Thales’ Well (Patrick D. O’Connor)

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.

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.

I am talking with Prof. Christian Miller about the nature of character. We discuss different types of character,  character psycholgoy, forms of character virtue as well as forms of character vice, the difference between moral habits and instincts, Aristotle's contribution to the theory of character, and the ever-present gap between who we are and who we should be. Christian outlines valuable strategies for helping us achieve virtue and avoiding vice. 

Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He was recently the Philosophy Director of the Beacon Project , funded by a $3.9 million grant from Templeton Religion Trust, and is Past Director of the Character Project, funded by $5.6 million in grants from the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 90 academic papers as well as three books with Oxford University Press, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), and The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017). His writings have also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Miller is the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (OUP), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (OUP), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (MIT Press), Integrity, Honesty, and Truth Seeking (OUP), and The Continuum Companion to Ethics (Continuum Press). You can find out more about him on his website, or you can follow him on Twitter @CharacterGap or on Facebook. You can purchase a copy of The Character Gap here. 

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.

This month I spoke to Prof. Felix O’Murchadha of the National University of Ireland at Galway about religion and violence. We discussed the nature of religious experience, and more specifically the relation between violation, witnessing and perpetration. This led on to a further discussion of temporality, sexual violence and forgiveness.  Our discussion revolved around Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Amery, Susan Brison and Hannah Arendt

You can find more about Felix here, and you can find a sample of his writings here.

Erratum: During the podcast I mentioned Rutger Bergman who is in fact named Rutger Bregman.

You can listen to more free 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 subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

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.

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 this episode, I discuss analytic philosopher David Lewis' concept of possible worlds with Dr Benjamin Curtis. Ben is  colleague at Nottingham Trent University. We talked about possible worlds, actual worlds, probability, causation and time.

Ben Curtis lectures in Philosophy at Nottingham Trent University. He has published on a wide-variety of themes including epistemology, bioethics, time as well as the philosophical status of antiques. You can find out more about Ben on his university webpage here. Ben has also contributed a number of pieces to The Conversation which you can find here.

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 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.

I had tremendous fun talking to philosopher and novelist Lars Iyer. We discussed Nietzsche in light of Lars' new novel Nietzsche and the Burbs. We discussed many of Nietzsche's famous concepts such as übermensh, amor fati and suffering, affirmation, nihilism and eternal recurrence. As well, we touched on Maurice Blanchot, Simone Weil, The Invisible Committee and disco!

Lars is a  a Reader in Creative Writing and Subject Head of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. He is the author of several academic articles and two monographs on Blanchot -  Blanchot’s Vigilance: Literature, Phenomenology and the Ethical  and Blanchot’s Communism: Art, Philosophy and the Political.(Palgrave Macmillan 2004, 2005). He is the author of The Spurious Trilogy (Spurious, Dogma and Exodus) with Melville House Publishing and now Nietzsche and the Burbs (2020). Nietzsche and the Burbs follows the reflections and comic musings of four young adults and their friend Nietzsche who have search for meaning in a meaningless world. You can find out more about Lars here, you can follow him on Twitter @utterlyspurious and you can buy a copy of Nietzsche and the Burbs here.

You can listen to more free 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 subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

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

I had an amazing conversation with Robert Zaretsky who is a Professor of Humanities at the Honors College, University of Houston. We spoke about French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus and his great pandemic novel The Plague. The Plague is currently receiving renewed critical attention due to the Covid-19 pandemic and is set to be re-issued by Penguin. Thus, I thought it would be a good time to discuss the novel. We touched on the background to Camus' novel, the influence of Thucydides on Camus,  silence, ethics, judgement, the distinction between moraliser and moralist, the strange parallels between Camus and George Orwell as well as Camus' perennial relevance.

Rob is a historian of France and literary biographer. Amongst others, he has published two biographies of Albert Camus entitled A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning with Harvard U.P. and Albert Camus: Elements of a Life with Cornell U.P. You can read his recent essay on Camus' The Plague here, and an essay he wrote on online pedagogy for Times Higher Education here. Elsewhere Rob is a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books where you can read his essay on Camus and Simone Weil here, as well as an essay on Franz Kafka here. He has also contributed to New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs and Chronicle of Higher Education. Here is an essay from Foreign Affairs where Rob writes about the importance of books in pandemics.  You can find out more about Rob on his university website here.

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 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 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.

In this episode, I am joined for a fascinating conversation with philosopher Evan Thompson as we delve into his thought-provoking book The Blind Spot. We discuss this collaboration with scientists Marcelo Gleiser and Adam Frank, his insights on reconciling the “scientific image” and the “manifest image” of the world, and the interplay between subjective experience and objective inquiry. Thompson explains what he means by the "blind spot" of scientific materialism—challenging assumptions about objectivity, reductionism, and the relationship between lived experience, forms of life and scientific knowledge. Thompson offers a compelling critique of reductionist views, proposing instead a vision of science grounded in human experience. We also discuss the cultural and ethical stakes of scientific inquiry in an age of scepticism and misinformation, with a thought-provoking look at climate change, subjectivity, and the unity of life itself. Other thinkers like Wilfred Sellers, Henri Bergson, G.W.F. Hegel and A.N. Whitehead all crop up.

Evan is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. You can view his website and profile here. The Blind Spot is available at all the usual outlets. Evan is also available on Bluesky: @evanthompson.bsky.social.

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.

This time I thought it would be useful to try to do something slightly different. Given that many teachers and lecturers have had on-line learning foisted about them due to the Covid-19 crisis, I thought it would be helpful to talk to an expert about ways of delivering on-line learning. I spoke with Dr David Webster who is the Director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning & Teaching at SOAS, University of London.  Dave and I discussed the benefits and pitfalls of on-line learning, synchronous and asynchronous delivery, blended learning, managing student expectations, the value of focusing on structure and specifics,  managing behaviour in online forums, ideas about segmenting on-line classes and a host of other practical tips and ideas to help us cope with the huge changes our teaching is currently going through.  

You can find out about Dave here and you can look at some his work on education here.  Dave tweets at @davidwebster.

You can listen to more free 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 subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

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.

Dr Don Milligan gives us a cultural history of the gay rights movement in Britain.  Don taught a course on the theory and practice of anti-capitalism at Manchester Metropolitan University. His researches examines how commercial society gives rise to political movements. He has campaigned for the gay liberation movement for many years.  Here he dicusses the cultural, legal and economic context which created the conditions for the progress of gay rights activism in the UK. 

 You can find a collection of Don’s writings here. He tweets at: @Don Milligan2020

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 this episode of Thales’ Well I talk to Prof. Felix O’Murchadha who returns to talk about his new book The Formation of The Modern Self (Bloomsbury, 2022). Felix’s book provides a genealogy of the emergence of the self in the early modern period. We had a very wide-ranging discussion moving from ancient accounts of the self to contemporary versions. We discussed Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume and Kant.

Felix is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Galway. You can find more about Felix here. And  here is a link to his University website. You can also find a sample of his writings here. Here is a link to the book at Bloomsbury, and it is also available in all the usual places.

Come study with me on Staffordshire University’s distance learning MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our distance learning 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.

This time we turn to Ancient Philosophy, and I discuss Plato with Dr Keith Crome. We speak about the pedagogical dimension of Plato's work, and focus specifically on Plato's Republic. Keith argues that to understand Plato, it is essential to understand Plato's account of education and how it relates to Socrates, the Sophists, the myth of the cave, the theory of forms, democratic politics as well as Plato's lesser known more playful side.

Keith Crome is scholar of ancient philosophy, postmodernism and education. He is a philosophy lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan Univeristy.  He is a specialist in the 20th Century thinker Jean Francois Lyotard, and has composed a monograph on this topic entitled Lyotard and the Greeks. You can find out more about Keith here.

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.

This episode I had a fantastic discussion with Dr Colin Alexander about propaganda. We discussed the nature of propaganda, how to identify it, its ubiquity, as well as things we might do to mitigate the effect of propaganda on ourselves and society. More specifically, we focussed on a particular case study, with Colin explaining how propaganda is deployed by charitable organisations, companies and governments. In addition, we spoke about representations of charity in culture with reference to Charles Dickens, Andrew Carnegie and Bob Geldof and Live Aid. The blog piece on Andrew Carnegie which formed the basis of our conversation can be found here.

Colin Alexander is Senior Lecturer in Political Communications at Nottingham Trent University, UK. His expertise surrounds propaganda studies, with a particular interest in communications ethics, imperialism and north-south issues. He is also interested in moral philosophy and debates surrounding the role of charity and altruism within society. He is the author of two monograph books: 'China and Taiwan in Central America' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and 'Administering Colonialism and War’ (Oxford University Press, 2019), and he recently published his first edited volume 'The Frontiers of Public Diplomacy: Hegemony, Morality and Power in the International Sphere' (Routledge, 2021).  

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.

I am talking with Dr Peter Howson from Nottingham Trent University about blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Peter is a Human Geographer, so we talk about the environmental impact of crypto-currency as well as it’s distribution in space. Largely, Peter explains to me the technological, economic, financial and geopolitical ramifications of these new forms of currency.

Unfortunately, we only had a short window to record this, and the only room available was one with a high ceiling and a loud fan. Therefore, the audio suffers. I have done my best with it so I hope you stick with it as Peter is exceptionally insightful about this topic.

Peter is currently a a Researcher and Lecturer in the School of Arts and Humanities at NTU. He is Course Leader for the MA in International Development and leads a number of modules across the Global Studies (Joint Honours) programme. His teaching and research interests span political ecology, critical geopolitics, gender, race and development, ‘green violence’, and blockchain-based environmental management in the Global South. Most of Peter's teaching draws on his research interests and professional experience in the Asia-Pacific region. You can find out more about Peter here.  The podcast Peter recommended is called the ‘The Missing Crypto Queen’. Here is some of the research that Peter spoke about during our conversation: ‘Tackling climate change with blockchain,’ ‘Marine conservation with blockchain,’ and ‘Tackling deforestation with blockchain.

You can listen to more free 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 subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

 Dave and I like to talk. And we did. Here we are talking about Nietzsche, and Dr Who.

This week I spoke to Dr David Webster from the Univeristy of Gloucstershire. Dave is a specialist in Buddhism, in particular the Pali canon. He talks about his life, religion, atheism and the future of education. He is the author of a brilliant little polemic called Dispiritied: How Contemporary Spirituality Makes Us Stupid, Selfish and Unhappy. 

You can find out about Dave here and you can look at his work on education here.  Dave tweets at @davidwebster

Lars Iyer is back! On this episode I talk to novelist Lars Iyer about the fiction, the writing process, the relation between literature and the world, a writers compulsion to write. We speak about a whole range of writers like Plato, Samuel Beckett,  Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, Margaret Duras, Thomas Bernhard. One of the things Lars suggests is that the value of literature is it utter uselessness. Like all good things!

Lars is a  Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. He is the author of several academic articles and two monographs on Blanchot -  Blanchot’s Vigilance: Literature, Phenomenology and the Ethical  and Blanchot’s Communism: Art, Philosophy and the Political.(Palgrave Macmillan 2004, 2005). He is the author of The Spurious Trilogy (Spurious, Dogma and Exodus), Nietzsche and the Burbs (2020) and now My Weil (2023) with Melville House Publishing. You can find out more about Lars here, you can follow him on Twitter @utterlyspurious.

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.

I had this conversation with Raymond Tallis before Christmas. Raymond Tallis is one of Britain's leading philosophers. His career was in medicine, which he studied at Oxford Univeristy. He became a Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester.  His primary research was in clinical  neuroscience. As well as being a philosopher, doctor, poet and novelist, Raymond is a campaigning activist for the National Health Service, as well as a strong advocate for Assisted Dying. He retired from medicine in 2006 to become a full time writer, thinker and cultural critic. We spoke about his life, the nature of consiousness, time, on assisted dying and his love for the NHS. We recorded our chat in a pub, so unfortunately the audio is not as clear as I would like. Ray promised to come back another time. 

Raymond is the author of countless books, articles and novels. You can find a full bibliography here.

Dave is back! We speak again about French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. This time we try to crack one of his most famous works Difference and Repetition. We talked about some very abstract concepts such as space, time, motion, representation and identity, and Deleuze’s three syntheses of time, but Dave does a brilliant of job of coherently explaining this very challenging book and the ‘sheet of black night’ that confronts us all.

Dr David Deamer is a writer and free scholar associated with Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. His interests lie at the intersection of cinema and culture with theory, history, and politics, centring on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, and Friedrich Nietzsche. He is the author of Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images (EUP, 2016); and Deleuze, Japanese Cinema and the Atom Bomb: The Spectre of Impossibility (Bloomsbury, 2014). He has published here and there in various edited collections and journals, and his latest essay – available free on the Film-Philosophy journal home page – is ‘Deleuze’s Three Syntheses Go to Hollywood: The Tripartite Cinema of Time Travel, Many Worlds and Altered States‘ (Film-Philosophy v23i3 EUP, 2019). You can find out more about David on his homepage.

You can listen to more free 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 subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

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.

Here I talked with my friend Dr David Deamer about French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Dave explains to me what Deleuze was about, and then we go on to talk about how Deleuze is important for understanding cinema, and what Deleuze teach us about film, or what film can do for philosophy. Dave is the author of Deleuze, Japanese Cinema, and the Atom Bomb: The Spectre of Impossibility [Bloombsury, 2014], as well as Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images [Edinburgh, 2016]. You can find out more about Dave here. 

I talk to psychologist Dr Christopher Kavanagh about the phenomenon of secular gurus. We discussed the secularism of latter day gurus, how they differ and compare to traditional cult leaders, what traits it takes to be a secular guru (galaxy brainedness, cultishness, anti-establishmentarianism), psychopathy/sociopathy, narcissism and techniques for avoiding manipulation.

Here is a link to the "Gurometer" where you can find out more about how to spot your latter day gurus. Chris is an Associate Professor in Psychology at Rikkyo University and works in the intersection of Cognitive Anthropology and Social Psychology with a research focus on emotions, group and ritual psychology. Chris is also one half of the Decoding the Gurus podcast, a podcast that studies, discusses and examines contemporary  'secular gurus', iconoclasts, and heterodox thinkers such as Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, The Weinstein brothers, Russell Brand, Sam Harris, Noam Chomsky,  Ibram Kendi, Robin D’Angelo etc. You can view Chris's research profile here and also follow him on X (Twitter) 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.

I discuss American novelist Cormac McCarthy with literary scholar Dr Julius Greve. Cormac McCarthy is known for his often bleak and unwavering take on the Western. He has written over ten novels, as well as plays and screenplays in the Southern Gothic literary tradition. Less discussed is the philosophical dimension of McCarthy’s novels. With Julius I discussed how philosophy is present in the  Blood Meridian, Suttree, The Orchard Keeper, The Road, Child of God, No Country for Old Men, The Border Trilogy and Outer Dark. We touched on ecocentrism, geocentric criticism, panpsychism, violence, myth and science and the role of German Idealism in McCarthy's work. Central to Julius’ interpretation is  the idea that McCarthy offers a synthesis of Orphic and Promethean myths, which offers a very human blend of grief and grace.

Julius Greve is a lecturer and research associate at the Institute for English and American Studies, University of Oldenburg, Germany. He is the author of Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature (Dartmouth College Press, 2018), and of numerous articles on McCarthy, Mark Z. Danielewski, François Laruelle, and speculative realism. Greve has co-edited America and the Musical Unconscious (Atropos, 2015), Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), “Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds” (a special issue of EJAS: European Journal of American Studies, 2017), and Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He is currently working on a manuscript on the relation between modern poetics and ventriloquism. You can find out more about Julius here.

You can listen to more free 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 subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

This week I am talking to Austin Hayden Smidt about the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Han is not well know in the Anglophone world, so we took this opportunity to try and introduce some of the key themes of his philosophy. This interview in El Pais offers a useful starting point to Han's thought and work. Also, Han writes relatively accessible and pithy texts. The books this podcast are based on are Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, The Burnout Society, and Agony and Eros.

Austin Hayden Smidt is a philosopher, producer, and performer. He is currently a Researcher in Political Economy at the University of Sydney working on a "Prolegomena to Any Future Political Economy." He also co-hosts the Owls at Dawn and Show Me The Meaning podcasts, as well as produces content for the Wisecrack YouTube channel. He tweets at: @austin_hayden 

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.

Anna Dawson is an award winning teacher and lecturer in Film and TV studies at Nottingham Trent University. She has worked in the film industry, as a film journalist, and  written study guides about the Lord of the Rings and The Matrix. She researches genre, gender, the British film industry and British cinema. We talked about our mutual admiration for the Netflix streaming series Jessica Jones (2015).  Jessica Jones offers a very strong depiction of sexual violence, and Anna spoke about how Jessica Jones shows how survivors cope with the aftermath of trauma, violence and psychological abuse. You can find out more about Anna here. 

This week I discuss the nature of denial, post-truth, and conspiracy theories with Dr Keith Kahn-Harris. We ended up talking about Holocaust denial, anti-vaxxing, climate change, and the resurgence of flat-earth theory. Keith tries to unpick the similarities and differences between all these different types of discourse. He argues that there are many types of denialism. Rather than classifying these phenomena as irrational and nonsensical, he argues that they are secretly are in love with the best traditions of scholarship and truth, and hold an irrepressible desire for respectability and legitimacy. Our talk is based on Keith's recent book Denial: The Unspeakable Truth (Notting Hill Editions, 2018).

Keith is a sociologist, essayist, and music critic. He is an Associate Lecturer and Honorary research fellow at Birkbeck College. As well, he is a Fellow of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and senior lecturer at Leo Baeck College.

You can find out more about Keith at his website here. He is on Twitter: @KeithKahnHarris

Here is the link to the BBC animation that Keith spoke about in the podcast.

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. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

This week I am talking to Olli Lagerspetz about his recent book A Philosophy of Dirt (Reaktion, 2018). This book is a fascinating exploration of what we mean by dirt, how we can use Philosophy to examine it, and whether dirt is an objective or subjective phenomenon. We talked about how dirt is conceived in science, art, politics, anthropology and how we might think of dirt in the context of the environment. As usual in a philosophy conversation, we ended up talking about Plato.

Olli Lagerspetz (b. 1963) is  a Senior Lecturer and Adjunct Professor at the Philosophy department at Åbo Akademi University, and Adjunct Professor of the History of Ideas at Oulu University. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Philosophical Investigations. Lagerspetz studied  at Åbo and, with Peter Winch, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1992-1998 he was Lecturer of philosophy at the University of Wales, Swansea. Lagerspetz has written extensively on the philosophy of the humanities and the social sciences and on the history of social anthropology. His   most recent books include A Philosophy of Dirt (2018), Trust, Ethics and Human Reason (2015) and Intellectual Networks,Philosophy and Social Anthropology (2014) with Kirsti Suolinna and Edward Westermarck. In his research, Lagerspetz has often liked to focus on issues that breach the fact/value divide.  He is interested in looking for alternatives to reductionist accounts of the world we live in. His  main intellectual influences (besides his parents and family members) are Ludwig Wittgenstein and Egon Friedell, plus people who have taught him or worked with him: Lars Hertzberg, Peter Winch, Richard Beardsmore, Ullica Segerstrale, Kirsti Suolinna, Göran Torrkulla, and Hans Rosing. Olli is married with two children and two cats. In his free time, he plays music (tuba and piano). His book was recently reviewed in The Guardian. You can find out about the book here.

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. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

This week I am talking about the great French novelist Emile Zola with Prof. Dan Rebellato of Royal Holloway University. We talk about Zola's life, his novels, the place of philosophy in his work, and Zola's famous "J'accuse...!" which is celebrating it's 120th anniversary this year. 

Dan is an academic and playwright whose expertise focusses on post-war and contemporary British theatre.  He is the author of 1956 and All That (Routledge, 1999). He also has composed a short monograph called Theatre & Globalization. He has also published Modern British Playwriting 2000-2009, The Suspect Culture Book, and Contemporary European Theatre Directors. He is currently working on a book project called Naturalist Theatre: A New Cultural History. As a playwright his work has been performed throughout the UK, Europe and the United states on both stage and radio. He was a major contributor to the BBC Radio 4 series  Emile Zola: Blood, Sex & Money which was an adaptation of Zola's 'Rougon-Macquart' cyle of novels. 

You can find out more about Dan here. He is also great fun on Twitter: @DanRebellato  His nightly tweets to the US President have reached legendary status.

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.

This week I am talking about forensic linguistics with Dr David Wright from Nottingham Trent University. We chatted about how forensic linguistics is used in crime detection, authorship analysis, expert witnessing, aiding policing investigation as well as some of the landmark cases where forensic linguistics has been used. We also spoke about David's research on the language of sexual violence in online forums. 

David Wright is a forensic linguist. His research applies methods of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis in forensic contexts, and aims to help improve the delivery of justice using language analysis. His research spans across a range of intersections between language and the law, evidence, crime and justice. He is co-author of An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence. You can read some of David's article at The Conversation.  He is on Twitter also: @WrightDW

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. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

I spoke with Will Large about the Jewish philosopher Emmanual Levinas.  Levinas is a philosopher who had a unique conception of ethics, one resistant to many of the traditional ways we approach ethics in Philosophy. Many of Levinas' writings were composed during his time in a prisoner of war camp, and his work unsurprisingly embraces notions of escape, otherness, subjectivity and anti-totalitarianism.  Also, many members of his immediate family were murdered by fascists. Levinas' entire career subsequently became devoted to radically transforming how we approach others in a concrete way. With Will, I had a wide-ranging conversation where we touched on the distinction between ethics and morality, Levinas' book Totality and Infinity, Daniel Kahnemann, Gilles Deleuze, virtue signalling, parenthood, the movie Election, political anarchism and environmentalism. 

Dr William Large works at the University of Gloucestershire. He is the author of Levinas' 'Totality and Infinity: A Reader's Guide and Heidegger's Being and Time: A Philosophical Guide. You can find out more about Will here.

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 subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

This week I had a fantastic conversation with Prof. Graham Harman about his unique theory of Object-Oriented Philosophy. Our discussion was wide-ranging, we discussed Graham’s background, metaphysics, HP Lovecraft, art, architecture, Bruno Latour, contemporary Marxism, and Graham's views on the current politics of the United States.

Graham is a Professor of Philosophy at Sci-Arc in Los Angles. He has authored several articles and over 15 books. Most recently his work includes Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (2018, Pelican) and Speculative Realism: An Introduction (2018, Polity). You can read the article Graham and I discussed about Bruno Latour here. Also, here you will find a link to the article Graham mentioned where he responds to Marxist criticism. Graham is a prolific blogger and you can find more about his writing and upcoming events there. You can also follow him on Twitter: @DrZamalek

With thanks to Niki Young of the University of Malta. 

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. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

This week Dr Liz Morrish is talking with us about all things university.  Liz is an Associate Fellow at York St John university who works in the emerging discipline of critical university studies. We discussed what neo-liberalism is, how it changes the nature of the university. We also talked about safe spaces, no-platforming, micro-aggressions and the political stakes of university discourse. 

You can find her more recent work on her blog: https://academicirregularities.wordpress.com/ 

She is also on twitter at @Lizmorrish 

Erratum: During the podcast Liz referred to Wendy Davis, when in fact she meant Wendy Brown.

This week I talk to Dr Kathleen Richardson about sex robots and notions of personhood, consent, loneliness and inter-dependence between humans. Kathleen is  a professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and AI at De Montfort University. She completed her PhD at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Her fieldwork was an investigation of the making of robots in labs at MIT.  She is the author of, amongst others. An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines. She is currently working on a manuscript called The Robot Intermediary? An Anthropology of Attachment and Robots for Children with Autism. If you would like to find out more about Kathleen's intellectual work you can visit her website here. Kathleen is the director of the Campaign Against Sex Robots, you can find out more about her activisim here.

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.

This month I am talking with Dr Luna Dolezal from the University of Exeter. Luna is Senior Lecturer in Medical Humanities, with a particular interest in applied phenomenology, philosophy of embodiment, philosophy of medicine and medical humanities (esp. through literature and philosophy). I chatted to Luna about the notion of shame, medicine, Sartre, Nussbaum and Channel 4's TV show Embarrassing Bodies. Luna is about to begin a major research project with the Wellcome Trust. You can find out more about Luna here.

You can read some of Luna's writings which we discussed on the podcast here.

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 subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

This month I am talking to Joe Smeeton. We had a brilliant chat about the nature of social work, anxiety, risk, child protection, the political backdrop to social working in the UK, and just what it is like to be a social worker. Joe provided an impassioned defence of the value of social work, as well as an honest account of the challenges and pitfalls social workers face in their day to day existence. 

Joe is a qualified social worker and academic. He works at the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield. He has published a variety of articles, and book chapters on social work where he has examined themes of risk, child protection, consent and is interested in how Hannah Arendt can illuminate the experience of being of a social worker.  Here you can find a link to his university profile, and here you should be able to access some of his work. You can following him on Twitter: @JoeSmeeton

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. We are also available on Spotify. You can subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

I had a fascinating discussion with Tim Edensor this week on the geography and politics of light. Tim has a brilliant talent for making us think  differently about something we take for granted. During our chat we talked about our changing perceptions of light, the politics of light, the aesthetic appreciation of light, and how one's willingness to decorate your house at Christmas might be a key factor in the Brexit vote. Most importantly we talked about Tim's great affection for  the Blackpool Illuminations. 

Tim is a Reader in Cultural Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. He researches geographies of tourism, national identity, industrial ruins. and urban materiality. Tim is the author of From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). You can find out more about Tim here. 

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. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

This week I had a really interesting discussion with Prof. Heidi Matthews about law, consent, and the MeToo movement. Heidi is an Assistant Professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. She co-directs the Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security. Her research area is international criminal law, the law of war, political theory and law and sexuality, with a specific focus on global regulation of political violence in relation to history and gender. You can read Heidi’s Aeon article on sexual consent here. You can follow Heidi on Twitter @Heidi_Matthews

We recorded this conversation prior to the Blasey Ford/Kavanaugh hearing in the US Senate, and the subsequent confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court. Heidi has since published an article in The Conversation commenting on these events. 

During the podcast, Heidi recommended listeners to consult the work of Paul Clark of Garden Court Chambers on the impact of economic austerity on the legal profession in the UK.

This we talk about all things mind. Philip Goff is a philosopher and consciousness researcher at Durham University. He works mainly on the problem of how to integrate consciousness into our scientific worldview. Goff’s 2017 book Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (Oxford University Press) argues against materialist accounts of consciousness and defends panpsychism as the best account of the place of consciousness in nature. Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the natural world. As well as publishing over 40 academic articles, Goff has written for the Guardian, Aeon and Philosophy Now. He is currently working on a book on consciousness and panpsychism aimed at a general audience, Galileo’s Error: A Manifesto for a New Science of Consciousness, which will be published in August 2019 (Pantheon in US, Rider in UK). 

You cand more info about Phillip here: 

 Twitter: @philip_goff

Website: www.philipgoffphilosophy.com

Blog: www.conscienceandconsciousness.com

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.

With the upcoming US elections I thought it would be a good time to see what a political philosopher has to say about it all. I am joined by Michael Baranowski who is a political scientist from Northern Kentucky University. We talked about Mike’s intellectual origins, the political philospher Edmund Burke, the legacy of John McCain, the possibility of socialism in America, and of course President Donald Trump, as well as the forthcoming elections. You can find out more about Mike here.  Mike is one of the hosts of the very brilliant podcast The Politics Guys.For anyone with an interest in American politics I thoroughly reccomend subscribing. 

The David Foster Wallace piece we mentioned in the show is called Up Simba! and is available as an ebook. Here is a link to the original Rolling Stone article about John McCain's 2000 election campaign. 

Neal Curtis from the University of Auckland stopped by one morning to talk about his book Idiotism: Capitalism and the Privitization of Life.  He also talked about sovereignty and superheroes, and the ethics and politics of drone warfare, and his great love of Wonder Woman.

You can find out more about Neal here: http://www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/people/ncur286

But if you want to get live updates, he is lots of fun on Twitter: @nealcurtis

In 1844 the Rochadale Pioneers established the principles of the cooperative movement. This was the spark that created the development and growth of the cooperative movement. Coops can be found in all parts of the world today, from business to housing, from education to transport,  from credit unions to workers cooperatives. Dr Cilla Ross is Vice-Principal of the Manchester Co-operative College, we spoke about her background, the relevance of the co-operative movement, the meaning of social justice, the different projects she works on, technology in education, equality, what solidarity means,  and how to make things better through cooperation. You can find out more about Cilla and the work she does at the college here.

The name of the book which escaped me during our conversation was Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild.

This week, as we approach All Hallows Eve, we turn to the ghastly, the monstrous,  the shocking, the ghoulish, the spooky and the downright eerie. I am talking to Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn who is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and American Literature. She is a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. We spoke about all things Gothic, the endless fascination with vampires, working class werewolves, ghosts, zombies, as well as how Gothic horror speaks to political questions. Sorcha also tells us about her love for Clive Barker.

You find out more about Sorcha’s work here: https://goo.gl/V1VK9k She tweets at: @VampireSorcha

The movie which Sorcha could not recollect towards the end of the podcast was Love at First Bite

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.

Andreas Wittell is a colleague of mine, and a person I love to talk to. Andreas is  a lecturer in Communications. We chatted mainly about the changing nature of technology, equality, sharing, and how the Internet can be sometimes even be good!

You can find out more about Andreas here: https://goo.gl/D9wmcx

This week I am talking about football with Prof. Stephen Mumford. We talk about how football makes you think, the role of causes, dispositions, luck, space and of course victory. Stephen also explain why football is a far superior game to rugby. Stephen is a Professor of Metaphysics at the University of Durham. He is the author of, among other things, Dispositions (Oxford, 1998), Russell on Metaphysics (Routledge, 2003), Laws in Nature (Routledge, 2004), David Armstrong (Acumen, 2007), Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion (Routledge, 2011), Getting Causes from Powers (Oxford, 2011 with Rani Lill Anjum), Metaphysics: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2012) and Causation: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2013 with Rani Lill Anjum). 

You can visit Stephen's webpage here. 

He is also great on Twitter: @SDMumford 

 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.

I spoke with Mark O'Connell about the impact of the philosophy of transhumanism. Mark is the author of a lovely book called To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers -which I reccommend you all read. This book blends philosophy, literature, travelogue in order to look at one of the most influential but least discussed trends in Philosophy: Transhumanism. Transhumanism is basically the idea that consiousness is not restricted to our physical or material body, and we can synthesise our minds with emerging technologies. As outlandish as that might sound, there is a lot of money being spent on this. 

Mark has written for The New Yorker, Slate, The Guardian, and The New York Times Magazine 

You can find out more about Mark here and on Twitter: @mrkocnnll

Keith Crome is scholar of ancient philosophy, postmodernism and education. He is a Philosophy lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan Univeristy.  He is a specialist in the 20th Century thinker Jean Francois Lyotard, and has composed a monograph on this topic entitled Lyotard and the Greeks. I spoke with Keith about why he thinks Lyotard is still important, the nature of language, rhetoric in the age of Trump, and his reflections on the philosophy of education.

You can find out more about Keith here.

Timothy Shenk speaks with me about the history of the ideas that directly led to the rise of Trumpism. Looking at figures like James Burnham and Samuel Francis, Tim discusses how there has been a long-standing dissenting conservatism defined by economic nationalism which sowed the seeds for the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the US Presidency. 

Tim is a national fellow at New America. He is the author of Maurice Dobb: Political Economist (Palgrave Macmillan 2013).  His work appears in Nation, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Dissent. The article which the podcast was based on appears here in The Guardian. You can also find the article podcasted here.

Tim is on Twitter: @Tim_Shenk

Mark Sinclair is a philosopher and scholar at Roehampton University. He specialises in the history of modern philosophy, especially in it's French incarnation. We spoke about about the history of vitalism in Philosophy, looking at some of it's key figures: de Biran, Ravaisson and Bergson. You can find out more about Mark here. 

Here Dr William Large from the University of Gloucestershire talks about one book, Martin Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time. Here we try to get to the bottom of this endlessly fascinating book, looking at some of the key moments from the text such as death, anxiety, authenticity and how we are beings in the world. Will is the author of, among other things Heidegger's Being and Time: A Philosophical Guide. You can find out more about Will here.