Episode 316: A Four-Letter Man (Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber")
Very Bad Wizards
David and Tamler go big game hunting and explore their first Hemingway short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” We dig into his characteristic themes of courage, cowardice, shifting power dynamics in marriages, and what it truly means to live a happy life. Plus, neuroscience may be complex, but can these AI generated neuroscience jokes tickle David’s funny bone? And a super timely discussion of an urgent issue: The Cracker Barrel logo. [apnews.com] [punsify.com] by Ernest Hemingway [wikipedia.org]
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Episode 315: Ceaseless Striving (Schopenhauer’s Pessimism)
Very Bad Wizards
David and Tamler tackle the topic chosen by our beloved Patreon supporters in the first VBW madness tournament – Schopenhauer. We discuss his essays “On the Sufferings of the World” and “The Vanity of Existence,” their strikingly modern perspectives on human life and behavior and the influences Schopenhauer took from Eastern thought. Plus, David has Tamler do a blind ranking of movie directors. [plato.stanford.edu] [iep.utm.edu] [full-text from gutenberg.org]
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Episode 314: The In-Betweeny Place
Very Bad Wizards
David and Tamler go long on McDonagh’s 2008 masterpiece "In Bruges." We talk about the terrific performances and all the weighty themes - sin, guilt, redemption, honor, language, and very inappropriate jokes. Plus philosophers talk about “sex within the discipline” and Tamler can’t handle it. [dailynous.com] [wikipedia.org]
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Episode 313: The Spontaneous Eruption of Now
Very Bad Wizards
David and Tamler try to wrap their heads around the metaphysics of past and future via the Borges essay(s) “A New Refutation of Time.” What does it mean to be a time skeptic or a time realist for that matter? If you’re a Berkeleyan idealist and Humean skeptic about the self, do you have to deny succession and simultaneity? The world, unfortunately, is real; and we, unfortunately, are Very Bad Wizards. Plus for centuries philosophers insisted that you couldn’t measure qualia, but then scientists just went ahead and… measured it! ...
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Episode 312: MechaSkeptic
Very Bad Wizards
David and Tamler return to David Hume’s somewhat slippery brand of skepticism, this time focusing Chapter 12 of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Plus speaking of things to be skeptical about, we dive into a recent paper called “Your Brain on ChatGPT” – does neuroscience show that LLM users incur a “cognitive debt”? [wikipedia.org] Hume's Enquiry Section 12: [davidhume.org]
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Episode 311: The Way to Dusty Death (Shakespeare's "Macbeth")
Very Bad Wizards
David and Tamler screw their courage to the sticking place and talk about their first Shakespeare play – The Tragedy of Macbeth. Plus we select 16 topics for our first VBW topic tournament suggested and voted by our beloved Patreon patrons.
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Episode 310: Bayes, Brains, and Buddhists
Very Bad Wizards
David and Tamler try to wrap their heads around the predictive processing theory of the mind and brain function and talk about a paper that applies the framework to meditation practices. But first a new Psychological Science article expresses skepticism about the existence of people who have no inner voice. So is David a new kind of human or is he just making up this condition to get attention? Assistant Editor’s note: When Tamler says he doesn’t talk to his dog “weirdly often,” he is lying. Lind, A. (2024). Are There Really People With No Inner Voice? Commentary on Nedergaard...
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Episode 309: Dissolving Into the One
Very Bad Wizards
David and Tamler heed the call to journey into the realm of Joseph Campbell. What are the unifying elements shared by myths and religions across time and culture? Does myth give us a portal into the hidden cosmic forces of the universe? Can it take us into depths of our unconscious and the nature of our own being? What is the legacy of Campbell’s thought today? Plus, three brave scholars of fascism at Yale flee the country to form in a center of resistance at…The University of Toronto.
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Bonus Episode: Va Va Boom (Robert Aldrich's "Kiss Me Deadly")
Very Bad Wizards
We kick off our Bonus "Noir Summer" series with Robert Aldrich's "Kiss Me Deadly" (1956). While the rest of the bonus series will be for Patreon subscribers only, the first is free to all.
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Episode 308: The Gray Man who Dreamed (Borges' "Shakespeare's Memory")
Very Bad Wizards
David and Tamler return to their happy place and talk about two pieces by JL Borges – the story “Shakespeare’s Memory” and the [essay/story/poem/literary sketch??] “Everything and Nothing.” What would it mean to have the memory of a supreme artist like Shakespeare? Would it help us understand his work, or how he was able to produce masterpiece after masterpiece What does it mean to have our own memories? How does all this connect to our sense of self? Plus cancel culture comes to Cornell, but don’t worry it’s about that one thing it's fine to...
info_outlineOver the years we’ve referred repeatedly to Plato’s cave, Platonic forms, and phrases like “copies of copies” without ever really explaining what we mean by these things. So as part of a new mini-series we’re going dive deeper into Plato’s famous images of the cave, the sun, and the divided line from Republic Books 6 and 7. What are Plato’s forms and how do they fit into the overall structure of his most famous dialogue? How does the form of the good relate to the other forms? What are the mystical elements of the cave metaphor? (Note: this is part one of a two-part discussion).
Plus, if we could go back in time and give one piece of professional advice to a younger version of ourselves, what would that be?
Plato's allegory of the cave (this has a couple of useful illustrations) [wikipedia.org]
Republic (Hackett Classics) translated by G.M.A. Grube [amazon.com affiliate link]
(you can get full text PDF files of Plato's Republic for free all over the internet, but this is the version we're using)
Let us know where we should hold our 300th episode listener meet-up [surveymonkey.com]