Thales’ Well

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.  

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.   

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.

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        

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.

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    

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 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.    

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

    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