Invasive Thoughts

Miguel de Beistegui (GUEST): The Crisis of Crises

In this episode of Invasive Thoughts, we speak with Miguel de Beistegui (ICREA Research Professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra) about crisis as one of the basic conditions of contemporary life. Our present is labelled with crises of almost every kind: financial, ecological, democratic, geopolitical, migratory, public-health, economic, and technological. Moving from the financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID pandemic of 2020 to Heidegger, Mallarmé, neoliberalism, and non-Western thought, we ask what these crises reveal about the world we inhabit and the forms of thinking still prevalent among us. Beistegui invites us to think more deeply about what it means to live and act when the shared and fragile ground of our lives—the Earth itself, or Gaia—has entered into crisis.

Emily Riehl (GUEST): Metamathematics and Infinity Category Theory

Emily Riehl (Johns Hopkins, Mathematics) joins us to discuss the power of abstraction in mathematics. Is category theory the mathematics of mathematics? What is infinity category theory? How has the form of a mathematical proof changed over time? Can AI execute mathematical proofs? Check out Emily's game, Reintroduction to Proofs: https://adam.math.hhu.de/#/g/emilyriehl/reintroductiontoproofs

Peter Fenves (GUEST): Kant's Rational Delusions

Peter Fenves (Northwestern) poses some unexpected questions relating to Immanuel Kant’s thought. How does politics emerge from a shortage of space? Should we understand humans as two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional creatures? Why do we so often desire to fly? Is the moral destiny of humanity to give way to a new species of rational beings on Earth? Is Nicholas delusional? (Listen at minute 53.) Finally, we consider what disappointed Walter Benjamin in Kant’s writings on history and how Benjamin’s critique reframes the Enlightenment conception of science.

Sean Kirkland (GUEST): Nietzsche and Heidegger at the End of Metaphysics

Is Nietzsche a philosopher or an anti-philosopher? Is Western philosophical thought one monolithic tradition? Sean Kirkland (DePaul Philosophy) joins us to discuss the position of such "threshold" thinkers as Plato and Aristotle on one hand and Heidegger and Nietzsche on the other. He also relates what he learned by translating Nietzsche for the new Stanford translation of the Complete Works. (This includes Nietzsche's punctuation habits: Sean counts 13 colons in one sentence from Nietzsche's drafts and 91 exclamation marks in The Birth of Tragedy.) Along the way, we return to the Greeks and the tragic vision of the world captured in Aristotle’s philosophy.

Jon Cogburn (GUEST): Bridging the Continental-Analytic Divide; Paradoxico-Metaphysics; and, Panpsychism, or, are all things Mind?

In this episode of Invasive Thoughts, we’re joined by Jon Cogburn, Chair of Philosophy at Louisiana State University. Jon sketches a history of the Continental–Analytic divide in American philosophy and suggests what it might take to bridge it today. Jon explains how more than one metaphysics could be true at the same time, and how even a self-contradictory metaphysics could be true. We go on to discuss contemporary philosophy’s attraction to set theory; the flat ontologies of Graham Harman and Tristan Garcia; ancient and contemporary forms of panpsychism; and, along the way, why philosophers so often find themselves at odds with administrators. We talk about the religion of Silicon Valley, philosophy’s relationship to popular culture (Jon has co-authored a book on philosophy and Dungeons & Dragons), and finally Jon’s Buddhism and how it informs his philosophical outlook.