58- Being a Climate Scientist with Aaron Thierry

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.

I speak with space philosopher Sabine Winters about her visits to telescopes, imagination in space science, and the night sky.

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/