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Justin E.H. Smith | The Point Magazine
What Is X?Episodes
Justin E.H. Smith | The Point Magazine
What Is X?
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Episodes of What Is X?
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This month’s episode of “What Is X?” asks a suitably grand question for the end of the year and for the end of Season 2: What is being? To help him figure it out once and for all (or to at least lessen our state of aporia), Justin brings on as
This month on “What Is X?”—timed perfectly after the latest crypto crash—Justin asks, What is money? To begin the conversation, his guest—Joseph Tinguely, a philosophy professor at the University of South Dakota and the editor of the forthcomin
On this episode of “What Is X,” Justin brings back a seasoned veteran for one last job: he invites on his friend Seb Emina, former editor of the London Review of Breakfasts blog and author of The Breakfast Bible, to ask: What is breakfast? Now
What does it mean for a number to exist? In the philosophy of mathematics, there are two general camps when it comes to numbers: there are the Platonists—or the “realists”—who think numbers somehow really exist, and there are the constructivist
The dog days of late summer call for a break from discussions of concepts like Time, War, and Virtue and a turn to a subject that, though significant, probably lacks its own Platonic form: Punk. Joining Justin for this episode of “What Is X?” i
On February 25th, Vladislav Davidzon burned his Russian passport on live TV to protest Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. War makes us do extreme things, Davidzon says, in this episode of “What Is X?” It sharpens national identities, intensifies feel
What counts as authorship? Why does it matter? Should we stop putting our names on what we write and sign off instead, as early scribes preferred to do, as nothing more than humble servants of God? In this episode, Justin E.H. Smith thinks thro
In this episode of “What Is X?” Justin E.H. Smith and Emily Thomas tackle the timely yet timeless question: "What is time?" Is time an external, objective fact, or is the flow and tempo of the world internal to us—in some sense, all in our head
In this live-recorded episode of What Is X?, Justin meets up with the writer Sam Kriss at a (sometimes noisy) pub in London to chat about conspiracy theories. What makes a conspiracy theory conspiratorial? What is the relationship between consp
Longtime Point readers may remember that Justin E.H. Smith contributed to our issue 14 “What is comedy for?” symposium back in 2017. He now returns to the subject for us with this episode of “What Is X?” on humor. Joining him is Luvell Anderson
On this episode of “What Is X?” Justin E.H. Smith asks: What is friendship? His guest, S. Abbas Raza, is the founding editor of 3 Quarks Daily and has a graduate degree in philosophy from Columbia, but what qualifies him as an expert on this to
In this episode of “What Is X?” Justin E.H. Smith comes ready to be persuaded, as he tries to get a handle on one of the most difficult Xes of all: consciousness. What are the inner states we experience? Is figuring it out just a matter of neur
The ancient conception of virtue is quite far removed from our own. Nowadays, we tend to think of virtue as a kind of moral righteousness, as opposed to sin. The Greeks, however, had a very different idea about virtue, or arete, as they called
For Valentine’s Day, there was only one question “What Is X” could ask, one that thinkers through the ages, from Plato to Howard Jones, have not managed to answer: What is love? In this episode, Justin E. H. Smith is joined by New School media
When it comes to gender, there are many big questions that people often get stuck on. On this episode of “What X?," Justin E. H. Smith asks Robin Dembroff, a professor of feminist and LGBTQ philosophy at Yale, to help untangle them. Justin and
On this episode of “What Is X,” Justin invites his “old friend and sometimes adversary” Jason Stanley, the Yale philosopher and author of How Fascism Works, to investigate what might seem to be a relatively narrow question: What are slurs? You
What is the relation between criticism and crisis—is criticism in crisis? On this episode of "What is X?," taped in July 2021, Justin invites the critic and poet Ryan Ruby on to attest to the state of criticism today. Is it even possible to pl
This week’s episode of “What Is X?” begins with a provocation: Does this conversation really need to be an hour long? Can’t Justin and this week’s interlocutor, D. Graham Burnett, just agree that history is what happens in the past, and let the
How is the aesthetic experience of art different from how we appreciate wonders of nature—a pretty flower, or a mountain vista, or a peacock's beautiful feather? In this brisk and bracing 40-minute discussion, Justin E.H. Smith is joined by cri
Say you’re researching your ancestry, and you hit a dead end: the genealogical trail goes cold. Is it really a dead end? Or might this open up new ways of understanding who we are and how we came to be? In other words: What do we mean when we s
Is matter “an idea in the mind of God,” as the early modern philosopher and noted immaterialist George Berkeley would have it? On this week's episode of “What Is X?” Justin invites on Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech and host of
Since the mid-twentieth century, there has been an ongoing quarrel over the definition of mental health: Are disorders like depression, OCD, or schizophrenia biologically determined or are they socially constructed?In this episode of “What Is X
Jeff Dolven and Justin E.H. Smith assay the hoard of poetry’s riches in this month’s episode: Is poetry a way of grasping at the treasures of language, past and present? Or might there be something that is particular to poetry, something unlike
What kind of thinking do we do when we sleep? Is that what dreaming is? And how is it different from the thinking we do in waking life? In this episode of “What Is X?,” Justin E.H. Smith talks to Matthew Spellberg, a scholar working on a compar
What does it mean to be a philosopher? After all, it's an odd job title. In this episode, Justin E.H. Smith asks philosopher and Point columnist Agnes Callard, What even is philosophy? What does philosophy do, and what does it take to do it? Al
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