For this episode, Damon talks to special guest and dear friend Xin Ye about Kierkegaard's unfinished novel: Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est.  Conversation includes the role of passion in philosophy, the implications of radical skepticism, and whether philosophy is fundamentally religious.

If  this conversation sparked your interest, Xin has a wonderful essay touching on these ideas and more published on The Reeds, which can be found here: https://www.the-reeds.com/theology-religion/The-Man-of-Faith

This is the first episode of an experimental series of unplanned conversations. The idea is to recapture the kinds of conversations we used to have after class or at a bar, where we follow our impulses when addressing a question, without necessarily agreeing with their content by nature of their being impulses. This allows for authentic thought, but also sometimes for radical statements with which the speaker probably wouldn't agree if pressed...we hope. 

In this episode, Peter and Damon (with late guest Francisco) discuss the introduction of Émile Durkheim's book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim is known as the father of sociology, and in this book he applies his methods of examining societies to primitive religions, to see what they can tell us about religion in general and ourselves. Topics range from examining what the essential elements of religion are, how all knowledge might be a product of social and/or religious thinking, and how Durkheim may have solved the great empiricism vs rationalism debate.

The Reeds starts off its new series of conversations on some lesser known texts and essays in the history of ideas. And who better to start with than the great thinker who inspired our name, who let us know we are nothing but thinking reeds: Blaise Pascal. In this episode, Damon, Peter, and Zihan discuss a minor work of his entitled "Of the Geometrical Spirit". The conversation includes the balance of intuition and deduction in the pursuit of truth, situating Pascal's claims with developments in modern mathematics, and the existential dread of infinite spaces. 

Members of The Reeds get together to discuss one of the seminal texts in the philosophy of science by the oft-overlooked polymath Michael Polanyi. 

In this introductory episode, Francisco and Damon begin their discussion of Polanyi with the first chapter of Personal Knowledge. They approach the main thesis of the book that all forms of knowing have a "personal coefficient", and with this in mind, work through his views on relativity theory, the Copernican revolution, and the intersection of science, math, and philosophy.