Thales’ Well

This time I thought it would be useful to try to do something slightly different. Given that many teachers and lecturers have had on-line learning foisted about them due to the Covid-19 crisis, I thought it would be helpful to talk to an expert about ways of delivering on-line learning. I spoke with Dr David Webster who is the Director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning & Teaching at SOAS, U...

Dave is back! We speak again about French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. This time we try to crack one of his most famous works Difference and Repetition. We talked about some very abstract concepts such as space, time, motion, representation and identity, and Deleuze’s three syntheses of time, but Dave does a brilliant of job of coherently explaining this very challenging book and the ‘sheet of blac...

I discuss American novelist Cormac McCarthy with literary scholar Dr Julius Greve. Cormac McCarthy is known for his often bleak and unwavering take on the Western. He has written over ten novels, as well as plays and screenplays in the Southern Gothic literary tradition. Less discussed is the philosophical dimension of McCarthy’s novels. With Julius I discussed how philosophy is present in the  Bl...

I had tremendous fun talking to philosopher and novelist Lars Iyer. We discussed Nietzsche in light of Lars' new novel Nietzsche and the Burbs. We discussed many of Nietzsche's famous concepts such as übermensh, amor fati and suffering, affirmation, nihilism and eternal recurrence. As well, we touched on Maurice Blanchot, Simone Weil, The Invisible Committee and disco! Lars is a  a Reader in Creat...

This month I spoke to Prof. Felix O’Murchadha of the National University of Ireland at Galway about religion and violence. We discussed the nature of religious experience, and more specifically the relation between violation, witnessing and perpetration. This led on to a further discussion of temporality, sexual violence and forgiveness.  Our discussion revolved around Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Amery...

This month I am talking to Joe Smeeton. We had a brilliant chat about the nature of social work, anxiety, risk, child protection, the political backdrop to social working in the UK, and just what it is like to be a social worker. Joe provided an impassioned defence of the value of social work, as well as an honest account of the challenges and pitfalls social workers face in their day to day exist...

I spoke with Will Large about the Jewish philosopher Emmanual Levinas.  Levinas is a philosopher who had a unique conception of ethics, one resistant to many of the traditional ways we approach ethics in Philosophy. Many of Levinas' writings were composed during his time in a prisoner of war camp, and his work unsurprisingly embraces notions of escape, otherness, subjectivity and anti-totalitarian...

This month I am talking with Dr Luna Dolezal from the University of Exeter. Luna is Senior Lecturer in Medical Humanities, with a particular interest in applied phenomenology, philosophy of embodiment, philosophy of medicine and medical humanities (esp. through literature and philosophy). I chatted to Luna about the notion of shame, medicine, Sartre, Nussbaum and Channel 4's TV show Embarrassing B...

This week I discuss the nature of denial, post-truth, and conspiracy theories with Dr Keith Kahn-Harris. We ended up talking about Holocaust denial, anti-vaxxing, climate change, and the resurgence of flat-earth theory. Keith tries to unpick the similarities and differences between all these different types of discourse. He argues that there are many types of denialism. Rather than classifying the...

This week I am talking to Olli Lagerspetz about his recent book A Philosophy of Dirt (Reaktion, 2018). This book is a fascinating exploration of what we mean by dirt, how we can use Philosophy to examine it, and whether dirt is an objective or subjective phenomenon. We talked about how dirt is conceived in science, art, politics, anthropology and how we might think of dirt in the context of the en...

This week I had a fantastic conversation with Prof. Graham Harman about his unique theory of Object-Oriented Philosophy. Our discussion was wide-ranging, we discussed Graham’s background, metaphysics, HP Lovecraft, art, architecture, Bruno Latour, contemporary Marxism, and Graham's views on the current politics of the United States. Graham is a Professor of Philosophy at Sci-Arc in Los Angles. He...

I had a fascinating discussion with Tim Edensor this week on the geography and politics of light. Tim has a brilliant talent for making us think  differently about something we take for granted. During our chat we talked about our changing perceptions of light, the politics of light, the aesthetic appreciation of light, and how one's willingness to decorate your house at Christmas might be a key f...

This week I am talking about forensic linguistics with Dr David Wright from Nottingham Trent University. We chatted about how forensic linguistics is used in crime detection, authorship analysis, expert witnessing, aiding policing investigation as well as some of the landmark cases where forensic linguistics has been used. We also spoke about David's research on the language of sexual violence in...

This week, as we approach All Hallows Eve, we turn to the ghastly, the monstrous,  the shocking, the ghoulish, the spooky and the downright eerie. I am talking to Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn who is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and American Literature. She is a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. We spoke about all things Gothic, the endles...

With the upcoming US elections I thought it would be a good time to see what a political philosopher has to say about it all. I am joined by Michael Baranowski who is a political scientist from Northern Kentucky University. We talked about Mike’s intellectual origins, the political philospher Edmund Burke, the legacy of John McCain, the possibility of socialism in America, and of course President...

  This week I had a really interesting discussion with Prof. Heidi Matthews about law, consent, and the MeToo movement. Heidi is an Assistant Professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. She co-directs the Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security. Her research area is international criminal law, the law of war, political theory and law and sexuality, with a spe...

This week I talk to Dr Kathleen Richardson about sex robots and notions of personhood, consent, loneliness and inter-dependence between humans. Kathleen is  a professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and AI at De Montfort University. She completed her PhD at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Her fieldwork was an investigation of the making of robots in labs at MIT. ...

This week I am talking about the great French novelist Emile Zola with Prof. Dan Rebellato of Royal Holloway University. We talk about Zola's life, his novels, the place of philosophy in his work, and Zola's famous "J'accuse...!" which is celebrating it's 120th anniversary this year.  Dan is an academic and playwright whose expertise focusses on post-war and contemporary British theatre.  He is th...

This week I am talking about football with Prof. Stephen Mumford. We talk about how football makes you think, the role of causes, dispositions, luck, space and of course victory. Stephen also explain why football is a far superior game to rugby. Stephen is a Professor of Metaphysics at the University of Durham. He is the author of, among other things, Dispositions (Oxford, 1998), Russell on Metaph...

This we talk about all things mind. Philip Goff is a philosopher and consciousness researcher at Durham University. He works mainly on the problem of how to integrate consciousness into our scientific worldview. Goff’s 2017 book Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (Oxford University Press) argues against materialist accounts of consciousness and defends panpsychism as the best account of the pla...

Dr Don Milligan gives us a cultural history of the gay rights movement in Britain.  Don taught a course on the theory and practice of anti-capitalism at Manchester Metropolitan University. His researches examines how commercial society gives rise to political movements. He has campaigned for the gay liberation movement for many years.  Here he dicusses the cultural, legal and economic context whic...

This week I am talking to Austin Hayden Smidt about the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Han is not well know in the Anglophone world, so we took this opportunity to try and introduce some of the key themes of his philosophy. This interview in  El Pais offers a useful starting point to Han's thought and work. Also, Han writes relatively accessible and pithy texts. The books this podcast a...

Anna Dawson is an award winning teacher and lecturer in Film and TV studies at Nottingham Trent University. She has worked in the film industry, as a film journalist, and  written study guides about the Lord of the Rings and The Matrix. She researches genre, gender, the British film industry and British cinema. We talked about our mutual admiration for the Netflix streaming series Jessica Jones (2...

 Dave and I like to talk. And we did. Here we are talking about Nietzsche, and Dr Who.

Here I talked with my friend Dr David Deamer about French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Dave explains to me what Deleuze was about, and then we go on to talk about how Deleuze is important for understanding cinema, and what Deleuze teach us about film, or what film can do for philosophy. Dave is the author of Deleuze, Japanese Cinema, and the Atom Bomb: The Spectre of Impossibility [Bloombsury, 2014...