Air

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Time to take in a breath of fresh air. In episode 133 of Overthink, Ellie and David close out their four-part series on the elements with air. They consider Anaximenes of Miletus’s belief that all things are made of air, Luce Irigaray’s belief that air is feminine, and the modern use of air as a weapon of battle. What can the TV series The Last of Us tell us about the inescapability of air Why have some philosophers thought the soul is made of air? And how does air allow itself to be forgotten? In the bonus, your hosts dive deeper into Irigaray, the plurality of air, and the idea of the ether.

Works Discussed:
Gaston Bachelard, Air in Dreams
Steven Connor, The Matter of Air
Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger
Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies
Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
The Last of Us (2025)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Overthink.
0:16.1	The Philosophy podcast, that's a breath of fresh air.
0:19.3	I'm Ellie Anderson.
0:21.2	And I'm David Peena-Gusman.
0:23.3	I have been watching the last season of The Last of Us.
0:26.7	I love this show.
0:28.3	We talked about the show before.
0:30.6	David, you're not totally caught up, right?
0:32.2	You're like super behind this past season.
0:34.6	No, but you told me you wanted to talk about this show, so I bench watched what was left.
0:39.6	So I am up to date on The Last of Us, yes.
0:42.6	Okay, okay.
0:43.6	Good job doing your homework.
0:45.2	We are recording this episode before the current season is complete.
0:49.1	And so we'll see what happens next.
0:51.3	But for those of you who may watch it, I am going to mention what could be
0:55.4	considered a spoiler. So if you don't want to hear that, skip ahead a little bit. Why am I mentioning
1:00.2	this in the episode on air? Well, on this most recent season of The Last of Us, there is an episode
1:07.1	where some of the characters go down to a hospital basement and they see that the
1:13.4	corticeps, which basically turns humans into zombies and is usually transmitted by a bite
1:19.5	from somebody who is infected, is in the air.
1:24.9	So it's this really intense moment where you go from thinking that the danger to you is in the
	...

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