September 18, 2026
What would it mean to remember the beginning of consciousness? Tim Harrison (English and Social Thought, UChicago) takes us through moments when literary and philosophical authors portray the beginning of experience. From Milton’s Adam and Eve to the late-discovered poems of Thomas Traherne to the political-philosophical thought of Locke and Rawls to the concerns of […]
July 1, 2026
Join us as we ask distinguished poet, critic, and translator Rosanna Warren about her literary autobiography, the state of literary criticism, and the role of the poet-critic. Rosanna discusses her literary and painterly childhood in France and her unusual path through the academy; the capaciousness of English in particular; past literary movements like deconstruction and […]
May 18, 2026
May 15, 2026 | In this episode of Invasive Thoughts, we speak with Miguel de Beistegui (ICREA Research Professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra) about crisis as one of the basic conditions of contemporary life. Our present is labelled with crises of almost every kind: financial, ecological, democratic, geopolitical, migratory, public-health, economic, and technological. Moving from the […]
April 5, 2026
Emily Riehl (Johns Hopkins, Mathematics) joins us to discuss the power of abstraction in mathematics. Is category theory the mathematics of mathematics? What is infinity category theory? How has the form of a mathematical proof changed over time? Can AI execute mathematical proofs? LISTEN RECOMMENDED READING Elements of ∞-Category Theory, with Dominic Verity (2022) Fat […]
March 10, 2026
Peter Fenves (Northwestern) poses some unexpected questions relating to Immanuel Kant’s thought. How does politics emerge from a shortage of space? Should we understand humans as two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional creatures? Why do we so often desire to fly? Is the moral destiny of humanity to give way to a new species of rational beings […]
February 9, 2026
Is Nietzsche a philosopher or an anti-philosopher? Is Western philosophical thought one monolithic tradition? Sean Kirkland (DePaul Philosophy) joins us to discuss the position of such “threshold” thinkers as Plato and Aristotle on one hand and Heidegger and Nietzsche on the other. He also relates what he learned by translating Nietzsche for the new Stanford […]
January 26, 2026
We’re joined by Jon Cogburn, Chair of Philosophy at Louisiana State University. Jon sketches a history of the Continental–Analytic divide in American philosophy
January 20, 2026
David Wellbery (UChicago German, Social Thought) joins us to discuss Goethe’s work, life, and milieu. He describes Goethe’s position at the center of an intellectual and artistic world which included Schiller, Hölderlin, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, the Schlegels, the Humboldts, and many other intellectual and scientific figures of the period. This episode will give listeners a sense of Goethe’s astonishingly various achievements in literature and natural philosophy.
January 13, 2026
Richard Strier (UChicago English, emeritus) recites the poem that changed his career, explains why formalism and historicism should be friends, offers us a way of reading George Herbert’s “Love” (III) and lets us in on a current argument with a friend about a Bob Dylan song.
December 27, 2025
Terry Pinkard, renowned Hegel scholar and translator of the Phenomenology of Spirit (2018) sits down with us to discuss his own intellectual career; the challenges of reading, translating, and understanding Hegel; when and how Hegel found a home in America and his relation to American democracy; and American pragmatism.
November 5, 2025
We return to Peirce for an exploration of his more speculative, systematic essays (“A Guess at the Riddle”, “Evolutionary Love”, and others). What should all systems of thought have in common?
September 5, 2025
How do advances in neuroscience disrupt our intuitive notions of the self? Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel brings together philosophy and the science of the brain to offers a novel redefinition of what it means to be an individual in the world.
July 10, 2025
For our sixth episode, we talk about the writings and social work of Jane Addams, American pragmatist philosopher, founder of Hull House in Chicago, and co-founder of the ACLU.
June 9, 2025
What distinguishes human beings from animals? The question has been a mainstay of philosophy for over two thousand years.
May 16, 2025
What is literary criticism? What concept of literature underlies it? Northrop Frye’s 1957 Anatomy of Criticism sketches a vast and comprehensive map of the literary universe and shows us what it would look like to entertain a total order of literature. We discuss aspects of Frye’s visionary project as well as literary criticism’s status today.
April 4, 2025
Quentin Meillassoux’s 2006 After Finitude seemed like it was going to revolutionize philosophy. It didn’t. We talk about its radical implications and why it may still have traction today.
April 4, 2025
Around the time he was finishing the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel almost became director of Goethe’s botanical gardens in Jena. We play around with affinities between Goethe’s botany and Hegel’s idealism.
April 4, 2025
“Certainly the greatest American thinker ever.” – Bertrand Russell. A foray into the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, father of pragmatism, largely through six classic essays.
