Time to take in a breath of fresh air. In episode 133 of Overthink, Ellie and David close out their four-part series on the elements with air. They consider Anaximenes of Miletus’s belief that all things are made of air, Luce Irigaray’s belief that air is feminine, and the modern use of air as a weapon of battle. What can the TV series The Last of Us tell us about the inescapability of air Why have some philosophers thought the soul is made of air? And how does air allow itself to be forgotten? In the bonus, your hosts dive deeper into Irigaray, the plurality of air, and the idea of the ether.

Works Discussed:
Gaston Bachelard, Air in Dreams
Steven Connor, The Matter of Air
Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger
Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies
Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
The Last of Us (2025)

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