Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbi...
30 Mar 202051min
Todd McGowan, "Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution" (Columbia UP, 2019)
An Interview with Todd McGowan about his recent Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (Columbia University Press, 2019). The book advocates for the relevance of Hegel’s dialec...
23 Mar 202050min
Zahi Zalloua, "Žižek on Race: Towards an Anti-Racist Future" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
The Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek’s prolific quips on various cultural and political issues around race and related issues, found either in short YouTube clips or lengthy book...
23 Mar 202039min
Great Books: Peter Brooks on Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents"
We want to be happy, we want to get what we want, we want to love and be loved. But life, even when our basic needs are met, often makes us unhappy. You can't always get what you want, Freud noted in ...
3 Mar 202049min
D. Gilhooley and F. Toich, "Psychoanalysis, Intersubjective Writing, and a Postmaterialist Model of Mind" (Routledge, 2019)
More than anything else, Psychoanalysis, Intersubjective Writing, and a Postmaterialist Model of Mind: I Woke Up Dead (Routledge, 2019) bears witness to what’s possible when the raw pain and heartbrea...
27 Feb 202057min
Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMast...
25 Feb 202042min
Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider, "Why Does Patriarchy Persist?" (Polity, 2018)
Activists have been working to dismantle patriarchal structures since the feminist and civil rights movements of the last century, and yet we continue to struggle with patriarchy today. In their new b...
10 Feb 202040min
