Intoxication

Overthink

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

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 21 December 2021

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Drunks, like children, always tell the truth. And after a night (or day) of drinking, everyone turns into a professional philosopher! What is it about intoxication that incites us to philosophize, to “wax poetic”? In episode 41, David and Ellie explore the theme of intoxication all the way from the wine-filled feasts of the ancient Greeks to contemporary debates about psychedelic drugs. They look at the fascinating “ergot hypothesis,” which holds that famous philosophers such as Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle came up with their most important metaphysical insights while tripping on an ancient psychedelic called “ergot.” And they consider what experiences of intoxication can teach us about power, privilege, and freedom.

Works Discussed

Carl Hart, Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear
Plato, The Symposium
R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries
Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind
Evgenia Fotiou "The globalization of ayahuasca shamanism and the erasure of indigenous shamanism"
Marty Roth, Drunk the Night Before: An Anatomy of Intoxication
Jean-Luc Nancy, Intoxication
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals
Maggie Nelson, On Freedom
Jacques Derrida, Plato’s Pharmacy

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm David Peña Guzman.
0:08.6	And I'm Ellie Anderson.
0:10.2	Welcome to Overthink.
0:12.0	The podcast were two friends, who are also professors, put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
0:18.7	Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.
0:29.5	David, today we're talking about the very juicy topic of drugs.
0:35.0	And alcohol.
0:36.4	And, you know, in thinking about this episode, one of the things that I
0:39.8	realized is how difficult I find it to talk about drugs with my students in the classroom.
0:46.5	As a faculty member, right? Like, what position should I occupy in relation to drugs?
0:51.9	Yeah. This is one of those topics that it's hard to know whether to share anecdotes or not. Although I have to just put my cards on the table. I'm kind of square, so I won't be like hiding a bunch of super juicy anecdotes about psychedelics in this episode. But you're going to be hiding some then. No, no, I don't know if I'll be hiding any. I just, if there are ones that I'm hiding, they're not, they're just not juicy.
1:13.9	Okay, fair enough.
1:15.0	I think if they're not juicy, then I encourage you to conceal them.
1:19.7	Only juicy revelations.
1:22.0	Yeah, this is going nowhere fast.
1:23.5	So let's get it somewhere fast because our listeners are coming to this episode with high
1:27.3	expectations, I would imagine. I want to start with an anecdote about a professor who does
1:33.3	speak openly about his experiences with drugs. And that is the psychology professor at Harvard
1:39.2	University, casual, Carl Elhart. And Carl El Hart is a neuroscientist who has written a book called
1:48.1	Drug Use for Grownups, Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. And in this book, Carl Hart talks about
1:54.6	the fact that he does recreationally a number of drugs that we would consider to be pretty
2:00.5	scary drugs, including
	...

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