Do political subjects have a default obligation to obey the law? In episode 105 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss civil disobedience in the present context of university activism for divestment from genocide in Gaza. They chart the genealogy of the concept of disobedience in political theory, from Thoreau and MLK through to today. Together with guest Noëlle McAfee, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory University, they reflect on the relationship between legal protest, civil disobedience, and political dialogue, and think about why activism must be part of any healthy democracy. Focusing on the psychoanalytic concept of ‘breakdown’, McAfee discusses the disproportionate administrative and militarized crackdown on student organizing that we are witnessing across American campuses today.

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
Noëlle McAfee, Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis
Noëlle McAfee, Democracy and the Political Unconscious
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government
Donald Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown”
Iris Marion Young, “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy”

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This is one for the books. In episode 104 of Overthink, Ellie and David consider what makes reading so rewarding, and, for many people today, so challenging! How did society shift toward inward silent reading and away from reading aloud in the Middle Ages? How have changes in teaching phonics and factors of classism, accessibility, and educational justice made it harder for the young to read? Why is reading philosophy so hard, and how can we increase our reading stamina?

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

Marcel Proust, Journée des Lecteurs
Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Julie Andrews, Mandy
Adam Kotsko, “The Loss of Things I Took for Granted,” Slate
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid

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Devon Price, Laziness Does Not Exist
Roland Barthes, “Let us dare to be lazy”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
Christine Jeske, The Laziness Myth
Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah
Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

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In episode 102 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss diverse ideas of racial mixedness, from family-oriented models of mixed race to José Vasconcelos’ and Gloria Anzaldua’s idea of the ‘mestizo’ heritage of Mexican people. They work through phenomenological accounts of cultural hybridity and selfhood, wondering how being multiracial pushes beyond the traditional Cartesian philosophical subject. Is mestizaje or mixed-race an identity in its own right? What are its connections to the history of colonialism and contemporary demographic trends? And, how can different relations to a mixed heritage lead to flourishing outside of white supremacist categories?

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
Rosie Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory
Elisa Lipsky-Karasz, “Naomi Osaka on Fighting for No. 1 at the U.S. Open”
Mariana Ortega, In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self

Naomi Osaka, “Naomi Osaka reflects on challenges of being black and Japanese”

Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude
Adrian Piper, “Passing for White, Passing for Black”
Carlin Romano, “A Challenge for Philosophy”

José Vasconcelos, La Raza Cósmica
Naomi Zack, Race and Mixed Race

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Welcome your robot overlords! In episode 101 of Overthink, Ellie and David speak with Dr. Shazeda Ahmed, specialist in AI Safety, to dive into the philosophy guiding artificial intelligence. With the rise of LLMs like ChatGPT, the lofty utilitarian principles of Effective Altruism have taken the tech-world spotlight by storm. Many who work on AI safety and ethics worry about the dangers of AI, from how automation might put entire categories of workers out of a job to how future forms of AI might pose a catastrophic “existential risk” for humanity as a whole. And yet, optimistic CEOs portray AI as the beginning of an easy, technology-assisted utopia. Who is right about AI: the doomers or the utopians? And whose voices are part of the conversation in the first place? Is AI risk talk spearheaded by well-meaning experts or investor billionaires? And, can philosophy guide discussions about AI toward the right thing to do?

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence
Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking
Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality
Mollie Gleiberman, “Effective Altruism and the strategic ambiguity of ‘doing good’”
Matthew Jones and Chris Wiggins, How Data Happened
William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future
Toby Ord, The Precipice
Inioluwa Deborah Raji et al., “The Fallacy of AI Functionality”
Inioluwa Deborah Raji and Roel Dobbe, “Concrete Problems in AI Safety, Revisted”
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation
Amia Srinivisan, “Stop The Robot Apocalypse”

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Overthink goes meta! In the 100th episode Ellie and David reflect on the podcast’s journey and the origins of its (flawless!) title. They take up the question, “What is overthinking?” Is it a kind of fixation on details or an unwanted split in the normal flow of ideas? Then, they turn to psychology to make sense of overthinking’s highs and lows, as the distracting voice inside your head and a welcome relief from traumatic memories. Through the philosophies of John Dewey and the Frankfurt School, they look at different ways to understand the role of overthinking in philosophy and the humanities. Is overthinking a damper on good decisions, or perhaps the path to preserving the possibility of social critique?

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

John Dewey, How We Think
Max Horkheimer, “The Social Function of Philosophy”
Herbert Marcuse, “Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture”
Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, “Responses to depression and their effects on the duration of depressive episodes”
Charles Orbendorf, “Co-Conscious Mentation”
Suzanne Segerstrom et al., “A multidimensional structure for repetitive thought”
Stephanie Wong et al., “Rumination as a Transdiagnostic Phenomenon in the 21st Century”

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Who’s afraid of zombification? Apparently not analytic philosophers. In episode 99 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk all about zombies and their unfortunate legacy in the thought experiments of academic philosophy. Their portrait as brain-eating and consciousness-lacking mobs is a far cry from their origins in the syncretic sorcery at the margins of Haitian Voodoo. This distance means that the uncanny zombie raises provocative questions about the problematic ways philosophy integrates and appropriates nonwestern culture into its canon. Your hosts probe beyond limits of the tradition when they explore zombification in animals, in reading, in Derrida, and beyond.

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

Ellie Anderson, “Derrida and the Zombie”
David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind
Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow
Descartes, Meditations
Leslie Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods
Daniel C. Dennett, "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies" & Consciousness Explained
Zora Neale Hurston, Tell my Horse
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”
Justin Smith-Ruiu, “The World as a Game”

The Last of Us (2023)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Get Out (2017)

Overthink, Continental Philosophy: What is it, and why is it a thing?

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They say this one is the real deal. In Episode 98 of Overthink, Ellie and David untangle the philosophy behind the way we compare, judge, and defend our reputations. From Machiavelli’s advice to despots looking to stay popular, to disgruntled students venting on their professors online, reputation can glide you to victory or trigger your fall from grace. Exploring concepts like the Matthew effect, the homo comparativus, and informational asymmetry, your hosts ask: Why do both Joan Jett and Jean-Jacques Rousseau refuse reputation’s fickle pleasures? Does David actually have a good work-life balance, or is everyone else hoodwinked? And, what is the place of quantified reputation in an increasingly digital world?

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code

Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, Bad Reputation

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Louise Matsakis, “How the West Got China’s Social Credit System Wrong,” Wired Magazine

Gloria Origgi, Reputation: What It Is and Why It Matters

Gloria Origgi, "Reputation in Moral Philosophy and Epistemology"

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Jordi Xifra, “Recognition, symbolic capital and reputation in the seventeenth century”

Overthink Episodes

Ep 28, Cancel Culture

Ep 19, Genius

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