Adventures Among Ideas: Recent Episodes
David Dennen
This podcast by David Dennen, PhD explores ideas in philosophy, cultural history, and literary theory. The point is view is generally Romanticist, pragmatist, and behaviorist, but other traditions are explored as well. Episodes are usually monologues, occasionally dialogues.
Daniel Tarpy and I talk with Johannes "Yogi" Jaeger about a wide range of topics, including: why philosophy should be important to biology, how our ideas affect the world we live in, the differences between living systems and algorithm-based systems, Michael Levin's "Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere," and the importance of art.
Further thoughts on emergence and consciousness.
Written version: https://daviddennen.medium.com/emergence-and-consciousness-reconsidered-7a5c19d5759b
I and Daniel Tarpy try to figure out what emergence means. Is it novelty? Is it the unpredictable? Is it rare? Is it everywhere? What sorts of things are emergent? How do we know when something is emergent? In part 2 we try to explain in what sense we think consciousness is emergent. Along the way we discuss dualism, panpsychism, physicalism, idealism, and pragmatism.
On the concept of "qualitative binding" in art with reference to John Dewey, John Middleton Murry, Susanne Langer, Vincent van Gogh, and Richard Wright.
In this conversation I, Daniel Tarpy, and Tyler Piteo-Tarpy discuss several ways of thinking about fundamental reality, including idealism, materialism/physicalism, pantheism and panentheism, pragmatism/relationalism, and triunalism. The conversation is exploratory; hopefully we’ll revisit certain topics in more depth in the future.
Do we have free will? Does it matter? Daniel Tarpy joins me to discuss the free will debate. We discuss some classic and recent ideas about free will and determinism, including those of Robert Sapolsky, Kevin Mitchell, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, John Dewey, C. A. Campbell, and Roderick Chisolm.
I argue that the problem with Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument (or Mary's Room Argument) against physicalism is that it's not about knowledge.
Is it possible for an artificial intelligence to become really conscious? Are some AIs already conscious, as at least a few people think? And in particular, are large-language-model-based chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard—which after all seem to express thoughts and feelings—conscious? If so, in what sense are they conscious? How conscious are they?
In this episode I look at four essays by the philosopher Jay Ogilvy on paradigm shifts, the nature of power, and possible futures.
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Ogilvy, James. “Understanding Power.” Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 5, no. 2 (1978): 128–144. https://doi.org/10.1177/019145377800500202
Ogilvy, James. “From Command to Co-Evolution: Toward a New Paradigm for Human Ecology.” Ecological Consciousness: Essays from the Earthday X Colloquium, University of Denver, April 21–24, 1980, pp. 265–293. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981.
Ogilvy, Jay. “Scenario Planning, Art or Science?” World Futures, vol. 61, no. 5 (2005): 331–346. https://doi.org/10.1080/026040290500561
Ogilvy, Jay. "Facing the Fold: From the Eclipse of Utopia to the Restoration of Hope." Foresight, vol. 13, no. 4 (2011): 7–23. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636681111153931
A discussion of experiential knowledge and virtual experience based on Dorothy Walsh's Literature and Knowledge (1969).
More on the relation between literature and knowledge, this time through the work of Eliseo Vivas.
Does literature give us knowledge? If so, what kind of knowledge? And knowledge about what? In this episode I explore literature as propositional knowledge, behavioral knowledge, and reorientational knowledge. Based on Morse Peckham's essay "Literature and Knowledge" (1972).
Discusses Derrida's deconstruction as a kind of double reading.
Useful Readings:
Abrams, M. H. “Construing and Deconstructing” (1986). Collected with Abrams’ other essay on deconstruction in Doing Things with Texts* (1989). https://archive.org/details/doingthingswitht00abra
Kakoliris, Gerasimos. Derrida’s Deconstructive Double Reading: The Case of Rousseau* (2022). https://www.academia.edu/78389332/Derridas_Deconstructive_Double_Reading_The_Case_of_Rousseau
Miller, J. Hillis. “On Edge: The Crossways of Contemporary Criticism” (1979). Collected in Theory Now and Then* (1991). https://archive.org/details/theorynowthen0000mill and https://www.unife.it/letterefilosofia/llmc/insegnamenti/letteratura-inglese-ii-llmc/materiale-didattico/programma-bibliografia-modalita-desame-e-materiale-didattico-letteratura-inglese-ii-laurea-interclasse-anno-accademico-2011-2012/J.%20Hillis%20Miller-%20On%20Edge.%20The%20Crossways-%201979.pdf
In this episode I discuss Wayne C. Booth's four values for good critical (and perhaps social and political) life. Based on Booth's Critical Understanding (1979).
In this episode I discuss a few ideas of the literary critic J. Hillis Miller on the ethics of reading.
Introducing three classic theories of the mind from a dualistic perspective: interactionism, parallelism, and epiphenomenalism.
On the incoherences in traditional psychology and how behaviorism tried to resolve them.
How do we come to know about our own subjective states? B. F. Skinner has given a pretty clear analysis of how this happens in his article “The Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms” (1945) and his book Verbal Behavior (1957). I discuss.
Dr. Will Kitchen joins me for a conversation about his book Romanticism and Film: Franz Liszt and Audio-Visual Explanation (Bloomsbury, 2021). Dr. Kitchen is currently a teaching fellow in film studies at the University of Southampton. We discuss how Romanticism influenced the development of film and how Romantics such as Franz Liszt have been represented in cinema.
In this episode I focus on a 1912 paper by John Dewey called "What Are States of Mind?" The paper is significant for recasting Dewey's theory of emotion (based on the James-Lange theory) with a more social emphasis.
What is the intentional fallacy? Is it intentional? Is it a fallacy? A bit about Peckham's critique of the famous Wimsatt and Beardsley essay and his own theory of intention. Based on Peckham's "The Intentional? Fallacy?" (1968).
Recorded 17 December 2021
What is language? What is speech? What are words and sentences? In this episode I present answers to these questions by Alan H. Gardiner (1879–1963).
I give an overview of B. F. Skinner's theory of literature—a theory you never knew existed but can't possibly live without!
Recorded 10 December 2021
What is the best way to think about language? Where does it come from? How do we use it? One important resource in answering these kinds of questions has been Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916). In this episode I explore Saussure’s view of language and speech and his theory of the linguistic unit or sign.
I discuss Morse Peckham's theory of value (or self-esteem) and apply it to the movie Joker (2019).
Recorded 3 December 2021
I talk about some key parts of John Dewey's "Theory of Valuation" (1939). This work is important as a major naturalistic and behavioristic theory of value.
Recorded 26 November 2021
Cell assemblies, as proposed by Donald Hebb, are groups of neurons that have something to do with concepts; they bridge the gap between the psychological and the biological. In this episode I introduce and explore Hebb’s cell assembly theory using Christian R. Huyck and Peter J. Passmore’s article “A Review of Cell Assemblies” (Biological Cybernetics, 2013).
Article links: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00422-013-0555-5 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236114295_A_review_of_cell_assemblies
On Thomas Szasz's theory of mind, based mostly on his paper "Mind, Brain, and the Problem of Responsibility" (2000).
I chat with Tomi Gomory about the well-known psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. Tomi is an associate professor of social work at Florida State University. He was a friend of Szasz during the end of Szasz’s life and is working on a biography about him. Here we discuss some of Szasz’s basic ideas, his books, and how he is sometimes misunderstood.
Originally posted 22 November 2021
In this episode I reflect on the recent essay collection Jordan Peterson: Critical Responses (edited by Sandra Woien, Open Universe). I contributed a chapter to this book on Peterson’s theory of human behavior. However, here I mainly focus on what other authors have written about Peterson’s discussions of postmodern neo-Marxism, his Biblical interpretations, and his theory of truth.
A discussion of John B. Watson's paper "Behavior and the Concept of Mental Disease" from 1916.
Recorded 12 November 2021
On the very first episode of Adventures Among Ideas, I discuss Anita Avramides' discussion (in her book Other Minds, 2001) of John Locke's view of the existence of other minds.
Recorded 5 November 2021
In this episode I discuss the differences between situational and emergent interpretation based on Morse Peckham's "The Infinitude of Pluralism" (1977). I also conclude the discussion of the “Limits of Pluralism” debate.
Are we just "a series of jerks"? In this episode I explore John Dewey's famous critical paper "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (1896).
Recorded 24 December 2021
I discuss James Kincaid's view, in "Coherent Readers, Incoherent Texts" (1977), that the text is an incoherent set of patterns that the reader tries (and fails) to unify through the activity of reading.
Joshua Gang’s book Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind (Johns Hopkins, 2021) is an intriguing look at the history of behavioristic psychology and its relevance to twentieth-century literature (especially Beckett, Pinter, and Coetzee). In this video I take on Gang's concept of “literary minds.” Do characters in literary texts have minds?
Recorded 31 December 2021
How are we able to know ourselves? In this episode I explore abduction, induction, and deduction via “Abductive Inference, Self-Knowledge, and the Myth of Introspection” (2021) by Eric P. Charles and Nicholas S. Thompson.
Read their chapter here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351959355_Abductive_Inference_Self-Knowledge_and_the_Myth_of_Introspection
Recorded 7 January 2022
A dialogue of sorts between philosopher James Feibleman and poet-activist Audre Lorde. On the age-old question: What is the appropriate parental response to bullying?
Recorded 14 January 2022.
What is the relation between a critical text and a literary text? Is it like the relation between a parasite and its host? What about the relation between metaphysics and nihilism? In the third part of the “Limits of Pluralism” debate, we follow J. Hillis Miller in exploring these issues.
On this episode I explore M. H. Abrams' critique, in "The Deconstructive Angel" (1977), of Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis Miller, from the Limits of Pluralism debate.
Part 1 of a series on the "Limits of Pluralism" debate of 1977. Do texts have meanings? How many meanings do they have? How can we know about these meanings? On this episode, Wayne Booth opens the debate.