Episode 319: The Shadow of the Object (Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia")

David and Tamler dive into Seneca's "On the Happy Life" and stoicism, the topic selected by our beloved patreon supporters. Why is stoicism so popular today? What does Seneca actually think about Epic...

10 Jan 20231h 34min

David and Tamler wind their way through another Borges story - "The Immortal"- about a Roman soldier who seeks the secret of immortality and, much to his horror, finds it. Plus some thoughts on the ut...

20 Des 20221h 34min

We often think of metaphors as poetic flourishes, a nice way to punctuate your ideas and make them more relatable. But what if metaphors aren’t simply tools of language but part of thought itself? D...

6 Des 20221h 30min

David and Tamler gild and stain David Hume’s essay “The Sceptic†with their sentiments. If nothing is inherently valuable or despicable, desirable or hateful, then what do philosophers have to of...

22 Nov 20221h 25min

In this podcast we examine a recent argument for the view that chess is not, in fact, a game. We discuss the Grasshopper's claim that all games must have a prelusory goal, as well as Skepticus' object...

1 Nov 20221h 23min

We welcome Sam Harris back to the show for a deep dive into Stanley Kubrick's confounding 1968 masterpiece "2001: A Space Odyssey." How long is the Dawn of Man? What does the second monolith do exactl...

18 Okt 20222h 34min

We dive into David Foster Wallace's sprawling 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." How do TV and new forms of media keep their hold on us when we know at some level that they're ...

4 Okt 20221h 46min

David and Tamler take their first real look at pragmatism via Richard Rorty's "Solidarity or Objectivity." Can we discover facts about the world as it "really is," independent of our own culturally in...

20 Sep 20221h 31min