Philosophy Playdate

This week, Steve and Christabel talk artificial wombs in answer to Steve’s son’s question, ‘What will we invent in the future?’ Christabel takes us through feminist critiques of the punitive social expectations and coercive medical practices that surround pregnancy, care of Shulamith Firestone, Julien Murphy and Alison Stone. Ever the problem-solver, Steve responds by devising an ingenious plan for relieving parental pressure to produce grandchildren. He also recounts some of his own experiences of gendered care expectations he’s come up against whilst raising twins. But could artificial wombs solve these sorts of problems?Christabel first introduces some optimists: Peter Singer and Deane Wells argue that ectogenesis could advance sexual equality, and Kathryn MacKay conjectures that this technology might weaken the conceptual link between biology and gender, thus furthering trans-inclusionary radical feminism. Steve brings his biological research background to bear against the biological essentialism that Simone de Beauvoir dismissed when she wrote that ‘biology is not destiny’ (and he takes some pot shots at pop geneticists along the way). After covering Anna Smajdor’s use of John Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’ thought experiment, Christabel introduces some healthy scepticism from Gulia Cavaliere into the debate. So give it a listen if you’ve ever wondered what it’d be like to have an (artificial) womb of one’s own, or if you’d like to know why some parents own a car seat but don’t have a car… Email us the impossible questions children ask you at [email protected] Find Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.com Find Christabel at https://christabelcane.com/ Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane

This week, Steve and Christabel tackle Rose’s question, ‘Do cats feel love?’ Steve reveals himself to be much like the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in his shared suspicion of the animals. Christabel observes that if human-feline relations are fraught, then we might have the philosophers to blame for this sorry state of affairs. A potted history of cat-based thought experiments follows, and a pattern quickly emerges: Schrödinger poisons his (hypothetical) cat, Peter Geach cuts his up, Gilbert Harman’s gets set alight, and G.E. Moore’s utilitarianism spells trouble for any cat whose interests clash with a human’s. Our hosts can’t help but wonder if the non-hypothetical cats have picked up on a vibe. But we didn’t always direct so much fictional violence towards our littler furry four-legged friends. Christabel takes us back to the Egyptian worship of the cat goddess Bastet in the ancient city of Bubastis. Steve delivers sage advice on how to design a cult, turn on a horseshoe crab, and how to (NOT) name your pets. But as with so much of philosophy, the episode throws up more questions than it answers, including: ‘Could a tech billionaire develop a sense of humour?’, ‘How would academic Q&A sessions benefit from the institution of demilitarized zones?’ and ‘Is it kind to eat a lobster?’ Email us the impossible questions children ask you at [email protected] Find Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.com Find Christabel at https://christabelcane.com/ Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane

Welcome, gentle listeners, to the second sacral brain of the two-part episode that attempts to answer whether we should sit up straight. Enter (if you dare) into a body of literature where bones are rocks, psychology is tectonics, and you can never be sure if a cited historical figure is a legitimate thinker, a eugenicist or entirely made up (you may find yourself wishing that those from the second category belonged to the last).  Christabel takes us through the academics who thought that the human ability to stand was a ‘summons to become rational’, covering Immanuel Kant, Erwin Straus and Hans Blumenberg. Steve drives through this carefully laid groundwork in a tank full of kangaroos, squirrels and octopuses. Christabel tries again with Ernst Haeckel’s conception of the spine as a zooid, and she relays an ancient paleontological beef between Othniel Charles Marsh, Laurenz Oken and Edward Charles Spitzka. Steve channels Karl Popper from beyond the grave to remind us all of the importance of falsifiable hypotheses – a point that seems to have entirely been lost on Haeckel and Marsh. Christabel responds by bringing out the big guns: Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann. We see how Thomas Moynihan draws on these German pessimist philosophers to deliver the final coup de grâce that closes his book Spinal Catastrophism, and melts our poor hosts’ brains once and for all. Email us the impossible questions children ask you at [email protected] Find Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.com Find Christabel at https://christabelcane.com/ Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane 

Over the next two episodes, Steve and Christabel will serve up a mind-melting mixture of psychoanalysis, osteology, theory fiction, evolutionary biology, hypergeneology (and maybe even a little bit of philosophy) to answer whether we should sit up straight. The answer is a resounding NO: or at least, it is if you ask the hyperstitional entity Professor Daniel Charles Barker. Christabel spends this first instalment of this two-parter recounting the circumstances under which she fell down the rabbit hole that is Spinal Catastrophism, Thomas Moynihan’s tour de force of a treatise – or rather, a spoof of a treatise – about how orthograde posture is not only the human race’s greatest triumph, but also its terrible downfall; one that will eventually doom us all.Christabel takes us on a whistle-stop tour through Nick Land’s accelerationism, Kant’s thoughts about orientation, Sadie Plant’s cyberfeminism, and Sándor Ferenczi’s work on the Freudian death drive. Steve explains parental brain depletion, ret-cons R2D2’s omniscience, and completely undermines the way our mothers taught us to tell right from left. Together, our hosts reveal buckets of arcane law spanning from the search for intelligent life, to football huddle tactics, to J.G. Ballard’s hypothesis that all beings harbour an innate desire to return to glorious radial symmetry.Confused yet? Listeners, you don’t know that half of it!Email us the impossible questions children ask you at [email protected] Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.comFind Christabel at https://christabelcane.com/Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane

This week, Christabel comes back (with a vengeance) to have another jab at Immanuel Kant as she and Steve set about answering Steve’s daughter’s question “Why do people keep secrets?” Steve rebuts Christabel’s accusation of being a Kant apologist (but does accept that there are some secrets – like, for instance, the exact cost of the very expensive guitar they might have purchased – that shouldn’t see the light of day). Christabel surveys Cicero’s and Aristotle’s conceptions of loyalty, and the duties of fidelity we might owe to our friends.  The duo then move on to what Michel Foucault described as the 18th Century rejection of political opacity, and one of its thought leaders, Jeremy Bentham. UCL’s corpse mascot was a complicated man: he described transparency as ‘antiseptic’, but he also thought that some degree of military secrecy could be justified on utilitarian grounds. Christabel explores Sissela Bok’s critique of this picture, and Steve lets us in on what we’re likely to find in a nuclear submarine’s safe at the very bottom of the sea. Finally, our hosts take a look at the secrets that the gods might keep from us. Christabel points out that myths involving divine secret names can be found across a range of different cultures, paying particular attention to initial reluctance that both Yahweh and Amun-Ra exhibited before disclosing their names to Moses and Isis. Steve points out that both keeping and learning secrets can be a double-edged sword (or more appropriately, kitchen knife).  So can you keep a secret? Because we think you’ll want to hear this… Email us the impossible questions children ask you at [email protected] Find Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.com Find Christabel at https://christabelcane.com/ Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane

In this episode, Steve and Christabel answer Steve’s son’s question “Is dobbing bad?” To get the skinny on snitching, Christabel revisits friend of the podcast, Immanuel Kant. She also draws on the Kantian scholarship of Helga Varden, Mary J. Gregor, James Mahon and Annette Baier (not to name names). We learn about the sneaky trick the father of deontology played on King Frederick William II, Steve tells us of his own real-life ‘murderer at the door’ case, and Christabel expresses her great relief at the fact that Kant remained a lifelong bachelor. The duo then drop in on ancient China get the straight dope on the Confucian conception of dobbing. They find out what Confucius thought of sheep rustling, and what Mencius – the second sage of Confucianism – thought it was permissible to do to get your dad out of a bind. They survey Liu Qingping’s critical approach to Confucian emphasis on the virtue of filial piety, and William Sin’s ‘liberal’ reading of these philosophers. In the process Steve reveals the link between esoteric philosophy and Ted Baker’s corporate management strategy, Christabel relays what Pierre Ladot thought about Socratic dialogue, and we are made privy to some genius-level medical marketing. So go ahead and give it a listen. But if anyone asks, you didn’t learn anything from us… Email us the impossible questions children ask you at [email protected] Find Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.com Find Christabel at https://christabelcane.com/ Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane

This week, Steve and Christabel answer Mylo’s question: ‘Is infinity a number?’ They enlist the help of the Milesians; Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes (who were Presocratic philosophers, and NOT Pokémon) and long-serving friend of the podcast Heraclitus. Unfortunately Pythagoras comes along and spoils the fun with his weirdly loaded takes on infinity (and women, rectangles and even numbers) and Aristotle banishes Zeno’s concept of the infinitesimally small to the realm of merely hypothetical mathematics.  Steve reveals why Pythagoras feared the eternal, and Christabel draws on the work of Annemarrie Schimmel, Elaine Howes, Bill Rosenthal and Rudy Rucker to conjecture that this ancient prejudice against the concept of infinity might have just been weak men expressing their misogyny all along. Steve takes this opportunity to inform other strong feminists of the proper etiquette to follow when called upon to open tightly-lidded jars for friends. Christabel quietly reflects on the fact no one has ever solicited her with such a request. But if the Pythagoreans were so offended by the infinite, then they shouldn’t have offered such enjoyable proofs of its existence: next up is Archytas of Tarentum (and his philosophical reflections on poking sticks into places they don’t belong). Archytas’ paradoxical conception of The Endless Void is compared with Margret Cavendish’s views on the matter, and Steve recounts a conversation with his son about the size of the universe that Christabel suspects these philosophers would have loved to butt in on. The episode wraps up on a more practical note with Brian Rotman’s concerns about the implications of infinitude for embodied counters, and Penelope Maddy’s observations as tohow children learn to construct both long numbers and long sentences. But the close of the episode serves as proof that all finite things must come to an end – until next week, that is! Email us the impossible questions children ask you at [email protected] Find Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.com Find Christabel at https://christabelcane.com/ Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane

Steve and Christabel venture forth from Plato’s cave on this week’s quest, which is to find out whether numbers are real. On the way, Christabel learns a surprising amount about football, Steve confesses to some light Twitter fraud, and we all learn how a cult leader should choose their favourite numbers. The episode begins in Ancient Greece with Pythagorean mathematician, astronomer and cosmologist (who was definitely NOT an extraterrestrial) Theano of Croton, and with her golden ratio and her theorem of the harmony of numbers. Steve points out that according to his extensive knowledge of Numberblocks lore, the relationships between the number characters is sometimes anything but harmonious. Christabel compares mathematical Platonism with Aristotle’s extensional account of numbers with particular reference to Joan Kung’s analysis of The Third Man Argument. The duo then skip forward to the mid-sixties and to Linda Wetzel’s critique of Paul Benaceraf’s structuralist take on numbers. The episode ends on Penelope Maddy’s metametaphysical stance that questioning the reality of numbers is beside the point. So long as we can agree on facts like ‘two plus two equals four’ it doesn’t really matter whether these numbers are concretely real, ghostly abstract objects, or convenient fictions. Christabel concludes that even if she finds it hard to walk away from metaphysical puzzles like these, rejecting the question is an extremely chic position to take.  Email us the impossible questions children ask you at [email protected] Find Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.com Find Christabel at https://christabelcane.com/ Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane 

Ready to get back in the saddle? Good! Because it’s part 2 of Steve and Christabel’s double-episode extravaganza answering Lowen’s question “Are horses important to the world?” In this second offering, Christabel expounds upon the symbolic significance of horses within ancient metaphysics. The duo begin in ancient India with the Rigveda, the oldest written work in the Vedic tradition. She reveals the unfortunate position wild stallions held within ritual sacrifice, and tells us what the Daoists agreed that metaphysicians and butchers have in common. Ever the champion of vegetarianism, Steve offers some parallel meat-free examples of his own. Our hosts then engage in some microcosm-macrocosm reasoning with Thales of Miletus, Hippocrates, and the authors of the Upanishads. Steve entertains the Stoic’s idea that tidal patterns are the Earth breathing in and out, but he stops short of endorsing the analogy of the cosmic horse (and the restorative powers of its seed – which can apparently be identified with the ancient Indian drink of soma). Steve takes this opportunity to wax lyrical about Chocomel, the soma of his household. This is a welcome palate cleanser for all. But Christabel doesn’t let us get too comfortable. She launches into an analysis of charioteer analogies, the first of which being Plato’s chariot-based symbolism within his depiction of lust within the Phaedrus. We learn some tips about what NOT to say to the object of your affections, and move swiftly on. Steve alludes to the time that he disproved heterosexual intercourse using magnets, and launches into a tirade against Channel 4. The second charioteer analogy comes from the Sāṅkhya tradition, and it explains the distinction between self (or puruṣa) and nature (or prakṛti). Thus ends our round trip across equine philosophy right back where we started in ancient India. Email us the impossible questions children ask you at [email protected] Find Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.com and watch him disprove magnetism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJMHzesJSgo Find Christabel at https://christabelcane.com/ Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane

This fortnight, Steve and Christabel embark on a double-episode stint to answer Lowen’s question, “Are horses important to the world?” This is part 1, and it’s jam-packed fuller with equine content than a Findus lasagne. The duo start off in Turin in 1889 to bear witness to Nietzsche’s last cogent conversation (it was admittedly a little one-sided, given that his final interlocutor was a poor cab-driver’s horse). Christabel dabbles in a little chaos theory, and Steve lets us in on how to procure Arthur Morgan the most badass steed in Red Dead Redemption II.  They then take a quick pit stop in 479–221 B.C.E. China to check in on the ‘School of Names’ philosophers. Gongsun Long is of particular interest, as is his famous (and maddeningly enigmatic) claim that “White horse is not horse”. Steve takes us back to elementary school for a lesson on colour mixing for pigments versus lights, and then treats us to an infinitely superior mnemonic for recalling the planets in our solar system. The episode closes in ancient Greece, and with the centuries-old logic joke that was tragically left out of Christopher Nolan’s adaption of The Odyssey. Steve points out that we shouldn’t be too disappointed, as the movie does deliver an Ithacan Batman – Spiderman crossover (reminiscent of a certain early YouTube viral classic). Our hosts grapple with cyclopes, Pegasi, alicorns and talking donkeys, but will they definitively answer Lowen’s question? Tune in next week for part 2! Email us the impossible questions children ask you at [email protected] Find Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.com Find Christabel at https://christabelcane.com/ Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane