Episode 244: Thanks for the Memories? (Borges' "Funes the Memorious)

David and Tamler talk about Caitrin Keiper's wonderful sprawling essay on elephant life and society and the many philosophical questions surrounding these extraordinary creatures. What kind of mental ...

30 Apr 20241h 23min

A Rabbi is found dead in a hotel room, stabbed in the chest. The room is filled with Kabbalah texts and a single page in an typewriter that reads "The first letter of the name has been written." The c...

16 Apr 20241h 25min

We dig into the biggest rivalry in Tamler's profession, analytic vs. continental philosophy. Are analytic philosophers truly the rigorous, precise, clear thinkers they take themselves to be? And is co...

26 Mar 20241h 22min

Phil Ford and J.F. Martel from the great "Weird Studies" podcast join us for a whirling discussion of Edgar Allan Poe's mesmerizing tale of decadence and disease "The Masque of the Red Death." We also...

12 Mar 20241h 39min

David and Tamler conclude their discussion of Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" – we talk about the hunger dance at twilight, Ben's greenhouse burning habit, Shin Hae-mi's mysterious disappearance, Lee Jong-...

27 Feb 20241h 9min

David and Tamler fall under the spell of Lee Chang-dong's 2018 masterpiece Burning, a movie where nothing is what it seems, or maybe it is. An alienated young man meets what seems like his dream girl ...

13 Feb 20241h 32min

David and Tamler play the old hits – Thomas Nagel and sex robots. In the main segment we talk about Nagel's essay "Sexual Perversion", a surprising essay on many fronts (Sartre, erotic fiction, concep...

30 Jan 20241h 35min

David and Tamler are back for the new year and one of our resolutions was to do more episodes on William James. Today we talk about his account of 'Attention' from his 1890 volume The Principles of Ps...

16 Jan 20241h 27min