philoscifiz

Never look a gift horse in the mouth? What would you do if offered everything you’ve been told you ever wanted? Matt and Dave check out Boots Riley’s utterly hilarious and deadly serious counter cultural and visually inventive sci-fi dystopia. So, will Cassius Green stick to the later-than-late-capitalism script? Find out in our season finale as the present, past, and future of slavery collide amidst worker unions, big tech, performance art, and Hegel’s dialectic.

Matt and Dave get trapped in a Cronenberg film! Because – it seems – you have to play the game to find out why you’re playing the game. Follow us as we tumble down a mole hole and enter the world of eXistenZ with the demoness Allegra Geller. Or do we? Technophobia becomes realist terror for the anti-gamer resistance while the film seen through the lens of Zola’s naturalism uses gaming to critique the reality of the real world. Or does it?

Matt and Dave are dropped head-first into a world where Descartes was right. Yet - proclaims the polyonymous entity from the shadows of this cyberpunk anime - 'neither science nor philosophy can explain what life is'. Set in future Japan, Motoko Kusanagi is a cyborg security agent, pondering such intangibles while fighting terror. From Gilbert Ryle to Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, we explore accounts of the mind-body problem, and the problem of machine reproduction.

Matt and Dave go to robot heaven in this old-skool sci-fi classic from the late 1970s. On one side, the aphoristic, gung-ho Vincent and the fear and trembling of old Bob; on the other, the martial uniformity of the sentinels, the eerie horror of the cyborgs, and the malign presence and silence of Maximillian. Join us and the crew of the Palomino as we encounter the evil genius of Dr Hans Reinhardt, and the ambiguity of the black hole and the spacetime beyond.

Matt and Dave bound into the second season of the podcast with this bright, joyful, and profound multi-perspectival sci-fi movie. A big ball of evil is zooming towards the Earth, with only the elemental Leeloo standing in the way of an extinction event. But is human life worth saving when we do what we do to each other? Or should Leeloo love her fate, as wise-cracking Korben Dallas believes? Questions Nietzsche explored beyond good and evil proliferate!