The following podcast contains explicit language.

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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gap Fest for December 27, 2018, the Conundrum Edition.

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I am David Plodz of Atlas, Obscura. I'm joined live on stage at a Skurpole Center on the Campus of New York University

by my fellow Gap Fest hosts John Dickerson of CBS this morning. Hello, David.

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And Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine. Hello, Emily.

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So for the past two centuries, New York City has been a laboratory of American philosophical thought.

I don't need to tell any of you that it was here growing up that William James formulated the will to believe doctrine

to find the difference between soft and hard determinism and made the case for radical empiricism.

Or that a few decades later, John Dewey galvanized early 20th century Americans with his theory of pragmatism,

which I can hear you all saying to yourself, was actually better understood as instrumentalism.

Manhattan was, of course, the heart of the philosophical melee after World War II was Rhinald Nieber's Christian realism,

Hanna Arons, meditations on totalitarianism and Iran's radically individualistic objectivism,

competed to capture the hearts and minds of Gothamites.

And on this very block in 1923, Frederick Hayek shed his early infatuation with democratic socialism

and began to turn toward the classical liberal ideas that would shape and guide 20th century economic theory.

And it is just this majestic tradition that we shall not honor tonight.

It is these crucial questions posed by Titan's philosophy that we shall not answer this evening.

Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Mill, Weber, Dirkheim.

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