What Do You Think? Episode 3: Dr. John Pauley
Oct 2, 2026 · 34 min · 9 segments
Send us Fan Mail What Do You Think? Episode 3: Dr. John Pauley Professor of Philosophy, Director…
- Speakers
- John PauleyGuest
Steve SieckHost
Oct 2, 2026 · 34 min · 9 segments
Send us Fan Mail What Do You Think? Episode 3: Dr. John Pauley Professor of Philosophy, Director…
Steve SieckHost
I want to come back to the merging of departments, just as someone who lived in academia for a while.
Yes, it's really a branch of metaphysics, which is about the nature of some particular thing.
Say, for instance, in trying to understand nature, you're actually trying to define it.
Or talking about human beings, right? What finally, ultimately is a human being? And when you're trying to figure out the kind of stuff I'm working on, The individual thing is never isolated, right? It's always in relation with other things.
So my project is really about how to understand human organization and community within nature.
So wrapping our heads around, what is the thing itself that we are defining? And so, for example, I'm looking out my window and there is a very old tree, but I don't consider it casually.
I consider it to be on the What do you call it? The city lawn part of this sidewalk.
But if there are more trees and less sidewalks, then at some point it flips over into now I'm in the wild, right? There's some magic taxonomy that we switch over into and now I am in it versus I've planted something on my otherwise completely paved area.
And that's the one I've always operated on as well until recently, where it's difficult for me to understand where nature would come to an end.
So, you know, we can we can maybe talk about humanized nature, humanized reality, and then try to figure out how that would relate to the thing that you were calling the wild thing.
Although it's very hard to find places in the world that haven't been touched by human beings.
And if you think about just walking into a forest or something, you have to remember, right, that many of the things that we do leave a mark on that forest.
I want to come back to the merging of departments, just as someone who lived in academia for a while.
Yes, it's really a branch of metaphysics, which is about the nature of some particular thing.
Say, for instance, in trying to understand nature, you're actually trying to define it.
Or talking about human beings, right? What finally, ultimately is a human being? And when you're trying to figure out the kind of stuff I'm working on, The individual thing is never isolated, right? It's always in relation with other things.
So my project is really about how to understand human organization and community within nature.
So wrapping our heads around, what is the thing itself that we are defining? And so, for example, I'm looking out my window and there is a very old tree, but I don't consider it casually.
I consider it to be on the What do you call it? The city lawn part of this sidewalk.
But if there are more trees and less sidewalks, then at some point it flips over into now I'm in the wild, right? There's some magic taxonomy that we switch over into and now I am in it versus I've planted something on my otherwise completely paved area.
And that's the one I've always operated on as well until recently, where it's difficult for me to understand where nature would come to an end.
So, you know, we can we can maybe talk about humanized nature, humanized reality, and then try to figure out how that would relate to the thing that you were calling the wild thing.
Although it's very hard to find places in the world that haven't been touched by human beings.
And if you think about just walking into a forest or something, you have to remember, right, that many of the things that we do leave a mark on that forest.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.