We Might Be Tables

We familiarised ourselves with the two metaphysical views about temporal relations, and began talking about process theism in our previous episode. Today, we'll examine the remaining claims and arguments and see just how metaphysically different process theism is from classical theism and whether it can support nonhuman animal personhood. From the case study of Tuffy and Daisy, to the role of sense perception and memory in determining personhood, our conversation in this episode promises to be a fun one. 

While these conversations are philosophically significant and just a lot of fun to have, they also enrich conversations surround animal rights and animal activism. In Daniel A. Dombrowski's words, "[We] need to move to a conceptual space where nonhuman animal personhood is not a shock".

Mentioned in the episode:

The Cognitive Tradeoff Hypothesis - Vsauce

Are Nonhuman Animals Persons? A Process Theistic Response

Do temporal relations have any role to play in determining personhood? What metaphysical assumptions need to be made to have a coherent account of what makes a person?

Daniel A. Dombrowski blew us away with this paper on personhood from a process theistic lens. Althought we have discussed some metaphysical questions (for instance, when do persons start existing?) in our previous conversation on personhood, this is the first time we examined the metaphysics of time and temporal existence in this context. In the first part of our discussion, we will take you through two extreme conceptualisations of personhood - Humean/Buddhist 'drop of existence' view and the classical theistic view.

Mentioned in the episode:

Daniel A. Dombrowski - Wikipedia

Are Nonhuman Animals Persons? A Process Theistic Response

Waking Life is one of those movies that penetrates the deepest layers of your mind and stays there. The complex plot and themes often feel overwhelming, but satisfyingly so. Not to mention, the visceral and mesmerising animation leaves barely any room for distraction. It's a film to be watched on the big screen, and not just once.

In today's episode, we discuss Linklater's experimental masterpiece, rotoscoping and all. Visual appeal aside, it is also fairly dense in its ideas (as mentioned previously), so it does call for close attention, and we've tried our best to cover everything we found most interesting!

The film touches on existentialism, politics, dreams, death, metaphysics and the nature of reality, to name a few.

We hope you watch the film before listening to the conversation, and also that you reach out with any thoughts you might have! It's a work that's well-worth detailed revisitation.

Mentioned in the episode:

Michio Kaku - Why Physics Ends the Free Will Debate 

Strauss-Howe Generational Theory 

William Strauss and Neil Howe - The Fourth Turning 

Stanford University (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute) - Can the sleeping brain create unique people that the waking brain has never seen before?  

If you could drink an elixir that extended your life by another week, would you do it? What if it extended your life by a month, or a year? Ten years? A hundred?

In an article titled "Life is Good", John Martin Fischer explores the idea of immortality, and how an immortal life could retain meaning.

All of us pursue so-called "projects" in our lives - activities that make our time on this planet worth it. Activities that are best described as our raisons d'être. However, would life still be meaningful if all we ever did was the little things? If all we ever did was eat, sleep, maybe read, or listened to music? Kissed our parents on the forehead and told them we loved them? What then?

Is existential boredom curable? Is persistence in life the cure?

This was an interesting read, to say the least. It isn't often we come across arguments for immortality, and although this article didn't have us entirely convinced, it made us consider possibilities we hadn't even thought of previously.

Let us know what you think! How would you feel about living forever?

Mentioned in the episode: 

Life is good - John Martin Fischer 

In our previous episode, we began our discussion on Lars Svendsen's 'Moods and the Meaning of Philosophy', where we spoke about the role of moods in behaviour, and how that has an influence on the practice of philosophy.

Today, we take that conversation forward, but focus more specifically on the meaning of philosophy and why the both of us find the subject interesting.

Certainly, philosophy can be boring, but this was a much-needed, reflexive talk about why that is the case, and what the potential antidotes to boredom could be.

In our previous episode, we discussed historical views on death, the meaning of human existence, and death as a form of estrangement. Today, we pick up where we left off and analyse the grief and mourning that follows death. Fuchs also surprised us with some insightful sections on immortality and posthumanism that we had an absolute blast discussing. Don't miss this one!

Considering the length and density of the discussion, the episode has been divided into sections according to the structure of the essay itself, the  timestamps to which are below:

Part 1: 1:10

Part 2: 39:05

Part 3: 61:10

We hope you enjoy this one; it was a satisfyingly tough nut to crack.

"The only hopeful counterpart to death is love as the principle of human sympathy and as the social principle of socialism".

Send us a message if you would like to read the essay yourself (we highly recommend you do)!

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Email - [email protected]

"Capitalism and class society lead to inequality, instrumentalist thinking, unhappiness and loneliness. Capitalism makes people unhappy, and in some ways drives them mad. Violence in the form of crime, including murder is unavoidable within capitalism".

We have, so far, been dealing with relatively abstract and idealist philosophical ideas, on their own. For our next pair of episodes, however, we will be looking at material realities and how (possibly absurd) concepts like death fit into a capitalist framework, using Christian Fuchs' Death and Love: The Metaphysics of Communication. With excerpts from thinkers like Thomas Nagel, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Karl Marx, this chapter (part of a larger book titled "Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory") raises (uncomfortable) questions about the nature of human relationships and the role of socialism in combating the phenomenon of death.

Considering the length and density of the discussion, the episode has been divided into sections according to the structure of the essay itself, the timestamps to which are below:

Part 1: 7:10

Part 2: 17:40

Part 3: 57:10

We hope you enjoy this one; it was a satisfyingly tough nut to crack.

"The only hopeful counterpart to death is love as the principle of human sympathy and as the social principle of socialism".

Send us a message if you would like to read the essay yourself (we highly recommend you do)!

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Email - [email protected]

Would the existence of God, or a superior being, change our moral systems? Is a moral system with God just as effective as a Godless moral system? We continue our discussion with these interesting questions and go where the rest of this fascinating paper takes us.

Join us in our final episode on The Moral Philosopher and The Moral Life

Mentioned in the episode:

The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life