Invasive Thoughts

Tim Harrison (GUEST): Impossible Experience and the Invention of Consciousness

What would it mean to remember the beginning of consciousness? Tim Harrison (English and Social Thought, UChicago) takes us through moments when literary and philosophica

Rosanna Warren (GUEST): Sacred Cannibalism

Join us as we ask distinguished poet, critic, and translator Rosanna Warren about her literary autobiography, the state of literary criticism, and the role of the poet-cr

Miguel de Beistegui (GUEST): The Crisis of Crises

In this episode of Invasive Thoughts, we speak with Miguel de Beistegui (ICREA Research Professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra) about crisis as one of the basic conditions o

Emily Riehl (GUEST): Metamathematics and Infinity Category Theory

Emily Riehl (Johns Hopkins, Mathematics) joins us to discuss the power of abstraction in mathematics. Is category theory the mathematics of mathematics? What is infinity

Peter Fenves (GUEST): Kant's Rational Delusions

Peter Fenves (Northwestern) poses some unexpected questions relating to Immanuel Kant’s thought. How does politics emerge from a shortage of space? Should we understand h

Sean Kirkland (GUEST): Nietzsche and Heidegger at the End of Metaphysics

Is Nietzsche a philosopher or an anti-philosopher? Is Western philosophical thought one monolithic tradition? Sean Kirkland (DePaul Philosophy) joins us to discuss the po

Jon Cogburn (GUEST): Bridging the Continental-Analytic Divide; Paradoxico-Metaphysics; and, Panpsychism, or, are all things Mind?

In this episode of Invasive Thoughts, we’re joined by Jon Cogburn, Chair of Philosophy at Louisiana State University. Jon sketches a history of the Continental–Analytic d

David Wellbery (GUEST): Goethe, the Age of Goethe, and World Literature

David Wellbery (UChicago German, Social Thought) joins us to discuss Goethe's work, life, and milieu. He describes Goethe's position at the center of an intellectual and

Richard Strier (GUEST): Shakespeare, Herbert, Jarrell, Dylan

Richard Strier (UChicago English, emeritus) recites the poem that changed his career, explains why formalism and historicism should be friends, offers us a way of reading

Terry Pinkard (GUEST): Hegel's America and America's Hegel

Terry Pinkard, renowned Hegel scholar and translator of the Phenomenology of Spirit (2018) sits down with us to discuss his own intellectual career; the challenges of rea

Peirce Again: Chance, Necessity, Love

We return to Peirce for an exploration of his more speculative, systematic essays ("A Guess at the Riddle", "Evolutionary Love”, and others). What should all systems of t

Metzinger's Ego Machines

How do advances in neuroscience disrupt our intuitive notions of the self? Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel brings together philosophy and the science of the brain to of

Jane Addams and Hull House

For our sixth episode, we talk about the writings and social work of Jane Addams, American pragmatist philosopher, founder of Hull House in Chicago, and co-founder of the

Agamben's Bored Animals

What distinguishes human beings from animals? The question has been a mainstay of philosophy for over two thousand years. Is it our bipedalism? Our rationality? Or could

Northrop Frye's Literary Universe

What is literary criticism? What concept of literature underlies it? Northrop Frye's 1957 Anatomy of Criticism sketches a vast and comprehensive map of the literary unive

Meillassoux's Failed Coup

Quentin Meillassoux's 2006 After Finitude seemed like it was going to revolutionize philosophy. It didn't. We talk about its radical implications and why it may still hav

Hegel, Goethe's Gardener

Around the time he was finishing the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel almost became director of Goethe's botanical gardens in Jena. We play around with affinities between G

Peirce, the "Greatest American Thinker"?

"Certainly the greatest American thinker ever." - Bertrand Russell. A foray into the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, father of pragmatism, largely through six classic