Episode 20 in which Ol, Val and special guest Daniel Yslas investigate the human mind via Spinoza

Episode 20 in which Ol, Val and special guest Daniel Yslas investigate the human mind via Spinoza

In our 20th episode we go back to our original orientation and ask the kind of questions that suit an introduction to philosophy, and that are found in Part 2 of Spinoza's Ethics. How can the human mind be just the idea of the body, as Spinoza claims? Do we really have ideas of every single event that occurs in our bodies? How can one global idea - the mind - contain other ideas?  Daniel Yslas, a student of philosophy at The American University of Paris, tells his unique story of how he got into the discipline.

Episode 19 in which Ol and Val get into a tiff about fictional ideas and the mind of God

On Part II of Spinoza's Ethics, Propositions 7 through 10.

Episode 18 - Spinoza's Ethics Part Two in which Luna encounters the mind of God and Val gets a strawberry cupcake

Ol and Val get methodical with Spinoza's construction of human minds and the mind of God.

Episode 17 in which Val, Ol and guest Jasper Lear all melt into one whilst interpreting Part I of Spinoza's Ethics

We explore Spinoza's absolute rationalism, his love of causal explanation, his arguments against multiple substances and how - going against our theological prejudices - he conceptualises an immanent God.

Episode 16 in which Spinoza throws Luna into the indivisible and indistinguishable infinite

Luna ventures out into absolute substance, learning to equate a depersonalised God with Nature, Nature as the necessary unfolding of an intricate causal nexus. Val tries out the bad pantheistic hippy German idealistic reading of Spinoza but Luna rescues him because she is not a hippy but a punk.