GWF Hegel is one of the most difficult philosophers in the western canon, but today we’ attempt to demystify him. In this episode, we’ll break down Hegel’s phenomenology, the dialectic, and the Hegelian understanding of desire. Our concrete entrypoint into the thought of Hegel is his famous chapter, The Master-Slave Dialectic. Deleuze argued that Nietzsche’s ... Show More
Oct 7
Untimely Reflections #47: Melanie Coughlin - Nishitani, Nietzsche & The Kyoto School
Melanie Coughlin, a scholar whose work focuses on Nishitani and the Kyoto school, joined me for a conversation that will hopefully provide a nice conclusion to the recent focus on Buddhism. We discussed karma, the misleading nature of intentions, Nishitani's theory of affect, emp ... Show More
1h 8m
Sep 29
151: Julian Jaynes, part 2 - The Witness of History
How did the bicameral mind emerge, and how did consciousness eventually take its place? Join me for an exploration of ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, in which Julian Jaynes traces the evidence over the centuries that suggest a disappearance of the gods and the emergence of su ... Show More
1h 56m
Sep 22
150: Julian Jaynes, part 1 - Hearing Voices
What is consciousness? Julian Jaynes rejects all of the popular answers: that consciousness is thinking, reason, memory, or the capacity for learning. Nor does he think it can be accounted for as a merely accumulative development of "sentience" through evolution. In his controver ... Show More
1h 25m
Jul 2020
Adrian Johnston, "Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism Volume II: A Weak Nature Alone" (Northwestern UP, 2019)
Engaging with almost any Western philosopher of the last couple centuries means you are usually, whether you realize it or not, working in the shadow of Hegel, his work proving stubbornly resistant to attempts to remove from contemporary thought. This has itself proven to be a so ... Show More
1h 38m