Apr 2025
Amy Zhang, "Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China" (Stanford UP, 2024)
After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in ... Show More
1h 7m
Yesterday
Tulasi Srinivas, "The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty" (Duke UP, 2025)
In The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty (Duke UP, 2025), Tulasi Srinivas offers a pathbreaking ethnography of contemporary Indian beauty parlors in Bangalore. Exploring the gendered world of beauty in the intimate spaces of the salon, whose popularity has explode ... Show More
52m 29s
Yesterday
The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, and the Struggle for Work in America
Most employers in the United States routinely conduct criminal background checks on job applicants, weeding out those with criminal convictions—and thus denying opportunities to those who need them most. In The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, and the Struggle for Work in A ... Show More
54m 13s
Apr 2023
Graham Harman, "The Graham Harman Reader" (Zero Books, 2023)
'Overcoming the war of religion between analytics and continentals with a brand-new metaphysical insight, Graham Harman has restored to philosophy its greatness and value.'
-Maurizio Ferraris, Italian continental philosopher and author of the Manifesto of New Realism
The Graham H ... Show More
58m 23s
Apr 2024
Charles William Johns, "Hegel and Speculative Realism" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)
Hegel and Speculative Realism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023) has two main objectives. Firstly, to assess the speculative realist formulations of the real regarding the ‘withdrawn’ object, radical contingency, the absolute register of extinction, and the current interest in ‘powers ph ... Show More
53m 3s
Oct 2024
Michael J. Thompson, "Descent of the Dialectic: Phronetic Criticism in an Age of Nihilism" (Routledge, 2024)
In Descent of the Dialectic: Phronetic Criticism in an Age of Nihilism (Routledge, 2024), Michael J. Thompson reconstructs the concept and practice of dialectics as a means of grounding a critical theory of society. At the center of this project is the thesis of phronetic critici ... Show More
58m 50s
Apr 2024
Vaia Touna and Richard Newton, "Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion: Revisiting Classical Theorists" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion: Revisiting Classical Theorists (Bloomsbury, 2023) introduces students to the so-called classics of the field from the 19th and 20th centuries, whilst challenging readers to apply a critical lens. Instead of representing scholars and t ... Show More
56m 4s
Mar 2017
Stephanie Ruphy, “Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered: A New Approach to the (Dis)unity of Science (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2017)
The idea that the sciences can’t be unified–that there will never be a single ‘theory of everything’–is the current orthodoxy in philosophy of science and in many sciences as well. But different versions of pluralism present very different views of what exactly they are pluralist ... Show More
1h 6m
Oct 2023
Episode 123, 'The Building Blocks of Reality' with Donnchadh O'Conaill (Part I - Substance)
<p class="">What is the underlying nature of reality? For Thales, the essence of the world was water; for the Stoics, it was Logos; for Heraclitus, the universe consisted, fundamentally, of fire, life-energy, or the 'thinking faculty'. The search for the building blocks of our wo ... Show More
41m 39s
Oct 2025
262 - Slavoj Žižek: Marxism, Quantum Mechanics, and Artificial Intelligence
Visit our sponsor, Wealthfront!: wealthfront.com/robinsonSlavoj Žižek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University, and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s Department ... Show More
1h 38m
Objects generate time; time does not generate or change objects. That is the central thesis of this book by the philosopher Graham Harman and the archaeologist Christopher Witmore, who defend radical positions in their respective fields.
Against a current and pervasive conviction that reality consists of an unceasing flux - a view associated in philosophy wi ... Show More
<p>Get tickets for our event: <a href= "https://www.skeptic.com/event" target="_blank" rel= "noopener">skeptic.com/event</a></p> <p>Daniel Dennett, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist, has spent his career considering the thorniest, most fundamental mysteries of the mi ... Show More
