David and Tamler tackle the topic chosen by our beloved Patreon supporters in the first VBW madness tournament – Schopenhauer. We discuss his essays “On the Sufferings of the World” and “The Vanity of Existence,” their strikingly modern perspectives on human life and behavior and the influences Schopenhauer took from Eastern thought. Plus, David has Tamler do a blind ranking of movie directors. Arthur Schopenhauer [plato.stanford.edu] Arther Schopenhauer [iep.utm.edu] The Essays of Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism [full-text from gutenberg.org]
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Episode 314: The In-Betweeny Place
David and Tamler go long on McDonagh’s 2008 masterpiece "In Bruges." We talk about the terrific performances and all the weighty themes - sin, guilt, redemption, honor, language, and very inappropriate jokes. Plus philosophers talk about “sex within the discipline” and Tamler can’t handle it. To Philosophers of Easy Virtue by Alex Rails [dailynous.com] In Bruges (2008) [wikipedia.org]
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Episode 313: The Spontaneous Eruption of Now
David and Tamler try to wrap their heads around the metaphysics of past and future via the Borges essay(s) “A New Refutation of Time.” What does it mean to be a time skeptic or a time realist for that matter? If you’re a Berkeleyan idealist and Humean skeptic about the self, do you have to deny succession and simultaneity? The world, unfortunately, is real; and we, unfortunately, are Very Bad Wizards. Plus for centuries philosophers insisted that you couldn’t measure qualia, but then scientists just went ahead and… measured it! Scientists Measure Qualia for First Time-It Was Thought To Be Impossible [youtube.com] Kawakita, G., Zeleznikow-Johnston, A., Takeda, K., Tsuchiya, N., & Oizumi, M. (2025). Is my “red” your “red”?: Evaluating structural correspondences between color similarity judgments using unsupervised alignment. iScience, 28(3). A New Refutation of Time [wikipedia.org] A New Refutation of Time by Jorge Luis Borges [pdf from gwern.net]
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Episode 312: MechaSkeptic
David and Tamler return to David Hume’s somewhat slippery brand of skepticism, this time focusing Chapter 12 of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Plus speaking of things to be skeptical about, we dive into a recent paper called “Your Brain on ChatGPT” – does neuroscience show that LLM users incur a “cognitive debt”? MIT study shows ChatGPT reshapes student brain function and reduces creativity when used from the start [edtechinnovationhub.com] Your brain on ChatGPT [arxiv.org] People are suffering... [linkedin.com] David Hume's "An Enquiry Concerning Hunan Understanding" [wikipedia.org] Hume's Enquiry Section 12: Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy [davidhume.org]
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Episode 311: The Way to Dusty Death (Shakespeare's "Macbeth")
David and Tamler screw their courage to the sticking place and talk about their first Shakespeare play – The Tragedy of Macbeth. Plus we select 16 topics for our first VBW topic tournament suggested and voted by our beloved Patreon patrons.
Very Bad Wizards is a podcast featuring a philosopher (Tamler Sommers) and a psychologist (David Pizarro), who share a love for ethics, pop culture, and cognitive science, and who have a marked inability to distinguish sacred from profane. Each podcast includes discussions of moral philosophy, recent work on moral psychology and neuroscience, and the overlap between the two.
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