Thales’ Well

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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. 

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

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. 

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.