Karl Marx is often portrayed as an advocate of technological progress — with mechanization as the necessary path to socialism. Prof. Gavin Mueller of the University of Amsterdam argues that reading flattens Marx's ideas. In Part 2 of this three-part…
They've been remembered as machine-smashers who tried to stop the future with a hammer. Historian Eric Hobsbawm called what they were actually doing something else: "collective bargaining by riot." In this episode, Prof. Gavin Mueller of the Univers…
Aristotle claimed that every human being has a built-in purpose — a telos — and that a good life means living out that purpose well. This episode brings five thinkers to that claim, each testing it from a different angle. Karl Popper's charge sets t…
When we design institutions to promote human wellbeing — schools, hospitals, cities, development programs — we are making assumptions about what wellbeing actually consists in. This episode raises the question of what it means for a human life to go…
Matt Ehret argues in this episode that Plato has been systematically misread — not by accident, but by extraction. The ban on poets from the Republic, one of the most cited passages in Western philosophy, has long served as evidence of Platonic auth…
The Allegory of the Cave is one of most highly cited texts in Western philosophy. Most readers encounter it in Book VII of Plato’s Republic as an illustration of enlightenment: prisoners who mistake shadows for reality, a philosopher who escapes int…
The word progress has become contested in many ways. It is invoked by its proponents as self-evident and dismissed by critics as a cover for inequality, environmental damage, or cultural loss. What both sides tend to share is an assumption that the …
When the best student an institution ever produced decides to leave — does that prove the institution worked, or that it failed? We live in a moment where institutional trust is called into question. The organizations built to accumulate and transm…
Can an institution be designed to transmit genuine knowledge across generations — or does every school eventually drift from the thing it was founded to preserve? Institutions built around a founding idea face a structural problem that no charter o…
What does it cost to found an institution on the claim that genuine knowledge belongs only to the few? The word "philosopher" arrives today with the weight of a long tradition behind it — a field, a canon, a set of institutions that claim authorit…
Plato vs. the Sophists: Rhetoric, Power, and the Making of Callicles Who is Callicles, and why does he still matter? He appears only once in the whole of Western philosophy — in a single Platonic dialogue written around 380 BCE. In 1959, the class…
Much of our political argument about who should make decisions for the rest of us rests on a prior assumption: can ordinary people be trusted to know enough about justice and the good to govern themselves well? The Sophists, as we traced in Episodes…
Summary This episode asks questions that the Sophists raised in fifth-century Athens and never fully resolved. When a school of thought is almost entirely known through the writings of its most powerful critic, how much of what we think we know is …
When leading AI companies such as Anthropic warn of "civilization" level risks from AI advances arriving within 1-2 years [1] , Professor Retz's framework invites us to ask: which historical narratives of progress implicitly shape these positions? T…
When one of the large AI companies announces that their new model will bring us "closer to AGI" (Artificial General Intelligence), what notion of progress, if any, are they invoking? When advocacy groups protest technological solutions to areas in…
Introducing Notions of Progress: A New Podcast What if many of our assumptions about technological progress rest on ideas formulated centuries ago—ideas we've inherited without examination? What if much of the current anxiety and uncertainty regard…