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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 SpectacleAn American Family (1973)
Superman (1978)
Love Island (2023)
Bridgerton (2005)Support the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast -
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 20Snow White (1937)
Mean Girls (2004)Overthink epiosdes
60. Influencers
82. Regret
98. ReputationSupport the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast -
Saknas det avsnitt?
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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 - OrganismsSupport the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast -
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)Support the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast -
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”Support the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast -
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 EvolutionSupport the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast -
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 DifferentSupport the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast -
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”Support the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
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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 SquidSupport the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast -
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 CapitalismSupport the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast -
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 DiscussedLinda 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 SelfNaomi 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 RaceSupport the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast -
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”Support the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast -
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”Support the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast -
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?
Support the Show.
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
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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 DiscussedKwame 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
Support the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
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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, AstrologySupport the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast -
“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!
Support the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast -
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 ReynoldsSupport the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast -
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 actSupport the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
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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
Special thanks to Alexandra Peabody for her support in researching this episode!Support the show
Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
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Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast - Visa fler
