What happens when the founder of cybernetics realizes his own invention could gut the labor movement? Gavin Mueller, author of Breaking Things at Work, describes how Norbert Wiener reached out to Walter Reuther's United Auto Workers to warn that automation was coming for factory jobs — an overture that stalled…
In Episode 17, Gavin Mueller traced the Luddites back to the guild economy of England's Midlands — skilled workers organizing to defend their wages, their working conditions, and their craft. In Part 2 of this conversation, Mueller follows that struggle forward into the century that reshaped it: Karl Marx's own…
They've been remembered as machine-smashers who tried to stop the future with a hammer — but historian Eric Hobsbawm called what they were doing "collective bargaining by riot." In this episode, Prof. Gavin Mueller (University of Amsterdam), author of Breaking Things at Work, walks through who the Luddites actually were:…
What happens to an ethics built on belonging to a city once that city stops being able to protect anyone? This episode opens the Hellenistic arc of Notions of Progress with one of the strangest and most memorable answers: Diogenes of Sinope, a philosopher who lived in a discarded wine…
Is artificial intelligence quietly convincing us that human judgment no longer matters? In 2023 Senate testimony, philosopher Shannon Vallor argued that a widespread AI narrative treats practical wisdom — what Aristotle called phronesis — not as a real human capacity worth defending, but as something already outdated. Her claim is…
Aristotle asks a question most modern philosophy has stopped asking: what is a human being for? In Part 1 of this two-part episode, Marshall works through Aristotle's argument that every activity aims at some good — and that there is a highest good, eudaimonia, that makes the others intelligible. Drawing…
In this clip from the Notions of Progress conversation with Matt Ehret, Ehret develops one of the episode's most striking arguments: that adopting a particular intellectual method produces not genuine freedom but its simulation. Drawing on Plato's Allegory of the Cave, Ehret argues that as a person becomes more enmeshed…
What if the divide between Plato and Aristotle is not a chapter in the history of philosophy — but a structural fault line that still determines how civilizations think about knowledge, progress, and discovery? In the final part of his conversation with Matt Ehret, Marshall examines Ehret’s argument that this…
Did Plato’s most famous allegory get hijacked by the very class of rulers it was meant to expose? Matthew Ehret argues that the Allegory of the Cave is one of the most systematically misread passages in Western philosophy. According to Ehret, self-styled Neoplatonists extracted the imagery of shadow-control and applied…
What if the most cited passage in Western philosophy has been deliberately misread — by both its critics and its supposed followers? In Part 2 of his conversation with Matt Ehret, Marshall examines the Allegory of the Cave, the Sophist movement, and a lineage of misuse running from ancient Athens…
Did the idea of progress originate with the ancient Greeks — centuries before the Enlightenment claimed it? In this clip from Part 1 of a three-part conversation, host Marshall establishes the premise that animates the Ehret Interview Arc: tracing the idea of progress back to ancient Greece is itself a…
This is the first of three episodes with Matt Ehret tracing the Plato–Aristotle divide and its consequences for Western intellectual history. In this episode, Matt Ehret argues that the fault line between Plato and Aristotle is not a historical curiosity — it is a living divide that continues to shape…
What principle did Aristotle carry out of Plato's Academy — and what did the institution he built in its place say about the one he left? Prof. Christopher Moore, in Calling Philosophers Names, identifies what makes Aristotle's departure philosophically decisive. For Aristotle, philosophical progress was cumulative: earlier thinkers were genuinely…
In episode 8, Plato coined the word philosopher and made a wager: that genuine philosophical knowledge could be institutionalized and accumulated across generations. Last episode 9, we examined the Academy he built to make that wager pay off — its curriculum, its method, its claim that episteme, anchored knowledge, could…
What did Plato actually found in 387 BCE — and why does the answer matter for how we think about progress? Prof. Guthrie’s account of the Academy reveals a community unlike anything that had existed before it: philosophers who lived, studied, argued, and ate together over decades in the grove…
Plato had named philosophy and founded the Academy to transmit it. But how do you teach what you believe cannot simply be handed over? That is the question at the center of Episode 9 — the second of three episodes tracing the founding and first great test of the Academy.…
Can ingenuity alone advance civilization — or does it require something technical skill cannot replace? In this clip from Episode 5, Prof. W.K.C. Guthrie, Prof. Rachel Barney, and Prof. Mauro Bonazzi guide us through Protagoras’ Myth of Prometheus — and what it actually argues. The standard reading treats the myth…
What does it mean to build an institution around an idea? In this clip from Episode 8 of Notions of Progress, Marshall traces how Plato transformed the word philosophos — originally closer to a taunt than an honorific — into the founding claim of a school that would outlast him…
Where did the word "philosopher" come from — and who got to decide what it meant? In Episode 8, Part 1 of Notions of Progress, we trace the moment Plato took a word that had begun as a mocking label and transformed it into an institutional claim. Prof. Christopher Moore's…
Can rhetoric make better citizens — or does it simply make better manipulators through the art of persuasion? In Part 2 of our Plato vs. the Sophists arc, we follow Plato's argument from the Meno to the Gorgias to answer that question. Scholars including W.K.C. Guthrie, E.R. Dodds, and George…
The Sophists said that excellence was teachable—that skill could be accumulated, transmitted, and built upon across generations. Plato disagreed. He built a counter-proposal that called into question whether collective progress of the kind the Sophists imagined was even possible. In Part 1, we examine the first two of Plato’s four…
The word “sophist” is still in common use—and almost exclusively as an insult. Sophistry means clever but dishonest reasoning. Yet the people this label was first attached to were the most sought-after teachers in the most dynamic democratic society the ancient world produced. They advised statesmen, authored constitutions, and theorized…
In this episode of Notions of Progress - Part Two, we continue exploring the fascinating evolution of progress thinking with Professor Tyson Retz, author of "Progress in the Scale of History" (Cambridge University Press, 2022). In this episode, Professor Retz discusses categories 3-5 of his framework: Relative Progress, Everybody’s Progress…
In this episode of Notions of Progress, we explore the fascinating evolution of progress thinking with Professor Tyson Retz, author of "Progress in the Scale of History" (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Professor Retz introduces his innovative five-category framework that traces various conceptions of progress as part of a layered and…