Episodes

October 29, 2024
295
01:33:58107.74 MB

Episode 295: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

David and Tamler hop into their Scooby Van and drive into Tobe Hooper’s mad and macabre horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre . How does this endlessly imitated movie still have the power to scare the shit out of people fifty years after its releas...

October 08, 2024
294
01:13:3084.32 MB

Episode 294: The Scandal of Philosophy (Hume's Problem of Induction)

CD Broad called induction “the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy.” As a matter of habit, we’re all confident that the sun will rise tomorrow morning and that we can predict where the planets and stars will be tomorrow night. But what’s the r...

September 24, 2024
293
01:25:3378.54 MB

Episode 293: Who Is the Dreamer? (Borges' "The Circular Ruins")

David and Tamler crawl up a riverbank, kiss the mud, and dream a discussion of Borges’ “The Circular Ruins.” We sort through various interpretations and allusions, the story as a metaphor for artistic creation, gnostic cosmology, solipsism, eternal recur...

September 10, 2024
292
01:15:1769.14 MB

Episode 292: Boundary Issues

David and Tamler lead off with a breakdown of the new commercial for â€œfriend (not imaginary)” a new AI necklace that takes hikes with you, interrupts your favorite shows, and will be there for your first kiss. Then we talk about a new paper co-authored b...

August 27, 2024
291
02:12:12121.25 MB

Episode 291: Shoe Shining

Cornell philosopher David Shoemaker joins us for a long winding journey up to the Overlook Hotel, a DEEP dive on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining . We tackle all the big questions - is the hotel truly haunted? What if anything does it symbolize? Why are the...

August 06, 2024
290
01:37:16111.53 MB

Episode 290: Blinded by the Light (Plato's Cave Pt. 2)

David and Tamler continue their discussion of Plato’s allegory of the cave. We talk about the connections with mystical traditions including Gnosticism, Sufism, and Buddhist paths to awakening. We also dig deeper into what Socrates calls ‘dialectic’ – wh...

July 23, 2024
289
01:12:1882.95 MB

Episode 289: Shadows on the Wall (Plato's Cave Pt. 1)

Over the years we’ve referred repeatedly to Plato’s cave, Platonic forms, and phrases like “copies of copies” without ever really explaining what we mean by these things. So as part of a new mini-series we’re going dive deeper into Plato’s famous images ...

July 09, 2024
288
01:30:05103.31 MB

Episode 288: The Despised Foot (The Denial of Death Pt. 2)

David and Tamler conclude their discussion of Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death . We talk about Becker’s philosophy of science (does he have one?), his sweeping explanations for strongman leaders, neuroses, mental illness, sexual fetishes, and the refr...

June 25, 2024
287
01:31:06104.47 MB

Episode 287: Gods With Anuses (The Denial of Death Pt. 1)

David faces his greatest fear as he and Tamler dive into Ernest Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer Prize winner The Denial of Death . Blending existentialist ideas within a psychoanalytic framework, Becker argues that the ultimate source of human motivation is not t...