works Discussed

    Briana Toole, “On Standpoint Epistemology and Epistemic Peerhood” and “Demarginalizing Standpoint Epistemology”
    Kate Chopin, The Awakening
    W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
    Jennifer Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined
    Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture
    David Foster Wallace, This Is Water
    Black. White. (2006)

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    Email | [email protected]

    YouTube | Overthink

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  • Western philosophy started… at the gym. In episode 83 of Overthink, Ellie and David tackle the philosophy of workouts, from Plato’s days as a wrestler to the modern loneliness of a solitary bench press. As they discuss the role of exercise — which the Greeks called gymnastics — in building bodies and training souls, they consider the ancient Olympics, the cravings for health and beauty that guide us through what David calls the "Protestant work-out ethic," and Jean Baudrillard's thoughts about Americans' passion for jogging.

    Works Discussed

    Jean Baudrillard, America
    Mark Greif, “Against Exercise”
    Drew Hyland, Philosophy of Sport
    Plato, The Republic, The Laws, and Euthyphro
    Heather Reid, Introduction to the Philosophy of Sport
    Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, and “The Government of Poland”
    Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body
    Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism


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  • Coulda, woulda, shoulda… In Overthink’s long-awaited epsiode 82, David and Ellie fret over the meaning of regret, in everything from life-altering career decisions to sloppy teenage breakups. They consider the usefulness of regret — if it has one at all — and explore its relation to a life well lived, investigating its philosophical lineage from Confucius and Aristotle to today. Can 20-year-olds regret? Can dogs? Is regret ever rational? And, when does remorse turn into existential despair?

    Works Discussed

    Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
    John Danaher, “The Wisdom of Regret and the Fallacy of Regret Minimization”
    Shai Davidai and Thomas Giolvich, “The Ideal Road Not Taken”
    Michael Ing, The Vulnerability of Integrity in Early Confucian Thought
    Paddy McQueen, “When Should We Regret?”
    Michel de Montaigne, “On Repentance”
    Carolyn Price, “The Many Flavors of Regret”
    Justin White, “Revelatory Regret and the Standpoint of the Agent”
    Russian Doll (2019)
    Sliding Doors (1998)
    Magnolia (1999)

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