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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Curiosity led Pandora to open a box, but what does being curious look like in our everyday lives? In episode 62, Ellie and David discuss the vilification of curiosity and the role of curiosity in the modern education system. To help, they talk with philosophy professor Perry Zurn and bioengineering professor Dani S. Bassett, twins who co-authored the book Curious Minds: The Power of Connection. Together, they consider how we can understand and cultivate different types of curiosity. 
 
 Works Discussed
 
 Saint Augustine, The Confessions
 Francis Bacon, "Of Tribute"
 Barbara Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry
 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
 Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
 Richard Phillips, “Curiosity: Care, Virtue and Pleasure in Uncovering the New” 
 Alastair Reed, “Curiosity” 
 Joelle Thomas and David M. Peña-Guzmán, “Review of Vinciane Despret’s What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?” 
 Perry Zurn, Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry
 Perry Zurn & Dani S. Bassett, Curious Minds: The Power of Connection

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Know thyself, the inscription at the shrine of Delphi reads. But can we truly know ourselves, like the Ancient Greeks believed? In episode 61 of Overthink, Ellie and David explore the concept of self-knowledge from looking inside ourselves to the reflection we put out into the world. Do we gain self knowledge through introspection, or are there better ways of finding out who we are? They discuss everything from imagination to doubting as a way to get a sense of ourselves.

Works Discussed

Catriona MacKenzie, Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics
Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time
Krista Lawlor, “Knowing What One Wants”
Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne
Plato, Dialogues
René Descartes, Discourse on Method
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
Richard Moran, Authority and Estrangement
William James, The Principles of Psychology

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Likes, lighting, and Lil Miquela. Influencers have taken over the online world, promoting everything from brands to lifestyle changes. But, what does it mean to exert influence over somebody and how has the rise of social media created a whole new category of the influencer? In episode 60 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss the job and person we now know as the influencer and how objectification and relationships play into this role.

Works Cited

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Talcott Parsons, “On the Concept of Influence”
Time Magazine, “The 25 Most Influential People on the Internet”

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Since the invention of film, we’ve seen an unimaginable shift in the nature of human perception — but what is film, really? In episode 59 of Overthink, Ellie and David dive into the nature of film. What distinguishes film from other art forms, like photography and theater? Do films depict reality as it is, or are films separate worlds in themselves? They dissect the ideology of the movie theater, human perceptions of montage over time and across cultures, the condition of the film spectator, and more!

Works Discussed

Béla Balázs, “Theory of the Film”
Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus”
Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed
Bernd Elzer & Martin Loiperdinger, “Lumiere’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth”
Jean Epstein, “The Intelligence of a Machine”
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
Susan Sontag, “The Decay of Cinema”
Susan Sontag, “Film and Theater”
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

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