Converging Dialogues

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Hein de Haas about migration and many of the myths surrounding immigration. They discuss why immigration is a major issue globally and its connection with nationalism, distinctions between immigration, emigration, asylum seekers, and refugees, and how migration is not at an all-time high. They also talk about internal/external migration, borders, labor demand in the USA, low-skilled vs. high-skilled workers, refugee crisis, hypocrisy on the political left and right, future of migration, and many more topics.

Hein de Haas is a sociologist and a geographer who has lived and worked in the Netherlands, Morocco and the United Kingdom. He is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He has a Bachelor’s in cultural anthropology and Master’s degree in social and environmental geography from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD in social sciences from the University of Nijmegen. He has worked as a researcher at the University of Amsterdam and as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Nijmegen. He was visiting scholar at Bilkent University in Ankara (Turkey) the Program of Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University of Cairo (AUC Egypt). He has been part of the International Migration Institute (IMI) at the University of Oxford and played a central role in lecturing and directing the newly established MSc in Migration Studies at the  Oxford Department of International Development (ODID). He was also a fellow at the Oxford Martin School and governing body fellow at Wolfson College. He is lead author of The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, a seminal text book in the field of migration studies. He is the author of the new book, How Migration Really Works: The Facts About the Most Divisive Issue in Politics.

Website: https://heindehaas.org/

Blog: https://heindehaas.blogspot.com/

Twitter: @heindehaas

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Rory Cox about the multiple origins of the just war concept. They give an overview of the Egyptian empire, nile river and its importance for the Egyptian kingdom, and the three major kingdom periods with a central monarchy. They also talk about the Hittites, boundaries of their kingdom, and why they were so short lived. They discuss the Israelites, problems with the Hebrew Bible as a primary source, and the legacy of the Israelites. They also define just war, ius ad bellum, ius ad bello, ius post bellum, and describe what war looked like in the ancient Near East. They talk about authority and divine appointment for going to war with these three kingdoms, self-defense, military ethics, culture and identity, treatment of combatants and non-combatants, importance of Deuteronomy 20 for the Israelites, violence and genocide, just war theory up to the modern era, and many more topics.

Rory Cox is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of St. Andrews. He has held two international research fellowships: a Wallenberg Research Fellowship at the Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace (University of Stockholm) in 2016; and a Humanities Collaboration Research Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Huntington Library, Los Angeles, in 2017-18. He has his Bachelors in Ancient History and a Masters in Medieval Studies from University College London. He has a DPhil in history from the University of Oxford. His main focus areas are on the ethics of war, history of violence, and intellectual history. He is the author of the book, Origins of the Just War: Military Ethics and Culture in the Ancient Near East.

Twitter: @drrorycox

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Lisa Feldman-Barrett about emotions. They discuss what emotions are and how they are different from affect and feelings. They also discuss the social construction model of emotions with discussion on interoception, exteroception, allostasis and homeostasis. They talk about predictive processing, Bayesian brain, emotions as heuristics, nature of reality, discrete emotions, emotions in relationships, and many more topics.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory (IASLab) at Northeastern University. She also holds research appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)/Harvard Medical School in the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Program in the Department of Psychiatry, and at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in the Department of Radiology. She is among the top 0.1% of the most-cited scientists in the world with more than 275 peer-reviewed scientific papers across several fields. Her research focuses on how the human brain, in continual conversation with the human body and the world, regulates the body and creates mental events, such as episodes of emotion.

Dr. Barrett has also received numerous awards for service to the field of psychology, including the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in Psychology (2021) and the Award for Distinguished Service to Psychological Science (2013), both from the American Psychological Association. She also received the Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science (2018) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2019). She has served on the editorial boards of psychology’s most important journals, including Psychological Science (since 2007), Psychological Review (2007-2012) and Current Directions in Psychological Science (2020-2023). She also served as president of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in 2019–2020.

She is the author of How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and 7 1/2 Lessons About The Brain. She has also edited five scientific volumes, including the 3rd and 4th editions of the Handbook of Emotion.

Website: https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/

Lab: https://www.affective-science.org/

Twitter: @lfeldmanbarrett

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Danna Staaf about the natural history of cephalopods. They discuss the family of cephalopods and their anatomy along with some of the behaviors, intelligence and consciousness with cephalopods, and what convergent evolution tells us about cephalopods. They talk about how cephalopods are able to live outside water, how they live in all bodies of water, impact of climate change, and many more topics.

Danna Staaf holds a PhD in invertebrate biology from Stanford university and is an expert on cephalopods. She continues to do research on cephalopods and has had her writing published in the Journal of Experimental Biology and numerous textbooks. She is the author of, Monarchs of the Sea: The Extraordinary 500-Million-Year History of Cephalopods and her latest book, The Lives of Octopuses and Their Relatives: A Natural History of Cephalopods.

Website: https://www.dannastaaf.com/p/home.html

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Venki Ramakrishnan about his discovering and mapping the ribosome structure. They discuss his background in coming from India to study physics and then biology, layout of ribosome, DNA, RNA, mRNA, and proteins, what we have learned about the ribosome over the past 50+ years, x-ray crystallography, and his trip to the LMB. They also discuss his experience of seeing atomic subunits of ribosomes for the first time, winning the Nobel Prize, and the future of ribosome research.

Venki Ramakrishnan is a biologist and group leader of the Medical Research Center (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology and is a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was President of the Royal Society from 2015 to 2020. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for his work on the sequence of the ribosome structure. He is also a member of the Order of Merit since 2012. He is the author of, Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome.

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Helena de Bres about the philosophy of twins. They talk about why people are fascinated by twins, binarizing twins, definitions of selfhood, twins and individuality, and the extended mind. They also talk about twins and love, twins and dating, what twins teach people about objectification, and many more topics.

Helena de Bres is Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. Her main interests are on philosophy of literature, specifically the nature of memoir. She also works with themes of creative writing, public philosophy, and distributive justice. She is the author of Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir and her most recent book, How to be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins.

Website: https://sites.google.com/wellesley.edu/helenadebres/home?authuser=0

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Darrin McMahon about the history of equality. They define equality and inequality, hierarchies, equality not being sameness, equality as a value, and equality in other animals. They also talk about the origins of equality, reverse hierarchy dominance theory for equality, cooperation, slavery, religion, the Greeks complicated history with equality, complexity of enlightenment values, equality in the future, and many more topics.

Darrin McMahon is David W. Little Class of 1944 Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Dartmouth College. He has his PhD from Yale University. He is the recipient of major fellowships from the Mellon and Guggenheim Foundations and has been visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York University, Yale University, the University of Rouen, the École Normale Supérieur, the École des Hautes Études, and the University of Potsdam. His writings have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, the New Republic, and Slates. He writes regularly for the Literary Review in London. He is the author of numerous books including the most recent, Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea.

Website: https://darrinmcmahon.com/

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Robert Jay Lifton about resilience, catastrophe, and survival. They discuss psychohistory, his work with survivors of Hiroshima, the death imprint for survivors and his work with Erik Erikson. They talk about Freud’s death drive and differences and similarities to the death imprint. They discuss understanding resilience and surviving COVID-19, individual and collective mourning, surviving the effects of climate change, protean self, survivor power, the realities of catastrophe, and many other topics.

Robert Jay Lifton is a psychiatrist and pioneer of psychohistory. He has been a professor at the Washington School of Psychiatry, Yale University, Harvard University, the City University of New York, and Columbia University. Together with Erik Erikson, he convened the Wellfleet Psychohistory Group in 1966. He is the author of numerous books including the most recent, Surviving our Catastrophes: Resilience and Renewal from Hiroshima to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Website: https://www.robertjaylifton.com/

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Samuel Moyn about cold war liberalism. They provide a definition of liberalism, cold war liberalism, and some of the differences between these two forms of liberalism. They discuss some of the lessons from Cold War liberals for liberals today and the rise of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. They discuss the work of Judith Shklar, romanticism for Shklar and Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper and historicism, Hannah Arendt on liberalism, Lionel Trilling on Freud and Cold War liberalism, the future of liberalism, and many more topics.

Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. He has his law degree from Harvard University and his PhD in modern European history from University of California, Berkeley. He is fellow at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Berggruen Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His main interests are in international law, human rights, and 20th century European moral and political theory. He was recently named one of Propsect Magazine’s top thinkers in the world for 2024. He is the author of numerous books including his most recent, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of our Times.

Website: https://campuspress.yale.edu/samuelmoyn/

Twitter: @samuelmoyn

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Philip Goff about the big questions of the universe. They discuss questions such as “why are we here” and “what is the purpose of living?” They talk about how much meaning could we possibly receive from life, value nihilism and value fundamentalism, and where do morals originate? They also discuss panpsychism, consciousness, Integration Information Theory, implications of panpsychism, and many more topics.

Philip Goff is a philosopher and professor at Durham University, UK. His main focus areas are on the nature of reality and he is well-published on panpsychism. He has a podcast, Mind Chat, and is the author of several books including the most recent, Why?:The Purpose of the Universe.

Website: https://philipgoffphilosophy.com/

Twitter: @philip_goff