Thales' Well

On Richard Rorty with Chris Voparil

On this episode I talk with Chris Voparil from Union Institute & University about American philosopher Richard Rorty. We discuss Rorty’s biography, his complicated relation with American Pragmatist philosophy and both analytic and continental philosophy, how Rorty dealt with accusations of relativism, his epistemological and moral pluralism, what Rorty has to say about solidarity and community building, how the academic left neglected economics  and forgot to talk about poor people, and what hope Rorty offers the  contemporary world.

Christopher J. Voparil is the author of two books Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision, (2006) and Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists (2022). He is also co-editor of The Rorty Reader (2010), Richard Rorty: On Philosophy and Philosophers: Unpublished Papers, 1960–2000 (2020), What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics (2023). He is the founding President of the Richard Rorty Society. You can find out more about Chris here.

If you would like to study with me you can find more information about our online education MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here.  September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T. You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Pod Bean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

On Spiritual Freedom with Martin Hägglund

On this episode of the podcast, I talk to Swedish philosopher Prof. Martin Hägglund from Yale University about his book This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free. The dominant theme of our conversation was  the meaning of freedom. Martin has a distinct notion of the demands of being free and we got into a detailed discussion about what freedom really means, how to think about it, how freedom is tied up with our social activities and just why our mortality is exactly the thing that makes us free. As well we talked about how human beings are a distinct kind of animal, a critique of posthumanism, Aristotle and living the good life, Kant’s theory of freedom, how freedom is a form of sustained activity, and also why being free is just plain hard! Enjoy!

Martin Hägglund is the Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of four books – Kronofobi: Essäer om tid och ändlighet (Chronophobia: Essays on Time and Finitude (Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002), Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford U.P., 2008), Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Harvard U.P., 2012), This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free (Pantheon, 2019) – as well as several articles, interviews and podcasts. You can find out more about Martin here at his university webpage or here on his personal webpage. You can also follow him on Twitter: @martinhaegglund

 

If you would like to study with me you can find more information about our online education MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here.  September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T. You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Pod Bean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

On Bruno Latour with Joost van Loon

On this episode I talk to Prof. Joost van Loon about French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour. We talked about a lot! Joost taught me about Latour’s actor network theory and while we were doing that we ended up chatting about the importance of concrete controversies, how objectivity works, the production of science, conspiracy theories, vaccine science, relativism, new materialism and Latour’s late turn to politics and ecology.

Joost van Loon is the Chair of General Sociology and Sociological Theory at Katholische Universität Eichstätt. He is the author of numerous books and articles. You can find out more about Joost via his university webpage here. Here is a link to Joost’s book Discussing New Materialism which we mentioned on the show. Latour’s book We Have Never Been Modern can be found here, and his late book on ecology can be found here.

If you would like to study with me you can find more information about our online education MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here.  September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T.

You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

 

 

On Alexandre Kojève with Hager Weslati

On this podcast I talk to Dr Hager Weslati about the philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Kojève is a hugely influential but not very well-known philosophers. Here Hager and I talk about his life, his philosophy, and his famous lectures on Hegel. Kojève was a philosopher,  entrepreneur, diplomat, architect of the European Union and possible spy!

Hager Weslati is a lecturer in media philosophy and political PR at Kingston University. She translated Alexandre Kojève’s Notion of Authority (2014) and his early 1950s manuscript on Kant (2024). Her current work is aligned with recent critical attempts, across a wide range of disciplinary areas, to engage Kojeve's mysterious system of knowledge and its strong resonances with contemporary thought and politics in a global context. You can find out more via Hager’s university webpage. Also, Hager has made some  writings available via her academia.edu page.

If you would like to study with me you can find more information about our online education MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here.  September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T.

You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

On the Truth of Snuff with Mark McKenna

A podcast with my colleague Dr Mark McKenna who is an Associate Professor at Staffordshire University. We talked about horror films. Specifically, we talked about the the snuff movie as a form of horror. We also talked about the cultural mythologies that have grown up around the concept of snuff, how this mythology transformed in the technological age as well issues pertaining to distribution, marketing and desensitization. Please note we discuss extreme violence and sexual violence in this podcast.

You can find out more about Mark via his personal website and his university webpage. Dr Mark McKenna is an Associate Professor in the Film and Media Industries and Director of the Centre for Research in the Digital Entertainment and Media Industries at Staffordshire University. Mark’s research is largely centered on cult and horror cinema, he is the author of Nasty Business: The Marketing and Distribution of the Video Nasties  (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Snuff (Liverpool University Press, 2023), and is co-editor of the Routledge collection Horror Franchise Cinema (2021), and author of the report Silicon Stoke 2023: Developing Film, TV and Other Content Production in North Staffordshire and is he is currently working on his third monograph, a study of the John Milius surf film Big Wednesday (1978) for the Routledge series Cinema and Youth Cultures.

If you would like to study with me you can find more information about our online education MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here.  September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T.

You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

 

On the Embrace of Capital with Don Milligan

Don Milligan is back to discuss his new book The Embrace of Capital  (Zero Books: 2022). In this , Don recounts and analyses his history of social and political activism interrogating the reasons he thinks working people have a love-hate relationship with capitalism but ultimately embrace it. But equally, Don tells us how working people hate insecurity, inequality, greed and love civic and political freedom. In our discussion, we chatted about royal weddings, royal funerals, rule of law, egalitarianism, the diversity of working class experience, exploitation, fairness, gentrification, technology and lots more!

You can buy a copy of the book here and here. Dr Don Milligan taught a course on the theory and practice of anti-capitalism at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research examines how commercial society gives rise to political movements. He campaigned for the gay liberation movement for many years. Don writes regular columns for his website “Off the Cuff”. You can find a collection of his writings here. You can also listen to Don’s cultural history of gay rights in Britain on Thales Well here. He tweets at: @Don Milligan2020

If you would like to study with me you can find more information about our online education MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here.  September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T.

You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

On Architecture with Graham Harman

On this episode Professor Graham Harman returns to talk about architecture and philosophy. We had a fascinating conversation discussing architecture in relation to the history of philosophy. Graham has tackled just this topic in new book Architecture and Objects  (2022), which has recently come out with University of Minnesota Press. We discuss a whole host of topics including the role of the ‘big three’ philosophers – Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze –how their thought informs architecture, and the ways Graham draws on, develops, and applies his own distinctive object-oriented-ontology (Triple O) position to architecture. Graham also talked about teaching architecture as a philosopher, materialism, the dangers of ‘literalism,’ ecology, the ideological dimension of architecture, and of course we spoke about buildings such as Imperial War Museum North, Sydney Opera House, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Newgrange,  and the Tate Gallery London.

Graham Harman is a world-leading philosopher. He works at Sci-Arc in Los Angeles. He has authored several books, articles and journals and you can find more information about him on his institutional webpage. In the discussion Graham mentioned these books specifically Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (2016, Polity), Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (2018, Pelican) and Speculative Realism: An Introduction (2018, Polity).

You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and PodBean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

 

On Nietzsche’s Socialism with Robert Miner

Friedrich Nietzsche is usually considered a staunch critic of socialism. My guest on this episode thinks this picture is a lot more complicated than we suspect. Professor Robert Miner suggests Nietzsche offers a very complex picture of what socialism entails, and we should consider Nietzsche as a critic and proponent of socialism. Robert Miner is a Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University. You can find a link to his university website here. Robert’s article, which we based this discussion on, is called ‘‘ Nietzsche as Critic and Proponent of Socialism: A Reappraisal Based on Human, All Too Human’’ and you can find it here. Robert has published a number of books on Nietzsche and other philosopher. You can buy his book on Nietzsche’s The Gay Science here, and his book on Nietzsche and Montaigne here.

If you would like to study with me you can find more information about our online education MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here.  September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T.

You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

On Simone Weil with Tiff Thomas

This episode I am talking to Dr Tiff Thomas. We discuss the philosophy, ideas and politics of activist, mystic, worker and educator Simone Weil. 

Tiff is a lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University and specializes in Spinoza. He is also interested in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Simone Weil. You can find out more about Tiff here. Tiff is a co-leader of the AHRC Funded UK Simone Weil Research Network which you can follow on Twitter here. You can also find links to his writings on Simone Weil and Spinoza at the bottom of these show notes.

If you would like to study with with me you can find more information about our online education courses MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here.  September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T.

Dr Tiff Thomas' Public Articles:

The Philosophical Salon: ‘Silence is Violence’: Simone Weil on the Impossible Demands of Justice

Latest Publications:

Thomas, C (2022) ‘Simone Weil’s Venice Saved: Pity, Beauty, Friendship’ in Bloomsbury Library for 20th-Century French Thought

Thomas, C (2021) ‘Spinoza on Melancholy and Cheerfulness’ in Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review

Thomas, C (2020) ‘On Religious and Cultural Objects: Articulate and Inarticulate Bodies in Spinoza’s Philosophy of Nature’ in European Journal of Philosophy

Thomas, C (2020) ‘Simone Weil: The Ethics of Affliction and the Aesthetics of Attention’, in International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Thomas, C (2020) ‘Brancusi’s Golden Bird and Loy’s “Brancusi’s Golden Bird”: A Spinozist Encounter’ in Philosophy and Literature

On Michel Serres with David Webb

On this podcast I am talking to my colleague Prof. David Webb a philosopher at Staffordshire University. David is the author of Heidegger, Ethics and the Practice of Ontology (Continuum: 2011) and Foucault's Archaeology: Science and Transformation (Edinburgh U.P. 2013). He has published several articles on Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, modern French philosophy. He is especially interested in epistemology and philosophy of science. We talked specifically about French Philosopher Michel Serres. David helped me understand Serres’ influences from Leibniz, Bachelard and ancient atomism, and we talked about what Serres has to say about science, art, poetry and the nature of contingency.

If you would like to find out more about David here is a link to his university web page. If you would like to study with David (and me!) you can find more information about our distance education courses here. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here. January and September intakes available either F/T or P/T.