Invasive Thoughts

Join us as we ask distinguished poet, critic, and translator Rosanna Warren about her literary autobiography, the state of literary criticism, and the role of the poet-critic. Rosanna discusses her literary and painterly childhood in France and her unusual path through the academy; the capaciousness of English in particular; past literary movements like deconstruction and New Criticism, as well as...

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 th...

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 (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 minu...

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 W...

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 d...

David Wellbery (UChicago German, Social Thought) joins us to discuss Goethe's work, life, and milieu. He describes Goethe's position at the center of an intellectual and artistic world which included Schiller, Hölderlin, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, the Schlegels, the Humboldts, and many other intellectual and scientific figures of the period. He also explains some of Goethe's administrat...

Richard Strier (UChicago English, emeritus) recites the poem that changed his career, explains why formalism and historicism should be friends, offers us a way of reading George Herbert’s “Love” (III) and lets us in on a current argument with a friend about a Bob Dylan song.

Terry Pinkard, renowned Hegel scholar and translator of the Phenomenology of Spirit (2018) sits down with us to discuss his own intellectual career; the challenges of reading, translating, and understanding Hegel; when and how Hegel found a home in America and his relation to American democracy; and American pragmatism. #Americanphilosophy #pragmatism #Hegel #Dewey #translation #Germanidealism #Ph...

We return to Peirce for an exploration of his more speculative, systematic essays ("A Guess at the Riddle", "Evolutionary Love”, and others). What should all systems of thought have in common? What would it mean to privilege spontaneity, chance, and even love in a philosophical worldview? What is “agapasm”? What happens to philosophy after Darwin? And what mystical meaning do the nu...

How do advances in neuroscience disrupt our intuitive notions of the self? Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel brings together philosophy and the science of the brain to offers a novel redefinition of what it means to be an individual in the world. Direct brain manipulation, psychopharmacology, induced out-of-body experiences—all of these pose new political and philosophical challenges for humanity.

For our sixth episode, we talk about the writings and social work of Jane Addams, American pragmatist philosopher, founder of Hull House in Chicago, and co-founder of the ACLU. For her peace advocacy, Addams (1860-1935) was the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize. She bantered with Tolstoy and became Chicago's first female garbage inspector. Tune in to hear more about her ideas and activitie...

What distinguishes human beings from animals? The question has been a mainstay of philosophy for over two thousand years. Is it our bipedalism? Our rationality? Or could it be our capacity for boredom? Giorgio Agamben takes up this question and its consequences in The Open: Man and Animal (2002).

What is literary criticism? What concept of literature underlies it? Northrop Frye's 1957 Anatomy of Criticism sketches a vast and comprehensive map of the literary universe and shows us what it would look like to entertain a total order of literature. We discuss aspects of Frye's visionary project as well as literary criticism's status today.

Quentin Meillassoux's 2006 After Finitude seemed like it was going to revolutionize philosophy. It didn't. We talk about its radical implications and why it may still have traction today.

Around the time he was finishing the Phenomenology of Spirit , Hegel almost became director of Goethe's botanical gardens in Jena. We play around with affinities between Goethe's botany and Hegel's idealism.

"Certainly the greatest American thinker ever." - Bertrand Russell. A foray into the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, father of pragmatism, largely through six classic essays.