Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Philosophy”

Episode 169: On Free Expression

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 15 May 2024 10:30:00 -0400

The ongoing crackdown on protests at many American universities prompts a discussion on the politics, ethics, and metaphysics of free expression.

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Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
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REFERENCES

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic
George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature
George Orwell, Inside the Whale
New York Times, “At Indiana University, Protests Only Add to a Full Year of Conflicts
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Indiana Daily Student, “Provost Addresses Controversy”
Official government page for the Proposed Bill to address Online Harms in Canada.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Daryl Davis, American musician and activist
DavidFoster Wallace, Just Asking

Episode 158: As Above, So Below: On Plato's 'Timaeus'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 10:30:00 -0500

In this episode of Weird Studies, we delve into the mysterious depths of Plato's Timaeus, one of the foundational texts of our civilization. In his characteristic brilliance, Plato blends cosmology and metaphysics, anatomy and politics to tell a creation story that rivals the most fantastical mythologies, yet he does it while remaining grounded in a philosophical rigor that announces a radically new way of thinking the world. Here, Phil and JF try unravel the layers of the dialogue, revealing how Plato's vision of a divinely ordered cosmos echoes through the corridors of esoteric thought from antiquity to modern times.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES

Plato, [Timaeus](https://hackettpublishing.com/history/history-of-science/timaeus](Donald Zeyl Edition)
Earl Fontenelle, The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast
The Book of Thoth
Graham Hancock, British journalist
Hesiod, Theogony
Hermes Trismegistus, {Emerald Tablet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Tablet)
Pierre Hadot,, scholar of classical philosophy
Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”
Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought
Lionel Snell, SSOTBME

Episode 116: On 'Blade Runner'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 10:00:00 -0500

In his 1978 bestseller The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins described humans as "survival machines" whose sole purpose is the replication of genes. All of culture needed to be understood as a side-effect, if not an epiphenomenon, of that defining function. Four years after Dawkins' book was published, Warner Brothers released Blade Runner, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's dystopian novel Do Androis Dream of Electric Sheep?. Ridley Scott's film presents us with a different kind of survival machine: the replicant, a technology whose sole function is the replication of human beings. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the ethical, metaphysical, and aesthetic dimensions of one of the greatest and most prophetic science fiction films of all time.

Support us on Patreon
Find us on Discord
Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack

REFERENCES

Ridley Scott (dir.), Blade Runner

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick, “The Android and the Human”
Philip K. Dick, “Man, Android, and Machine”
Dennis Villeneuve (dir.), Blade Runner 2049
Weird Studies, Episode 114 on the Wheel of Fortune
Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner: BFI Film Classics
Alan Nourse, The Bladerunner
Weird Studies, Episode 115 on Brian Eno
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Weird Studies, Episode 5 on “When Nothing is Cool”
JF Martel, “Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things”
John Carpenter (dir,), The Thing
Beyond Yacht Rock podcast
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”
Weird Studies, Episode 86 on “The Sandman”
Orson Welles (dir.), Touch of Evil
George Orwell, 1984

Episode 112: Readings from the 'Book of Probes': The Mysticism of Marshall McLuhan

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 10:45:00 -0500

The Book of Probes contains a assortment of aphorisms and maxims from the work of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, each one set to evocative imagery by American graphic designer David Carson. McLuhan called the utterances collected in this book "probes," that is, pieces of conceptual gadgetry designed not to disclose facts about the world so much as blaze new pathways leading to the invisible background of our time. In this episode, Phil and JF use an online number generator to discuss a random yet uncannily cohesive selection of of McLuhanian probes.

REFERENCES

Marshall Mcluhan and David Carson, The Book of Probes

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Marshall Mcluhan, The Mechanical Bride
Aristotle, System of causation
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato
Weird Studies, Episode 71 on Marshall Mcluhan
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Christiaan Wouter Custers, A Philosophy of Madness
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense
Marshall Mcluhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
Harry Partch, American composer
Marc Augé, Non-Places
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Denis Villeneuve (dir.), Arrival
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

Episode 109: Infinite Play: On 'The Glass Bead Game,' by Hermann Hesse

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 10:30:00 -0400

JF and Phil have been talking about doing a show on The Glass Bead Game since Weird Studies' earliest beginnings. It is a science-fiction novel that alights on some of the key ideas that run through the podcast: the dichotomy of work and play, the limits and affordances of institutional life, the obscure boundary where certainty gives way to mystery... Throughout his literary career, Hesse wrote about people trying to square their inner and outer selves, their life in the spirit and their life in the world. The Glass Bead Game brings this central concern to a properly ambiguous and heartbreaking conclusion. But the novel is more than a brilliant work of philosophical or psychological literature. It is also an act of prophecy -- one that seems intended for us now.

Header image by Liz West, via Wikimedia Commons.

REFERENCES

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Paul Hindemith, German composer
Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture
Alfred Korzybski, concept of Time Binding
Christopher Nolan, Memento
William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism
Jeremy Johnson, Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness
Teilhard de Chardin, French theologian
Mathesis
Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze
Weird Studies, Episode 22 with Joshua Ramey
Joseph Needham, British historian of Chinese culture
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

Episode 93: Living and Dying in a Secular Age: On Charles Taylor and Disenchantment

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 10:30:00 -0500

In A Secular Age, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor tries to come to grips with the seismic development that transformed the world after the Renaissance, namely the secularization of the society and soul of Western humanity. What does it mean to live in an age where religion, once the very matrix of social existence, is relegated to the realm of private and personal choice? What defines secularity? Are modern people really as "irrelegious" as we make them out to be? In this episode, JF and Phil squarely train their sights on a question that continues to haunt them, with Taylor as their Virgil in what amounts to a descent into the ordinary inferno of modern unknowing.

Header Image by Pahudson, via Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES

Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity
Weird Studies, ep 71: The Medium is the Message
Penn & Teller, Bullshit
René Descartes, Meditations
Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Jacques Ellul, The New Demons
David Foster Wallace's essay on David Letterman
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics
Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History

Episode 56: On Jean Gebser, with Jeremy D. Johnson

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 11:30:00 -0400

The German poet and philosopher Jean Gebser's major work, The Ever-Present Origin, is a monumental study of the evolution of consciousness from prehistory to posthistory. For Gebser, consciousness adopts different "structures" at different times and in different contexts, and each structure reveals certain facets of reality while potentially occluding others. An integral human being is one who can utilize all of the structures according to the moment or situation. As Gebserian scholar Jeremy Johnson explains in this episode, modern humans are currently experiencing the transition from the "perspectival" structure which formed in the late Middle Ages to the "aperspectival," a new way of seeing and being that first revealed itself in the art of the Modernists. Grokking what the aperspectival means, and what it might look like, is just one of the tasks Jeremy, Phil and JF set themselves in this engaging trialogue.

Jeremy D. Johnson is the author of the recently released Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness.

REFERENCES

Jeremy Johnson, Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and the Integral Consciousness
Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin
William Irwin Thompson, Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness
Ken Wilber, integral theorist
Lionel Snell, “Spare Parts”
Nagarjuna, “Verses of the Middle Way” (Mulamadhyamakakarika)
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Object-oriented ontology (OOO)
Dogen, Uji (“The Time-Being”), from the Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye)
Special Guest: Jeremy D. Johnson.

Episode 54: Lobsters, Pianos, and Hidden Gods

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 13:00:00 -0400

"All things feel," Pythagoas said. Panpsychism, the belief that consciousnes is a property of all things and not limited to the human brain, is back in vogue -- with good reason. The problem of how inert matter could give rise to subjectivity and feeling has proved insoluble under the dominant assumptions of a hard materialism. Recently, the American filmmaker Errol Morris presented his own brand of panpsychism in a long-form essay entitled, "The Pianist and the Lobster," published in the New York Times. The essay opens with an episode from the life of Sviatoslav Richter, namely a time where the famous Russian pianist couldn't perform without a plastic lobster waiting for him in the wings. In Morris's piece, the curious anecdote sounds the first note of what turns out to be a polyphony of thoughts and ideas on consciousness, agency, Nerval's image of the the "Hidden God," and the deep weirdness of music. Phil and JF use Morris's essay to create a polyphony of their own.

REFERENCES

Errol Morris, "The Pianist and the Lobster"

Sviatoslav Richter, Russian pianist
Nick Cave., Red Hand Files #53
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Bruno Monsaingeon (dir.), Richter: The Enigma
Bon Jovi, "Livin’ on a Prayer"
Brad Warner, "The Eyes of Dogen"
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Edgard Varèse, composer
Benjamin Libet, neuroscientist
Robin Hardy (dir), The Wicker Man
Frans De Waal, Mama’s Last Hug
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego
Tarot de Marseille - XVIII: The Moon
Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life
Carl Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry", The Red Book
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods

Episode 49: Out of Time: Nietzsche on History

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 11:00:00 -0400

In his essay "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," Nietzsche attacks the notion that humans are totally determined by the historical forces that shape their physical and mental environment. Where other philosophers like Plato saw virtue in remembering eternal truths that earthly existence had wiped from our memories, Nietzsche extolled the virtues of forgetting, of becoming "untimely" and creating a zone where something new could arise. For Nietzsche, history was useful only if it served Life. Because we live in an age which constantly reifies history (through movies, news, social media, etc.) while also tricking us into thinking we somehow exist outside of history, the essay remains as relevant today as it was when Nietzsche wrote it a century and a half ago.

REFERENCES

Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" in Untimely Meditations
Epic Rap Battles of History: Eastern Philosophers vs Western Philosophers
Ernest Newman, Life of Wagner
Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature
Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity
Michael Foucault, "What is Englightenment?"
Antinatalism
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
P. J. O’Rourke, American writer
Richard Pryor, American comedian

Episode 18: Does 'Consciousness' Exist? - Part Two

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 10:00:00 -0400

JF and Phil finally get down to brass tacks with William James's essay "Does Consciousness Exist?" At the heart of this essay is the concept of what James calls "pure experience," the basic stuff of everything, only it isn't a stuff, but an irreducible multiplicity of everything that exists -- thoughts as well as things. We're used to thinking that thoughts and things belong to fundamentally different orders of being, but what if thoughts are things, too? For one thing, psychical phenomena (a great interest of James's) suddenly become a good deal more plausible. And the imaginal realm, where art and magic make their home, becomes a sovereign domain.

REFERENCES

William James, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?"
Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego
William James, Essays in Psychical Research
Weird Studies D&D episode
Proust, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu
The Venera 13 probe's photos of the surface of Venus
Wallace Stevens, "A Postcard from the Volcano"

Episode 8: On Graham Harman's "The Third Table"

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 13:00:00 -0400

JF and Phil discuss Graham Harman's "The Third Table," a short and accessible introduction to "object-oriented ontology." Phil takes us on a tour of his closet, we discover that JF's kids are better at this weird studies stuff than their old man, and the conversation veers through Harman's Lovecraftian "weird realism," Zen's "just sit" meditation, panpsychism, Martin Buber's I and Thou, experimental filmmaking, and more.

WORKS AND IDEAS CITED IN THIS EPISODE

Graham Harman, "The Third Table"
Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects
Martin Heidegger, Being in Time
J. F. Martel, "Ramble on the Real"
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World
Graham Harman, "Objects and the Arts" (lecture)
Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism is Baloney
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
Walden, A Game – A computer game based on Heny David Thoreau’s classic work, Walden
South Park, “Guitar Queer-O” (season 11, episode 13)
Wikipedia entry on art critic David Hickey
Heraclitus, Fragments
Martin Buber, I and Thou
The concept of “substantial form” in Aristotle’s philosophy
Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology"
Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things
William James, "Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?"
Andy Warhol’s minimalist films Empire and Sleep
Wikipedia entry on filmmaker Terrence Malick
Neil Jordan (director), The End of the Affair (based on the novel by Graham Greene)
J. F. Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Gustav Klimt, The Kiss (painting)
Matthew Akers (director), David Blaine: Beyond Magic
The Duffer Brothers (directors), Stranger Things 2

Episode 1: Introduction to Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 08:00:00 -0500

Phil and J.F. share stories of sleep paralysis and talk about Charles Fort's sympathy for the damned, Jeff Kripal's phenomenological approach to Fortean weirdness, Dave Hickey's notion of beauty as democracy, and Timothy Morton's hyperobjects.