What's Left of Philosophy

A lot of the discussion goes right over my head, but I love listening to the interplay between the group. Five stars!

While there are some nice episodes and I’ve learned a lot listening to those, ultimately I find the programme very unbalanced. Not thar there should be a balance between progressive and reactionary, but rather that for these guys there is only one way of doing progressive and it’s the one their all on board with. They tend to laugh at and belittle alternative viewpoints of their choice and they don’t to racism very well (like a lot of middle-class lefties actually, and I say that as an academic myself), doing that very Hegelian thing of lionising only the voices (and more importantly specific versions of those voices and specific pronouncements) which reinforce their shared viewpoint. It’s like the worst groupthink, the ‘cool kids in the class variety’ functioning only to underline their coolness. It ultimately seeks to create a narrative rather than inform. Yeah. I get it, I know the path of despair is not a scary prospect, but what people like this don’t realise is that lots of people are already well acquainted with it and have been for generations (which is the point of Adorno for instance). Probably going to get ridiculed by them for not looking for fascists, and rather ‘going hard on them’. I hitch is what people like this always say.

This has become a go-to podcast for me after listening to the interview with the super cool Robin Celikates! Excellent hosts, excellent guests…

This podcast is a really good run through of various ideas in left philosophy, pitched at an accessible level but without avoiding going into interesting detail. Excited to see how it goes!