unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Greg La Blanc

unSILOed is a series of interdisciplinary conversations that inspire new ways of thinking about our world. Our goal is to build a community of lifelong learners addicted to curiosity and the pursuit of insight about themselves and the world around them.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

  1. 659. Science Journalism, Academic Silos, and the Cost of Being Right with Matt Kaplan

    3d ago

    659. Science Journalism, Academic Silos, and the Cost of Being Right with Matt Kaplan

    Matt Kaplan is the science correspondent at The Economist and also the author of a number of books. His latest work is I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right. Greg and Matt discuss how Matt chose science journalism over academia, the value of being a generalist, and how journalists can cross-pollinate ideas from others. They also discuss academic silos, pecking orders, and how fear, funding pressures, and ego create sticky consensuses that punish deviants, and linking historic cases to modern parallels.  Matt argues that incremental NIH/NSF funding discourages bold leaps compared with HHMI-style risk-taking, calls for better incentives for peer review and career transitions for senior scientists, and recounts a case in which a dissenting scientist was attacked to the point that they left the field. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: When scientific silos break, innovation happens 09:31: There was a medical conference at the same hotel where this marine biologist was presenting, and one of the surgeons at the medical conference walked by and listened and talked to the marine biologist afterwards and said, “Hey, are you telling me that that spit will hold together stuff in a salty environment?” And the biologist said, “Well, yeah, it's in the ocean.” And the surgeon went, “‘Cause we have really serious problems getting glue that works in the saline environment of a bloody surgery table because your blood is salty, and glues don't work, and we can't put bones together with bolts when the bones are fragments.” So together, they ultimately collaborated and created a glue from the sandcastle worm that's now used in surgery tables around the world. And it was just my favorite word in the world: serendipity. Total serendipity. Why institutions resist new ideas 14:18: I think uncertainty and fear make us cling to the things that we know. And the more uncomfortable we are with change, the more we cling like a security blanket to the consensus. Big problems require bigger risks 31:13: I don't think we do enough of the Howard Hughes-type stuff because we got some pretty big problems. I mean, feeding eight billion people, dealing with climate change, generating enough power to have all of the nations of the world have electricity and refrigeration. We can all come together and say refrigeration is probably pretty important. Defeating pandemics. We really have a lot of stuff that needs to be done, and that's not going to get done if we keep taking baby steps. We've got really big problems, and to do that, we need to get comfortable with failure real fast, and we currently are just not accepting it. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Bioinspired by Sandcastle Worm Glue | Article Robert Axelrod The Big Bang Theory Johann Klein Louis Pasteur Joseph Lister Ignaz Semmelweis National Institutes of Health National Science Foundation Howard Hughes Medical Institute Katalin Karikó Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Guest Profile: Personal Website | About Page LinkedIn Profile Guest Work: Amazon Author Page I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right The Science of Monsters: The Origins of the Creatures We Love to Fear David Attenborough’s First Life: A Journey Back in Time with Matt Kaplan Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    1 hr
  2. 658. Preventing Alzheimer's: Bridging Research and Practice with Dr. Dale Bredesen

    6d ago

    658. Preventing Alzheimer's: Bridging Research and Practice with Dr. Dale Bredesen

    Dale Bredesen is the senior director of the Precision Brain Health Program at Pacific Neuroscience Institute and also the founding CEO of the Buck Institute. He also has authored a number of books, including, most recently, The Ageless Brain: How to Sharpen and Protect Your Mind for a Lifetime and The End of Alzheimer's: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline. Greg and Dale discuss Dale’s “network insufficiency” view of Alzheimer’s that shifts focus from plaques alone to a balance of synaptic “supply and demand.” He argues the brain switches from connection to protection under chronic insults, which are microbes, inflammation, toxins, metabolic syndrome, sleep apnea, and poor energetics. Dale highlights tau phosphorylation as part of an antimicrobial response and APOE4 as a pro-inflammatory risk gene with evolutionary benefits.  They also discuss diet, insulin resistance, exercise, sleep metrics, stress, and the case for prevention and combined approaches. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The brain’s shift from connection to protection 07:33: We see it at every level in the brain. We see it at the molecular level, that you have a connections program and a protection program. We see it at the cellular level, we see it at the tissue level, and even at the organismal level. You can see when people—and you can actually measure this now with blood tests—is someone on the connection side or on the protection side? So therefore, when you have insults, and over our lives it's typically various microbes, it's leaky gut, it's sleep apnea, it's various toxins we're exposed to, air pollution, mercury, microplastics, unfortunately, anesthetic agents, horrible food, all these things that are demanding you be in that protection mode, then ultimately you cannot support five hundred trillion synapses. The supply-and-demand theory of cognitive decline 30:08: Anything that lowers your supply or increases your demand is going to increase your risk for cognitive decline. On the other hand, anything that lowers the demand and increases the supply is going to be a risk reducer, whether it's Omega-3s, whether it's resolvins, whether it's exercise, whether it's better sleep, more deep sleep, less sleep apnea. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of things. So, for the first time, our armamentarium to reduce risk and reverse decline is huge. Now we can look at these different pieces and manipulate them so that we get better and better outcomes. Are doctors the antithesis to Silicon Valley? 49:23: Well, here's the thing. Doctors are the antithesis to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is always looking for what's disruptive, what's next, how can we go further, do more. And to be fair, it's because typically those things are not going to kill you. Whether you, like, get your package from Amazon a little faster, it's not going to kill you. Whereas the doctors are told, “Listen,” just like being in the army, “If you do not do what we tell you, someone's going to die.” And that's fair, okay. But they're very poor, therefore, at innovation. If you go back to history, it’s scary, scurvy—it was understood what to do about scurvy in the sixteen hundreds. It wasn't generally accepted until the nineteen hundreds. So thousands and thousands and thousands of people died needlessly because doctors said, “No, we do not believe this.” And the same thing, frankly, is happening now with Alzheimer's disease. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's Prion Richard Feynman Alzheimer's Disease Amyloid Apolipoprotein E KAATSU Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Pacific Neuroscience Institute Profile at Apollo Health Social Profile on Instagram Guest Work: Amazon Author Page The Ageless Brain: How to Sharpen and Protect Your Mind for a Lifetime The End of Alzheimer's: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline The End of Alzheimer's Program: The First Protocol to Enhance Cognition and Reverse Decline at Any Age The First Survivors of Alzheimer's: How Patients Recovered Life and Hope in Their Own Words TEDx Talk: A precision approach to end Alzheimer's Disease Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    1h 1m
  3. 657. Prophecy and Prediction: Exploring AI’s Future with Carissa Véliz

    Jun 4

    657. Prophecy and Prediction: Exploring AI’s Future with Carissa Véliz

    Carissa Véliz is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI, a Fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford, and the author of multiple books, including, most recently, Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI. Greg and Carissa discuss Carissa’s newest work, where she links prediction to surveillance and argues that forecasts are speech acts that intervene in the world, often becoming self-fulfilling or self-defeating. She says humans seek prophecy to relieve anxiety, but this grants power to predictors and can undermine autonomy, democracy, and fairness, especially via opaque algorithms, social-credit-style control, and pattern-matching decisions like lending.  Carissa urges transparent, contestable criteria, skepticism about incentives behind predictions, and treating unwanted forecasts as invitations to defy rather than “obey in advance.” Their conversation critiques utilitarianism and effective altruism for relying on long-term prediction, discusses fatalism and moral luck, and advocates resilience, scenario planning, Epicurean agency, and literature as an antidote to doomscrolling, shrinking attention, and AI-driven cultural convergence. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: When forecasts become commands 25:28: Instead of obeying predictions by believing them uncritically, I suggest that we interpret them as invitations for defiance. And maybe some predictions you do not want to defy. Maybe some predictions you're like, “Okay, yeah, I like that future, and I'm on board.” But with the ones that you don’t like, I think the correct attitude is, “No, we're not. No, we're not. That's not where we're going.” Can predictions bend reality? 25:34: When we believe that prediction uncritically, when we listen to it as if it were a fact, because grammatically it sounds like a fact, what we are doing is obeying implicitly in the sense of Timothy Snyder, of obeying in advance before we are issued an explicit command. When we interpret predictions as facts, we implicitly obey in advance. Obeying in advance 23:54: When we believe that prediction uncritically, when we listen to it as if it were a fact, because grammatically it sounds like a fact, what we are doing is obeying implicitly in the sense of Timothy Snyder, of obeying in advance before we are issued an explicit command. When we interpret predictions as facts, we implicitly obey in advance. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Pythia Bayesian Inference Robert K. Merton Oedipus Epicurus Epicureanism Stoicism Notes from Underground Hilary Putnam J. L. Austin How to Do Things with Words Laplace's Demon Peter Singer Guest Profile: CarissaVeliz.com Faculty Profile at Hertford College Faculty Profile at Oxford University Wikipedia Profile LinkedIn Profile Social Profile on X Guest Work: UnSILOed Ep 501: The Philosophical and Ethical Dimensions of Privacy and Surveillance with Carissa Véliz Amazon Author Page Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance Privacy Is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    50 min
  4. 656. Startup Governance, Mission Control, and the Failures of Shareholder Primacy with Eric Ries

    Jun 2

    656. Startup Governance, Mission Control, and the Failures of Shareholder Primacy with Eric Ries

    Eric Ries is an author, podcaster, and founder of The Lean Startup. He hosts The Eric Ries Show and his notable books Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great, The Lean Startup, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama, The Leader's Guide, and The Startup Way. Greg and Eric discuss why startups and corporations lose their mission through shifts from founder-to investor-control, changing from long-term focus to short-term focus, and purpose-driven to profit-driven behavior. Eric argues governance is “organizational soul craft” and critiques shareholder primacy as a recent, judge-and-academic-driven ideology that creates unaccountable short-term pressure, metric surrogation, and value destruction, even for shareholders.  Eric also explains how markets reward short-term cost-cutting (e.g. reduced R&D), and why mission-driven companies can outperform. He outlines practical protections such as writing mission primacy into charters, converting to Public Benefit Corporations, and stronger structures like foundation ownership (e.g. Novo Nordisk and Patagonia). *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Mission-driven or mission-hopeful? 12:39: So I think for companies, we're seeing this world now where we have a divergence between the mission statement and the actual mission or purpose of the organization. So the mission statement is lofty. I tell the story in the book of Silicon Valley Bank before it collapsed. Its mission statement was something like, “To advance the innovation economy,” or whatever. But its actual legal purpose was just maximize shareholder value. So this divergence caused the collapse of the bank. And so, first of all, if you have a mission statement, but your purpose says “any lawful act or activity,” you're lying. Just so you know, you are lying to your customers. You are lying to your employees. You're lying to everyone you say that mission to because, according to current legal theory, you could be replaced at a moment's notice by your investors, who will then can change the mission to whatever they want. I call that not being mission-driven. You are mission-hopeful. You're hoping nobody will do this to you in the future. Governance is organizational soul craft Governance sounds really boring, but it's really the art of organizational soul craft. It's actually really interesting. And if we can get leaders and founders to pay more attention to it, they can have a much higher probability of their organization enduring. The age of temporary organizations 27:46: I say we've entered an era of temporary managers running temporary organizations for the benefit of temporary owners because executive tenure, company lifespan, and average holding period of stocks have all collapsed in the last, especially the last twenty-five years, let alone the last forty years. So, I don't think it's possible to really have—it's very difficult to build a value-creating organization in that span, and the markets will punish you for doing so. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Governance Shareholder Primacy Overlapping Consensus Silicon Valley Bank Andy Rachleff Environmental, Social, and Governance Mark Zuckerberg Guest Profile: LinkedIn Profile Wikipedia Page The Lean Startup Social Profile on X Guest Work: The Eric Ries Show YouTube Channel Amazon Author Page Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great The Lean Startup by Eric Ries – How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Build Successful Businesses The Leader's Guide The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    59 min
  5. 655. Inside The Mind of DeepMind’s Founder with Sebastian Mallaby

    May 28

    655. Inside The Mind of DeepMind’s Founder with Sebastian Mallaby

    How did a teenage video game designer from London become a Nobel Prize-winning scientist behind one of the most consequential technology efforts in history? Sebastian Mallaby is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the new book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence which provides an in-depth look into one of the greatest minds behind artificial general intelligence. In this episode, Sebastian and Greg discuss how Hassabis's early immersion in game design and neuroscience shaped his unique approach to artificial intelligence, why groundbreaking science is increasingly happening outside academia, and the tension between scientific discovery and corporate strategy.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why AI is becoming an ‘infinity machine’ 03:01: It struck me that two breakthroughs in AI pointed to more to come. And these were AlphaGo and then AlphaFold. And what these two things had in common was—you had a sort of massive combinatorial space in both cases. So with Go, because it's a nineteen-by-nineteen board, the very first move, there's three hundred and sixty-one choices, then there's three-sixty for the second one. If you multiply that out, you pretty soon get to a search space which is sort of, you know, approaching infinity in terms of the number of possible permutations in the game. And with proteins, the way they can fold is even bigger. And so in both of these challenges, effectively, you have a machine that can make sense of near infinity of data, so an infinity machine. And once you have that, I figured, well, it's niche for the moment, but it may not stay niche forever. The “Third Way” that helped Google overcome the innovator’s dilemma 44:06: The third way is you have a skunkworks, like DeepMind in London, which is a separate entity, and you're letting them kind of be the new policy in waiting, like the fightback policy in waiting. And you don't activate it. But when the moment comes when your competitor embraces the new technology, and you're in danger of falling foul of the innovator's dilemma, then you've got the answer because you've been keeping it ready, and you bring it in, and then you fight back fast. How DeepMind helped Google catch up in the AI race 42:54: How did they, in the space of two and a half years, go from the merger announcement to Gemini 3.0, which was better than the ChatGPT rivals? The key to it is that DeepMind had that top-down strike-team methodology, which came from the video game development world, and they imposed that on the Mountain View team, which was much more bottom-up and kind of inchoate in the research process. And that's what generated Gemini 3.0. That's how they got ahead. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Sebastian Mallaby | unSILOed AlphaGo AlphaFold Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter Geoffrey Hinton Mustafa Suleyman Guest Profile: Senior Fellow Profile at Council on Foreign Relations Professional Profile on LinkedIn Guest Work: The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence  The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future  More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite  The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    50 min
  6. 654. Predictive Brains, Placebos, Awe, and the Mind–Matter Frontier with Jo Marchant

    May 25

    654. Predictive Brains, Placebos, Awe, and the Mind–Matter Frontier with Jo Marchant

    Jo Marchant is a science journalist and podcast host, and also the author of several books. Her latest works include In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment and Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body. Greg and Jo discuss the shared threads across her work: a long view of the history of thought and the mind–body relationship. Jo explains how physics and neuroscience challenge a single objective “now,” describing perception as an active predictive process shaped by past experience and expectations, with examples from illusions and sensory priming. They discuss predictive coding, placebo effects, psychoneuroimmunology, anxiety as attention-weighted error monitoring, and how mindfulness and awe can rebalance attention and reduce stress. Jo also contrasts flow with mindfulness, explores choking and depersonalization-derealization as over-attention to self, and critiques medicine’s structural barriers to integrating context and meaning.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why once you hear it, you can't unhear it 14:49: There are other times when we can consciously override things where, for example, if you hear, I don't know, a record being played backwards or something, and it might not, you know, sound like anything, and you're told that actually there's a satanic message hidden within the sound, and you see written down a transcript of what the voice is meant to be saying. So you're listening for it, and so that's adjusting the filtering that your brain's doing. And so it will sort of tune down some things, tune up other things, and then suddenly the voice pops out and you hear it clear as day, and you think, “How on earth did I not hear it before?” You can't unhear it. Perception is prediction 09:59: Everything that we perceive is being shaped by everything that we have perceived in the past and everything that we expect about the future. There's no differentiation between real physical pain and psychological pain. 22:20: There's no differentiation between real physical pain and psychological pain. It's all exactly the same pain. All of that pain or fatigue or whatever it is , is that integrated output of the brain taking everything into account that it knows, and then it's giving you this warning signal, and it's that sort of overall picture. And it's the exact same pain, whether that is purely coming from you've just broken your leg or something, or whether it's coming from a lifetime of stress and trauma that's telling you that you're in a really dangerous situation and something is wrong. The pain is going to feel just as real. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Heraclitus Placebo Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder (DPDR) Guest Profile: JoMarchant.com Wikipedia Page Social Profile on Instagram YouTube Channel Guest Work: Amazon Author Page In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body Decoding the Heavens The Shadow King: The Bizarre Afterlife of King Tut's Mummy Where The Wild Thoughts Are Podcast Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    1 hr
  7. 653. Crafting a Purposeful Life with Tom Rath

    May 21

    653. Crafting a Purposeful Life with Tom Rath

    Tom Rath is a researcher and #1 NYT bestselling author of 12 books. His latest works are How Full Is Your Bucket? And What's the Point? Turning Purpose Into Your Daily Superpower. Greg and Tom discuss the broader arc of Tom’s work, translating research on wellbeing, engagement, and strengths into practical tools. Tom describes shifting from self-improvement to “other-improvement,” using Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s question “What are you doing for others?” as a daily compass, and reframing purpose as an hour-by-hour “portfolio” rather than a single grand mission.  He contrasts purpose with passion, criticizes status and social-comparison traps, and argues that the responsibility for one’s wellbeing largely rests with individuals because many employers and leaders model unhealthy, always-on habits themselves. Tom explains his concept of job/task/relationship/cognitive crafting, the primacy of relationships, and how AI increases the need to prioritize proactive, creative, human work over reactive tasks that are likely to be automated. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: What’s the point of any given hour in your day? 13:57: What's the point of any given hour in your day, and is it doing something that serves other people, makes a contribution to the world? Or is it something that kind of winds you up and gets you charged so you can be at your best for other people? Kind of just asking, the point of that is even more important now than it was 12 months ago because, as I've studied this and gotten more into all of the tools that are available at our disposal with AI right now, the things that can be automated and just require responding instead of thinking about something and initiating or creating, those are the things that are going to be eliminated most rapidly. So my mindset on this has changed a little bit in the last six months, even to say I think everybody needs to be a little more critical and ask some of those questions because if you're doing something that just involves pulling together some numbers or responding to some emails, that's not sustainable anymore. Your strengths don’t make a difference in isolation 50:31: The point of uncovering your natural talents or pathways is not so that you can go out there and beat your strengths into the world and tell everybody about your strengths. The point of it is so you can be more systematic about engineering how you apply those strengths to serve your clients and your customers and your community and the people around you because your strengths don't make a darn bit of difference in isolation. They kind of come to life in the context of a relationship and of a purpose. Can you make purpose more practical? 11:52: Telling people that they need to go find some big grand purpose at any stage in their life may do more harm than good because it produces a level of anxiety where you're thinking it's something larger than it really is that you need to find, or it's one big thing. Versus, as you get into the work, I've found that if you treat purpose like something you do on an hour-by-hour basis, and it's multiple touch points throughout a day, and it's a way to restructure what you do and reprioritize your daily routine, that you can make purpose into something practical. And when you're able to do that, your day is a little more rewarding. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Eudaimonia Donald O. Clifton Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Guest Profile: TomRath.org LinkedIn Profile Wikipedia Profile Facebook Profile Social Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author Page How Full Is Your Bucket? What's the Point? Turning Purpose Into Your Daily Superpower Strengths Finder 2.0 Strengths Based Leadership Life's Great Question: Discover How You Contribute To The World It's Not About You: A Brief Guide to a Meaningful Life Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    57 min
  8. 652. Silent Legacies: How Enlightenment Philosophers Faced Mortality with Joanna Stalnaker

    May 19

    652. Silent Legacies: How Enlightenment Philosophers Faced Mortality with Joanna Stalnaker

    Joanna Stalnaker is a professor of French at Columbia University and also the author of the books The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death and The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia. Greg and Joanna discuss how Enlightenment figures faced death amid disbelief or tempered religious belief. Joanna says scholars have emphasized 18th-century death rituals more than philosophers’ personal end-of-life writings, and she links her interest to growing up with atheist philosopher parents to her earlier work on Enlightenment description, and Rousseau’s late writings.  Their conversation covers models like Socrates and Montaigne’s, public scrutiny of deaths, last rites, and burial, and tensions between posterity and accepting oblivion. They discuss Hume’s death and ambivalence about his reception, Diderot’s Seneca-inspired reflections and critique of Rousseau’s self-presentation, Voltaire’s editing of Meslier and correspondence with Madame du Deffand, Buffon’s gradual “ossification” view of dying, salons and letters’ role in Enlightenment networks and women’s participation, posthumous publication, and the value of literary form for understanding embodied philosophy and equanimity toward death. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: On publishing a book against transhumanism 07:19: I published the book [The Rest Is Silence] that, in a certain sense, it's kind of a book against transhumanism or all these attempts to sort of survive, whether it be through technology or whether it be through spreading one's genetic material by having as many babies as possible. There's this—I see, in our current moment, a kind of denial of death through those various phenomena. Sorates is a model of enlightened death  04:53: Socrates is a model in terms of how to die, what one might call an enlightened death; how to die a philosophical death; and how to face death in a courageous manner, in keeping with one's philosophy. And that was a preoccupation for both David Hume and Voltaire. They were very aware that the public was watching their deaths and that there was great interest in how they would die and whether they would recant their beliefs on their deathbeds. They were thinking back to this model of Socrates, I believe. Can you separate philosophy from the way it is written? 39:04: One of the things that I want to insist on in my work is the fact that we need to take literary form and genre and style into account because it's very difficult. The philosophical ideas cannot be extracted from their form, and I, in this particular book  [The Rest Is Silence], was interested in the question of embodiment because my book is really about them attempting, acknowledging their coming deaths but acknowledging that they lived as bodies, as mortal bodies, and attempting to find a way to express that in writing. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Stoicism Epicureanism Michel de Montaigne Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers by Carl L. Becker Denis Diderot David Hume Madame du Deffand Voltaire Boredom Adam Smith Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Columbia University Profile for the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities Guest Work: Amazon Author Page The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    52 min
See All (659)

4.6
out of 5
73 Ratings

About

unSILOed is a series of interdisciplinary conversations that inspire new ways of thinking about our world. Our goal is to build a community of lifelong learners addicted to curiosity and the pursuit of insight about themselves and the world around them.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Information

  • Creator
    Greg La Blanc
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    659
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

You Might Also Like