Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

Crises and revolutions, with Isabela Granic

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Episode notes

Part 5 in a series of interviews on the book I'm working on, Neither/Nor. In this episode, ⁠⁠Isabela Granic⁠⁠ begin the discussion with Whitehead and his assertion that philosophy must be in conversation with the sciences.

Topics discussed:

  • My enormous Kuhn thread
  • Are we in a scientific crisis?
  • My recording of Kuhn's lecture: "Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice" (1973)
  • Kuhn's relationship to the Buddha
  • The Buddha's relationship to Darwin
  • Schopenhauer and his case for using intuition versus rational reasoning
  • Buddha’s dependent origination and how “backward causality” is precisely the process that Schopenhauer espouses in his writing about intuition, Kuhn with his observations of paradigm shifts, and Darwin with his careful consideration of catgories of species
  • Framed this discussion and the podcast as a whole as a process of laying out the many different strands and nodes of ideas that need to be laid bare before selecting and constructing the coherent theoretical framework for Neither/Nor, the book I’m writing
  • Recent podcasts on emptiness with Jake Orthwein and Rob Knight
  • The Nietzsche quote I mention is this one, from a draft of Ecce Homo (1888)
  • Hypercarnivory: https://archive.org/details/CopesRuleHypercarnivory
  • Are we in a revolution? A crisis?
  • To come back to: Heraclitus, Zhuangzi, Sextus Empiricus, Hannah Arendt, Kropotkin's Mutual Aid
  • Ended with the impossible question: Are we living at the cusp of a paradigm shift?

Previous episodes:

Clerestory by ⁠⁠Bryan Kam⁠⁠ • Infrequent updates at ⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠ • All my work plus exclusive content at ⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠

Show notes https://pod.fo/e/171350