Episode 49: Are We Insects or Angels or Both?
Are we puny and wretched or divine and transcendent? Or are we both? According to the great French mathematician, inventor, and religious thinker Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), yes. This week Eric and Tay...
9 Aug 53min
Episode 48: Was Nietzsche a Proto-Fascist?
Was Nietzsche a fascist? Does liking Nietzsche make you a fascist? If the bully boy heralds of MAGA are present-day fascists, does that make them latter-day Nietzscheans? Join Eric and Taylor as they ...
3 Mar 202558min
Episode 47: Are We Always at War with Ourselves?
Did you ever want something and not want it, or love somebody and also hate them? If you did, does that mean there are two different things inside you and they are having a war? Or are there three? Th...
17 Feb 202558min
Episode 46: Are We Living in a Cave? (Part 2)
Are we still living in a cave? In this sequel episode Eric and Taylor contemplate what might happen if you got out of Plato’s cave. Would the sun blind you? And if you tried to convince the other pris...
10 Feb 202544min
Episode 45: Will Intelligent Machines Destroy Us?
Are computers becoming so supersmart that they might supersede all human intelligence and eat us for lunch? Or is the very idea of “machine intelligence” a sad blend of conceptual confusion, willful i...
3 Feb 20251h 5min
Episode 44: Are We Living in a Cave? (Part 1)
Are ordinary experience and everyday life hopelessly benighted and delusional, a realm of shadows, full of spectacle and drama but signifying nothing? This week Eric and Taylor descend into the most f...
27 Jan 20251h
Episode 40: Is Food Art?
This week Julia Moskin, Pulitzer Prize winning food reporter for the New York Times, joins Eric and Taylor to ask whether food is (or can be) art, and how it manages to do that while also just being y...
11 Feb 20241h 11min
Episode 38: Is Justice Possible?
Some things are obviously horribly bad and wrong. Is it possible to make them right? Do some people deserve satisfaction while others deserve punishment or mercy? When juries deliver verdicts and judg...
7 Jan 202454min
