Ryan McDermott - On Genealogy

10/21/19 • 65 min

The first episode of the podcast is based on Ryan McDermott’s session at the summer school in 2018, and a follow-up interview we conducted with him afterwards. Ryan is a professor of medieval and reformation English literature at the University of Pittsburgh, and one of the originators of the Genealogies of Modernity project as a whole. We discuss with Ryan the many and varied senses that genealogy has as a term and methodology in the humanities, before looking at some particular examples of genealogical thinking which he has found important in his own work.

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Karen Detlefsen - Women in Early Modern Philosophy

This week’s episode is based on an interview we conducted with Karen Detlefsen, professor of Early Modern Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Karen takes us through the so-called ‘standard narrative’ of early modern philosophy and illustrates how it serves to exclude very many important thinkers from the 17th and 18th centuries.