Very Bad Wizards

Latest Episodes:

Episode 284: Reel Choices May 15, 2024

Show notes

David and Tamler choose an episode topic that will define the identity and meaning of the Very Bad Wizards podcast going forward – our top 3 existentialist movies. Plus, you're gonna be shocked to hear this, you might want to sit down, but there has been surprisingly little research on the metaphysics of puns. We look at a recent paper that remedies this appalling gap in the literature – and maybe the biggest surprise of all, Tamler has some nice things to say about it.

Episode 283: When Elephants Podcast Apr 30, 2024

Show notes

David and Tamler talk about Caitrin Keiper's wonderful sprawling essay on elephant life and society and the many philosophical questions surrounding these extraordinary creatures. What kind of mental states can we attribute to them? Do they have a kind of language? Are they moral? What are our moral duties to them? What accounts for the long-standing taboo against 'anthropomorphizing' elephants and other complex non-human animals? And lots more.

Plus, a new segment "there should be a German word for this" - we come up with new German words for common phenomena or experiences. And a big announcement in the promo segment about the podcast going forward.

Please consider supporting a long-time listener's attempt to get their family out of Gaza.[gofundme.com]

Links:

Do Elephants Have Souls? by Caitrin Keiper [thenewatlantis.com]

Episode 282: Fearful Symmetry (Borges' "Death and the Compass") Apr 16, 2024

Show notes

A Rabbi is found dead in a hotel room, stabbed in the chest. The room is filled with Kabbalah texts and a single page in an typewriter that reads "The first letter of the name has been written." The celebrated detective and "reasoning machine" Erik Lönnrot suspects a rabbinical explanation but is he seeing patterns that may not be there? David and Tamler get out their pipes, magnifying glasses, and deerstalker hats to unravel another Borges mystery: "Death and the Compass." Plus a new study on why men make errors about whether women are flirting with them, the latest in our series on studies that employ erotic fiction.

Links:

A Dress Is Not a Yes: Towards an Indirect Mouse-Tracking Measure of Men's Overreliance on Global Cues in the Context of Sexual Flirting

Pinpointing the psychological factors linked to men's misjudgments of women's sexual interest

Death and the Compass by Jorge Luis Borges [wikipedia.org]

Episode 281: Choose Your Fighter Mar 26, 2024

Show notes

We dig into the biggest rivalry in Tamler's profession, analytic vs. continental philosophy. Are analytic philosophers truly the rigorous, precise, clear thinkers they take themselves to be? And is continental philosophy really just a bunch pretentious charlatans spouting French and German gibberish and writing obscure prose to mask the incoherence of their ideas? We look at a nice paper by Neil Levy that goes beyond the stereotypes and tries to describe and explain the differences between the two schools. Plus, The University of Austin (sic) is back in the news and we have a report from someone who attended one of their Forbidden Courses. This should be so easy but the article has us deeply conflicted about what to make fun of. [Important update: Trixie is on a 5 day streak of no accidents and is a perfect little sweet girl.]

Links:

An American Education: Notes from UATX by Noah Rawlings

Levy, N. (2003). Analytic and continental philosophy: Explaining the differences. Metaphilosophy, 34(3), 284-304.

Episode 280: Mad Masque (with Phil Ford and J.F. Martel) Mar 12, 2024

Show notes

Phil Ford and J.F. Martel from the great "Weird Studies" podcast join us for a whirling discussion of Edgar Allan Poe's mesmerizing tale of decadence and disease "The Masque of the Red Death." We also talk about weird fiction more generally, why it's so suited to the short story genre, how it creates a mood that drips and bursts from the seam of the page. Plus David and Tamler in the opening segment talk about Aella's data-driven, chart and graph filled birthday orgy. Is she the sex symbol for our times?

Links:

Sponsored by:

BetterHelp: You deserve to be happy. BetterHelp online counseling is there for you. Connect with your professional counselor in a safe and private online environment. Our listeners get 10% off the first month by visiting BetterHelp.com/vbw. Promo Code: VBW
Factor: Chef-prepared, dietitian-approved meals, ready to eat. Sign up today and get restaurant-quality meals made by real chefs delivered to your door. Visit factormeals.com/vbw50 and use code VBW50 to get 50% off your order.

Episode 279: The Greenhouses We Burned Along the Way (Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" Pt. 2) Feb 27, 2024

Show notes

David and Tamler conclude their discussion of Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" – we talk about the hunger dance at twilight, Ben's greenhouse burning habit, Shin Hae-mi's mysterious disappearance, Lee Jong-su's clumsy and doomed quest to find out what really happened, and what to make of that final scene. Plus we choose the finalists for our Patreon listener selected episode.

Episode 278: Schrödinger's Everything (Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" Pt. 1) Feb 13, 2024

Show notes

David and Tamler fall under the spell of Lee Chang-dong's 2018 masterpiece Burning, a movie where nothing is what it seems, or maybe it is. An alienated young man meets what seems like his dream girl from his small town, but she's about to leave for Africa. Will he take care of her cat? Is there a cat? When she comes back she's attached (maybe) to a slick rich guy played by Steven Yeun and then she disappears. What happened? What's real and what's a pantomime? Adapted from a Murakami short story that's adapted from a Faulkner short story, this movie warrants a true VBW deep dive, so we had to do it in two parts. This is part 1. Plus another segment of our pet peeves. "Updating my priors," "Fixed it for you," faculty governance, and more, these are the things that really grind our gears.

Links:

Burning (2018) [wikipedia.org]

The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami (containing the short story "Barn Burning) [amazon.com affiliate link]

Barn Burning by William Faulkner [wikipedia.org]

Sponsored by:

BetterHelp: You deserve to be happy. BetterHelp online counseling is there for you. Connect with your professional counselor in a safe and private online environment. Our listeners get 10% off the first month by visiting BetterHelp.com/vbw. Promo Code: VBW
Factor: Chef-prepared, dietitian-approved meals, ready to eat. Sign up today and get restaurant-quality meals made by real chefs delivered to your door. Visit factormeals.com/vbw50 and use code VBW50 to get 50% off your order.

Episode 277: The Merits of Buggery (Nagel's "Sexual Perversion") Jan 30, 2024

Show notes

David and Tamler play the old hits – Thomas Nagel and sex robots. In the main segment we talk about Nagel's essay "Sexual Perversion", a surprising essay on many fronts (Sartre, erotic fiction, conceptual analysis, much more). What's the nature of sexual desires? Can we say that some sexual interactions are perversions? Which ones? Can we have a perverse form of a hunger? Plus, a new study examines attitudes about sexual assault by probing for intuitions on assaulting sex robots. It gets more confusing from there.

Links:

Grigoreva, A. D., Rottman, J., & Tasimi, A. (2024). When does "no" mean no? Insights from sex robots. Cognition, 244, 105687.

Nagel, T. (1969). Sexual perversion. The Journal of Philosophy, 5-17.

Sponsored by:

BetterHelp: You deserve to be happy. BetterHelp online counseling is there for you. Connect with your professional counselor in a safe and private online environment. Our listeners get 10% off the first month by visiting BetterHelp.com/vbw. Promo Code: VBW
Green Chef: Get great recipes made from organic produce and premium proteins of the highest quality delivered to your door. Visit Greenchef.com/60vbw, and use code 60VBW to get 60% off, plus 20% off your next two months.

Episode 276: Attention Please Jan 16, 2024

Show notes

David and Tamler are back for the new year and one of our resolutions was to do more episodes on William James. Today we talk about his account of 'Attention' from his 1890 volume The Principles of Psychology – another remarkably prescient chapter that still feels more than relevant today. What is attention and how does it function in the mind? What accounts for the different ways that we attend to things? Does attention help to shape or construct our reality? What is attention's connection to the will? Does James anticipate predictive coding theory?

Plus we discuss the removal of the head of a renowned university for reasons that have nothing to do with the mission of higher learning.

Episode Links

Chancellor of University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Fired [nbc.com]

William James chapter on Attention from Principles of Psychology (1890) [yorku.ca]

Episode 275: The Ineffable Center (Borges' "The Aleph") Dec 26, 2023

Show notes

An episode interesting from every point of view, we train our eyes on Jorge Luis Borges' "The Aleph." The first segment wins the kudos of the learned, the academician, the Hellenist, as we talk about the favorite things we saw this year. The second segment — baroque? decadent? the purified and fanatical cult of form? — dives into the philosophy, comedy, satire, and poignancy of this classic story. Once again, we show our awareness that truly modern podcasting demands the balm of laughter, of scherzo. The finicky will want to excommunicate our discussion without benefit of clergy but the critic of more manly tastes will embrace this episode as he does his very life.

"The Aleph" by Jorge Luis Borges [wikipedia.org]

Version we read: Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Andrew Hurley) [amazon.com affiliate link]

Sponsored by:

BetterHelp: You deserve to be happy. BetterHelp online counseling is there for you. Connect with your professional counselor in a safe and private online environment. Our listeners get 10% off the first month by visiting BetterHelp.com/vbw. Promo Code: VBW
Listening.com: Save time by listening to academic papers on the go. Very Bad Wizards listeners get 3 weeks free when signing up at listening.com/vbw
Givewell.org: Make your charitable donations as effective as possible. If you've never donated through GiveWell before, you can have your donation matched up to before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. Just go to givewell.org, pick PODCAST, and enter VERY BAD WIZARDS at checkout.

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