Episode 30 - Henri Bergson’s Philosophy with Jeanne Proust

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 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).