Category: Podcast

It’s the end of the year, and time for a spectacular final episode of Discuss. We tried to get Neil Robertson, Ron Haflidson, and Wayne Hankey to answer your exam questions while Grecian oil wrestling for ultimate supremacy, but that fell through. Instead, we’re taking a look back on FYP with two of its survivors. […]

More and more since the turn of the millennium, societies have been reckoning with issues of race, integration, solidarity, and appropriation. But exactly what is contained in those concepts, and how they function in our understanding of ourselves and other people, is often difficult to pin down. One person who tried to conceptualize race and […]

It’s around this time of year that many FYP students are having their faith in God, politics, and Enlightenment ideals of human equality rocked by one moustachioed ubermensch: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. In his short but prolific period of productivity in the latter half of the 19th century, Nietzsche put his mind to critiquing the high […]

This week, King’s was visited by scholar, philosopher, and poet Dr. Jan Zwicky for the Alex Fountain Memorial Lecture. Zwicky’s celebrated poetry and philosophical works seek to understand “lyric comprehension” — the process that is involved in humming a tune without knowing the notes or seeing a face in the leaves of a tree. It […]

Nowadays, ghosts are for the history network, hypnotism is for quitting smoking, and Justin Bieber passes for a member of the Illuminati. The ways of the occult sure have fallen in our estimation. And yet, not too long ago, seances and hypnotism were part of a countercultural revolution. Stealing from a long history of esoteric […]

When the young Marx was writing of spectres haunting Europe he might not have imagined his ideas hanging around for so long. Nonetheless, Marx’s revolutionary ideas persist today, thanks in no small part to Soviet dogma and Western academic obsession. But is there any practical relevance to Marxism anymore? What can this revolutionary doctrine offer […]

Late 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant may have written most of his works in an obtuse, indecipherable style, but due to the importance and novelty of his ideas it’s hard to overstate his importance. In Romanticism, Hegelianism, and even astronomy Kant has marked his influence, building from a new emphasis on human subjectivity. This week, […]

When Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774, it tapped into a reserve of human emotion not expressed by the rationality of the past century. But Goethe’s story of a young man’s suicide was only the precursor to a more mature, intellectual movement that would dominate German discourse and change the very nature […]

In our final extra episode of Discuss., Berger explains how the colonial experiment in India changed the way the West thinks.