Guilty pleasures or cult classics, at the end of the day they’re just bad movies. In episode 76 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk with Matthew Strohl about bad movies and why it’s okay to love them. Strohl is a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana who specializes in aesthetics and ancient philosophy. He is the author of Why It’s Okay to Love Bad Movies. Here, he talks with Ellie and David about what makes certain movies “bad” yet also somehow “good,” and introduces us to two ways of relating to bad movies: bad movie ridicule vs bad movie love. What value do bad movies add to our lives and how can we develop community around the practice of watching bad movies?

Works Discussed
Dancin’: It’s On! (2015)
Looking Glass (2018)
Showgirls (1995)
Matthew Strohl, Why It's Okay to Love Bad Movies

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*cricket noises* In episode 75 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss silence and its connection with awe, ecstasy, and the experience of the divine. They talk about David’s experience staying silent during a collegiate debate and Ellie’s practice of meditation as it relates to silence. How does being silent reveal the inner and outer noise that so often surrounds us? They talk about Christian mysticism, Dauenhauer's deep silence, and Heidegger’s call of conscience and explore the various forms of silence that shape our everyday lives.

Works Discussed 

St. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica

John Cage, 4’33” 

Bernard Dauenhauer, Silence: The Phenomenon and its Ontological Significance

Rupert Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with John Cage 

Louis Pelletier, “Silence please! A brief history of silence at the theater”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Dōgen Zenji, Shōbōgenzō

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What kind of authority do we appeal to when we invoke lived experience? Isn't all experience "lived"? Why does the *discourse* today so frequently refer to this concept, and what are its philosophical origins? In episode 74 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss the phenomenology of lived experience, including its roots in Dilthey, who considered lived experience to be historical. They incorporate Fanon’s work into the conversation to answer the question of if our lived experience of the world is something that varies along identity lines such as race.

Works Discussed 

Wilhelm Dilthey, Poetry and Experience

Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Martin Jay, Songs of Experience 

Becca Longtin, “From Factical Life to Art: Reconsidering Heidegger's Appropriation of Dilthey”

Pamela Paul, “The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’”

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What do Gwen Stefani, Iggy Azalea, and Camille Monet have in common? They are all blonde women who are probably guilty of cultural appropriation. In episode 73 of Overthink, Ellie and David tackle cultural appropriation, starting with the kerfuffle over Claude Monet’s painting La Japonaise at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Pulling from their own experiences of cultural appropriation and from academic explorations of the topic, they consider whether individuals should even be called out for cultural appropriation. They talk about Nguyen and Strohl’s concept of “group intimacy” and debate whether we can ever draw a clear line between insiders and outsiders in a particular cultural group.

Works Discussed

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture

Jesa Marie Calaor, “Gwen Stefani: “I Said, ‘My God, I’m Japanese’”

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

Erich Hatala Matthes, “Cultural Appropriation Without Cultural Essentialism?”

C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl, “Cultural Appropriation and the Intimacy of Groups”

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To be or not to be? That is the question. At the center of Hamlet’s soliloquy is the issue of whether life is worth living. In episode 72 of Overthink, Ellie and David consider this issue with philosopher and existentialism expert Céline Leboeuf. How can we find meaning in our lives when the world seems random and indifferent to our interests? Leboeuf talks about how her personal experience with an existential crisis and her philosophical search for a way out of it led her to consider religious, atheist, and spiritual answers to the question "Why Live?" Ellie and David also consider Camus’ notion of the absurd, and whether life is just a series of blips of suffering with no higher purpose.

Works Discussed

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
William James, “Is Life Worth Living”
Céline Leboeuf, "Why Live? The Three Authors Who Saved Me During an Existential Crisis"
John Jay McDermott “Why Bother: Is Life Worth Living?”
Samuel Scheffer, Death and the Afterlife
Leo Tolstoy,  A Confession 

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Is the emotional opacity of men a social justice issue? In episode 71, Ellie and David break down the concepts of emotional and hermeneutic labor. The notion of emotional labor was originally created to shed light on gendered workplace interactions, but it has since been applied to romantic and other kinds of relationships. Is this expanded use of the term justified? Ellie’s research suggests that the concept of hermeneutic labor may better explain asymmetries of power in romantic relationships between men and women. Hermeneutic labor imbalances are produced by men’s inability to name and interpret their feelings and by the societal expectation that women manage their own emotions and those of their male partners simultaneously. How does Ellie’s research on hermeneutic labor shift our perspective on the issue of gender in emotional work?

Works Discussed

Ellie Anderson, “Hermeneutic Labor: The Gendered Burden of Interpretation in Intimate Relationships Between Women and Men”
Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart
bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
Judith Farr Tormey, "Exploitation, Oppression and Self-Sacrifice"
Ronald Levant, “Desperately seeking language: Understanding, assessing, and treating normative male alexithymia”
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, “Stoicism (as Emotional Compression) Is Emotional Labor”
Kathi Weeks, "Hours for What We Will: Work, Family, and the Movement for Shorter Hours”

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In the next hour, I might miss out on the greatest thing that could happen to me. Or maybe that’s just the FOMO talking. FOMO, the fear of missing out, has infiltrated the zeitgeist in the past decade. What does the obsession with FOMO tell us about our desire to connect with others in an age of consumer capitalism and social media? In episode 70, Ellie and David consider the fear of missing out in light of Nietzsche’s ressentiment, Freud’s psychoanalysis of Little Hans, and how FOMO has changed due to COVID. They consider whether the movement toward JOMO, or the joy of missing out, provides a viable solution to the fear.

Svend Brinkmann, The Joy of Missing Out: The Art of Self-Restraint in an Age of Excess Paperback
Sigmund Freud, Obsessions and Phobias
Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy”
Mayank Gupta and Aditya Sharma, “Fear of missing out: A brief overview of origin, theoretical underpinnings and relationship with mental health”
Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”
Mark Morford, “Oh My God You are So Missing Out”
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
James A. Roberts and Meredith E. David, “The Social Media Party: Fear of Missing Out (FoMO), Social Media Intensity, Connection, and Well-Being”

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Wild animals who build communities, domestic companions who love, and captive creatures who suffer. In episode 69 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk with renowned philosopher Martha Nussbaum about her capabilities approach to animal justice. They touch on topics as varied as animal sentience, factory farming, habitat destruction, and the ethics of predation. Together, they discuss the failure of established ethical frameworks to fully incorporate the more-than-human world, explore our ethical responsibilities to other animals, and consider how our legal system might need to change in order to facilitate the flourishing of all life on earth.

Works Discussed
Rachel Aviv, The Philosopher of Feelings
Martha Nussbaum, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility

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I’m holding out for a hero. From Achilles to Odysseus and modern day heroes, what does it mean to be a hero, and why are we obsessed with hero worship? In episode 68 of Overthink, Ellie and David dissect the figure of the hero, from its masculinist overtones to how it differs from other morally praiseworthy figures, such as the saint. They discuss how the concept of heroism has changed over time from the time of Homer to the age of CNN.

Works Discussed
Ari Kohen, Untangling Heroism
Marina McCoy, Wounded Heroes
Friedrich Nietzche, “On the Uses and Liabilities of History for Life”
J.O. Urmson, “Of Saints and Heroes”
Philip Zimbardo and Zeno Franco, “The Banality of Heroism”
Zeno Franco, Scott T. Allison, et. al, "Heroism Research: A Review of Theories, Methods, Challenges, and Trends"

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It’s corn! A big lump with knobs, it has the juice, I can’t imagine a more beautiful thing. Wise words about corn that relate to the sense of taste. In episode 67 of Overthink, Ellie and David finish their series on the five senses talking about the gustatory experience. They consider if taste is merely a subjective experience or are there some things that objectively taste good? Ellie and David discuss how having good taste relates to the perceptual experience of taste and why taste is such a big part of community.

Works Discussed

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy
A. S. Barwich, Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind
David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste
Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste
Mengzi, Mengzi
Passport to Paris (1999)

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