Ways of Knowing

Episode 8 of Ways of Knowing -- Season 2, an audio series about the humanities. Made by The World According to Sound and The University of Washington. This episode features the work of professor of philosophy, Sara Goering.

Episode 7 of Ways of Knowing -- Season 2, an audio series about the humanities. Made by The World According to Sound and The University of Washington. This episode features the work of Mal Ahern, professor of cinema and media studies.

Episode 6 of Ways of Knowing -- Season 2, an audio series about the humanities. Made by The World According to Sound and The University of Washington. This episode features the work of professor of cinema and media studies, Golden Owens.

Episode 5 of Ways of Knowing -- Season 2, an audio series about the humanities. Made by The World According to Sound and The University of Washington. This episode features the work of professor of Math and the Comparative History of Ideas, Jayadev Athreya.

Episode 2 of Ways of Knowing -- Season 2, an audio series about the humanities. Made by The World According to Sound and The University of Washington. This episode features the work of professor of International Studies, as well as law, societies and justice––Stephen Meyers.

Episode 2 of Ways of Knowing -- Season 2, an audio series about the humanities. Made by The World According to Sound and The University of Washington. This episode features the work of professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures Hamza Zafer.

Episode 2 of Ways of Knowing -- Season 2, an audio series about the humanities. Made by The World According to Sound and The University of Washington. This episode features the work of professor of French Richard Watts.

Episode 1 of Ways of Knowing -- Season 2, an audio series about the humanities. Made by The World According to Sound and The University of Washington. This episode features the work of professor of English and Data Science Anna Preus.

In the previous episode, we heard how so-called artificial intelligence is being sold to the public as a revolutionary, inevitable technology that is going to completely transform society. This claim is built around the misleading metaphor of “artificial intelligence,” which equates machine processes with human intelligence. Generative AI products are being marketed as proof that machines will ver...

With today’s so-called generative artificial intelligence, we’re being told that we have finally arrived. We’re now beginning to build true “thinking machines,” machines that will do everything a human can do, only better, faster, and more efficiently. This will change every aspect of our lives, for good…or for bad. Either way, there’s no turning back. We can’t stop generative AI. Only learn to li...

Text written with a typewriter is not the same as text written by hand, composed on a computer, sent in a text message, or generated by artificial intelligence. Like all media, the typewriter does not just transmit what a person wants to write. It is its own particular medium. In the 20th century, it changed the way writers write and the way people read—profoundly altering warfare, commerce, liter...

We increasingly interact with the world through the binary, on/off medium of buttons—from keyboards and appliances, to the digital interfaces of phones and tablets; but it didn’t have to be this way. “There is nothing natural or inevitable about buttons or the act of pushing a button. Various constituencies over the years—especially advertisers and manufacturers—have marshalled tremendous resource...

While extensions are masculine coded and deal with tools that extend what human beings already do, containers offer a different and more feminine concept of media: something that selects, stores, and processes information. Containers primarily allow for preservation, but this goes far beyond things like food, water, or other materials. They also determine cultural and intellectual production. For...

Writing is an extension of our voice, cars of our legs, guns of our fists, telephones of our ears, televisions of our eyes…Marshall McLuhan considered all media to be technology that extended the human body. The arrival of a medium like writing can completely reorder social relations because it has the power to “shape and control the scale and form of human association and action.” McLuhan’s idea...

We’re surrounded by media—not just when we look at our phones, turn on the TV, or get on the internet. Everything from Tupperware and office plants to buttons and smartphone apps is exerting pressure on what we think, how we think, and what is even possible to think. This is Media Objects, produced in collaboration with Media Studies at Cornell University. With support from the college of Arts and...

While the U.S. Constitution is constantly invoked to justify how the country should be governed, it actually provides very few specifics on how that should be done. Instead, the designed ambiguities of the document require the imaginative powers of its citizenry to interpret it and decide which laws should be implemented and how they should be enforced. Episode guest is George Thomas, professor of...

Given the option to plug into a world totally free from conflict and struggle, most would choose to remain in their current reality. A true utopia would be too boring, stifling—with no problems to solve, there would be no outlet for creativity, for the imagination. Episode guest is John Farrell, professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College. Produced with the Gould Center for Humanistic Stu...

If a person spends their entire life seeing only in black and white, is it possible for them to truly know what it would be like to experience color? Philosophers have debated this for decades, but one thing they have often overlooked is the power of the imagination. It is a skill, and like any other skill it can be honed, perhaps enough to allow one to achieve deep knowledge of an experience they...

Media are increasingly monopolizing attention: Your mind is prevented from wandering, from generating thoughts, having associations, coming up with ideas. Over time, this dulls the creative faculties and weakens the power of imagination, which is essential for the creation of art…as well as for a clear perception of reality. Episode guest is Radhika Koul, professor of literature at Claremont McKen...

Science is not some purely rationalist endeavor that exists in an isolated realm of objective observations and hard data that can deliver absolute truths. It is built on and intertwined with the modes of analysis, intellectual history, and ways of knowing in the humanities. 0:00 Intro 2:19 Part 1 –– Metaphors We Live By 5:52 Part 2 –– Metaphors in Science, an Ancient Paradox 10:32 Part 3 –– Embryo...

The first in a 9-part series dedicated to deep, intentional listening. Episodes of "The Listening Experience" will be released about every four months.

There's a lot to hear in outer space if you change the way you listen.

The story of how gravitational waves were finally discovered and how we are making sense of them.

Some of the most iconic images we have of the universe closely resemble 19th-century landscape paintings of the American West. A big part of the reason has to do with how scientists interpreted visual data from telescopes like Hubble.

With the telescopes of the 20th century, astronomers began to see a universe that just so happened to resemble the cosmos as described by a 13th century Italian poet…Dante Alighieri.