PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

Join for ad-free and more episodes https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills There's only been about a century of structuralism. It had a day, then in the 80s haters celebrated its falloff. But today, the LLMs designed according to the precepts of structuralist linguistics have proven Saussure's intuitions were more accurate than even he could have suspected. We read the argument from Language Machines...

This week we evaluate a paper written by a Google DeepMind engineer which, in effect updates the Chinese Room Thought Experiment (Searle, 1980) to modern LLMs. Get this episode and hundreds more https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Join for ad-free and more episodes https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills Hubert Dreyfus loved recounting how he was maligned for his AI skepticism, which was informed by applications of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and turned out to be correct as of 2007. Is he still correct in the age of LLMs and self-driving cars? Link to article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S...

All episodes are ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills While many had hoped for a Butlerian Crusade against the thinking machines, the Pope has instead released a lukewarm encyclical asking the mean machine men making automated murder drones to please be nice to us. This episode we evaluate whether Christian Humanism has any juice left. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclica...

More where this came from at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills People have not always had a self, our selves were invented. According to Foucault, our concept of self emerged from religious technologies, genres of writing, and the institutions that perpetuated them. https://amzn.to/4uWyVAg  

Hear our Lasch series at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills After three episodes reading  Culture of Narcissism we conclude that despite a unique perspective, it's way overrated.

jk it's just fake news that duped conservatives yet again. This viral lie claimed that a remote Amazon tribe fell apart the instant they discovered internet pornography, but in the end it says a lot more about us than it does about the Marubos. go to patreon to never miss an episode https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

This week we inspect the latest form of anthropotechnics, its surrounding moral panic, and American Psycho comparisons (Baudrillard was right about everything). Get hundreds of hours more at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

For hundreds of hours of content like this, it's https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Find all episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills This week we read Sloterdijk's 1999 "Rules for the Human Zoo" (https://web.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/docs/Elmauer.pdf) which was the source of immediate controversy and accusations of fascism and eugenics. We see what the hype was about. 

Find All Episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/c/plasticpills. We read the eminent  The Gift (https://amzn.to/3NAenx3) by Marcel Mauss which is important to later theorists including Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida. (originally recorded 08/24)

Find All Episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/c/plasticpills. We read Durkheim's Elementary forms of Religious Life (https://amzn.to/4c1ubkB) and try to get a hold on a primordial concept, what for Claude Levi-Strauss exemplifies the floating signifier: it's MANA (originally recorded 08/24).

This is a preview but you can find all our episodes and other work ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills . In this episode we read Sloterdijk's proposal for how to fix Philosophy from The Critique of Cynical Reason.

This is a preview, find all our episodes and other work ad-free at  https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills . In this episode we cover Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason and why Philosophy needs to incorporate disrespect, sacrilege, and fart jokes if it is ever going to be relevant again.

Find all our episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/c/plasticpills Peter Sloterdijk wrote a philosophy bestseller in 1983 called The Critique of Cynical Reason . In this episode, we try to communicate what he means by cynical reason.  https://monoskop.org/images/7/7b/Sloterdijk_Peter_Critique_of_Cynical_Reason.pdf

This is a preview but you can find all our episodes and other work ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills . In this episode we cover the Cynical school of Diogenes and contemporary philosophers in his lineage.

We discuss the proposition of hyperreal fascism as presented in this video essay (https://youtu.be/R9fpm-lorIU) and its relationship to current events and the Trump Administration

Jeffrey Epstein is not primarily known as a philosopher, but his emails illustrate that he had higher ambitions than pedophilia. We explore both the latent and manifest content of Jeffrey Epstein's theorizing, as well as who enabled him, and come to realize that he was the victim of a rare psychotic illness.  Join our patreon to get the epsidoes not posted here https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Everyone is talking about Canada leading the charge into the New World Order. Are we excited yet? Watch the glorious father of our nation deliver the goods at Davos, or not. Join us on Patreon to get all our eps ad-free: https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Stoicism is on its comeback among dumb 20 year olds, which is too bad because Epicureanism is the superior Athenian philosophy. We discuss hedonism, happiness, and the Swerve™.  Only half of our episodes are posted here! Find the other half ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

The history of Stoicism is long and complicated, and we didn't want to end with AI alpha male YouTube channels, so here is a rundown focused on Greek Stoicism, some comparisons to Buddhism, and whether or not this philosophy could help in 2026.  Get all episodes at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

From Zero to hero: Samantha Fulnecky has been honoured by the Oklahoma government and named "an American hero" for her paper submission to her Psych course in which she claimed it is demonic to believe in more than one gender. Still, the Pill Pod heats up over whether she deserved the grade she received… More Pill Pod: https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills Read Samantha's essay and the instructors'...

It's the bi-yearly event in the ongoing race war between analytic and continental philosophy. Philosophers of all stripes invited themselves to partake in the latest and stupidest skirmish, and so we have undertaken a reading of the match that lit the powder keg: How Continental Philosophers "Argue": On the Unseriousness of the Discipline ( https://benthams.substack.com/p/how-continental-philosoph...

Access exclusive episodes https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills A Signifying Chain (or symbolic chain, or signifying web) is a structuralist concept developed by Jacques Lacan and others ("The Agency of the Letter"; https://amzn.to/4p6wx6l). Signifying chains structure discourses and we believe, explain the growing rift in conservative politics.

Have a look at our exclusive content https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills The Pill Pod reads Daniel Kolitz' anthropology of the gooners in Harper's Magazine https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/ and we find it's all connected man Other sources cited included Lacan Seminar X, Freud Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Baudrillard Transparency o...