Natality with Jennifer Banks
Overthink
Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.
4.7 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 7 October 2025
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why does much of the history of philosophy neglect the topic of birth? In episode 142 of Overthink, Ellie and David chat with Jennifer Banks about her book Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth. They think through the debate between pronatalism and antinatalism, and consider alternatives to these positions. They also discuss Hannah Arendt’s account of natality and what Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein tells us about the relationship between birth and monstrosity. What is birth, and why does it seem to defy so many of our concepts and categories? What’s the difference between being-born and giving-birth? And how would our view of ourselves change if we saw ourselves through the lens of a “philosophy of birth” (as opposed to, say, “a philosophy of death”)? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts dive further into Hannah Arendt’s works, focusing on the link between her concept of natality and her ideas about the public/private distinction.
Works Discussed:
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Jennifer Banks, Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth
Alison Stone, Being Born: Birth and Philosophy
Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People
Marjolein Oele, “The Dissolution of the Pregnant City: A Philosophical Account of Early Pregnancy Loss and Enigmatic Grief”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Overthink. |
| 0:19.0 | The podcast were two philosophers and gender exciting new discussions about everyday life. |
| 0:25.1 | I'm Ellie Anderson. |
| 0:26.7 | And I'm David Peña-Gusman. |
| 0:28.6 | David, there's often one thing that people focus on as the inevitable fact of a human life, and that is death. |
| 0:37.3 | Or maybe you could say death and taxes, |
| 0:39.7 | if you will. Sometimes people will focus on those as two. I take it we're not talking about |
| 0:44.9 | taxes today. We're not talking about taxes today. But we're also not talking about death, |
| 0:50.1 | because even though people often focus on death as the inevitable feature of a human life, |
| 0:58.1 | there's also another very important an inevitable feature, which is birth. |
| 1:03.1 | All of us will die and also all of us were born. |
| 1:09.4 | What birth and death have in common is that they are transitional points between being and non-being. |
| 1:16.2 | Birth is the pivot point, which is our entrance into existence. |
| 1:20.9 | And mortality, of course, is our exit into non-being, barring, of course, theological |
| 1:26.6 | religious and spiritual interpretations that |
| 1:29.3 | presuppose the existence of an afterlife. |
| 1:32.3 | And so in that sense, both of these themes bring us face to face with the limits not only of a life, |
| 1:38.7 | but also with human understanding, because it's so difficult to really think about who we |
| 1:43.8 | were, were we anything before birth, |
| 1:47.9 | and who we will be or where we will be after death. And so they are the bookends, not just for |
| 1:56.2 | our existence, but for the very possibility of thinking our existence. Wow, controversial. |
| 2:02.1 | Who were we before we were born? |
... |
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