This month’s episode of “What Is X?” asks a suitably grand question for the end of the year and for the end of Season 2: What is being? To help him figure it out once and for all (or to at least lessen our state of aporia), Justin brings on as his guest Kris McDaniel, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame and the author of “The Fragmentation of Being.” Though we might find this question intimidating, Kris notes that this is no longer the case today: though fundamental throughout the history of philosophy, it’s now popular to think the nature of being is too simple to spend much time on. To restore the concept to its proper place, Kris and Justin delve into Heidegger, examined here as part of the Aristotelian tradition. (Heideggerians, take note: this is the episode for you.) What is Dasein, anyway? What distinguishes it from the human? And the hardest metaphysical question of all: Why is the man-on-the-street gut-level notion of what being is still so distant from all this Dasein talk? These questions have ethical implications, too: Kris and Justin discuss what kind of effect ontological status might have on our relationships, and what happens if it turns out our own kids are just random aggregates of particles. Also discussed: whether biology alone can disclose the essence of the siphonophore, why God doesn’t care about wheelbarrows, and the risks of spending too much time with Leibniz.

This month on “What Is X?”—timed perfectly after the latest crypto crash—Justin asks, What is money? To begin the conversation, his guest—Joseph Tinguely, a philosophy professor at the University of South Dakota and the editor of the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Money—announces he isn’t sure himself. Together, Justin and Joseph attempt to figure it out—or to at least explain why it’s so difficult to grasp what money is. First, there’s the foundational problem of trying to understand money by looking at its historical origins: material objects might survive, but ephemeral beliefs and social formations do not. And then there are the foundational splits: is money an object or a social relation? Has money historically moved in the direction of increased abstraction, from cash to credit, or is it originally abstract—a particular kind of credit? Justin provides valuable firsthand experience from 1990 Leningrad, when the ruble collapsed and Marlboro Reds briefly held sway as the premier unit of exchange, but perhaps such questions are better left to the economic historians. Our philosophers also undertake some intractable philosophical inquiry: money’s association with sin and corruption, the relationship between theology and debt, what money has to do with friendship and gift-giving, and, of course, why it’s difficult to treat cryptocurrency as actual money.

On this episode of “What Is X,” Justin brings back a seasoned veteran for one last job: he invites on his friend Seb Emina, former editor of the London Review of Breakfasts blog and author of The Breakfast Bible, to ask: What is breakfast? Now the editor-in-chief of The Happy Reader, Seb is no longer in the breakfast game—but when this podcast comes calling, one must answer. Together, Justin and Seb plumb their past and present as breakfasters, as post-Kelloggian subjects, as staunch opponents to the tyranny of brunch. Breakfast, that humble first meal of the day, is not just a meal, Seb asserts, but a mindset. Why is that? And what makes it such a universal, unifying experience compared to lunch and dinner? Listen in and you’ll also learn why cereal deserves a There Will Be Blood-style epic about its early days in Battle Creek, Michigan, what the Full English reveals about Brexit and the geopolitics of Western Europe, and the dishonor the BBC regularly casts upon breakfast. Plus: a peek into the secret language of Justin’s childhood.

What does it mean for a number to exist? In the philosophy of mathematics, there are two general camps when it comes to numbers: there are the Platonists—or the “realists”—who think numbers somehow really exist, and there are the constructivists, who think they’re the products of mathematical activity. In this episode of “What Is X?” Justin invites on the Columbia University mathematician Michael Harris to try to figure out what the ontological status of numbers is. Are they the ultimate abstractions, or is there something "more real" to numbers than even our physical world? If we ran into them in outer space, would aliens understand numbers as we've conceived of them here on earth?  Over the course of the hour, you'll get to listen in on: a  discussion of the relationship between numbers and culture, a true story that sounds like a joke about three mathematicians who walk into a bar, and a back-and-forth about why certain philosophers are obsessed with mathematics (hint: its unmediated access to truth).

The dog days of late summer call for a break from discussions of concepts like Time, War, and Virtue and a turn to a subject that, though significant, probably lacks its own Platonic form: Punk. Joining Justin for this episode of “What Is X?” is our own Joey Keegin—a contributing editor at The Point and a veteran of punk scenes of the 1990s and 2000s. Once a hitchhiker and freight train hopper and DIY participant, Joey is estranged from punk now yet still inspired by it. Why? To ask what punk is, Joey points out, is to ask more than simply what punk music is—because it’s “a promise,” he says, “of a way of living, a promise of a way of being together with other people.” But when it’s just as punk to be straight-edge as it is to be addicted to heroin, how do you sort the good from the bad? Can there even still be punk after the death of rock? Together, Justin and Joey attempt to sort out these distinctions. Along the way, they discuss whether it’s possible for a punk to age gracefully, what punk understands about modernity that hippies didn’t, and why Socrates was not a punk—but was maybe a hardcore kid.

On February 25th, Vladislav Davidzon burned his Russian passport on live TV to protest Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. War makes us do extreme things, Davidzon says, in this episode of “What Is X?” It sharpens national identities, intensifies feelings and social relations, and upends daily life. It makes civilization-upholding taboos fall away. Davidzon is a Russian-Ukrainian writer, editor and policy expert who has spent the past fourteen years writing on Eastern Europe and reporting from numerous conflict zones, including—most recently—the war in Ukraine (from which he helped his family flee in March). Together with Justin, Vlad discusses the art and philosophy of war, the nature of martial virtue, the ambitions and lapses in the post-Cold War political order, and whether war can ever be eradicated from the human condition. They also cover: the movement to cancel Pushkin, whether we’re now seeing a return to nineteenth-century modes of being and what happens when hipsters head to the front.

What counts as authorship? Why does it matter? Should we stop putting our names on what we write and sign off instead, as early scribes preferred to do, as nothing more than humble servants of God? In this episode, Justin E.H. Smith thinks through these questions with Jonathan Egid, writer and doctoral student in comparative literature at King’s College London. The two consider the Hatäta Walda Heywat—which, depending on who you ask, is either a seventeenth-century philosophical treatise by little-known Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob, or a forgery composed in the nineteenth century by the Italian monk who claimed to have discovered it. Was Zera Yacob a real person? If the monk did write the Hatäta, why would he choose to renounce his authorship, given how much work it would have taken? Smith and Egid discuss the motives behind self-effacement and self-promotion, the postmodernist idea of the death of the author, and why we keep reading Homer when we don’t know if he even existed. What does this all mean, they ask, for issues of representation and efforts to meaningfully diversify the philosophical canon?

In this episode of “What Is X?” Justin E.H. Smith and Emily Thomas tackle the timely yet timeless question: "What is time?" Is time an external, objective fact, or is the flow and tempo of the world internal to us—in some sense, all in our head? Could a robot have consciousness even if it didn't understand time? To help concretize these potent questions, Justin and Emily look back at the thought of a now mostly-obscure metaphysician by the name of J.M.E. McTaggart, who argued that time was unreal. In doing so, however, he proposed a framework for time that philosophers have taken up enthusiastically ever since: either one must believe that time is purely linear—occurring as a series of discrete moments in sequence, plotted out on a timeline, simply past or future—or that there is some special interval we might call the "present," in addition to the past and future. Since McTaggart's time, philosophers have been excitedly proclaiming themselves either A theorists (partisans of the present) or B theorists (team pure past and future). Listen in to find out which identity Justin and Emily claim for themselves! Throughout the hour, they also touch on Leibniz and Aristotle's notions of temporality, Adorno on the spatialization of time, and why the ancient Greeks could dream up many notions we'd now think of as sci-fi, but the one thing that seemed to exceed their imagination was time travel.

In this live-recorded episode of What Is X?, Justin meets up with the writer Sam Kriss at a (sometimes noisy) pub in London to chat about conspiracy theories. What makes a conspiracy theory conspiratorial? What is the relationship between conspiracy theories and philosophical skepticism?  Do we have a responsibility to correct misinformation, or should we try to embrace the right to be wrong? Over the course of this ninety-minute conversation, Justin and Sam amble through some conspiracy-theory greatest hits: the JFK assassination, 9/11 truthers’ interest in chemtrails, Jeffrey Epstein, COVID lab-leaks, "New Chronology," and the belief that all mountains were once trees—and even talk about some of their favorites. They wonder together about the relationship between the narratives spun by conspiracy theorists and those of novelists, poets and dreamers—might conspiracy theory be a kind of literature? Could the impulse behind conspiracy theories—like those of the "flat earthers" or those who believe the real sun has been replaced with an LED simulacrum—be understood not as madness or pure irrationality, but as something akin to a basic human desire for cosmological knowledge?

Longtime Point readers may remember that Justin E.H. Smith contributed to our issue 14 “What is comedy for?” symposium back in 2017. He now returns to the subject for us with this episode of “What Is X?” on humor. Joining him is Luvell Anderson, a philosophy professor at Syracuse currently at work on a book on the ethics of racial humor, from its dangers and transgressions to its progressive potential. Humor, Luvell tells Justin, is “a kind of dialogue with its culture, the cultural milieu in which it’s set.” So how, his project asks, should ethical considerations and cultural context bear on our judgments of what’s funny? What are the advantages and disadvantages of crude and less “respectable” humor, and what do we miss when we ignore their function as highly ritualized practices? What forms of communication is humor capable of that conventionally rational argument is not? To explore these questions, Justin and Luvell tackle a number of topics: the limits of satire, the tense relationship between humor and morality, and what Dave Chappelle and Hannah Gadsby have in common. Along the way, they also discuss why the Greeks thought lettuce was so funny, the tragedy of Richard Pryor, and whether a theorist of comedy needs a good sense of humor.