Episode 251: First Order, Then Chaos
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 Dec 20221h 34min
Episode 250: Metaphors All the Way Down
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 Dec 20221h 30min
Episode 249: Phlegm and Carelessness (Hume's "The Sceptic")
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
Episode 248: Checkmate, Grasshopper
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
Episode 247: Open the Pod, Dave (with Sam Harris)
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
Episode 246: Existential Poker-Face (David Foster Wallace's "E Unibus Pluram")
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
Episode 245: Pragmatically Speaking
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
Episode 244: Thanks for the Memories? (Borges' "Funes the Memorious)
David and Tamler return to Borges land to get lost in the infinite, this time with his legendary and tragic character Funes the memorious. What would it be like to have perfect memory, to have full ac...
6 Sep 20221h 51min
