71 min listen
Episode 192: Postmodern Wet Dreams (Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote")
FromVery Bad Wizards
Episode 192: Postmodern Wet Dreams (Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote")
FromVery Bad Wizards
ratings:
Length:
97 minutes
Released:
Jul 7, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
David and Tamler dive into “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a very funny Borges story that also raises deep questions about authorship, reading, and interpretation. What would it mean for the same text to be written by two different authors more than three hundred years apart? Is this story the post-modernist manifesto that literary critics like Roland Barthes believed it to be? Or is the narrator in the story just a delusional sycophant, a victim of Menard’s practical joke – and the story by extension, a practical joke by Borges on the post-modernist movement to come?
Plus, My Little Pony fans finally confront their Nazi problem.
Plus, My Little Pony fans finally confront their Nazi problem.
Released:
Jul 7, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Episode 1: Brains, Robots, and Free Will (Free Will and Morality Pt. 1): Dave and Tamler talk about the new wave of skepticism about free will and moral responsibility in the popular press from people like Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne, and argue that neuroscientific data adds little of substance to the case other than telling us what we already know: human beings are natural biological entities. Dave comes out as a Star Trek nerd and asks whether we're all, in the end, like Data the android. They also wonder whether a belief in free will is all that's keeping us from having sex with our dogs. Finally, Dave grills Tamler about his new book on the differences in attitudes about free will and moral responsibility across cultures. by Very Bad Wizards