Life From Plato's Cave

Tim Fawns is Associate Professor at the Monash Education Academy, Monash University, Australia. Tim’s research interests are at the intersection between digital, clinical and higher education, with a particular focus on the relationship between technology and educational practice. Tim’s research covers a broad range of educational practices (including curriculum design, assessment, teaching practice, evaluation and more), with emphasis on appreciating complexity. Here's Tim's article with Sven Schaepkens: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/10401334.2022.2048832  And my article with Anne de la Croix about The Reflective Zombie: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6283773/  This is my substack: https://marioveen.substack.com/ and my website https://marioveen.com/.  You can now order my Dutch language book about Plato's allegory of the cave: https://noordboek.nl/boek/hoe-plato-je-uit-je-grot-sleurt/ (also available as e-book). I hope you enjoy the episode! Mario http://lifefromplatoscave.com/   

I speak with Pieter Lemmens about the techosphere, Technology with a capital T, and the question of evil and nihilism in relation to Mehdi Belhaj Kacem. Pieter Lemmens teaches philosophy and ethics at the Institute for Science in Society (ISiS), at the Radboud University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He has published on themes in the philosophy of technology, philosophical anthropology and (post)phenomenology, and on the work of Martin Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk, Bernard Stiegler, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and post-autonomist Marxism. Recent book publications are Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Concept of Technology in the Anthropocene (2021, co-edited with Yuk Hui) and The Technical Condition: The Entanglement of Technology, Culture, and Society (2022, co-edited with Tsjalling Swierstra, Tamar Sharon and Pieter Vermaas). Current interests are the planetarization of technology and the technosphere, the renewal of continental philosophy of technology in the age of the Anthropocene and the relation between technology and evil. This is my substack: https://marioveen.substack.com/ and my website https://marioveen.com/.  You can now order my Dutch language book about Plato's allegory of the cave: https://noordboek.nl/boek/hoe-plato-je-uit-je-grot-sleurt/ (also available as e-book). I hope you enjoy the episode! Mario http://lifefromplatoscave.com/   

I speak with space philosopher Sabine Winters about her visits to telescopes, imagination in space science, and the night sky.   Sabine Winters is a philosopher of space and a PhD candidate at Utrecht University, where she researches the epistemic role of imagination in space science. Her methodology combines qualitative empirical research through interviews with space scientists with philosophical analysis of scientific understanding and progress. She lectures in philosophy at ArtEZ University of the Arts and is preparing her first book on place, space, and the cosmos, forthcoming with Ten Have Publishers.    Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabinewinters/ Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/sllwinters/ Substack (Dutch): https://substack.com/@sabinewinters scientificimagination.org  sabinewinters.nl    About an hour into the episode, Sabine mentions this paper: S. Wadia, C. M. Reed, J. M. Chung, L. M. Bateman, A. N. Mamelak, U. Rutishauser, and D. Y. Tsao, "A Shared Code for Perceiving and Imagining Objects in Human Ventral Temporal Cortex," Science 392, no. 6794 (April 9, 2026): 207–215, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adt8343   This is my substack: https://marioveen.substack.com/ and my website https://marioveen.com/.  You can now order my Dutch language book about Plato's allegory of the cave: https://noordboek.nl/boek/hoe-plato-je-uit-je-grot-sleurt/ (also available as e-book). I hope you enjoy the episode! Mario http://lifefromplatoscave.com/   

In this episode with Aaron Thierry, we discuss Cassandra's Children: Scientific Responsibility in an Era of Climate Emergency.  Dr.Aaron Thierry is an ecological scientist, science communicator and environmental campaigner. He received his original PhD in Ecology from the University of Sheffield and went on to a position as a postdoc on a project researching climate feedbacks in the Arctic. Aaron subsequently left academia to focus his efforts on environmental activism and became a youth campaign coach working for a leading UK environmental charity. His past experiences have led him to become fascinated by the question of how and why scientists engage in social movements. To better understand this conundrum, he returned to research and has recently finished a new PhD in Science and Technology Studies on the social responsability of climate scientists. Enjoy the episode! This is my substack: https://marioveen.substack.com/ and my website https://marioveen.com/.  You can now order my Dutch language book about Plato's allegory of the cave: https://noordboek.nl/boek/hoe-plato-je-uit-je-grot-sleurt/ (also available as e-book). I hope you enjoy the episode! Mario http://lifefromplatoscave.com/   

In this episode with Daniel Ross, we do a deep dive into AI. Though I've been thinking about AI (https://marioveen.com/2004/06/14/intelligent-artificiality/) I didn't really address it on this podcast yet. And who better to start this theme with than a philosopher of technology. Daniel Ross obtained his doctorate from Monash University in 2002. He is the author of Violent Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis: Steps Towards a Metacosmics (Open Humanities Press, 2021 -free to download). He is also the co-director with David Barison of the feature documentary The Ister (rent or buy on Vimeo), which premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2004, and which won awards in Montreal and Marseille. Through that film, he met the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, and has subsequently published twelve volumes of translation of Stiegler’s work, most recently The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (Polity Press, 2019) and Nanjing Lectures 2016–2019 (Open Humanities Press, 2020 - free to download), along with the collective volume by Stiegler and the Internation Collective entitled Bifurcate: ‘There Is No Alternative’ (Open Humanities Press, 2022 - free to download). The most recent translation is Immense Regression (K. Verlag). This is the first volume of Stiegler's work What is called caring? and we will discuss it in a future episode. This is my substack: https://marioveen.substack.com/ and my website https://marioveen.com/.  You can now order my Dutch language book about Plato's allegory of the cave: https://noordboek.nl/boek/hoe-plato-je-uit-je-grot-sleurt/ (also available as e-book). I hope you enjoy the episode! Mario http://lifefromplatoscave.com/   

We discuss The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight it. Genevieve Guenther is the founding director of End Climate Silence and affiliate faculty at The New School, where she sits on the board of the Tishman Environment and Design Center. Dr. Guenther advises NGOs, corporations, and policymakers on fossil-fuel disinformation and climate communication, and she serves as Expert Reviewer for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Her research has appeared in both scholarly journals and media outlets such as Scientific American, The New Republic, and MSNBC, and she has been invited to speak about climate and language to audiences at Duke, Columbia, and Harvard, among other universities. Genevieve's website: https://genevieveguenther.com/  Get The Language of Climate Politics here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-language-of-climate-politics-9780197642238?cc=nl&lang=en&  Genevieve's op-ed in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/24/cop30-wrecked-fossil-fuels-russia-saudi-arabia-brazil  This is my substack: https://marioveen.substack.com/  You can now order my Dutch language book about Plato's allegory of the cave: https://noordboek.nl/boek/hoe-plato-je-uit-je-grot-sleurt/ (also available as e-book).

Arthur Oldeman is a climate change researcher, communicator, consultant, and activist. After his engineering studies, he recently finished his PhD research on climate variability and atmospheric dynamics in warm past climates. He writes about everything climate on weblog Klimaatveranda.nl and puts his climate expertise to use in politics with GroenLinks and activism with Scientist Rebellion. Currently, he works as a climate adaptation and meteorology consultant at Weather Impact. Sources: Arthur’s PhD thesis: https://research-portal.uu.nl/en/publications/climate-variability-in-a-warm-past-the-mid-pliocene-as-an-analogu Great blog by Aja Watkins on the more philosophical question if we can really know whether current climate change is unprecedented (related to the lack of knowledge of our geological history) https://www.extinctblog.org/extinct/2023/3/24/is-contemporary-climate-change-really-unprecedented  Great publication on past abrupt changes and their impacts https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00790-5  Climate action tracker - projecting temperature at the end of the century based on current policies, actions, pledges, etc: https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-thermometer/ Interesting paper from a philosopher of science on the concept of analogy in paleoclimate (Wilson, 2024) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-023-04202-6 More on the concept of uniformitarianism: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/uniformitarianism/ Weatherimpact: https://www.weatherimpact.com/ This is my substack: https://marioveen.substack.com/  You can now order my Dutch language book about Plato's allegory of the cave: https://noordboek.nl/boek/hoe-plato-je-uit-je-grot-sleurt/ (also available as e-book) The episode image is a photo of part of the cover of Arthur's PhD thesis and was designed by Mark van Hasselt: https://www.instagram.com/markvanhasselt/ 

This is the second part of our conversation about Mieke Bal's Moments of Meaning-Making: On Anachonism, Becoming, and Conceptualizing, published by Valiz. Mieke Bal (1946) is a Dutch theorist, video artist, and a well-known writer and feminist. She has been a Professor in Literary Theory (University of Amsterdam). In 1994 she was a co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Bal has been teaching at many institutes and universities in Europe, US, and beyond. She is known for her specific ways of ‘deep-reading’ artworks (e.g. Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Louise Bourgeois, Nalini Malani), and intertwining her research with various disciplines, such as contemporary and nineteenth-century literature, psycho-analysis, gender studies, philosophy, bible studies. Bal also works as a video artist, which she approaches as a specific form of cultural analysis.  Now that Mieke Bal is getting older —being very active and involved in many art and research projects—she has been ruminating on how to reflect on a full life with different roles and experiences. She did not want to write a navel-staring autobiography and came up with an ABC of Memories, and the concepts these have generated: key terms that have a specific value to her, that interlink as a mesh of meaning, weaving together daily experiences and teaching, her know-how to art making, to the core concepts of her analytical work.  This is my substack: https://marioveen.substack.com/  You can now order my Dutch language book about Plato's allegory of the cave: https://noordboek.nl/boek/hoe-plato-je-uit-je-grot-sleurt/ (also available as e-book) My previous interview with Mieke Bal is Episode 21: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2nJr0OdC11WiZVcvAcVCOR?si=LSKWhfz5Sq-fuBLtK_KfDw 

We discuss Mieke Bal's Moments of Meaning-Making: On Anachonism, Becoming, and Conceptualizing, published by Valiz. Mieke Bal (1946) is a Dutch theorist, video artist, and a well-known writer and feminist. She has been a Professor in Literary Theory (University of Amsterdam). In 1994 she was a co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Bal has been teaching at many institutes and universities in Europe, US, and beyond. She is known for her specific ways of ‘deep-reading’ artworks (e.g. Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Louise Bourgeois, Nalini Malani), and intertwining her research with various disciplines, such as contemporary and nineteenth-century literature, psycho-analysis, gender studies, philosophy, bible studies. Bal also works as a video artist, which she approaches as a specific form of cultural analysis.  Now that Mieke Bal is getting older —being very active and involved in many art and research projects—she has been ruminating on how to reflect on a full life with different roles and experiences. She did not want to write a navel-staring autobiography and came up with an ABC of Memories, and the concepts these have generated: key terms that have a specific value to her, that interlink as a mesh of meaning, weaving together daily experiences and teaching, her know-how to art making, to the core concepts of her analytical work.  This is my substack: https://marioveen.substack.com/  You can now order my Dutch language book about Plato's allegory of the cave: https://noordboek.nl/boek/hoe-plato-je-uit-je-grot-sleurt/ (also available as e-book) My previous interview with Mieke Bal is Episode 21: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2nJr0OdC11WiZVcvAcVCOR?si=LSKWhfz5Sq-fuBLtK_KfDw 

We discuss Turning the arrow: education after the age of the world-view by Gert Biesta: https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/507626803/BiestaAPJE2025TurningTheArrow.pdf  Gert Biesta is Professor of Public Education in the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy at Maynooth University, Ireland, and Visiting Professor of Education at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL). Until July 2025 he was Professor of Educational Theory and Pedagogy at the Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh. He publishes on the theory of education and the philosophy of educational research, with a particular interest in teaching, teacher education, curriculum, citizenship education, arts education and religious education. So far, his work has appeared in 21 different languages. His most recent monograph, World-Centred Education: A View for the Present, was published by Routledge in 2022. This is my substack: https://marioveen.substack.com/  You can now order my Dutch language book about Plato's allegory of the cave: https://noordboek.nl/boek/hoe-plato-je-uit-je-grot-sleurt/ (also available as e-book) My previous interview with Gert Biesta is Episode 22: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5Ios0v1c7SvA5Q3vLRSfMr?si=T8H28-TNSWKFKsNvaYw9Yw  And my interview with Ginie Servant-Miklos about Pedagogies of Collapse: https://open.spotify.com/episode/07p0xx2mRBeQaa0KxSFRjv?si=7QK0hOj-QradM2R4Kg4QIA