Overthink

Let a thousand flowers bloom! In episode 92 of Overthink, Ellie and David have a panoramic conversation on love beyond monogamy with philosophy professor, podcaster, and author of Why It's OK To Not be Monogamous, Justin L. Clardy. They envision relations of love and special attachment that aren't bound to the notion of sacrifice. They also turn to personal stories and question the role of marriage in consumer capitalism and its nonstop pressure to find the One and Only. Together, they find in non-monogamous pathways to reimagine agency, identity, and community — and a nudge toward a richer philosophy of our relations with the world around us.

Note: Ellie misspeaks when she mentions that married couples have lower satisfaction levels than unmarried ones. The correct claim, based on this study, is that they have fewer social ties. We apologize for the mistake!

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed
Marina Adshade, "The Origins of the Institutions of Marriage"
Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay
Elizabeth Brake, Minimizing Marriage
Justin Clardy, Why It’s OK to Not Be Monogamous
Carrie Jenkins, What Love Is
Robert Nozick, "Love's Bond"
Pages The Reading Group

Related Overthink episodes
15. Marriage
16. Monogamy
17. Open Relationships
18. Polyamory

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Is mom still doing your laundry!? In episode 91 of Overthink, Ellie and David explore the twisty world of mommy issues, from the OG mother Mary to today’s seducing MILFs. They look into psychonalytic theories of the mom-child bond, paying close attention to ways these theories have been challenged and expanded in the 20th century. They also discuss Simone de Beauvoir’s critique of maternal devotion by diving into some its most extreme, and problematic, manifestations. Your hosts ask: Is it true that mothers identify more easily with their children of the same gender? Do  macho men and wimpy boys sexualize their mothers in similar ways? And of course: who’s the biggest mama’s boy of them all?

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity
Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering
Michelle Dean, "Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, …"
Jacques Derrida, Reflections on the Mother Tongue
Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader
Donald Winnicott, The Good Enough Parent
Don Jon (2013)
MILF Manor (2023)

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Who’s your daddy? Episode 90 is all about daddy issues. Ellie and David investigate father-child relations and the sexual, emotional, and familial worlds they create. From summer zaddies and sexy dad bods to hero feminist dads, your hosts travel from psychoanalysis all the way to theology to explore the expansive world of father figures. Do we all, as Julia Kristeva says, harbor unconscious fantasies of seeing our fathers “beaten”? Could civilization itself, as Freud suggests, be rooted in an archaic act of patricide for which we still feel guilty without realizing it? Ellie and David tackle hard questions about how parenthood, gender, and vulnerability interact. They even wonder whether they might have “daddy issues” of their own!

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

Katherine Angel, Daddy Issues
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, and "A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men"
Carl Jung, A Theory of Psychoanalysis
Julia Kristeva, A Father is Being Beaten
Jenn Mann, "Think You Have Daddy Issues?"
Father of the Bride (1991)
The Golden Bachelor (2023)

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No, you’re not hallucinating! In episode 89 of Overthink, Ellie and David investigate the loopy world of psychedelics. Did you know that after doing psychedelics Jean-Paul Sartre went through a  “lobster phase” during which he hallucinated lobsters everywhere he went? Once paraded as mind-opening gateways to the nature of reality, psychedelics are back in the conversation today as tools of therapy and neuroscience. Your hosts take a crack at the philosophy of these puzzling substances, from their implications for phenomenology and the nature of consciousness, to the ethics of their medicinal use, in light of their risks and long-lasting effects. If a trip can transform our mind and senses, it might be that our everyday perception really is far weirder than we think.

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

Robin Carhart-Harris, et al. “The Entropic Brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs”
Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
Mike Jay, “Sartre’s Bad Trip”
Chris Letheby and Jaipreet Mattu, "Philosophy and Classic Psychedelics: A review of some emerging themes"
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind
Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
Dana G. Smith, “What Does Good Psychedelic Therapy Look Like?”
Simeon Wade, Foucault in California

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Ellie and David are serving… dinner! In episode 88 of Overthink, your favorite podcasters explore the philosophy of food, discussing everything from Glaucon’s plea for fancy meals in the Republic, to the rich ways in which food is intertwined with our individual and cultural identities. They welcome food critic and philosophy professor Shanti Chu for a lively conversation about the gendering of meals, the ethics of food systems (lab-grown meat, anyone?), the future of restaurants, and much more. Bon appetit!

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat
Shanti Chu, “Nonviolence through Veganism” and “Public Philosophy and Food: Foodies, Ethics, and Activism”
Claude Fischler, "Food, Self, and Identity"
A. Breeze Harper, Sistah Vegan
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity
Plato, Republic
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation

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Time to be real! In episode 87 of Overthink, Ellie and David go back and forth about authenticity. They explore its deep roots in existentialist philosophy and Romanticism, and grapple with the paradoxes of being authentic in the era of reality TV, social media, and friendly-branded megacorps. They dive into philosophical critiques of authenticity, and explore how Heidegger’s writings on “Eigentlichkeit” (often translated as “authenticity” or “actuality”) stand up today. Is authenticity the same thing as sincerity? Can you be authentic and insincere, or sincere and inauthentic? Who do we try to be authentic for: ourselves or other people? And might drag queens be the greatest example of postmodern authenticity?

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

Taylor Carman, "The Concept of Authenticity"
Skye Cleary, How to Be Authentic
Brit Dawson, “Buying and selling authenticity: a decade of reality TV”
Alessandro Ferrara, The Critique of Authenticity
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio, You and Your Profile
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity
Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity
Drag Race Spain S2
The Bachelor

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Give us a listen, and we’ll give you the world! In Episode 86 of Overthink, Ellie and David ask: what does it mean to live in a world? From animal spirit masters in Labrador to the foundations of climate science, they discuss why the concept of "world" is so contentious, and even at the brink of collapse. They  navigate our entangled concepts of nature, culture, and the idyllic nurturing earth through the work of Hannah Arendt and Arturo Escobar. Is the world of animals the same as our own? And, what could it mean to imagine a world where many worlds fit? In times of deep planetary transformation, philosophizing our place in this world has never been more important.

This episode was produced by Emilio Esquivel Marquez and Aaron Morgan as part of their Summer Undergraduate Research Program at Pomona College.

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism
Mario Blaser, “Doing and undoing Caribou/Atiku”
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Planetary Humanities”
Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World
Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics
Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
Travis Holloway, How to Live at the End of the World
Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects
Conservation International, Mother Nature (2015)

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This episode gets an enthusiastic yes from us. In episode 85 of Overthink, Ellie and David dive into the crux of sexual consent. They work through some of the earliest attempts on the part of American universities at developing a sexual consent policy, before unpacking the fiery debates surrounding consent today — ranging from complex legal cases as well as instances of “gray rape.” They probe the limits of popular understandings of consent with cases involving intense physical pain, and cases which undo the very stability of our idea of consent. (Can one meaningfully consent to one’s own murder?) They explore Ellie’s own proposal for rethinking our idea of consent. Is consent contractual? Performative? Magic? And, should it really be the central tenet of our sexual ethics?

Content warning: this episode contains graphic discussions of sexual violence and bodily harm.
Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

Linda Martín Alcoff, Rape and Resistance
Ellie Anderson, “A Phenomenological Approach to Sexual Consent” and “The Limits of Consent in Sexual Ethics”
Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
Ann Cahill, Rethinking Rape
Heidi Hurd, “The Moral Magic of Consent”
Jonathan Ichikawa, “Presupposition and Consent”
Joseph Fischer, Screw Consent
Joan McGregor, Is it Rape?
Caleb Ward and Ellie Anderson, “The Ethical Significance of Being an Erotic Object”
Bari Weiss, “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader”
Is It Date Rape? (1991 SNL Skit)

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What does it mean to be marginalized? Does marginalization give some people more epistemic authority than others? And, if so, what should we all do with this information? In episode 84 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about standpoint theory, its complex intellectual history, and its relationship to W. E. B. DuBois’ concept of double consciousness. They welcome an expert on the subject: Dr. Briana Toole, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. In their conversation, they chat about how standpoint theory makes sense of electoral politics, educational policy, bizarre reality TV, and much more. They also discuss Corrupt the Youth, a philosophy outreach program founded by Dr. Toole that brings philosophy to high schools in the U.S.

Check out this episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

Briana Toole, “On Standpoint Epistemology and Epistemic Peerhood” and “Demarginalizing Standpoint Epistemology”
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
Jennifer Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture
David Foster Wallace, This Is Water
Black. White. (2006)

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Western philosophy started… at the gym. In episode 83 of Overthink, Ellie and David tackle the philosophy of workouts, from Plato’s days as a wrestler to the modern loneliness of a solitary bench press. As they discuss the role of exercise — which the Greeks called gymnastics — in building bodies and training souls, they consider the ancient Olympics, the cravings for health and beauty that guide us through what David calls the "Protestant work-out ethic," and Jean Baudrillard's thoughts about Americans' passion for jogging.

Works Discussed

Jean Baudrillard, America
Mark Greif, “Against Exercise”
Drew Hyland, Philosophy of Sport
Plato, The Republic, The Laws, and Euthyphro
Heather Reid, Introduction to the Philosophy of Sport
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, and “The Government of Poland”
Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

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