RSam Podcast

Dr Peter Rollins is a philosopher and radical theologian working through the tradition of apophatic theology, Freud, Lacan, Hegel and Žižek. He has a PhD dealing with post-structural theory from Queen's University, Belfast, and is the author of numerous books, including How (Not) to Speak of God and The Idolatry of God. Dr Rollins is the creator of Pyrotheology, which is a life technology that...

Abstraction, mimesis and the evolution of deep learning: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-023-01688-z You can find more of Prof Hamelryck's work at https://thamelry.github.io/ and his Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=YoTlzjkAAAAJ&hl=en You can find more of Dr Eklöf's work at https://researchprofiles.ku.dk/en/persons/jon-ekl%C3%B6f and https://www.linked...

Dr Stephen E. Robbins researches AI, cognitive science, psychology and the philosophy of mind. He holds a PhD in cognitive psychology, minoring in computer science with a thesis on Bergson's model of mind vs. the computer model of mind. He's also a former university professor specialising in perception and cognition, a military veteran and spent many years in the tech industry as a softwar...

Prof Stijn Vanheule is a clinical psychologist, professor at Ghent University, Belgium, and psychoanalyst in private practice (New Lacanian School for Psychoanalysis and World Association of Psychoanalysis). He is the author of numerous books such as Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy, The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective, and Psychiatric Diagnosis Revisited: From DSM to Clinical Case Formu...

Prof Sabina Leonelli is a philosopher of science and professor at the Technical University of Munich. She is well known for her work on scientific practices, data-centric science, and open science policies. She was awarded the 2018 Lakatos Award for her book 'Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study.' Prof Leonelli is a leading figure in the philosophy of data and technology and the philosophy...

Helen Rollins is a writer and filmmaker from Northern Ireland, currently based between Belfast and London. She studied modern languages and literature at Cambridge and the ENS de Lyon. She lectures in philosophy, film and psychoanalysis and is the author of the book Psychocinem a, which reexamines the connection between psychoanalysis and film. In this episode, we discuss the relationship between...

Prof Jeffrey Yoshimi is a professor in the departments of Cognitive and Information Sciences and Philosophy at UC Merced. He studies the relationship between the dynamics of consciousness and the dynamics of neural activity in an embodied brain. As part of this, Prof Yoshimi models neural networks, creates mathematical models of embodied agents and studies Husserl. Darius Parvizi-Wayne is a PhD st...

Prof Graham Harman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. He was also a professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School. Prof Harman is one of a handful of contemporary philosophers who are constructing the position called speculative realism, and his specific po...

Dr Francesca Bellazzi is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the ERC-funded project AssemblingLife at the University of Oslo, working on self-assembling processes in biochemistry. Her main research explores the philosophy of biochemistry and the interface between chemistry and biology. Her thesis was titled "Biochemical Kinds and the Unity of Science". She will be releasing her upcoming book 'Philosophy...

Dr Barry Taylor is the Chair of the Department of Theology at Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS) College Dublin. He is also the author of multiple books including, ' Entertainment Theology: Exploring Spirituality in a Digital Democracy ' and ' Sex, God, and Rock 'n' Roll: Catastrophes, Epiphanies, and Sacred Anarchies '. In this episode, we discuss living the death of God. You can find more...

Dr Pietro Mazzaglia is a Senior Machine Learning Researcher at Qualcomm Research Netherlands. He did his PhD at Ghent University, Belgium, with the dissertation title "Efficient Learning Strategies for Embodied Intelligence." Dr Mazzaglia's main research areas are embodied AI, robotics, world models, and deep reinforcement learning. In this episode, we discuss embodied AI, the gap between neurosci...

Christopher Satoor is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in the Department of Humanities at York University. His research focuses on the Classical German philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries and the German idealist philosophies of Kant and Fichte, with an extra special concentration on the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. He is also the creator of the #TheYoungIdealist series on Classical...

Prof Michael Potter is Professor of Logic at Cambridge and a Life Fellow of Fitzwilliam College. He was previously at Oxford, where he took a D.Phil. in pure mathematics and was a Fellow of Balliol College. Prof Potter has authored multiple books on Frege, Wittgenstein, set theory and analytic philosophy, including 'Wittgenstein's Notes On Logic ', ' Set Theory And Its Philosophy ' and ' The Rise...

Dr Cadell Last is an anthropologist and Hegelian philosopher who is interested in biocultural evolution, mind-matter relations, and speculative futures. His PhD thesis, Global Brain Singularity , focuses on all three of these topics. He is the author of Systems and Subjects, Enter the Alien, and many other interdisciplinary books. Dr Last has taught multiple courses on Hegel's Science of Logic , S...

Katherine Everitt is a Hegelian scholar, philosopher, writer, poet and artist. Katherine is a Research Fellow at the Global Center for Advanced Studies in Dublin and a Secondary Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her PhD, ' Hegel in Vertigo: An Ontology of Space ,' was supervised by Frank Ruda at the European Graduate School. Reading Hegel with Badiou and Zizek, she argues that...

Dr. Vlasta Sikimić is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Science and a member of the Philosophy and Ethics group at Eindhoven University of Technology. Her research focus is on the Social Epistemology of Science, Metascience, Philosophy of AI & ML in Science and Philosophy of AI in Education. In this episode, we discuss the relationship between science and capitalism. You can find more of...

Dr Nikhil Venkatesh is a fellow in the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law at King's College London. He specialises in moral, social, and political philosophy. His research focuses primarily on utilitarianism and socialism. His PhD thesis argues that recognising the social nature of persons makes utilitarianism more defensible. In this episode, we discuss the social nature o...

Prof Daniel Lakens is an Associate Professor in the Human-Technology interaction group at Eindhoven University of Technology. His areas of expertise include meta-science, research methods and applied statistics. Prof Lakens' main lines of empirical research focus on conceptual thought, similarity, and meaning. He also focuses on how to design and interpret studies, applied (meta)-statistics, a...

Dr Emily Qureshi-Hurst is a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College and a College Lecturer in Philosophy at Oriel College in Oxford. Dr Qureshi-Hurst completed a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford in Science and Religion (2021). Her thesis examined the theoretical support for a B-theory of time provided by special and general relativity, and re-interpreted Paul Tillich's do...

Eliot Rosenstock is a psychotherapist. He is the senior editor of The Young Freudians magazine, an experimental philosophy and psychology journal that provides ideas on everything from new ideas in psychodynamic therapy to eco-theory. He is the author of Žižek in the Clinic and The Ego And Its Hyperstate . In this episode, we do a Žižekian ideology critique of mental health while discussing Freud...

Prof. Todd McGowan is a professor of English at the University of Vermont and Professor and Director of Film and Television Studies. He’s authored numerous books on Hegelian philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, existentialism and film studies, including Emancipation After Hegel , Capitalism and Desire , Enjoyment Right & Left and Embracing Alienation . He also hosts the superlative Why Theory...

Prof. Adrian Johnston is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. He is the author of numerous books, including Zizek's Ontology, A New German Idealism, the Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism trilogy and Infinite Greed. Prof. Johnston is in continuous dialogue...

Helen Rollins is a writer and filmmaker from Northern Ireland, currently based between Belfast and London. She studied modern languages and literature at Cambridge and the ENS de Lyon. She lectures in philosophy, film and psychoanalysis and is the author of the forthcoming book Psychocinema . In this episode, we discuss film theory, lack, obect a , Lacan's gaze, the divided self, Hegelian cont...

Anna Riedl is a cognitive scientist who researches rationality under radical uncertainty. She completed her undergraduate degree in psychology at the University of Vienna and did the Middle European interdisciplinary master's programme in Cognitive Science. Anna was a researcher at the Viennese Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support and a member of the Global Shapers Commun...

Mel Andrews is a philosopher of science who primarily focuses on machine learning and the role of mathematical and computational methods in scientific modelling. Mel is currently a predoctoral research associate at the Department of Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University and doing a PhD in philosophy of science at the University of Cincinnati. They are also a visiting scholar at the Austra...