What's Left of Philosophy

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What's Left of Philosophy

Lillian Cicerchia, Owen Glyn-Williams, Gil Morejón, and William Paris

134 episodes

1 week ago

In this episode, we talk about Marx’s critique of the Gotha Program, but you knew that from the title. We discuss Marxian critiques of redistributive left politics, why dogmatic Marxists are wrong about this, and much more. We connect it to the present and disagree. It’s very good. Listen. References: Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ Music: “Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com “My Space” by Overu | ...

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Society & Culture,

All content for What's Left of Philosophy is the property of Lillian Cicerchia, Owen Glyn-Williams, Gil Morejón, and William Paris and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

In this episode, we talk about Marx’s critique of the Gotha Program, but you knew that from the title. We discuss Marxian critiques of redistributive left politics, why dogmatic Marxists are wrong about this, and much more. We connect it to the present and disagree. It’s very good. Listen. References: Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ Music: “Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com “My Space” by Overu | ...

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Society & Culture,

Episodes (20/134)

What's Left of Philosophy

126 | Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program

In this episode, we talk about Marx’s critique of the Gotha Program, but you knew that from the title. We discuss Marxian critiques of redistributive left politics, why dogmatic Marxists are wrong about this, and much more. We connect it to the present and disagree. It’s very good. Listen. References: Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ Music: “Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com “My Space” by Overu | ...

1 week ago

58 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

125 TEASER | Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power

In this episode, we talk about Elias Canetti’s 1960 book Crowds and Power. Equal parts political theory, poetic sociology, and speculative anthropology, this staggering work explores human social life through an increasingly elaborate series of reflections on the nature of crowds. The result is a fascinating typology of different kinds of crowds in which human beings cast off their individuality for the sake of equality and directed collective action: there are baiting crowds, feast crowds, p...

1 month ago

10 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

124 | Living Through Capitalism w/ Dr. James Chamberlain

In this episode, we talk with James Chamberlain about his new book, Living Through Capitalism, in which he argues that capitalism is hostile to biological life processes and our ability to know them well enough to lead flourishing lives. Capitalism mutilates all life, and not just human life, in its harnessing of life for its own ends. Only in communities that resist this “strange teleology” that capitalism imposes on life can we truly be free. leftofphilosophy.com References: James Cha...

1 month ago

57 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

123 | Adam Smith and the Lessons of Sympathy

In this episode, we take on Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Although he is now more well known as an economist because of his later book The Wealth of Nations, Smith shows himself to be a philosopher in his own right in Moral Sentiments. Smith, contrary to popular characterizations, wanted to show that our conduct is not solely motivated by egoism or selfishness, but that we are also motivated by the fortunes of others. For Smith it is only through sympathy that society can achie...

2 months ago

1 hour 5 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

122 | Real Abstraction and the Origin of Consciousness with Alfred Sohn-Rethel

In this episode, we talk about Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s audacious and influential text Intellectual and Manual Labor. A fellow traveler of the Frankfurt School, Sohn-Rethel argued that the social activity of commodity exchange involves a set of real abstractions that actually precede and give rise to the structure of human consciousness and its capacity for mental abstraction. This really puts Kant in his place: the supposedly pure reason of the transcendental subject is historically conditioned ...

2 months ago

54 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

121 | The Federalist Papers

In this episode we discuss the essays of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton compiled as the Federalist Papers. We talk about the philosophical justifications of the recently signed US Constitution, focusing especially on the tension between, on one hand, their passionate defense of republicanism against tyranny and despotism, and on the other, their hostility toward democratic forces. We place the problem of the durability of the republic at the core of their thought, and while noting the s...

3 months ago

1 hour 2 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

120 TEASER | Raymond Williams on Literature and Cultural Materialism

In this episode, we discuss the literary and cultural theories of Raymond Williams. Famous for classic works of literary analysis like The City and the Country and concepts like ‘structures of feeling’, we join Williams in analyzing how our emotions, impulses, and tone in poetry and novels evolve in relation to economic development. Many structures of feeling today are built on exploitation, but maybe that’s not the end of the story. This is just a short teaser of the full episode. To h...

3 months ago

9 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

119 | Exploitation and the Theory of Domination w/ Prof. Nicholas Vrousalis

In this episode, we welcome Nicholas Vrousalis onto the show to discuss his recent book Exploitation as Domination: What Makes Capitalism Unjust. The basic thesis of the book is that capitalist exploitation should be understood as a problem of domination, and thus freedom, rather than a problem of fairness or vulnerability. For Vrousalis where there is exploitation there is domination, but there can be domination without exploitation. Throughout our conversation Nicholas takes us through his ...

4 months ago

56 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

What’s Left of Philosophy Live Show! August 7, Epiphany Center for the Arts, Chicago

Our live show at the Epiphany Center for the Arts is right around the corner! Doors open at 7pm, and the show starts at 8. It’s a one-night only event, so don’t miss it! Get your tickets here: https://link.dice.fm/J7acfdeb77d4 Also on August 7 here in Chicago: Pelle Dragsted will be discussing his book Nordic Socialism with William Banks and Matt McManus at Pilsen Community Books at 6pm! Details can be found here: https://pilsencommunitybooks.com/events/46798 See you soon! leftofphilosophy.co...

5 months ago

1 minute

What's Left of Philosophy

118 | Axel Honneth and the Ideal of Social Freedom

In this episode we discuss Axel Honneth’s Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life. As one of the most prominent representatives of the so-called ‘3rd generation’ of Frankfurt School critical theory, we ask whether Honneth’s notions of ‘normative reconstruction’ and ‘social freedom’ build constructively upon the legacies of critical theory or depart from them in a more liberal direction. Lillian reminds us that he has good answers to some of our more acerbic criticisms of hi...

5 months ago

57 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

117 | Hardt and Negri's Empire, 25 Years Later

In this episode, we discuss Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. First published in 2000, this seminal post-Marxist text analyzed changes to power, sovereignty, and class structure in the age of globalization. Twenty-five years ago, it was the Left who was anti-globalization. Today, it’s the Right. So, we might ask, are we still in the Age of Empire? GET YOUR TICKETS FOR THE LIVE SHOW HERE: https://epiphanychi.com/events/whats-left-of-philosophy-live-show-karl-marxs-communist-manifesto/ ...

6 months ago

57 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

116 TEASER | Are We Losing our Morality? Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and the Nihilism of Modern Society

In this episode, we discuss Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark book After Virtue. MacIntyre, an ex-Marxist and committed anti-liberal, offers a defense of the Aristotelian tradition and its search for the truly common good against the dominant tendency of liberal societies to reduce morality to individual preferences. Modern society, MacIntyre believes, is one where we live fragmented lives, unable to narrate a coherent story of the relationship between morality and politics. Our invocations of mo...

6 months ago

10 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

WLOP LIVE SHOW ANNOUNCEMENT! | AUGUST 7 | EPIPHANY CENTER FOR THE ARTS, CHICAGO

Hi everyone! We are thrilled to announce that we will be performing live on August 7 at the Epiphany Center for the Arts in Chicago. This is a one-time only event and tickets are limited! Get yours here: https://epiphanychi.com/events/whats-left-of-philosophy-live-show-karl-marxs-communist-manifesto/ Among other things, we’re planning to talk about the Communist Manifesto. The event will be filmed and released as a special episode. We’re really excited about this – it’s going to be a fantasti...

6 months ago

1 minute

What's Left of Philosophy

Gil is Teaching a Class on Spinoza's Ethics in Chicago

That's right, folks! Next month, Gil is teaching a class on Spinoza's Ethics at Twelve Ten Gallery in Chicago through the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Enrollments are now open for anyone interested. Check out the course description and sign up here: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/courses/spinozas-ethics/ Hope to see some of you there! leftofphilosophy.com Music: AMALGAM by Rockot

6 months ago

2 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

115 | Modern Barbarism with Thorstein Veblen

In this episode, we talk about Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. In it, he argues that modern culture is basically continuous with that of predatory barbarism, except that it is drunk on the extreme surplus produced by capitalism. Under these conditions, much of human activity becomes performative: consumption, leisure, and perhaps paradoxically enough even hustle culture are all forms of demonstrating one’s superiority in a petty game of social esteem. We explore some of these ...

7 months ago

57 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

114 | What's Left of Representation?

In this episode, we discuss the centrality of ‘representation’ in politics and political theory, guided by Hanna Pitkin’s 1967 treatise The Concept of Representation. Much of the focus is on her notion of ‘substantive representation’ – the activity of advancing the welfare and interests of others – in comparison to the empty husk of formal representation we’ve all become accustomed to in our putatively representative democracies. We explore the Anglo-American efforts to constitutionally immun...

7 months ago

56 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

113 TEASER | Political Marxism

In this episode, we discuss “political marxism” as a paradigm shift in Marxist thinking about historical development, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and why that should matter to philosophers with an interest in challenging easy conceptual binaries that remain entrenched even in radical circles, like between economics and politics. We take a look at the two leading figures of this kind of Marxism – Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood – to put the conflict back into class conf...

7 months ago

14 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

112 | Excavating Utopias w/ Dr. William Paris

In this episode, we discuss WLOP co-host William Paris’s recently published book Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation. In his book, Will examines the utopian elements in the theories of W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, and James Boggs and their critique of racial domination as the domination of social time. The crew talks about the relationship between utopia and realism, the centrality of time for our social practices, and how his...

8 months ago

1 hour 13 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

111 TEASER | Infantile Disorders: The Coming Insurrection

In this episode, we discuss the 2007 text The Coming Insurrection, written by the pseudonymous collective The Invisible Committee. We talk about the book’s scathing condemnation of the present, its critique of everyday life in the dying late capitalist empires of the 21st century, and the kind of insurrectionary anarchism it advocates. Maybe we’re just grumpy old people who have failed to kill the cops in our heads, but we think the project dead-ends in presentist adventurism and doesn’t take...

8 months ago

16 minutes

What's Left of Philosophy

110 | What is Liberalism? Part VI. Possessive Individualism and the Collapsing Order

In this episode, the boys talk about C.B. Macpherson’s insightful text The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Macpherson holds that liberal political theory from Hobbes to Locke is correct in its premises, since like it or not we basically all are defined by our properties, living in a society almost exclusively defined by market relations—but that those same market relations engender class antagonisms that progressively undermine the possibility of durable social cohesion. He want...

9 months ago

54 minutes