Episode 279: The Greenhouses We Burned Along ...

David and Tamler talk about Jorge Luis Borges' disorienting short story "The Other." A 70-year-old Borges sits on a bench by the Charles River and who should he encounter but himself as a 19-year-old, by the Rhône River in 1918 Geneva. Is this a dream? Who is dreaming it? What do ...  Show more

In another Back 2 Basics episode, David and Tamler talk about Plato's "Crito," a dialogue that takes place two days before Socrates' death by hemlock. His friend Crito wants him to escape, but Socrates will only agree if they judge that it's the right thing to do. One imagined de ...  Show more

In this episode, we discuss Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark book After Virtue. MacIntyre, an ex-Marxist and committed anti-liberal, offers a defense of the Aristotelian tradition and its search for the truly common good against the dominant tendency of liberal societies ...

In a world of conflicting values, polarized opinions, and ever-shifting cultural norms, it’s no wonder morality feels... broken. In this episode of Rethink, Anderson, Sayenne, and Jose explore how our traditional moral frameworks are being challenged—from the decline of religious ...  Show more

In the age of social media and short-form content, many people insist that our attention spans are getting shorter. But historian Daniel Immerwahr reminds us that people have cried wolf for centuries about technology hijacking our attention. In this episode, Adam and Daniel dive ...  Show more

This week, we approach one of the most infamous ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche: the dual-prehistory of the morality we follow today. Throughout his career, Nietzsche had an inkling that the origins of our moral ideas did not follow a clean, neat pattern -- a single course of develo ...  Show more