Fun
Overthink
Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.
4.7 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2024
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Even philosophers need downtime. In episode 106 of Overthink, Ellie and David take a break and chase down fun’s place in today’s world — from its aesthetic opposition to the highbrow realm of beauty, to its peculiar absence from philosophical discourse. What role does fun play in the good life? How does fun relate to art, play, and ritual? Can you really have fun by yourself? And what happens when the lines blur between the fun and the political?
Check out the episode's extended cut here!
Works Discussed
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target
Erna Fergusson, Dancing Gods
Michel Foucault, The History of Madness
Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Plato to Foucault
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment
Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow
Alan McKee, Fun!: What Entertainment Tells Us About Living a Good Life
David Peña-Guzmán and Rebekah Spera, "The philosophical personality"
Jen D’Angelo & Mariana Uribe, Mamma Mia! But Different
Substack | overthinkpod.substack.com
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | dearoverthink@gmail.com
YouTube | Overthink podcast
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Overthink. |
| 0:15.3 | The podcast where two philosophers have fun with big ideas. |
| 0:20.1 | I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson. |
| 0:21.7 | And I'm Dr. David Pena-Gusman. |
| 0:24.1 | Fun is exceptionally hard to define. |
| 0:27.3 | There are all these concepts that are closely related to it, such as play, leisure, humor, and pleasure. |
| 0:34.3 | But there is not a lot out there about fun specifically. Yeah, we decided to do this |
| 0:41.0 | episode topic before we looked into the literature. And then once we looked into the literature, |
| 0:45.6 | we were like, oh, wow, okay, there actually isn't very much of it. And that is for reasons that we |
| 0:50.6 | will unpack over the course of the episode. We also did find some fun research, |
| 0:54.4 | some fun research. So stay tuned for that. But I found myself in looking into this topic, |
| 1:01.5 | doing what Socrates says is the wrong way to define something, which is instead of giving a |
| 1:07.4 | definition, just pointing to all the things that are fun, right? Like, going to an amusement |
| 1:11.9 | park is fun. I mean, is it, though, all those lines and expensive bad food? I don't know that. |
| 1:20.0 | I think it's super fun. Going to an amusement park on a random Wednesday when all the kids are in school, |
| 1:24.6 | how about that? Then the overpriced bad food doesn't seem so bad |
| 1:27.5 | anymore because there are no lines. Amusement parts are a big no for David. Okay, so what do you |
| 1:34.8 | find fun then? So I will let you know that something that I have coming up this weekend is going to be |
| 1:40.3 | extremely fun, which is that I have signed up for my first tennis competitive tournament |
| 1:45.7 | in over a decade. And so for me, sports are the epitome of fun. And I'm going to be doing that |
| 1:51.2 | for three days in a row. Oh, my gosh. Bless you, David. I know this and I love this about you, |
| 1:56.6 | but there is nothing I find less fun than either participating in or speculating in a sporting event. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D., and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D. and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

