Overthink

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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Have you ever experienced the headache-inducing odor of Axe body spray? Smell has immense power, but why has it been undervalued in philosophy? In episode 66, Ellie and David are joined by philosophy professor Dr. Benjamin Young to discuss the sense and how we perceive smell. They talk about everything from Anosmia, the loss of smell, to the smellscape of middle school. 

Works Discussed

Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View
Bill Lichen, “The Sliding of Smell”
James McHugh, Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell In Indian Religion And Culture
Larry Shiner, Art Scents: Exploring the Aesthetics of Smell and the Olfactory Arts
Marta Tafalla, “A World Without the Olfactory Dimension”
Benjamin Young, “Stinking Consciousness”
Benjamin Young, Theoretical Perspectives on Smell

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Have you heard? In episode 65 of Overthink, Ellie and David continue the series on the five senses as they discuss hearing. From wanting to close your ears to stop overhearing a conversation to the noise pollution outside your bedroom window, how does the sense of hearing make its way into our everyday lives? They also discuss how Deaf culture calls upon us to retool our understanding of the importance of hearing for human life.

Works Cited

Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews
Christopher Frith, “Disorders of self-monitoring and the symptoms of schizophrenia"
Karen Hanson, “The Self Imagined: Philosophical Reflections on the Social Character of Psyche”
Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness
Hans Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight”
Simon McCarthy-Jones, “Stop, Look, and Listen”
George Herbert Mead, Selected Writings
Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness
Michel Serres, The Five Senses
Robert Sparrow “Defending Deaf Culture”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Logical Investigations
Defu Yap, Laura Staum Casasanto, and Daniel Casasanto, “Metaphoric Iconicity in Signed and Spoken Languages”

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And at last I see the light. In episode 64 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss vision in the second installment of their ongoing series on the five senses. They discuss the prevalence of visual metaphors for knowledge, and why sight has historically been the most privileged of the senses. Ellie and David talk about the difference between Greek and Vedic approaches to vision and how culture and language can impact important aspects of the visual experience such as the ability to perceive the color blue.

Works Discussed

Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern World
Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass
William Gladstone, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age
Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes, the Denigration of Vision in 20th Century French Thought
Hans Jonas, "The Nobility of Sight"
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life Toward a Philosophical Biology
Plato, The Theaetetus
Plato, The Republic
The Upanishads 

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Touch, texture, and tickling. From touch working as a form of recognition to the sensation of shapes, touch is a part of our everyday lives. In episode 63 of Overthink, Ellie and David begin their series on the five senses with touch. They discuss the significance of Cinderella’s original fur slipper and why Lucretius believed that milk and honey particles have a smooth, round shape. They also consider why some ancient philosophers consider touch the primary sense and what we learn about the nature of the self from the phenomenology of touching and being touched.

Works Discussed

Matthew Fulkerson, The First Sense: A Philosophical Study of Human Touch
Galen, Complete Works
G. Stanley Hall, "The Psychology of Tickling, Laughing and the Comic"
William Harvey, The Circulation of the Blood and Other Writings
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations
Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers and Charles T. Wolfe,“The senses in philosophy and science: from the nobility of sight to the materialism of touch”
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible
Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation
Michel Serres, The Five Senses

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