From Émile Zola to Edward Said, from Antonio Gramsci to… Joe Rogan? In episode 79 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss the figure of the high-minded ‘intellectual’ and their role in today’s mass-media landscape. Who are intellectuals, what do they do, and what are they for? Ellie and David ask whether intellectuals have a duty to participate in public debate, and whether they can truly partake in liberatory action in such a capacity.

Works Discussed

Julien Benda, The Treason of Intellectuals
Christoph Charles, Birth of the Intellectuals: 1880-1900
Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims
Antonio Gramsci, The Intellectuals
Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?
Mary McCarthy, The Groves of Academia
Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual
Émile Zola, J’accuse...!
Armchair Expert Podcast
Binchtopia Podcast
SmartLess Podcast

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One must imagine Sisyphus…bored. Take a break from boredom and listen to episode 78 of Overthink as David and Ellie guide you through the fabulously idle realm of this “bestial, indefinable affliction.” They discuss the peaceful highs and painful lows of their middle school summer slumps, the endless days of pandemic panic, and the sluggish mornings of monks during the Medieval period. What can boredom teach us about existence? Is Kierkegaard right that the masses are boring while the nobles bore themselves? Can 9-year-olds be existentially bored? Maybe all we need to overcome boredom is a little bit of fun, perhaps a holiday. Or is it?

Works Discussed

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
Andreas Elpidorou, The Feeling of Boredom, Boredom and Poverty
Evagrius, Of the Eight Capital Sins
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
Pascal, Pensées
Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom
Michel de Montaigne, Of Sorrow
The Twilight Zone

* In the episode, we misattributed the quote “The cure for boredom is curiosity” to Dorothy Parker. The quote belongs to Ellen Parr.

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Fireworks, a gushing waterfall, little death. The orgasm. In episode 77 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss how phenomenology and psychoanalysis interpret the experience of orgasm. They talk about evolutionary theories of  the orgasm, including the theory that the body can suck up...“higher quality sperm.” They tackle what the orgasm gap says about the state of gender and sex in our society.

Works Discussed

George Bataille, Erotism

Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”

Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”

Sara Heinämaa, “The Phenomenology of Desire and Orgasm”

Jacques Lacan,  Jouissance

Elisabeth Lloyd, The Case of the Female Orgasm Bias in the Science of Evolution

Emily Nagoski, Come As You Are

Thomas Percy, “Walking in a Meadow Green”

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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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