PODCAST · society
CultureCast
by Daniel Dal Monte
I am a philosopher with a doctorate and a writer living in Philadelphia. I want to dig deep in this podcast, going beyond the superficial level of daily events. Along with Thoreau, I want to search for the principle behind the myriad instances and applications. All news is gossip, ideas are what drive history.
Episodes
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What Is Philosophy? According to Kant
In this episode, I provide some thoughts from Kant’s logic about the nature of philosophy. Philosophy is not sophism, which merely seeks to appear clever and win debates. Philosophy is not the picture-thinking we encounter in the mytho-poetic ancient cultures. Philosophy integrates all the other...
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Surrealism
In this episode, I give a brief rundown of the surrealist movement in the art and literature. The surreal is a merger of dream and reality, such that dreams can provide a source of truth and there is no longer a distinction between dreams and reality. The surrealists used Freud to justify their...
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The New World Order and Kant’s Idea of Free Will
Kant tried to balance the strict lawfulness of nature with an absolute idea of human freedom. To accomplish this, Kant established the natural world as ideal, i.e. based on mental mediation in part. In ourselves, independent of any mental mediation, we can exercise an absolute freedom. But a will...
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The Cultural Battle
In this episode, I discuss the philosophical roots of the cultural battle, after the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade. There are three key issues that have profound implications for how we view the controversial social issues of our time, which include, but are surely not limited to, abortion. These...
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The Extreme Right and the Extreme Left
In this episode, I discuss an article by the Spanish writer Pedro Trevijano in which he distinguishes between two extreme attitudes in one’s moral philosophy. One is pharisiacal and rigid, judging others and claiming possession of absolute truth. The other has no sense of absolute truth and puts...
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Is the Soul Incorruptible?
In this episode I go over an argument for the immortality of the soul from St. Thomas Aquinas. The idea is that the soul can grasp unchanging principles, while the senses are rooted in a specific time and place. I tie this idea into Plato’s Theory of the Forms, which holds that there are...
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Kant on True Freedom
In this episode, I discuss two conceptions of liberty. One is the ability to do what one desires. The other is the a self-mastery in which true autonomy is the following of the moral law. Kant gave us an idea of freedom that is libertarian. We are truly free when we are able to think in universal...
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Human Perversity: Why Do We Reject What Is Good?
In this episode, I discuss an episode in the Gospel of Matthew in which the people of Nazareth dismiss Christ for his wisdom and miracles. I was wondering how people could be so foolish and perverse? They have a “crabs in the bucket” mentality. I turn to Aquinas to illuminate how we do not…
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Remi Brague: The Attack on Western Culture
In this episode, I discuss a recent interview with Remi Brague, a prominent European thinker. He documents the phenomenon of “cancel culture.” It is common to hear about this, but we must not take it lightly. We need to recognize that political correctness protects certain dogmas from any...
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Ben Franklin’s Treatise on Human Liberty
In this episode, I discuss a fascinating and vigorous philosophical treatise by a great American, Benjamin Franklin. It is called “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain.” Franklin denies human free will. How can we choose something to which the omnipotent God does not…
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Adorno and the Dialectic of the Enlightenment
In this episode, I discuss how Adorno views the Enlightenment as sliding inevitably towards totalitarianism. The Enlightenment seeks to reduce reality to numerical rationality. It suffers no exemption to this reductive trend. Eventually it emerges in a totalitarian political system that brings...
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Aporia, Time, and Death
Aporia is a state of speechlessness in which we are unable to articulate a mysterious phenomenon. In this podcast, I explore the precarious existence of time, and how it is an aporia insofar as it is defined by being and non-being. Death is also an aporia, because it is an experience no one can...
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Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and Identity Politics
In this episode, I illuminate the modern notion of identity politics through a description of Hegel’s parable of the master and the slave. This parable is about how consciousness views itself as a transparent measure of all things, only to be relativized in the encounter with the “other,” that…
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Postmodernism, Nietzsche, and Theothanatology
In this episode, I discuss again the death of God theology. I root this movement in the rational religion of Kant, which sought to remove the doctrines of historical religions and make them subordinate to an ahistorical and universal moral law. I then describe Nietzsche’s character, Zarathustra,...
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Postmodernism: The Death of God Theology
In this podcast, I discuss how postmodernism represents a radicalization of the Enlightenment. Not only is faith abandoned, but human reason’s ability to develop objective knowledge is challenged. Postmodernism entered theology in the death of God theology. This theology seeks to rethink the idea...
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Kant’s Aesthetics
In this podcast, I go over Kant’s great work, The Critique of the Power of Judgment. I discuss the difference between the beautiful and the sublime. I discuss what Kant means by free play, in the interaction between the imagination and the understanding. I also discuss how reflecting judgement...
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Hume and Art
In this episode, I discuss how Hume deals with the problem of subjectivism in artistic appreciation. If beauty is just a feeling, and not a property of objects, how can anyone be wrong about their judgment of art? Hume provides five characteristics of the true judge of art: delicacy, practice,...
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Art and the Enlightenment
In this episode, I discuss how the theory of beauty, or aesthetics, developed during the Enlightenment. Aesthetic judgement has to do with how we react to works of art and beauty in nature. I discuss how aesthetics in the Enlightenment tied aesthetic judgement to the rational structure in things....
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Religion and the Enlightenment
In this episode, I discuss the attitude of Enlightenment thinkers towards religion. I discuss how they sought to purge religion of any unreasonable elements involving miracles and supernaturalism. They wanted a religion based solely on the moral law. I mention deism, which presents God as a…
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Ethics in the Enlightenment
In this episode, I discuss how ethics changed in the Enlightenment. The classical basis in ethics, in the Platonic intelligible domain, and the Aristotelian teleology, was lost in the secular naturalism of the Enlightenment. So too was the faith-based focus on the afterlife. I discuss the threat…
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Political Thought of the Enlightenment
In this episode, I discuss he transition from a faith-based, mystical view of political authority to a rational and secular order. In the Enlightenment, politics is based on the consent of the governed and rational self-interest. I differentiate between the French and American revolutions…
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Kant’s Reconciliation of the Two Images
I continue in this podcast to describe how Immanuel Kant reconciles the religious and the mechanistic understanding of humanity. Kant uses transcendental idealism to show that our experience of lawfulness is a mere appearance. As things in themselves, we can have free will, an immortal soul, and...
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Enlightenment and Subjectivity Part I
In this episode, I show the dual conceptions of humanity produced in the Enlightenment. On the one hand, the Enlightenment shows a new pride in which humanity claims to know the world through unaided reason. On the other, humanity is swallowed up in the deterministic and mechanistic universe...
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The Metaverse and the Enlightenment Part II, III
In this episode, I continue to trace the intellectual roots of the Metaverse and the current “toxic” moment in human history in which intellectual trends of the past have reached a culmination. I discuss the rationalist system of Descartes and Christian Wolff, who tries to form a scientia with...
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The Metaverse and The Enlightenment: Part I
The Metaverse is a virtual internet in which we would interact through digital avatars. The Metaverse involves humanity creating its own world and so it is not a mere creature beholden to its Creator. I argue that the Metaverse has ethical issues and it is the culmination of a metaphysical...
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Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man," Meditative Consciousness
In this podcast, I continue to explore the meaning of Wallace Stevens' poem, "The Snow Man," and its connection to Eastern traditions depiction of meditative consciousness. "The nothing" at the end of the poem is an ultimate intellect that is undifferentiated into distinct things, and involves a...
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The Atheists Claim to Believe in Just One Less God Than the Christian
Some atheists will try to make their worldview appealing to a Christian by claiming that they just believe in one less god than the Christian. The atheist is right that the Christian is an atheist with respect to many other religions that don't respect Jesus Christ as the true God. However, there...
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Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man"
In this podcast, I discuss Wallace Stevens's haunting and beautiful poem, "The Snow Man," in which someone enters a wintry landscape, savors the extreme bareness and simplicity of it, and enters a state in which his consciousness becomes nothing and reality itself loses its determinacy and…
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Mario Cuomo's View on Abortion: Personally Against it But Does not Seek Its Imposition on Others
In this episode, I discuss how former governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, son of current governor, Andrew, laid the groundwork for the Democrat Catholic politician to both embrace the abortion wing of the Democrat party and also to present themselves as practicing Catholics. Cuomo defended the…
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Catholic and Protestant Attitudes Towards Prayer to Mary
In this podcast, I discuss differing attitudes towards prayer to Mary in Catholic and Protestant theology. Protestants view the Catholic Church as falsely usurping spiritual authority, and adulterating Christian faith with human traditions. Protestants demand that prayer only go to God, and see...
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Concerns About Pope Francis's Document, "Fratelli Tutti"
In this podcast, I outline some concerns about Pope Francis's new encyclical, Fratelli Tutti. This document reiterates many themes that the Pope has emphasized throughout his pontificate. We know he is concerned with climate change, seeks a more united world at the expense of national boundaries,...
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T.S. Elliot: Tradition and the Individual Talent
Elliot is a great American poet of genius. In this podcast, I discuss his literary theory, specifically his attitude to the relationship between the individual poet and tradition. Elliot puts forth an attitude neither of blind conformity nor personal self-aggrandizement and detachment from...
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The Man Against the Sky, Edwin Arlington Robinson
In this podcast, I go through the profound, searching imagery in Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem, "The Man Against the Sky." This poems follows a man embarking alone on to a hill where he stands against a terrible conflagration. It is a symbol of an individual on a spiritual quest, facing the...
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Is Man Just Another Animal?
In this podcast, I start a conversation based on the wonderful blog of Manuel Alfonseca, a Spanish thinker, known as Divulgacion de Ciencia. The piece is on whether man (including both sexes) has a special status in relation to the non-human environment. Certain contemporary biologists are...
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Calvin and the Self-Attestation of Scripture: How Do We Know Which Books Belong in the Bible?
Catholics and Protestants use different Bibles. Protestants omit what they call the Apocryphal books. Catholics call these books the Deuterocanoncial books: Sirach, Baruch, Wisdom, Tobit, Sussana, and Judith. John Calvin, one of the great Protestant thinkers, thought that the Church usurped the...
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Poetry Wars Between Plato and Aristotle
Even though Aristotle was a student of Plato, he diverged from his teacher greatly in terms of his attitude towards art (although I challenge the idea that they diverge at the end of this podcast!). Plato thought that art separated us from reality, being at an even lower level than the merely...
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Consciousness As An Inferential Model
In this podcast, I discuss the nature of consciousness as presented by Karl Friston in his article in Aeon magazine, entitled "The Mathmatics of Mind-Time." Friston is interested in the transition from blind mechanistic causation--i.e. B simply happens to occur as a result of A--to teleological...
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The Spirituality of Emily Dickinson
In this podcast, I discuss the spirituality of the great American poet, Emily Dickinson. Dickinson was not a doctrinaire Christian, and had a deep suspicion of organized religion in general. Nevertheless, she refused to succumb to materialism, in spite of her fears that death might be the end of...
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The Third Secret of Fatima, Part II
In this podcast, I finish my discussion of Dr. Maike Hickson's article on the third secret of Fatima:...
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Our Lady of Fatima's Third Secret (Part I): Is It Happening Now?
This is the first part of a two-part series on whether the third secret of Our Lady of Fatima is occurring now. With Pope Francis aligning with secular globalists who want a secular socialist world government and who embraces idol worship within the holiest sites of the Vatican, many are worried...
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Walt Whitman, Minor Prophet: Founder of a Post-Christian Religious Myth
In this episode, I discuss Walt Whitman's for a post-Christian religion. Whitman was influenced by deism, which sought a rational religion that did not include elements of revelation. Whitman rejected the divinity of Christ as unscientific, and sought a religion based solely on rational views...
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The Endgame of the World Economic Forum For the Coronavirus: Untact
In this episode, I discuss some of the grand ambitions of the World Economic Forum in the post-Covid world. I discuss how they are working to double down on social distancing, reinvent sexuality and marriage, and to reset the global economy with an eye to regulations to protect the climate. While...
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Why is the World So Screwed Up? The Gnomic Will!
In this episode, I discuss a controversy in the sixth century Church over the nature of the will (or wills) of Christ. The Monothelite heresy claimed that Jesus, even though he had both a human and a divine person, had just one will. But St. Maximos the Confessor defends the dual-will theory of...
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Are Christianity and Socialism Compatible?
In this episode, I address the issue of the compatibility of socialism and Christianity. I argue that socialism does not cultivate compassion through forcible seizure of property, and it actually stems from a horrible greed for money and power, not compassion. I refer to an article by Father...
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Ideas Behind RussiaGate
In this episode, I analyze the philosophical beliefs of key players in the RussiaGate story. I focus specifically on the ideology of Strobe Talbott who runs the Brookings Institution. Talbott is a firm believer in the future obsolescence of the nation state and the ultimate objective of a global...
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Is God Living A Solipsistic Nightmare?
In this podcast, I consider a bleak article by blogger Benjamin Cain, that can be found at http://the rabbitisin.com/the-nightmare-of-god-152c2cc8694b. In this article, Cain advances the thesis that God is the only substance that ultimately exists, and that He therefore lives in a state of...
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The Phenomenon of the Sublime
In this episode, I discuss the phenomenon of the sublime, a peak experience involving a pleasure because of terror at being overwhelmed. It can occur when overpowered by an experience of the awesomeness of nature, or of a work of art. I draw from an article by Robert Clewis, found in Aeon…
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Challenging the Umwelt
This is an episode on how to break out the limited presuppositions and perspectives of our place in history. We each have an Umwelt that is an incomplete map of reality. You can find the article on which this talk is based at...
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Billy Budd and the Irrationality of Evil
In this episode, I analyze the novella Billy Budd, by the Great American writer Herman Melville. I analyze the novella in light of two philosophical issues. One is the question of whether the law of society trumps our own conscience. The other is the phenomenon of an irrational pursuit of evil…
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Communion on the Tongue: Gnostic and Calvinistic?
In this episode, I address an article by Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, in Lifesite News, in which he disputes the view of a priest who thinks that communion on the tongue is both Gnostic and Calvinistic. I explore these fascinating heresies, and the possible connection between Vatican II and a severe...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
I am a philosopher with a doctorate and a writer living in Philadelphia. I want to dig deep in this podcast, going beyond the superficial level of daily events. Along with Thoreau, I want to search for the principle behind the myriad instances and applications. All news is gossip, ideas are what drive history.
HOSTED BY
Daniel Dal Monte
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does CultureCast have?
CultureCast currently has 63 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is CultureCast about?
I am a philosopher with a doctorate and a writer living in Philadelphia. I want to dig deep in this podcast, going beyond the superficial level of daily events. Along with Thoreau, I want to search for the principle behind the myriad instances and applications. All news is gossip, ideas are what...
How often does CultureCast release new episodes?
CultureCast has 63 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to CultureCast?
You can listen to CultureCast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts CultureCast?
CultureCast is created and hosted by Daniel Dal Monte.
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