18 June 2025
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Sep 10, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Gregg Caruso
- What is neuroexistentialism?
- Neuroscience, free will, and existentialism
- The “compatibilist” claim that free will and determinism can co-exist
- To define “free will,” first redefine “agency”
- Why the importance of luck should make us doubt intuitions about free will
- Moral responsibility and the Nazi war criminal thought experiment
- Does Gregg’s personality predispose him to reject retribution?
Aug 23, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- What is pleasure, and what isn’t?
- How human will fits into philosophies of pleasure
- Addiction, brain chemistry, and the lies we tell ourselves
- Why are some people more prone to addiction than others?
- Addiction as a disease of deprivation
- Antonio Demasio’s new book that rethinks culture and the roots of consciousness
Aug 9, 2018 —
Josh Summers & Stephen Asma
- Stephen’s new book, Why We Need Religion
- Who is Stephen’s intended audience?
- How religion shaped our emotional lives for millennia
- Can you benefit from religion without sincere belief?
- “False consolation”? No such thing, Stephen says
- Stephen learns to appreciate the “smells and bells” of Buddhism in Bhutan
- How will religion evolve in America?
Jul 31, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Brian Leiter
- To understand Marx, start with Hegel’s dialectics
- Why Marx emphasized economic production over Hegelian idealism
- Dan: Was Marx’s concept of labor too narrow?
- What will happen if technology eliminates most jobs?
- Marxism post-WWII: More than college activism and Jefferson Airplane?
- Brian: Marx’s predictions were right, but his predicted timeframe was all wrong
- Why “diversity blather” is a capitalist wolf in Marxist clothing
Jun 29, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Michael Pollan
- Michael Pollan’s new book, How to Change Your Mind
- Dissolving the ego via meditation and via psychedelics
- Brain, self, and personal narrative
- The underground subculture of psychedelic guides
- Michael feels the love and sees the unity (you had to be there)
- Do psychedelics validate scientific materialism or undermine it?
- Scientific vs. religious descriptions of psychedelic experience
- Why is the brain capable of psychedelic experiences?
- The future of psychedelics in research and society
Jun 26, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Massimo Pigliucci
- Dan and Massimo on ontology: What exists and what doesn’t?
- What, if anything, do Saturn’s rings have in common with virtue?
- Materialism as a product of scientism
- The immaterial features of human life and society
- The most important philosopher you’ve never heard of
- What does Daniel Dennett mean by “self,” anyway?
- Massimo: A single ontology isn’t enough to describe reality
Jun 20, 2018 —
William Black & Jemar Tisby
- Jemar’s path from educator to historian
- How racial history shapes the landscape of the Deep South
- The “quiet exodus” of black Christians from white evangelical churches
- Not a “skin problem,” but a “sin problem”
- Jemar: Kindness isn’t just being polite to avoid offense
- Bill explains the historic racial divide within the Cumberland Presbyterian Church
Jun 13, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Where do culture, emotion, and cognition intersect?
- Is altruism a fluke of humans’ inherently selfish nature?
- How Western individualism clouds our view of human nature
- Stephen: The strongest cultural adaptations are shared unconsciously
- An evolutionary explanation of Trump’s cult of personality
- Complicating the narrative on immigrant cultural values and success
- Reactions to Stephen’s new book, Why We Need Religion
Jun 7, 2018 —
William Dailey & Ross Douthat
- Ross’s new book, To Change the Church
- The strengths and weaknesses of Ross’s intellectual approach to faith
- Father Bill speaks from Ireland about the country’s recent abortion referendum
- Ross challenges liberal Catholics to explain their logic of doctrinal change
- How marriage, divorce, and communion came back into Catholic conversation
- What will people who read Ross’s book in a hundred years think of it?
May 23, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Richard Thompson
- Richard, a.k.a. miceelf88, joins Dan to talk gender politics
- The difference between sex and gender identity
- The ontological (and legal) issues with fluid gender identity
- Dan: Social identities like gender aren’t “self-made”
- What trans identity means for the civil rights coalition
- Jordan Peterson and gender as the essence of self
- Empathy vs. sympathy in coalition building
May 17, 2018 —
William Black & ContraPoints
- What is “autogynephilia”?
- Are there identifiable “subtypes” of trans women?
- Are trans individuals’ souls “trapped in the wrong body”?
- Why ContraPoints ruffles feathers in the Twittersphere
- New Atheism as an entry point to the alt-right
- Assessing Sam Harris and Ezra Klein’s recent debate on race and IQ
May 15, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Are emotions cultural or physiological?
- Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s argument for emotion-via-culture
- Why social construct theory is all the rage today
- Rami’s thoughts on self-help psychology
- Rami: Pets teach us that emotional connection predates language
- What makes emotions adaptive to environment?
- Stephen and Rami review the Jaak Panksepp Memorial Symposium
- What neuroscientists say about the brain’s unpredictability
Apr 27, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Chris Stedman
- Chris’s experience as a humanist chaplain at Harvard and Yale
- Secular community with a moral tone
- Atheism, anti-theism, and humanism
- What Richard Spencer doesn’t like about the Abrahamic faiths
- Atheism and tribalism
- Atheistic fervor as a response to religious trauma
- An inspirational atheism
- Does some New Atheist rhetoric encourage bigotry?
Apr 25, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Crispin Sartwell
- Is masculinity treated as a pathology?
- Why girls are outperforming boys in class
- Disentangling gender and sex, culture and biology
- “Girl power” was a success, but at what social cost?
- Crispin’s years as a teen revolutionary
- The modern school as a totalitarian institution
- What really explains high-security schools?
- How safe can we reasonably expect to be in society?
- Is the media distorting our narratives of crime and danger?
Apr 23, 2018 —
Philip Menchaca & Kelly Baker
- The Ku Klux Klan’s appeal to Protestant America
- How the KKK rationalized a Jewish Jesus
- The Birth of a Nation and the symbology of the burning cross
- How to “love thy neighbor” as a Klansman (answer: very selectively)
- Kelly: The Klan declined, but its politics went mainstream
- Kelly’s search for apocalyptic rhetoric in Klan literature
Apr 9, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Puppet Show: Are emotions in the brain?
- Luiz Pessoa’s argument for the feedback between lower and higher brain function
- How the regions of the brain evolved to interact
- “The content problem” in the neuroscience of emotion and cognition
- Are the common fears of snakes and spiders “hard-wired,” and how?
- What brain mapping fails to tell us about cognition
- Rami’s research on prosopagnosia (face blindness) and emotional cognition
Mar 23, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Massimo Pigliucci
- Massimo’s new edited volume, Science Unlimited?: The Challenges of Scientism
- What is scientism?
- Science and the challenge of studying subjective experience
- And about those pesky fundamental questions of existence…
- How philosophical thought underpins all research methodology
- Massimo: Core concepts across science have competing interpretations
- The importance of distinguishing “is” from “ought”
- What neuroscience can never explain about human consciousness
Mar 13, 2018 —
Josh Summers & David Lesondak
- What is fascia and why does it matter?
- When fascia malfunctions
- What David does as a “body worker”
- How body posture could influence mental health
- Unanswered questions in fascia research
- Can mindfulness meditation reduce the perception of pain?
- The concept of “tensegrity,” or tensional integrity, in the human body
Mar 9, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Josh Summers
- Bob and Josh recount their first meeting after a silent meditation retreat
- Does yoga always have a spiritual component?
- How Josh’s yoga practice prepares the body for meditation
- How yoga’s focus on breath can lead to the body
- Solutions to modern distraction
- Bob: Mindfulness practice can erode essentialist thinking
- What’s the point of Bob’s Mindful Resistance Project?
- The present and future of the Mindful Resistance Newsletter
Mar 7, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Puppet show: Why are human emotions unique?
- Does self-restraint make us human?
- Considering emotions as social constructs
- Stephen: If you have emotions, you have consciousness
- Artificial intelligence doesn’t necessarily defer to it its creator
- How insects are like robots
- Does culture change how the brain reads emotion in faces?
Mar 2, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Richard Prum
- Darwin’s approach to explaining the peacock’s cumbersome plumage
- Could beauty have evolved, in part, for beauty’s sake?
- The sense in which traits favored via mate selection may not be ‘adaptive’
- Mate preference and aesthetics
- What can we learn from ducks’ miserable sex lives?
- How paternal investment in offspring became part of human life
- When sex isn’t for reproduction
- Richard’s misgivings about evolutionary psychology
Mar 1, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Crispin Sartwell
- Crispin’s “Why They Suck” essay series
- Why in particular does Michelangelo suck?
- The contrasts in humanism represented in Italian and Northern Renaissance art
- The “ennobling quality” of human emotion in early Renaissance art
- Why Dan is a humanist and Crispin is not
- Identifying the internal incoherence of Michelangelo’s work
- Dan: Judaism’s approach to moral agency begins in the Garden of Eden
- Crispin questions emphasizing human endeavors over all others
Feb 22, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Daniel Tippens
- What does Dan K. mean by Philistinism?
- How philistines reduce the irreducible in all walks of life
- Philistinism’s creeping control in philosophy and the academy
- When we invest in arts and letters, what do we get in return?
- What good are refined senses, anyway?
- Dan T. explains how refinement can prevent us from being duped
Feb 9, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- This week’s puppet show: How do emotions help us survive?
- Darwin’s attempts to understand the inner lives of animals
- Can we really hide our feelings? Rami doubts it
- The “seeking” drive that keeps us going
- Angst: Fear without an object
- How culture complicates finding a mate
- Is there an adaptive function to recognizing beauty?
Feb 5, 2018 —
William Black & Benjamin Park
- The Mormon Church’s new president, 93 year-old Russell M. Nelson
- The decades-long campaign to incorporate the Church into the American mainstream
- Does the Church clash with academic historical study?
- Untangling the fates of remarried Mormons’ souls
- The LDS Church as a contained society within the US
- Why did the first Mormon women choose polygamy?
Jan 22, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Stephen Batchelor
- Striking parallels between Buddhism’s Mara and Christianity’s Satan
- How Stephen’s opera Mara came to fruition
- Bob and Stephen argue about the true meaning(s) of “enlightenment”
- How much authority should a secular Buddhist ascribe to the Buddha?
- The perils of clinging to the dharma
- Stephen’s unusual place in the Buddhist world
Jan 17, 2018 —
Nikita Petrov & Tanya Luhrmann
- How psychosis and prayer can make invisible entities ‘real’
- Why the voices heard by American schizophrenics are especially mean
- Turning madness into vocation: the shamans of West Africa
- Why talking to one’s hallucinations is a good idea
- How evangelicals shape their God
- ‘Remembering’ past lives in Scientology and ‘satanic ritual abuse’ in therapy
Jan 13, 2018 —
Josh Summers & Thomas Joiner
- Thomas describes a modern narcissism epidemic
- Does a lack of self-esteem fuel narcissism?
- Why is a focus on the “self” ubiquitous in mindfulness?
- Challenging the health claims of mindfulness meditation
- Why “self-compassion meditation” makes both Josh and Thomas uncomfortable
- The common ground between mindfulness and stoicism
Jan 10, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Stephen and Rami present: “The Evolution of Emotion” puppet show
- How ancient societies managed their earthly impulses
- The human anger displayed in Greek mythology
- Marcus Aurelius’s concept of the “wise man”
- Hafez, the drunk Sufi poet
- How does culture influence our core emotions?
- Are animals capable of feeling anger?
- Stephen on how horror plays on our most primal fears
Dec 24, 2017 —
Robert Wright & Kieran Setiya
- Midlife and coming to terms with who we aren’t
- Is the midlife crisis different for men and women?
- Kieran: Disappointment is a given for the mid-career academic
- There’s more to life than minimizing suffering
- Schopenhauer (and the Buddha): Dissatisfaction is inherent in desire
- Bob suggests a familiar culprit: selfhood
Dec 19, 2017 —
Robert Wright & Cullen Murphy
- Cullen’s new book about the heyday of the funny pages, Cartoon County
- What it was like to grow up as the child of a cartoonist
- Artists who were politically liberal and culturally conservative
- An idyllic white world created for a quasi-idyllic time
- No belly-buttons, no male nipples
- How Cullen took over writing Prince Valiant—and how that shaped his subsequent writing
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