The Observing I Podcast
David Johnson
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Emil Cioran and the Insomnia of Being
Emil Cioran was the most honest philosopher of the twentieth century. He believed, with total intellectual sincerity and forensic rigour, that being born was a catastrophe nobody asked for, that…
Not Yet: The Philosophy of Ernst Bloch
Not yet.Ernst Bloch was born in a factory town on the Rhine in 1885 and spent the next ninety-two years refusing to accept that the present tense was the final word on anything. He built an entire…
Leszek Kolakowski, the man who autopsied his god
What do you do when the thing you used to explain everything stops explaining anything?Leszek Kołakowski was born in Poland in 1927. He grew up under Nazi occupation, educated in secret because the…
Vladimir Solovyov and the Philosophy of the World Soul
Three times in his life, Vladimir Solovyov saw her. Once at nine years old in a Moscow church. Once in a lecture hall mid-sentence. Once face down in the Egyptian desert alone at night. He called her…
Nikolai Federov: The Librarian who declared war on Death
What if your acceptance of death isn't wisdom? What if it's surrender with better branding? What if the most dangerous idea humanity ever had wasn't pride or violence or the will to power, but the…
Jan Patočka and the Philosophy of Living in Truth
Jan Patočka was a Czech philosopher who spent thirty years banned from teaching, running illegal philosophy seminars in private apartments, passing hand-typed manuscripts through networks of people…
Mikhail Bakhtin and the Unfinished Self
You are not one person. You never were.This is not a metaphor about complexity or depth. This is not inspirational content about containing multitudes. This is a structural diagnosis of how…
Lev Shestov and the Violence of Reason
Lev Shestov spent his entire life at war with the most dangerous idea in human history. Not God. Not death. Not the void. Reason itself. The belief that things must be as they are. That necessity is…
The Berdyaev Problem: What If You're Afraid of Freedom?
September 1922. A German steamship loaded with Russia’s most dangerous weapons. Not bombs. Not guns. Philosophers. Seventy intellectuals who committed the ultimate crime against the Soviet state.…
Dostoevsky: Patient Zero of the Nervous Breakdown
Your life is being optimized into a coffin. Every app on your phone, every metric at your job, and every "wellness" routine you follow is designed to turn you into a predictable, manageable,…
Kafka and the Machinery of Modern Dread
Welcome to 2026. The calendar flipped, but the gears didn’t stop grinding.Most people think Franz Kafka wrote fantasy. They think he dreamed up giant bugs and invisible judges because he had a…
The Vanishing of Vernon Pale
This episode is a little different. It’s a work of fiction. A Christmas ghost story for philosophers. A Dickensian horror wrapped in VHS static and existential dread.In 1983, a philosophy professor…
The Secret Lives of Objects
What if everything around you has a secret life you’ll never access?Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology makes a radical claim: objects aren’t just props in the human drama. The hammer in your…
Chronophobia: Why Modern Life Makes Us Afraid of Time Itself
You wake up and the first thing you think is how many hours you wasted sleeping. How many emails piled up. How many opportunities slipped past while you were unconscious. This is chronophobia. The…
Ethics for the End of Everything
The universe is falling apart. That is not a metaphor. That is physics. That is the second law of thermodynamics. That is entropy winning every single time you take a breath, think a thought, care…
How Imagination Becomes Reality: Grant Morrison and the Tulpa Effect
Grant Morrison had a nervous breakdown in 1988 while writing about insanity. He was channeling madness, writing madness, becoming madness. And then one day the character he created walked into his…
Hyperobjects and Other Nightmares: Timothy Morton and the Ecology of Collapse
You think you understand climate change. You don’t. You think it’s a problem you can solve with better recycling habits and electric cars. It’s not. It’s a hyperobject. Something so massively…
The Cartography of Pain: Paul Auster's City of Glass and the Architecture of Identity
A writer named Daniel Quinn answers the wrong phone number at three in the morning and becomes a detective who never existed. He follows a father who locked his son in darkness for nine years trying…
Four Thousand Weeks: A Love Letter to Your Mortality
You have approximately four thousand weeks to live. If you’re lucky. If you’ve already lived thirty years, you’ve spent about fifteen hundred of them. They’re gone. You’re not getting them back.This…
Peter Putnam's Cosmos: The Functionalist Demolition of Self
This week on The Observing I, prepare for the total demolition of your most cherished comfort: the belief in your soul. We drag the ghost out of the machine and dissect the brutal, cold logic of…
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The Observing I Podcast has published 144 episodes since January 2023, covering topics in Education, Philosophy.
The Observing I Podcast is currently active with new episodes weekly. Average episode length is 34m.
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