Best Mad Philosopher Podcasts (2025)

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Cass R. Sunstein, "Imperfect Oracle: What AI Can and Cannot Do" (APS Press, 2025) 35:02

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1d ago35:02

35:02

Imperfect Oracle is about the promise and limits of artificial intelligence. The promise is that in important ways AI is better than we are at making judgments. Its limits are evidenced by the fact that AI cannot always make accurate predictions--not today, not tomorrow, and not the day after, either. Natural intelligence is a marvel, but human bei…

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Susan Stewart's Clarendon Lectures: Poetry's Nature 35:28

7d ago35:28

35:28

Susan Stewart Poetry's Nature

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Jon Mills, "End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) 41:46

8d ago41:46

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Dr. Jon Mills, has had an impressive career as practicing professional, researcher, educator and writer in the psychology and psychoanalytic field. His work bounds the world of philosophy and psychology, focusing upon both individual human behavior and the manifestation of the collective behavior in the social context. He is the author and/or edito…

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HoP 476 What He Should Have Said: the Early Cartesians 26:07

9d ago26:07

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Early Cartesians including Cordemoy and de La Forge develop but also challenge Descartes’ ideas, defending atomism and occasionalism.By Peter Adamson

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What is indigenous philosophy? 1:16:23

16d ago1:16:23

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Jack sits down with Brian Burkhart, Indigenous philosopher and scholar, to explore a radical and timely idea: What if Indigenous thought isn’t just tradition or spirituality, but a powerful philosophical framework—one that challenges Western systems and offers a deeply relational way of understanding nature and community in our time?…

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Peter Lamont, "Radical Thinking: How to See the Bigger Picture" (Swift Press, 2024) 43:36

23d ago43:36

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Radical Thinking: How to See the Bigger Picture (Swift Press, 2024) is a book about how you view the world. It's about the things that shape your thoughts, from what you notice and how you interpret it, to what you assume, believe and want. It's also about how, if you think in a radical way, you can look beyond your limited view of the world to see…

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HoP 475 Ariane Schneck on Elisabeth and Descartes 34:33

23d ago34:33

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We finish our look at Elisabeth of Bohemia and Descartes by talking to Ariane Schneck about their correspondence, focusing on the mind-body problem and the passions.By Peter Adamson

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Who Needs College Anymore: Imagining A Future Where Degrees Don’t Matter 51:42

25d ago51:42

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In this optimistic yet practical assessment of how postsecondary education can evolve to meet the needs of next-generation learners, Kathleen deLaski reimagines what higher education might offer and whom it should serve. In the wake of declining enrollment and declining confidence in the value of a college degree, she urges a mindset shift regardin…

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Madness & Acute Religious Experiences, with Richard Saville-Smith 51:15

26d ago51:15

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Host Pierce Salguero sits down with Richard Saville-Smith, an independent scholar of madness, religion, and psychiatry. We discuss Richard’s book Acute Religious Experiences (2023), which argues that frameworks from Mad Studies can get us out from under the academy’s current habit of either pathologizing or sanitizing religious experiences. Along t…

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Anthony Bonato, "Dots and Lines: Hidden Networks in Social Media, AI, and Nature" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025) 1:05:42

27d ago1:05:42

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Can networks unlock secrets of AI or make sense of a social media mess? A behind-the-scenes look at how networks reveal reality. According to mathematician Anthony Bonato, the hidden world of networks permeates our lives in astounding ways. From Bitcoin transactions to neural connections, Dots and Lines: Hidden Networks in Social Media, AI, and Nat…

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David Edmonds, "Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, a Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need" (Princeton UP, 2025) 55:30

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Imagine this: You’re walking past a shallow pond and spot a toddler thrashing around in the water, in obvious danger of drowning. You look around for her parents, but nobody is there. You’re the only person who can save her and you must act immediately. But as you approach the pond you remember that you’re wearing your most expensive shoes. Wading …

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Donald G. Nieman, "The Path to Paralysis: How American Politics Became Nasty, Dysfunctional, and a Threat to the Republic" (Anthem Press, 2024) 53:45

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Much has been written about political polarisation in the United States, but no one has examined it through the lens of recent U.S. history. There is nothing deterministic about how we became polarised, and it happened more recently than many think. To fully understand the problem, we must take the long view, the perspective provided by history, wi…

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Mark L. Haas, "The Geriatric Peace: Population Aging and the Decline of War" (Oxford UP, 2025) 52:20

1M ago52:20

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The vast majority of the world's countries are experiencing a demographic revolution: dramatic, sustained, and likely irreversible population aging. States' median ages are steadily increasing as the number of people ages 65 and older skyrockets. Analysts and policymakers frequently decry population aging's domestic costs, especially likely slowing…

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Nick Spencer, "The Landscapes of Science and Religion: What Are We Disagreeing About?" (Oxford UP, 2025) 38:48

1M ago38:48

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The relationship between science and religion has long been a heated debate and is becoming an ever more popular topic. The scientific capacity to manipulate and change humans and their environment through genetic engineering, life extension, and AI is going to take a huge leap forward in the twenty-first century, provoking endless debates around h…

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Walter Scheidel, "What Is Ancient History?" (Princeton UP, 2025) 59:20

1M ago59:20

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It’s easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history—obsolete, irrelevant, unjustifiably focused on Greece and Rome, and at risk of extinction. In What Is Ancient History?, Walter Scheidel presents a compelling case for a new kind of ancient history—a global history that captures antiquity’s pivotal role as a decisive phase in human de…

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Jack Buffington, "Environmental Innovation: An Action Plan for Saving the Economy and the Planet by 2050" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) 43:43

1M ago43:43

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Environmental sustainability policy has failed due to focusing on symptoms rather than the root cause problems. Through significant research and a detailed roadmap for how to achieve sustainability by 2050, Buffington provides a realistic, game changing path forward that is both good for the environment and the economy. Dr. Jack Buffington received…

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Marcel Proust 48:26

1M ago48:26

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Joshua Landy Proust: A very short introduction

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Mario Livio and Jack Szostak, "Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest for Cosmic Life" (Basic Books, 2024) 55:44

1M ago55:44

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For a long time, scientists have wondered how life has emerged from inanimate chemistry, and whether Earth is the only place where it exists. Charles Darwin speculated about life on Earth beginning in a warm little pond. Some of his contemporaries believed that life existed on Mars. It once seemed inevitable that the truth would be known by now. It…

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Thomas Christian Bächle and Jascha Bareis eds., "The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025) 1:00:17

1M ago1:00:17

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Autonomous weapons exist in a strange territory between Pentagon procurement contracts and Hollywood blockbusters, between actual military systems and speculative futures. For this week's Liminal Library, I spoke with Jascha Bareis, co-editor of The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025), about how these dual existences shape internatio…

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Todd Mcgowan, "Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity" (Columbia UP, 2024) 1:05:20

1M ago1:05:20

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Todd McGowan forges a new theory of capitalism as a system based on the production of more than what we need: pure excess. He argues that the promise of more—more wealth, more enjoyment, more opportunity, without requiring any sacrifice—is the essence of capitalism. Previous socioeconomic systems set up some form of the social good as their focus. …

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Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century" (Princeton UP, 2022) 55:32

2M ago55:32

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Hitler, Stalin, and Mao ruled through violence, fear, and ideology. But in recent decades a new breed of media-savvy strongmen has been redesigning authoritarian rule for a more sophisticated, globally connected world. In place of overt, mass repression, rulers such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Viktor Orbán control their citizens by…

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Every Purchase Matters: How Fair Trade Farmers, Companies, and Consumers are Changing the World 57:38

2M ago57:38

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We all have the power to change the world through the products we buy. This simple premise has driven the growth of the conscious consumer movement for decades. Indeed, what started with a handful of niche sustainability brands has exploded into the mainstream with labels like Organic, Non-GMO, and Fair Trade Certified now adorning products in majo…

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Vijay Selvam, "Principles of Bitcoin: Technology, Economics, Politics, and Philosophy" (Columbia UP, 2025) 58:41

2M ago58:41

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Principles of Bitcoin presents a holistic, first-principles-based framework for understanding one of the most misunderstood inventions of our time. By stripping away the hype, jargon, and superficial analysis that often surrounds the crypto industry, this book uncovers the true ingenuity behind Satoshi Nakamoto’s creation—and its profound implicati…

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Is Marx Still Relevant? 1:09:05

2M ago1:09:05

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Jack interviews Vanessa Wills, philosopher, professor, and author of Marx’s Ethical Vision, to explore a radical and timely idea: What if Marx wasn’t just a political economist, but a moral thinker, one whose ethical critique of capitalism speaks urgently to the injustices of our time?

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Ben Zweibelson, "Reconceptualizing War" (Helion, 2025) 1:04:18

2M ago1:04:18

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War remains the most chaotic and destructive act our species is capable of. In addition to waging war against those we disagree with, we also battle with which beliefs about war are superior to alternatives. We make war with ideas, beliefs, and mindsets along with bullets, bombs, and missiles. The tactics and technologies matter, but only if societ…

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David J. Helfand, "The Universal Timekeepers: Reconstructing History Atom by Atom" (Columbia UP, 2023) 1:02:13

2M ago1:02:13

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Atoms are unfathomably tiny. It takes fifteen million trillion of them to make up a single poppy seed—give or take a few billion. And there’s hardly anything to them: atoms are more than 99.9999999999 percent empty space. Yet scientists have learned to count these slivers of near nothingness with precision and to peer into their internal states. In…

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Zack Cooper, "Tides of Fortune: The Rise and Decline of Great Militaries" (Yale UP, 2025) 40:18

2M ago40:18

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An ambitious look at how the twentieth century's great powers devised their military strategies and what their implications mean for military competition between the United States and China. How will the United States and China evolve militarily in the years ahead? Many experts believe the answer to this question is largely unknowable. But Zack Coo…

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Judith Grisel, "Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction" (Doubleday, 2019) 1:00:13

2M ago1:00:13

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Not a lot of authors go from spending their early twenties homeless and addicted to cocaine to becoming one of the world’s leading researchers on the neuroscience of addiction. But Dr. Judith Grisel, in her new book Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction (Doubleday, 2019), uses her personal story to illuminate the ways in which …

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Lizzie Wade, "Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures" (Harper, 2025) 1:29:26

2M ago1:29:26

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A richly imagined new view on the great human tradition of apocalypse, from the rise of Homo sapiens to the climate instability of our present, that defies conventional wisdom and long-held stories about our deep past to reveal how cataclysmic events are not irrevocable endings, but transformations. A drought lasts for decades, a disease rips throu…

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William Marx, "Libraries of the Mind" (Princeton UP, 2025) 1:05:38

2M ago1:05:38

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Erich Auerbach wrote his classic work Mimesis, a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, based largely on his memory of past reading. Having left his physical library behind when he fled to Istanbul to escape the Nazis, he was forced to rely on the invisible library of his mind. Each of us has such a library—if not as extensive as Auerbach’s—eve…

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Chris Washington, "Nonbinary Jane Austen" (U Minnesota Press, 2025) 1:09:55

2M ago1:09:55

1:09:55

In Nonbinary Jane Austen, Chris Washington theorizes how Jane Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that we can supposedly see solidifying in the eighteenth century. Arguing that her writing works to abolish gender exclusivity altogether, Washington shows how she establishes a politics that ushers in a futur…

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The Nomadic Origin of the State 1:13:26

2M ago1:13:26

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Contemporary, commonly-accepted understandings of the history of Chinese state formation see the nomadic pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe as peripheral appendages to a centralized, agriculturalist empire. In his work, Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene argues against what he calls “the Sinocentric paradigm” in favor of an interpretation of nomadic pastorali…

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On Bullshit in AI 20:40

2M ago20:40

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Today we’re continuing our series on Harry Frankfurt’s seminal work, On Bullshit. I have the privilege to speak with Arvind Narayanan co-author of the book AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What it Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference (Princeton University Press, 2024). Arvind is the perfect guest to explore the subject of bullshi…

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Caleb Smith. Distraction and discipline. 49:47

2M ago49:47

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Caleb Smith Thoreau's axe: Distraction and discipline in American culture Today, we’re driven to distraction, our attention overwhelmed by the many demands upon it—most of which emanate from our beeping and blinking digital devices. This may seem like a decidedly twenty-first-century problem, but, as Caleb Smith shows in this elegantly written, med…

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Dan-el Padilla Peralta, "Classicism and Other Phobias" (Princeton UP, 2025) 50:52

2M ago50:52

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Classicism and Other Phobias (Princeton University Press, 2025) shows how the concept of “classicism” lacks the capacity to affirm the aesthetic value of Black life and asks whether a different kind of classicism—one of insurgence, fugitivity, and emancipation—is possible. Engaging with the work of Sylvia Wynter and other trailblazers in Black stud…

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Book Talk 67 : The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science 1:07:01

2M ago1:07:01

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What is reliable knowledge? Listen to philosopher Michael Strevens, author of The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, to understand how science discovers the truth. At the current moment, when expertise is under attack and the idea of truth is contested from all sides, Strevens explains the remarkable success of science’s “…

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Agathe Demarais, "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests" (Columbia UP, 2022) 1:06:28

2M ago1:06:28

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Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply t…

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HoP 474 States of the Union: Descartes on the Passions 19:20

2M ago19:20

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What do emotions reveal about the connection between mind and body? We turn to Descartes’ correspondence with Elisabeth and his On the Passions to find out.By Peter Adamson

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The Argument for Peace and Non-Violence 53:11

2M ago53:11

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Host Jack Russell Weinstein visits with peace activist Kathy Kelly

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On Bullshit in Politics 33:00

3M ago33:00

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Today we’re continuing our series on philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s seminal work, On Bullshit. Our guest is Michael Patrick Lynch, Provost Professor of the Humanities and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Michael is the author of the recently published book, On Truth in Politics: Why Democracy …

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Edward Tenner, "Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences" (APS Press, 2025) 57:20

3M ago57:20

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How did the addition of lifeboats after the Titanic shipwreck contribute to another tragedy in Chicago harbor three years later? How efficient are wild animals as investors, and how do dog breeds become national symbols? Why have scientific breakthroughs so often originated in the study of shadows? How did the file card prepare scholarship and comm…

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Genocide Studies International Partners with New Books Network 37:02

3M ago37:02

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Today I’m thrilled to announce a new partnership with Genocide Studies International. GSI is one of the preeminent journals in the field of Genocide Studies. Published by the University of Toronto Press and housed in the Zoryan Institute, GSI is dedicated to “to raising knowledge and awareness among scholars, policy makers, and civil society actors…

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HoP 473 As Rational As You: Elisabeth of Bohemia 21:44

3M ago21:44

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A royal scholar and philosopher sets aside the tribulations of her family to debate Descartes over the relation between mind and body and the nature of happiness.By Peter Adamson

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The Truth About Bullshit: Celebrating the 20th Anniversary Edition of On Bullshit with Pamela Hieronymi 36:52

3M ago36:52

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Today I’m thrilled to launch a brand new series for the Princeton UP Ideas Podcast. 20 years ago, Princeton University Press published a short volume with an excellent title: On Bullshit (Princeton UP, 2025). Written by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit was adapted from an essay that explored the meaning, uses, and consequences of bullshit. …

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Bernd Roeck, "The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance" (Princeton UP, 2025) 52:00

3M ago52:00

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Today I’m speaking with Bernd Roeck about his book, The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 2025). Bernd is professor of modern history at the University of Zurich and director of the German Centre for Venetian Studies in Venice. Translated by Patrick Baker, The World at First Light is a truly magiste…

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HoP 472 Less Cheer, More Knowledge: Descartes’ Ethics 20:31

3M ago20:31

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Descartes’ “provisional” morality and his views on free will and virtue.By Peter Adamson

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Henry David Thoreau 51:00

4M ago51:00

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Henry David Thoreau A Very Short Introduction Lawrence Buell The first concise account of Thoreau's life, thought, work, and impact in more than half a century Builds upon the explosion of new scholarship on Thoreau during the decade of the bicentennial of his birth Treats Thoreau's two most famous and influential works - Walden and "Civil Disobedi…

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Introducing The Critical Edition of the Works of C. G. Jung 15:33

4M ago15:33

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"Princeton University Press is thrilled to share news of a major new initiative: the publication of The Critical Edition of the Works of C. G. Jung. As the longtime publisher of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung in North America, PUP is honored to be global publisher of the Critical Edition, having recently secured world language rights and the sup…

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Elizabeth N. Saunders, "The Insiders' Game: How Elites Make War and Peace" (Princeton UP, 2024) 47:01

4M ago47:01

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One of the most widely held views of democratic leaders is that they are cautious about using military force because voters can hold them accountable, ultimately making democracies more peaceful. How, then, are leaders able to wage war in the face of popular opposition, or end conflicts when the public still supports them? The Insiders’ Game (Princ…

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A Philosophical Look at Madness with guest Justin Garson 1:18:27

4M ago1:18:27

1:18:27

Jack interviews Justin Garson, writer, philosopher, and professor, to explore an unsettling and illuminating idea: What if madness isn't just a disorder, but a signal, expressing something deeply out of sync in our lives or society?