Welcome back to IN THE RAW, my new podcast. This week we have a tremendous guest, Athenian Stranger. You may have read his fantastic essay in MAN’S WORLD Issue Eleven about the Tom Hardy film Warrior and how this fight film, which might easily be dismissed as unsophisticated and unthinking, actually explores important philosophical and existential themes from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The essay was one of the featured essays for the issue and received a huge amount of positive feedback from readers. Athenian will be writing for the magazine again soon!
Athenian has a deep academic background in philosophy, although he’s left that world behind, largely due to frustration at the intellectual constraints of university life. This is the main theme of our discussion today: what went wrong with the Western university, why, and what we can do, including some very practical advice, to make up for these deficiencies.
Athenian works tirelessly to promote philosophical discussion on Twitter, regularly hosting Twitter Spaces to discuss great works of philosophy and literature, and he’s also created athenscorner.com as an online library of his lectures and discussions, with written material, for anybody looking to build their knowledge of philosophy and literature. There are lectures on pre-Socratic philosophers like Heraclitus, later Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, and modern philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as lectures on Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, HP Lovecraft and even topics like the importance of lifting weights.
Follow Athenian on Twitter @athens_stranger.
IN THE RAW 5: Athenian Stranger