Very Bad Wizards is a podcast featuring a philosopher (Tamler Sommers) and a psychologist (David Pizarro), who share a love for ethics, pop culture, and cognitive science.
In this episode, Tamler and David discuss The Odyssey Books 15 & 16, in which father and son (and father figure and son) are reunited, and in which the Odysseus and Telemachus start planning their revenge against the suitors.
Tamler and David discuss Books 13 & 14 of The Odyssey. Odysseus finally makes it to Ithaca and meets up with Athena, gets a disguise, and has a chat with his most loyal slave Eumaeus.
Why do baseball players have so many superstitious rituals compared to athletes in other sports? How does this relate to the magic rituals of the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia? We dive into Bronisław Malinowski's classic 1925 paper "Magic, Science, and...
David and Tamler discuss The Odyssey's iconic books 11 & 12, in which our hero visits the ghosts of the dead, hears the call of the sirens, and survives a no-win situation.
Tamler and David discuss the action-packed books 9 & 10 of The Odyssey, in which Odysseus makes some questionable choices, the crew encounters cannibal giants, and Circe casts her porcine spells.
Since well before the big bang, people have been bitching about Tamler's chosen field. We talk about Bernard Williams' (qualified) defense of analytic philosophy in his essay "On Hating and Despising Philosophy." We also dig into Lily Hu's review of a rec...