Fire

Overthink

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

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Are all fires inherently bad? In episode 130 of Overthink, David and Ellie launch a four-part series on the elements, starting off hot with fire. They look at the role of fire in Greek mythology (focusing on the myth of Prometheus), the evolution of humans’ relationship with fire, and fire’s role as the universal metaphor. Why did Prometheus steal fire from the Olympians and give it to humans? Why does Bachelard believe that fire is “the” philosophical element par excellence? How did Western culture turn fire from friend to foe? And what would a non-antagonistic relationship to fire look like? In the bonus, your hosts give their fiery takes on arson and pyromania.

Works Discussed:

Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire
Stephen J. Pyne, The Pyrocene
Stephen J. Pyne, “Fire in the mind: changing understandings of fire in Western civilization.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	curious overthinkers already know that I literally record our episodes from my closet.
0:05.3	Yes, almost five years into the podcast.
0:07.2	I am still doing this.
0:08.2	David and I are trying to figure out an alternate setup.
0:10.5	We're trying to get to a place where we can afford not only new mics, but hopefully
0:13.6	more in-person recording opportunities.
0:16.1	So if you want to help us on that journey, go to patreon.com.
0:19.4	But I'm actually here just to apologize for my audio in this upcoming episode because I accidentally messed up my mic and the audio quality is terrible.
0:29.3	So, May I cool put on that.
0:30.6	Thank you so much to our audio editor, Aaron.
0:32.5	And actually to our software's AI, I have to admit, for helping, uh, improve things to make it listenable.
0:39.7	But I still wanted to apologize because it is not quite up to our normal standards.
0:43.4	That said, I love this episode.
0:45.3	It was so much fun and it spans all kinds of overthinking topics.
0:48.7	So we hope you'll still listen.
0:50.1	I just wanted to warn you about that.
0:51.5	Thank you all.
0:52.1	This has been Ellie.
1:09.9	Welcome to Overthink.
1:15.4	The podcast where two philosophers go after big ideas like a moth to a flame.
1:17.7	I'm Ellie Anderson.
1:19.3	And I'm David Peña Guzman.
	...

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