The following podcast contains explicit language.

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

I am David Plotz of Atlas Obscura.

I'm joined live on stage at a Skirball center on the campus of New York University

by my fellow GabFest host John Dickerson of CBS this morning.

Hello, John.

And Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine.

Hello, Emily.

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 defined 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

Reinemann's Christian realism, Hannah Arendt's meditations on totalitarianism,

and Ayn Rand'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 Titans of Philosophy that we shall not

...