OVERTHINK

In episode 169 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about discipline. They think about modern culture’s rejection of discipline and how this manifests on the left vs the right, the association between discipline and punishment, and Michel Foucault’s seminal ideas on how disciplinary power rose in society. How can we discipline children without resorting to punishment? And are there models of self-discipline that don’t need to be rooted in punishment of the self?

In episode 168 of Overthink, Ellie and David take a closer look at Emmanuel Levinas’s article “On Escape.” They discuss Levinas’s claim that escape is central to the human condition and explore what exactly we try to escape from and escape to. They explain how this aspect of human existence is crystallized by our experiences of need, pleasure, and even nausea. Are we condemned to being needy beings? How does Levinas’s view of shame put him at a distance from Sartre? And is Levinas right that to be a human is to never be at peace with oneself?

In episode 167 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about all things evil. They think through the characterization of evil with darkness in Disney, Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds theory, the conflation of evil with badness, and Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. How does Manichaeism attempt to resolve the problem of evil? Is evil simply the lack of good in the world? Can evil be disambiguated from its religious past? And does evil still have relevance in an age of secular ethics or should we give up on the concept altogether?