Spectrevision Radio

Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.

For more episodes, or to support the podcast,

go to weirdstudies.com. Hi, welcome to Weird Studies. This is Phil.

Thanks to a convergence of medical and family crises, combined with a couple of weeks of out-of-town travel,

J.F. and I have found ourselves having to manage an unexpected interruption to our release schedule.

Now, we'll be back next week with a brand new flagship show, but for now, we're going

to tie you over with another of the bonus episodes we record for our Patreon folks.

This one is a wide-ranging chat that goes every which way, as is our custom in the Patreon

episodes, but it also coheres around a central theme, the distinction between philosophy and theory.

We recorded this episode almost a year ago when J.F. was gearing up to offer his course on fairy tales on our Weird As Fear teaching platform.

It was very much part of the overarching conversation we were having around the ideas of that

course, but its ideas are still timely even a year later.

After all, we're still puzzling our little heads about causality and the degree to which

paranormal and weird phenomena might raise strong ontological claims.

At the beginning of this episode, JF remarks that doing these bonus episodes doesn't

feel like work, and I think that that's true, inasmuch as these Patreon episodes always

feel like instances of pure play. With the flagship shows, we go in with a topic we've chosen

in advance, and each of us comes prepared

with texts, quotes, the conceptual set pieces that, however unscripted, are nevertheless structured.

By analogy, we might think of improvisation in Duke Ellington's Blanton-Webster band.

With the Patreon shows, we typically go in with nothing at all and wait to

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