Metaphysics
In the Dust of This Planet
by Eugene Thacker(2011)
The first volume of Thacker's Horror of Philosophy trilogy, exploring the idea of a world without us. Draws on Lovecraft, demonology, and continental philosophy to ask what happens when thought confronts a world that is fundamentally not for us.
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Episodes featuring this book
H.P. Lovecraft | The Complete Philosophy of Cosmic Horror for Sleep
The universe is not hostile. It is indifferent. Which is worse. Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft. In this episode, we trace the full arc of Lovecraft's life and ideas, beginning with a boy and a telescope on a hill in Providence, Rhode Island, and ending with a philosophical vision that science keeps confirming. We explore his materialism and his intellectual formation, from the ancient atomists through Schopenhauer and Haeckel. We unpack the core claim of cosmicism: that the universe operates on scales and according to principles that are simply beyond human comprehension. We examine his major stories as philosophical texts, from "The Call of Cthulhu" to "At the Mountains of Madness" to "The Colour Out of Space." We address his racism honestly and philosophically. And we ask the question his work leaves behind: what does it mean to live with dignity in a cosmos that does not know you are here?
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky | Book Summary
A slow walk through the novel in which a theory is put to the test with an axe. This episode traces Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment from the Wiesbaden hotel room where it was drafted in the summer of 1865 to the Siberian riverbank where it ends. We follow Rodion Raskolnikov from the rehearsal in the pawnbroker's apartment, through the murder and the long delirium that follows, into the cat and mouse interviews with the investigator Porfiry Petrovich, into the narrow room where Sonya reads from the Gospel of John, and finally into the Haymarket and the voluntary confession. Along the way we sit with Marmeladov in the tavern, read the mother's letter, meet Svidrigailov in his long bored afternoon, and walk with Raskolnikov through one of the longest and strangest interior arguments in the nineteenth century novel. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.
We Should Never Have Been Born | Cioran's Darkest Philosophy
Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Emil Cioran. Some nights the thought you cannot chase away is the one you most need a voice to name. Emil Cioran wrote for sixty years about the pointlessness of existence, and lived for eighty four years. The gap between what he argued and how he lived is the honest center of his work. This long quiet episode follows him from a Carpathian village where a priest's son ran barefoot among graves, through the cafes of interwar Bucharest, through a dark political period he spent the rest of his life working against, through the small Paris attic he shared with Simone Boue for over fifty years, and into the final afternoons in the Luxembourg Gardens. A calm unhurried portrait of the most rigorous stylist of despair in twentieth century literature, and of the quiet stubborn survival that was his truest answer to his own philosophy. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.
Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance | Book Summary
In nineteen seventy-four, the technical writer Robert Pirsig published a first-person account of a motorcycle journey west from Minneapolis, undertaken with his young son and two friends, which opened outward at intervals into a sustained philosophical Chautauqua on the meaning of quality in a mechanical age. This episode is a guided reading of that book from the inside. It follows Pirsig's road from the opening watch-glance through the distinction between classical and romantic understanding, through the ghost of the former self he calls Phaedrus, through the demolition of the subject-object split, and into the mountains where stuckness, gumption, and peace of mind become the practical heart of the argument. It is a patient, unhurried reading for listeners who want to spend an evening inside one of the most widely read works of serious American philosophy. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.
The Stranger by Albert Camus | Book Summary
A quiet, sentence-by-sentence reading of Albert Camus's short novel of a killing, a trial, and a final night. The episode opens in a Paris hotel room in May of nineteen forty, as a young Algerian journalist named Albert Camus finishes the first draft of a very short novel while the German army crosses into France. From there the narration walks through The Stranger itself, chapter by chapter. A telegram from a nursing home. A funeral under a hard sun. A harbor, a woman, a comedy at a movie house. A neighbor with a revolver and a letter to write. A beach, a spring, four extra shots. An examining magistrate with a silver crucifix. A condemned cell. A priest who will not go away. A final page that has been argued over for more than eighty years. The reading closes on the book's long life after publication.
Thomas Ligotti | The Puppet's Curse: Why Consciousness Is Humanity's Greatest Horror
Thomas Ligotti wrote horror fiction as philosophical argument, producing the most uncompromising pessimist literature of the last century. Tonight we trace the life and work of Thomas Ligotti, from a Catholic childhood in Detroit to the crisis at seventeen that broke his inherited sense of the world, through the decades he spent as a reference editor by day and a weird-fiction writer by night. We follow him into the small-press debut that announced a strange new voice, through the mature collections that refined it into something closer to philosophical argument, into the corporate-horror novella about a man pushed out of his job, and into the quieter late stories of decayed towns and malignantly useless factories. We examine the long, obscure tradition of philosophical pessimism that stood behind his fiction, and we turn at last to the treatise in which he finally stated his position in his own voice. A slow journey through the darkest and most carefully written American horror of our time. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.