Episode #220: Mark Lilla

In Episode #220, political scientist Mark Lilla joins Osi to discuss the paradoxical human impulse to seek knowledge while often resisting it at the same time. They examine this phenomenon of willful ignorance through history and examine how it shapes much of today’s American politics.Mark Lilla, Professor of Humanities, specializes in intellectual history, with a particular focus on Western political and religious thought. Before moving to Columbia in 2007 he taught in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and at New York University. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, he is the author of Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know (2024),The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (2017), The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (2016), The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (2007),The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (2001),and G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (1993). He has also edited The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (2001) with Ronald Dworkin and Robert Silvers, and The Public Face of Architecture (1987) with Nathan Glazer. His latest book is Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know (2024)