Madness, Mysticism, and Philosophy – A Talk with Wouter Kusters

Podcast: Pop Apocalypse (LS 27 · TOP 10% what is this?)Episode: Madness, Mysticism, and Philosophy – A Talk with Wouter KustersPub date: 2025-07-02Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationFor episode 14 of Pop Apocalypse, we welcome the linguist and philosopher Wouter Kusters. Kusters is the author of Pure Madness (2004) and A Philosophy of Madness (2014), both of which won the Dutch Socrates Award for best philosophy book of the year. We discuss (5:26) how the experience of psychotic thinking challenges and illuminates our notions of language, philosophy, and mysticism. Along the way, we touch on the similarities between mystical and mad experiences, apophatic and psychotic uses of language, the phenomenology of time, and the impact of Kusters’ books on mental health specialists.Wouter Kusters, PhD, is a linguist and philosopher based in the Netherlands. Two of his books received the Dutch Socrates Award for the best and most inspiring philosophy book of the year: Pure Madness (2004) and A Philosophy of Madness (2014). The English version of this latter work was released in 2020 by MIT Press. In 2022, an Arabic version was released, and a Chinese translation is expected this year. Kusters writes on a range of themes in various outlets that explore perennial questions of meaning, madness, mysticism, and language.LINKSWouter Kusters' homepageA Philosophy of MadnessThe podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Matthew J. Dillon, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.