Thinking With... A Rhetorical Theory Podcast

Episode 12 – Plant Sex Everywhere! Gay Science Book 5 continued 0:30 – 1:50 – How to Lose Listeners 1:55 – 19:45 Nathaniel went on strike: normally likes complexity but sees the allure of dogmatic anger, though that is exhausting. Hard to find joy again; Booboo’s physical unhealth; reading N as therapy for both; section 348/9; 370 – every philosophy as suffering through either excess or poverty of...

00:30 – 1:55 Gay Science Book 5 (which we hardly mention) 2:05 - 30:00   the recurring end-of-semester dilemma; applying a policy vs. making a decision; “fairness” as a way to avoid making a decision?; the desire for a calculus; Nate tries to make John feel better; absolving oneself of the responsibility of a decision; the architecture of the teaching situation is messy; accommodations and their d...

Gay Science – Book 4 continued 00:30-3:30 Quitting tobacco and scotch (or not); 3:38-13:45 Like the stoics; 308 – advice vs. diagnostics (both are actions); 301 and 306 – no blanket advice, it always depends on the style of life involved 14:00-28:45 Amor fati – enduring vs. affirming fate; not acceptance (of being) – the diagnostic move is the advice; just different types of life; 307 – not reason...

Episode 9 – The tone of affirmative thinking Gay Science Book 4 00:30-12:40 Nietzsche’s affirmative direction; 276; 307; reason is a symptom of a way of life; 278 – how great that we aren’t always honest, esp about death; 289 12:50- a delight in the prospect of becoming; joy of philosophizing as the production of new ways of living; 324 life as an experiment; not redemption – to see what is necess...

Episode 8 - The Smell of Thinking End of Book3 00:30 - 4:00  section 213 cause and effects - cause is added later as an intervention;   4:00 - 18:15 Reading the short maxims vs. reading aphorisms; teaching. Section 192 on good natured people, Section 193 on Kant, section 195 - distilled. Like kafka short stories; section 152 on different colors; diagnosing styles of life; changing questions - onto...

Book 3 (again) 0- 3:15 Bad intros 3:20 - 16:00 Nietzsche’s materialist comedy; section 124 - the infinite;  panic attacks - cognitive models vs. affective experiential; subjectivity; thinking as terror/comfort; what meaningless means;  16:00 - 39:20 section 143: advantages of polytheism; vs. monotheism; agonism vs. true/false; section 149 Plato and Pythagoras as failed founders of religions; the c...

§108-125 0- 3:00 Podcasting and Romance; new intros;  3:00- 22:40 Book 3 Gay Science §108— The Death of God; theology of atheism; §109 anthropomorphism and will to power; the need for error life v knowledge ; §110 22:42 - 41:55 John’s “famous” saber tooth tiger anecdote; the recurring problem of identification; thinking was/is risky; perceiving complexity dangerous for life; the advantage of unjus...

0:00–14:25 The sections on “woman” are not distinct from the rest of the book; §68 “Will and Willingness” §64 “Skeptics” superficiality of existence ; the feminine operation and the body marked by the feminine operation. 14:30–36:20 John’s writing project ; maybe these aphorisms are more interesting now? §74 “The Unsuccessful” and §75 “The Third Sex” ; Kaufman can’t handle it anymore ;  §80 “Art a...

0:00–22:30 What does The Gay Science have to do with rhetoric? ; §57 “To the Realists”, §58 “Only as Creators”, §59 “We Artists” ; our drunken passion for reality and reason ; our ridiculous desire to transcend reality ; creation, destruction, and the insanity of maintenance ; is there a political valiance to this dynamic? §76 “The Greatest Danger” ; the dangers of the exception and the rule ; wha...

0:00–18:30 Intro; Approach for a second read; Nate gratuitously makes it about Hegel; §26 “What is Life?” ; the positivity of becoming; §23 “The Signs of Corruption” and §24 “Different Forms of Dissatisfaction” ; §39 “Changed Taste.” The active power of taste & decay; the non-linearity of futurity; taste vs opinion; §11 “Consciousness” the body doesn’t trust consciousness – it’s still in beta...

0:00-8:50 – Intro; §2 “Intellectual Conscience” ; My questioning, my certainty, my injustice. 8:50-28:30 – The instinct to evaluate; The art of questioning; The mystical allure of authorial intention; the inadequacy of quantification, the absurdity of grading, and other equivalences 28:40-39:45 – Back to the intellectual conscience; reading for understanding? lol; teaching bad (?) movies; §3 “Nobl...

0:00–5:20 – Pedagogical query: “Why can’t white dudes follow simple instructions?”  5:20–18:50 – Intro to the new season; Structure of the book, tone, question of completeness, title: gay, joy, queer?  19:00–34:55 – Philosophy’s blind pursuit of truth, value of the veil with nothing behind it, philosophy and health, the careful art of not knowing – Serena Williams example: the context is not separ...

In this ep, we discuss Derrida's "White Mythology."  Some themes and talking points:  - metaphor as an organizing principle of philosophy - how to ground or "unground" a philosophical system - catachresis vs metaphor - Hegel vs Derrida  - Heidegger's nostalgia 

In this special episode, Dr. Brooke Rollins, an Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University, joins the Thinking With crew to discuss Derrida's "Nietzsche and the Machine" interview, as well as Brooke's research in risk, gambling, analytics (in sports and in life), and rhetorical theory. 

In this ep, we talk through Derrida's essay, "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve." Much of this episode is dedicated to teasing the orientational differences between Hegel and Derrida, as well as the difficulties and affordances, generally, of the post-Hegelian project. 

In this episode, we discuss Derrida's essay, "Structure, Sign, and Play."  Topics covered include:  - the relationship between ethnocentrism and metaphysics - our culpability in metaphysical structures of engagement - Derrida’s version of rigor in critical theory - Derrida’s treatment of Levi Strauss - the limits of deconstruction - the bricoleur vs engineer - the relation between contin...

In this episode, we talk through Derrida's "Signature Event Context," which is primarily a reading and extension of J.L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words. Our conversation covers, among other things, Derrida's notion of iterability, Austin's concepts of performativity and illocutionary force, the Searle vs. Derrida exchange, and the desire for truth and certainty in philosophy. 

First ep of 2023! We took a lil break for the holidays. In this ep, we're talking about Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy" again, among other things. Good episode -- no effort in the episode description.

In this episode, Nathaniel, John, and Nate talk through the first half of Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy." 

In this episode, we talk through the first 25 pages of Derrida's Of Grammatology:  - the primacy of writing  - embeddedness of metaphysics  - who needs Saussure anymore?  - signifiers, signifieds, and signifier/signifieds  - writing instruction as constitutively theological

We cover a lot of ground in this episode, but not a lot of this ground is tied directly to Derrida. In the beginning of the episode, we talk about the dynamics of appropriation, math, physics, the terminology of becoming, and Heraclitus. Towards the middle and end, we discuss the brevity of history, how Hollywood must save us, and the genius of the Matrix. 

Thinking With... is back! This season, we cover a variety of Derrida's texts, including "Différance," Of Grammatology, "Plato's Pharmacy," "Signature Event Context," "From General to Restricted Economy," "Nietzsche and the Machine," and "White Mythology."  In this episode, we do a short intro where we discuss the details of this season as well as the new intro music.  In the episode, pro...

Sampled conversations from previously recorded episodes on Heidegger that did not make the cut (but are still potentially worth your time). 

0:00-16:00 as thinkers of movement, why don’t Hegel and Heidegger use the term, “becoming”? Heidegger’s celebrating of ancient Greek thought the duality of “Being” and “being” the performative undercurrent of representational thinking 16:00-29:00 H’s fetishizing and essentializing of Greek thinking essence for Heidegger vs. essence for Nietzsche trying to think the problematic of representationali...

0:00-13:00 thinking as perceiving dwelling in the problematic slogans in philosophy H’s notion that philosophical questions cannot (structurally) have answers 13:00-19:00 thinking the movement of thinking rendering the unthought thinkable Heidegger’s ambitions as a philosopher 19:00-31:00 essence as ambiguity Heidegger’s fetishizing of ambiguity the problem of common speech and language 31:00-40:0...