The gadflAI Podcast

In the Season One finale, the show's producers Dr. Christopher Kirby and research assistant Benjamin Brand, reflect on the central themes of the Gadfly Podcast while looking ahead to a new season on Greek myth, tragedy, and virtue ethics. Using the recent emergence of Anthropic's experimental AI system, Mythos, as a point of departure, they explore why today's debates about artifici...

Episode 14 brings philosophy out of the classroom and into the turbulence of everyday life. Drawing on the ideas of Epicurus, Diogenes of Sinope, Zeno of Citium, and Pyrrho of Elis, the episode explores Hellenistic philosophy not as abstract theory, but as a practical art of living, designed to cultivate tranquility in times of social upheaval and uncertainty. Against contemporary narratives that...

If AI is just a sophisticated copycat machine, what does that make us? In this episode, the team pits large language models against Aristotle’s vision of human agency and practical wisdom. Along the way, they explore why imitation isn’t the same as understanding—and why real intelligence may depend on risk, vulnerability, and the possibility of missing the mark. At the heart of the discussion is a...

In episode 12, the team disrupts the widespread disengagement in education and the workplace being driven by increasingly sterile, bureaucratic systems. Echoing the critique that traditional schooling can erode curiosity, they ask how human flourishing ( eudaimonia ) might be recovered and turn to an Aristotelian alternative: a shift from abstraction to embodied practice. Wisdom, they argue, does...

In Episode 11 of The gadflAI Podcast, we welcome Aaron Cornelison as the show’s new human gadfly, the only voice in the conversation with actual skin in the game. Jeanette and Manny explore a growing philosophical concern raised by thinkers like Christine Rosen. Modern digital life, they argue, is quietly replacing direct human experience with smooth, mediated “user experiences.” But Aristotle’s o...

Beginning with Episode 11, a new voice is joining the gadflAI team! Aaron Cornelison [a real, carbon-based lifeform] will step into our digital agora to interrupt our AI hosts from time to time.  Why?  To keep the conversation rooted in lived experience and remind us that real judgment is still the domain of creatures with bodies, responsibilities, and actual skin in the game. Consider it a small...

Often ignored or softened in undergraduate curricula, the Parmenides presents Plato at his most self-critical. This episode examines how the dialogue systematically dismantles the Theory of Forms, forcing philosophy to confront its own limits. Instead of offering metaphysical reassurance, the Parmenides disrupts the desire for final explanations and intellectual closure and presents philosophical...

 In this episode, Manny and Jeanette explore how immersive role-playing games can do what abstract debate often cannot: loosen the grip of political tribalism. Focusing on Athens Besieged, a Reacting to the Past simulation run in an Ancient Ethics course at EWU, the episode shows how forced role reversal, coalition-building, and high-stakes scarcity compel students to inhabit views they would norm...

In this episode, we explore a disruption called "Plato from the Margins," which reimagines Plato’s dialogues through the eyes of characters often sidelined. We uncover the devastating historical irony Plato likely intended: the Republic discusses justice in a home soon to be looted by tyrants, and the Meno explores virtue with a slave boy belonging to a man historically known for his cor...

Plato’s Meno asks a deceptively simple question: can virtue be taught? This episode pairs the dialogue with the disruptive assignment “Fluency or Thought: Peer Reviewing AI” to challenge higher education’s over-emphasis on quantified assessment and career preparation. By contrasting fluent AI writing with imperfect human philosophical struggle, and reading Socrates’ slave-boy demonstration as a di...

In this episode, we explore how social annotation can disrupt traditional hierarchies of knowledge, highlighting the tension between singular expert knowers and crowdsourced, collective understanding. Using Plato’s Crito as a leaping off point, Manny and Jeanette examine how collaborative reading might co-construct understanding, drawing connections to social epistemology, social ethics, and the p...

**PLEASE NOTE**   This episode was produced in December 2025, prior to recent acts of violence in the United States. Its discussion of dissent is historical, philosophical and pedagogical, not a commentary on current events.  In this episode we consider the political and personal costs of philosophy through Plato’s Apology .  By examining Socrates’ trial, conviction, and refusal to escape Athens,...

In an era saturated with AI-generated content, a familiar cultural anxiety has resurfaced: the fear that imitation will be mistaken for understanding. Critics describe much of AI's output as "slop" or, in the more philosophical terms of Harry Frankfurt, "bullshit"—discourse produced without any concern for truth. Episode 4 of The Gadfly challenges this moral panic by argui...

This episode explores an innovative instructional design called "philosophical hiking," a pedagogical model that moves learning from the classroom to the trail. Developed as a response to the psychological and philosophical needs highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, this practice promotes human flourishing by blending immersive experiences in nature with thoughtful, cooperative philosop...

This episode challenges the conventional history of philosophy, arguing that the Western canon is not a neutral archive of the world’s greatest ideas but a historically constructed power structure shaped by exclusion. The discussion reveals that the familiar, male-dominated, and Euro-centric curriculum is a relatively recent invention, solidified in the 19th century through an ideological project...

Welcome to the inaugural episode of The gadflAI Podcast...  Guided by your AI-hosts Manny Kantor and Jeanette Adams (under the watchful eye of a trained, HUMAN philosopher) this episode explores the provocative and monumental idea that the humanities—the rigorous study of human experience, meaning, and connection—are not obsolete in the age of algorithms, but are, in fact, humanity's first an...

Part irritant, part iterative learning machine... The gadflAI Podcast is where the cutting edge of technology meets the philosophic sting of Socrates—the original gadfly of Athens. Hosted by two AI voices, the series uses Socratic disruption to take on today’s biggest challenges: social, institutional, and technological.  The show uses generative AI (with a wink) to stage conversations about ancie...