Thales' Well

On this episode of the podcast, I talk to Swedish philosopher Prof. Martin Hägglund from Yale University about his book This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free. The dominant theme of our conversation was the meaning of freedom. Martin has a distinct notion of the demands of being free and we got into a detailed discussion about what freedom really means, how to think about it, how freedom is tied up with our social activities and just why our mortality is exactly the thing that makes us free. As well we talked about how human beings are a distinct kind of animal, a critique of posthumanism, Aristotle and living the good life, Kant’s theory of freedom, how freedom is a form of sustained activity, and also why being free is just plain hard! Enjoy! Martin Hägglund is the Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of four books – Kronofobi: Essäer om tid och ändlighet (Chronophobia: Essays on Time and Finitude (Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002), Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford U.P., 2008), Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Harvard U.P., 2012), This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free (Pantheon, 2019) – as well as several articles, interviews and podcasts. You can find out more about Martin here at his university webpage or here on his personal webpage. You can also follow him on Twitter: @martinhaegglund If you would like to study with me you can find more information about our online education MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here. September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T. You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Pod Bean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

On this episode I talk to Prof. Joost van Loon about French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour. We talked about a lot! Joost taught me about Latour’s actor network theory and while we were doing that we ended up chatting about the importance of concrete controversies, how objectivity works, the production of science, conspiracy theories, vaccine science, relativism, new materialism and Latour’s late turn to politics and ecology. Joost van Loon is the Chair of General Sociology and Sociological Theory at Katholische Universität Eichstätt. He is the author of numerous books and articles. You can find out more about Joost via his university webpage here. Here is a link to Joost’s book Discussing New Materialism which we mentioned on the show. Latour’s book We Have Never Been Modern can be found here, and his late book on ecology can be found here. If you would like to study with me you can find more information about our online education MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here. September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T. You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

On this podcast I talk to Dr Hager Weslati about the philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Kojève is a hugely influential but not very well-known philosophers. Here Hager and I talk about his life, his philosophy, and his famous lectures on Hegel. Kojève was a philosopher, entrepreneur, diplomat, architect of the European Union and possible spy! Hager Weslati is a lecturer in media philosophy and political PR at Kingston University. She translated Alexandre Kojève’s Notion of Authority (2014) and his early 1950s manuscript on Kant (2024). Her current work is aligned with recent critical attempts, across a wide range of disciplinary areas, to engage Kojeve's mysterious system of knowledge and its strong resonances with contemporary thought and politics in a global context. You can find out more via Hager’s university webpage. Also, Hager has made some writings available via her academia.edu page. If you would like to study with me you can find more information about our online education MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here. September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T. You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

A podcast with my colleague Dr Mark McKenna who is an Associate Professor at Staffordshire University. We talked about horror films. Specifically, we talked about the the snuff movie as a form of horror. We also talked about the cultural mythologies that have grown up around the concept of snuff, how this mythology transformed in the technological age as well issues pertaining to distribution, marketing and desensitization. Please note we discuss extreme violence and sexual violence in this podcast. You can find out more about Mark via his personal website and his university webpage. Dr Mark McKenna is an Associate Professor in the Film and Media Industries and Director of the Centre for Research in the Digital Entertainment and Media Industries at Staffordshire University. Mark’s research is largely centered on cult and horror cinema, he is the author of Nasty Business: The Marketing and Distribution of the Video Nasties (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Snuff (Liverpool University Press, 2023), and is co-editor of the Routledge collection Horror Franchise Cinema (2021), and author of the report Silicon Stoke 2023: Developing Film, TV and Other Content Production in North Staffordshire and is he is currently working on his third monograph, a study of the John Milius surf film Big Wednesday (1978) for the Routledge series Cinema and Youth Cultures. If you would like to study with me you can find more information about our online education MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here. September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T. You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

Don Milligan is back to discuss his new book The Embrace of Capital (Zero Books: 2022). In this , Don recounts and analyses his history of social and political activism interrogating the reasons he thinks working people have a love-hate relationship with capitalism but ultimately embrace it. But equally, Don tells us how working people hate insecurity, inequality, greed and love civic and political freedom. In our discussion, we chatted about royal weddings, royal funerals, rule of law, egalitarianism, the diversity of working class experience, exploitation, fairness, gentrification, technology and lots more! You can buy a copy of the book here and here. Dr Don Milligan taught a course on the theory and practice of anti-capitalism at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research examines how commercial society gives rise to political movements. He campaigned for the gay liberation movement for many years. Don writes regular columns for his website “Off the Cuff”. You can find a collection of his writings here. You can also listen to Don’s cultural history of gay rights in Britain on Thales Well here. He tweets at: @Don Milligan2020 If you would like to study with me you can find more information about our online education MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here. September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T. You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

On this episode Professor Graham Harman returns to talk about architecture and philosophy. We had a fascinating conversation discussing architecture in relation to the history of philosophy. Graham has tackled just this topic in new book Architecture and Objects (2022), which has recently come out with University of Minnesota Press. We discuss a whole host of topics including the role of the ‘big three’ philosophers – Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze –how their thought informs architecture, and the ways Graham draws on, develops, and applies his own distinctive object-oriented-ontology (Triple O) position to architecture. Graham also talked about teaching architecture as a philosopher, materialism, the dangers of ‘literalism,’ ecology, the ideological dimension of architecture, and of course we spoke about buildings such as Imperial War Museum North, Sydney Opera House, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Newgrange, and the Tate Gallery London. Graham Harman is a world-leading philosopher. He works at Sci-Arc in Los Angeles. He has authored several books, articles and journals and you can find more information about him on his institutional webpage. In the discussion Graham mentioned these books specifically Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (2016, Polity), Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (2018, Pelican) and Speculative Realism: An Introduction (2018, Polity). You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and PodBean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

Friedrich Nietzsche is usually considered a staunch critic of socialism. My guest on this episode thinks this picture is a lot more complicated than we suspect. Professor Robert Miner suggests Nietzsche offers a very complex picture of what socialism entails, and we should consider Nietzsche as a critic and proponent of socialism. Robert Miner is a Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University. You can find a link to his university website here. Robert’s article, which we based this discussion on, is called ‘‘ Nietzsche as Critic and Proponent of Socialism: A Reappraisal Based on Human, All Too Human’’ and you can find it here. Robert has published a number of books on Nietzsche and other philosopher. You can buy his book on Nietzsche’s The Gay Science here, and his book on Nietzsche and Montaigne here. If you would like to study with me you can find more information about our online education MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here. September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T. You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

This episode I am talking to Dr Tiff Thomas. We discuss the philosophy, ideas and politics of activist, mystic, worker and educator Simone Weil. Tiff is a lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University and specializes in Spinoza. He is also interested in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Simone Weil. You can find out more about Tiff here. Tiff is a co-leader of the AHRC Funded UK Simone Weil Research Network which you can follow on Twitter here. You can also find links to his writings on Simone Weil and Spinoza at the bottom of these show notes. If you would like to study with with me you can find more information about our online education courses MAs in Philosophy here at Staffordshire University. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here. September intakes F/T or January intakes P/T. Dr Tiff Thomas' Public Articles: The Philosophical Salon: ‘Silence is Violence’: Simone Weil on the Impossible Demands of Justice Latest Publications: Thomas, C (2022) ‘Simone Weil’s Venice Saved: Pity, Beauty, Friendship’ in Bloomsbury Library for 20th-Century French Thought Thomas, C (2021) ‘Spinoza on Melancholy and Cheerfulness’ in Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review Thomas, C (2020) ‘On Religious and Cultural Objects: Articulate and Inarticulate Bodies in Spinoza’s Philosophy of Nature’ in European Journal of Philosophy Thomas, C (2020) ‘Simone Weil: The Ethics of Affliction and the Aesthetics of Attention’, in International Journal of Philosophical Studies Thomas, C (2020) ‘Brancusi’s Golden Bird and Loy’s “Brancusi’s Golden Bird”: A Spinozist Encounter’ in Philosophy and Literature

On this podcast I am talking to my colleague Prof. David Webb a philosopher at Staffordshire University. David is the author of Heidegger, Ethics and the Practice of Ontology (Continuum: 2011) and Foucault's Archaeology: Science and Transformation (Edinburgh U.P. 2013). He has published several articles on Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, modern French philosophy. He is especially interested in epistemology and philosophy of science. We talked specifically about French Philosopher Michel Serres. David helped me understand Serres’ influences from Leibniz, Bachelard and ancient atomism, and we talked about what Serres has to say about science, art, poetry and the nature of contingency. If you would like to find out more about David here is a link to his university web page. If you would like to study with David (and me!) you can find more information about our distance education courses here. You can find out more information on our MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here. January and September intakes available either F/T or P/T.

On this episode of Thales’ Well I talk to Prof. Felix O’Murchadha who returns to talk about his new book The Formation of The Modern Self (Bloomsbury, 2022). Felix’s book provides a genealogy of the emergence of the self in the early modern period. We had a very wide-ranging discussion moving from ancient accounts of the self to contemporary versions. We discussed Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume and Kant. Felix is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Galway. You can find more about Felix here. And here is a link to his University website. You can also find a sample of his writings here. Here is a link to the book at Bloomsbury, and it is also available in all the usual places. Come study with me on Staffordshire University’s distance learning MA in Continental Philosophy via this link. Or, join our distance learning MA in Philosophy of Nature, Information and Technology via this link. Find out more about me here. January and September intakes available either F/T or P/T.

This episode I had a fantastic discussion with Dr Colin Alexander about propaganda. We discussed the nature of propaganda, how to identify it, its ubiquity, as well as things we might do to mitigate the effect of propaganda on ourselves and society. More specifically, we focussed on a particular case study, with Colin explaining how propaganda is deployed by charitable organisations, companies and governments. In addition, we spoke about representations of charity in culture with reference to Charles Dickens, Andrew Carnegie and Bob Geldof and Live Aid. The blog piece on Andrew Carnegie which formed the basis of our conversation can be found here. Colin Alexander is Senior Lecturer in Political Communications at Nottingham Trent University, UK. His expertise surrounds propaganda studies, with a particular interest in communications ethics, imperialism and north-south issues. He is also interested in moral philosophy and debates surrounding the role of charity and altruism within society. He is the author of two monograph books: 'China and Taiwan in Central America' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and 'Administering Colonialism and War’ (Oxford University Press, 2019), and he recently published his first edited volume 'The Frontiers of Public Diplomacy: Hegemony, Morality and Power in the International Sphere' (Routledge, 2021). You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

On this episode, I discuss analytic philosopher David Lewis' concept of possible worlds with Dr Benjamin Curtis. Ben is colleague at Nottingham Trent University. We talked about possible worlds, actual worlds, probability, causation and time. Ben Curtis lectures in Philosophy at Nottingham Trent University. He has published on a wide-variety of themes including epistemology, bioethics, time as well as the philosophical status of antiques. You can find out more about Ben on his university webpage here. Ben has also contributed a number of pieces to The Conversation which you can find here. You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

I had an amazing conversation with Robert Zaretsky who is a Professor of Humanities at the Honors College, University of Houston. We spoke about French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus and his great pandemic novel The Plague. The Plague is currently receiving renewed critical attention due to the Covid-19 pandemic and is set to be re-issued by Penguin. Thus, I thought it would be a good time to discuss the novel. We touched on the background to Camus' novel, the influence of Thucydides on Camus, silence, ethics, judgement, the distinction between moraliser and moralist, the strange parallels between Camus and George Orwell as well as Camus' perennial relevance. Rob is a historian of France and literary biographer. Amongst others, he has published two biographies of Albert Camus entitled A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning with Harvard U.P. and Albert Camus: Elements of a Life with Cornell U.P. You can read his recent essay on Camus' The Plague here, and an essay he wrote on online pedagogy for Times Higher Education here. Elsewhere Rob is a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books where you can read his essay on Camus and Simone Weil here, as well as an essay on Franz Kafka here. He has also contributed to New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs and Chronicle of Higher Education. Here is an essay from Foreign Affairs where Rob writes about the importance of books in pandemics. You can find out more about Rob on his university website here. You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

I am talking with Prof. Christian Miller about the nature of character. We discuss different types of character, character psycholgoy, forms of character virtue as well as forms of character vice, the difference between moral habits and instincts, Aristotle's contribution to the theory of character, and the ever-present gap between who we are and who we should be. Christian outlines valuable strategies for helping us achieve virtue and avoiding vice. Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He was recently the Philosophy Director of the Beacon Project , funded by a $3.9 million grant from Templeton Religion Trust, and is Past Director of the Character Project, funded by $5.6 million in grants from the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 90 academic papers as well as three books with Oxford University Press, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), and The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017). His writings have also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Miller is the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (OUP), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (OUP), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (MIT Press), Integrity, Honesty, and Truth Seeking (OUP), and The Continuum Companion to Ethics (Continuum Press). You can find out more about him on his website, or you can follow him on Twitter @CharacterGap or on Facebook. You can purchase a copy of The Character Gap here. You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

This time we turn to Ancient Philosophy, and I discuss Plato with Dr Keith Crome. We speak about the pedagogical dimension of Plato's work, and focus specifically on Plato's Republic. Keith argues that to understand Plato, it is essential to understand Plato's account of education and how it relates to Socrates, the Sophists, the myth of the cave, the theory of forms, democratic politics as well as Plato's lesser known more playful side. Keith Crome is scholar of ancient philosophy, postmodernism and education. He is a philosophy lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan Univeristy. He is a specialist in the 20th Century thinker Jean Francois Lyotard, and has composed a monograph on this topic entitled Lyotard and the Greeks. You can find out more about Keith here. You can listen to more free back content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can also subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review.

I am talking with Dr Peter Howson from Nottingham Trent University about blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Peter is a Human Geographer, so we talk about the environmental impact of crypto-currency as well as it’s distribution in space. Largely, Peter explains to me the technological, economic, financial and geopolitical ramifications of these new forms of currency. Unfortunately, we only had a short window to record this, and the only room available was one with a high ceiling and a loud fan. Therefore, the audio suffers. I have done my best with it so I hope you stick with it as Peter is exceptionally insightful about this topic. Peter is currently a a Researcher and Lecturer in the School of Arts and Humanities at NTU. He is Course Leader for the MA in International Development and leads a number of modules across the Global Studies (Joint Honours) programme. His teaching and research interests span political ecology, critical geopolitics, gender, race and development, ‘green violence’, and blockchain-based environmental management in the Global South. Most of Peter's teaching draws on his research interests and professional experience in the Asia-Pacific region. You can find out more about Peter here. The podcast Peter recommended is called the ‘The Missing Crypto Queen’. Here is some of the research that Peter spoke about during our conversation: ‘Tackling climate change with blockchain,’ ‘Marine conservation with blockchain,’ and ‘Tackling deforestation with blockchain. You can listen to more free content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

This time I thought it would be useful to try to do something slightly different. Given that many teachers and lecturers have had on-line learning foisted about them due to the Covid-19 crisis, I thought it would be helpful to talk to an expert about ways of delivering on-line learning. I spoke with Dr David Webster who is the Director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning & Teaching at SOAS, University of London. Dave and I discussed the benefits and pitfalls of on-line learning, synchronous and asynchronous delivery, blended learning, managing student expectations, the value of focusing on structure and specifics, managing behaviour in online forums, ideas about segmenting on-line classes and a host of other practical tips and ideas to help us cope with the huge changes our teaching is currently going through. You can find out about Dave here and you can look at some his work on education here. Dave tweets at @davidwebster. You can listen to more free content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

Dave is back! We speak again about French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. This time we try to crack one of his most famous works Difference and Repetition. We talked about some very abstract concepts such as space, time, motion, representation and identity, and Deleuze’s three syntheses of time, but Dave does a brilliant of job of coherently explaining this very challenging book and the ‘sheet of black night’ that confronts us all. Dr David Deamer is a writer and free scholar associated with Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. His interests lie at the intersection of cinema and culture with theory, history, and politics, centring on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, and Friedrich Nietzsche. He is the author of Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images (EUP, 2016); and Deleuze, Japanese Cinema and the Atom Bomb: The Spectre of Impossibility (Bloomsbury, 2014). He has published here and there in various edited collections and journals, and his latest essay – available free on the Film-Philosophy journal home page – is ‘Deleuze’s Three Syntheses Go to Hollywood: The Tripartite Cinema of Time Travel, Many Worlds and Altered States‘ (Film-Philosophy v23i3 EUP, 2019). You can find out more about David on his homepage. You can listen to more free content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player FM, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

I discuss American novelist Cormac McCarthy with literary scholar Dr Julius Greve. Cormac McCarthy is known for his often bleak and unwavering take on the Western. He has written over ten novels, as well as plays and screenplays in the Southern Gothic literary tradition. Less discussed is the philosophical dimension of McCarthy’s novels. With Julius I discussed how philosophy is present in the Blood Meridian, Suttree, The Orchard Keeper, The Road, Child of God, No Country for Old Men, The Border Trilogy and Outer Dark. We touched on ecocentrism, geocentric criticism, panpsychism, violence, myth and science and the role of German Idealism in McCarthy's work. Central to Julius’ interpretation is the idea that McCarthy offers a synthesis of Orphic and Promethean myths, which offers a very human blend of grief and grace. Julius Greve is a lecturer and research associate at the Institute for English and American Studies, University of Oldenburg, Germany. He is the author of Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature (Dartmouth College Press, 2018), and of numerous articles on McCarthy, Mark Z. Danielewski, François Laruelle, and speculative realism. Greve has co-edited America and the Musical Unconscious (Atropos, 2015), Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), “Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds” (a special issue of EJAS: European Journal of American Studies, 2017), and Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He is currently working on a manuscript on the relation between modern poetics and ventriloquism. You can find out more about Julius here. You can listen to more free content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player FM, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity

I had tremendous fun talking to philosopher and novelist Lars Iyer. We discussed Nietzsche in light of Lars' new novel Nietzsche and the Burbs. We discussed many of Nietzsche's famous concepts such as übermensh, amor fati and suffering, affirmation, nihilism and eternal recurrence. As well, we touched on Maurice Blanchot, Simone Weil, The Invisible Committee and disco! Lars is a a Reader in Creative Writing and Subject Head of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. He is the author of several academic articles and two monographs on Blanchot - Blanchot’s Vigilance: Literature, Phenomenology and the Ethical and Blanchot’s Communism: Art, Philosophy and the Political.(Palgrave Macmillan 2004, 2005). He is the author of The Spurious Trilogy (Spurious, Dogma and Exodus) with Melville House Publishing and now Nietzsche and the Burbs (2020). Nietzsche and the Burbs follows the reflections and comic musings of four young adults and their friend Nietzsche who have search for meaning in a meaningless world. You can find out more about Lars here, you can follow him on Twitter @utterlyspurious and you can buy a copy of Nietzsche and the Burbs here. You can listen to more free content from the Thales' Well podcast on TuneIn Radio, Player Fm, Stitcher and Podbean. You can also download their apps to your smart phone and listen via there. You can subscribe for free on iTunes. Please leave a nice review. You can follow me on Twitter: @drphilocity