Edith Stein, Empathy & the Loss of Wonder with Allister Lee
Anagoge Podcast
The danger of AI, Allister Lee argues, is not that it lies to you but that it flatters you. A PhD candidate at the University of Exeter, Allister applies the phenomenology of Edith Stein to the failures of chatbots, coining "sycophantasy" for the way AI offers the form of empathy while lacking its substance: real otherness, real friction, real resistance. Without an "other" who can push back, recursive self-reflection becomes a closed loop that slides toward what the literature calls AI psychosis. But Allister resists pure pessimism. AI is a "negative tool," a photographic negative that...
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Enactivism, Buddhist Epistemology & the Cosmic Play with Hüseyin Beyköylü
Anagoge Podcast
Hüseyin Beyköylü left medicine for cognitive science after an LSD experience, and five years later he's arguing that mainstream psychology and neuroscience are built on assumptions that systematically miss what matters most about the mind. This is a dense, careful conversation about epistemology, metaphysics, and why randomized controlled trials can't capture human transformation. We get into the entropy-fluency hypothesis, how destabilization and reorganization cycle through every scale from insight to mystical experience, and why false fluency (the smoothness of a conspiracy theory, the...
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Psychedelic Realism, Platonism & The Ground of Being with Danny Forde
Anagoge Podcast
Most philosophical work on psychedelics either reduces the experience to brain states or floats off into vague mysticism. Danny Forde carves a third path. He argues that psychedelics strip away the ego's narrative overlay and give you direct contact with reality as it actually is. The case is built on realist phenomenology, anti-psychologism, and a sober Platonism that treats essences as real but not otherworldly. The episode is a sustained, sometimes contentious dialogue about whether that claim holds up: whether perception can ever be "raw," whether the minimal self really persists...
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God and Technology with Heidi Campbell
Anagoge Podcast
Can technology save us? That question has been asked since the Industrial Revolution, and Heidi Campbell has spent 30 years studying how religious communities keep answering it. In this conversation, she walks through her Religious Social Shaping of Technology framework, showing that even the most conservative groups do not reject technology outright but filter it through their core values and authority structures. From the kosher cell phone in Israel to Zoom communion during the pandemic, the research reveals a consistent pattern that most popular narratives get wrong. The conversation then...
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The Orthodox Vision of Beauty with Timothy Patitasas
Anagoge Podcast
Timothy Patitsas argues that Western ethics has the order of the transcendentals backwards. Truth and goodness come first in most traditions. But Patitsas, drawing from Greek Orthodox theology, argues that beauty must come first. Not beauty as aesthetics, but beauty as the force that draws you toward God, toward wholeness, and toward a life worth living. In this conversation, we work through what that actually means: how liturgy functions as a structuring force analogous to high-reliability organizations like aircraft carriers, why asceticism follows naturally from eros rather than opposing...
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The Timaeus, Beauty and Tradition with Piero Boitani
Anagoge Podcast
How much of what you read are you actually missing? In this in person conversation recorded in Rome (full video on YouTube), comparative literature scholar Piero Boitani makes the case that most of us are functionally illiterate when it comes to the Western canon, not because we lack access to the texts, but because we lack the layered knowledge required to read them. He demonstrates this with a single word in Tolstoy that links The Death of Ivan Ilyich to Christ's crucifixion through Tolstoy's own Gospel translation, a connection invisible without Russian, Greek, and biblical literacy working...
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The Science & Spirituality of Psychedelics with Michiel van Elk
Anagoge Podcast
This is a in-person recorded podcast. The video is available on YouTube. Michiel van Elk is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Leiden University and head of the PRiSM Lab, where he studies the cognitive neuroscience of religion and psychedelic experiences. In this episode, we take a sober look at the current state of psychedelic science, moving beyond the cultural evangelism and media hype. Michiel critiques the biomedical model of psychedelic therapy, discusses the disappointing effect sizes in recent clinical trials, and highlights methodological issues like "breaking blind"...
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Platonism, Mysticism & Mysteries with Arthur Versluis
Anagoge Podcast
Arthur Versluis is the author of Platonic Mysticism: Contemplative Science, Philosophy, Literature, and Art and a Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. His work bridges the gap between rigorous scholarship and the experiential reality of spiritual traditions. We examine the transformative power of art and its ability to mediate between the material and the transcendent. Versluis highlights the Hudson River School and the concept of "Luminism," explaining how the visual representation of light in nature mirrors the internal experience of mystical illumination....
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Object-Oriented Ontology & the Nature of Reality with Graham Harman
Anagoge Podcast
This conversation explores the depths of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and its radical departure from both analytic and continental philosophy traditions. Graham Harman explains the limitations of "literalism" in science and how great philosophy relies on intuition and rhetoric rather than just rational justification. We discuss the influence of Martin Heidegger’s tool analysis and the difference between "real" and "sensual" objects. We also cover the role of architecture in philosophy and why art may be the only way to touch the reality of things. 00:00 - Introduction to...
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The Self, Consciousness & Relationality with James Cooke
Anagoge Podcast
This was the first real-life episode of the Anagoge Podcast, recorded in Portugal. The video of the conversation is available on YouTube. James Cooke is a neuroscientist, writer, and contemplative practitioner whose work bridges neuroscience, philosophy, and spirituality. In his recent book The Dawn of Mind, he proposes a bold reframing of consciousness—placing it not in the brain alone, but within the deeper relational dynamics of life itself. In this episode, we explore James’ formative mystical experience as a teenager and how it set him on a lifelong journey to understand...
info_outlineAnagoge Podcast is now over 1 year old! Thank you everyone for listening.
Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis. He is a founding editor and continues as a co-editor-in-chief of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, an interdisciplinary journal published by Springer.
In this episode, we talk about Shaun's background, the nature of phenomenology and cognitive science, the role of embodiment and action, and Shaun's research about the overview effect; the awe astronauts feel during spaceflight when seeing Earth.
My main microphone died shortly after the podcast started, so you will notice the quality decreasing at some point, as I had to use my camera microphone. Sorry!
The timestamps below are made for YT so they are not 100% accurate as the pace differs slightly.
02:00 Shaun's background in philosophy
05:19 Shaun's background in cognitive science
07:00 Interdisciplinarity and Cog-Sci
10:00 The paradox of phenomenology
17:02 Scientific vs philosophical methods in phenomenology
21:02 Cog-Sci as an example of the role of philosophy in science
26:17 Existentialism in phenomenology
32:00 Embodied Cog-Sci and psychopathology
36:09 Virtual reality for therapy
39:45 What's 4E Cognitive Science?
53:05 4E Cognitive Science and Buddhism
58:15 Varela and Dalai Lama - Mind & Life Institute
1:00:00 Metaphysical tensions of Buddism and Western Science
1:04:00 Awe in the overview effect
1:10:15 Differences in present and future reporting
1:14:10 Background of the awe experience
1:16:45 Feeling of unity
1:19:45 Connections with psychedelic and religious experiences
1:25:00 Enactivist Cognition
1:31:00 Critique of Heidegger of social cognition
1:34:50 History of embodiment
If you would like to connect with me on Instagram, you can do so at @tiagobooks.