Welcome back to IN THE RAW, my weekly podcast, where I’m joined by a wide array of the most interesting people on the internet today. Before I introduce my guest, I’d like to remind you that, until the end of the month, you can get 15% off a full year’s subscription by clicking the red button below:
This week we have a tremendous guest—a returning guest—Athenian Stranger. He appeared way back on IN THE RAW 5, where we talked about the Western university and what has gone so wrong—and, just as importantly, what we can do to try and fix it. Athenian has a deep academic background in philosophy, although he’s left that world behind, largely due to frustration at the intellectual constraints of university life.
Athenian works tirelessly to promote philosophical discussion on Twitter, regularly hosting Twitter Spaces to discuss great works of philosophy and literature, and he’s also created athenscorner.com as an online library of his lectures and discussions, with written material, for anybody looking to build their knowledge of philosophy and literature. There are lectures on pre-Socratic philosophers like Heraclitus, later Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, and modern philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as lectures on Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, HP Lovecraft and even topics like the importance of lifting weights. Today, on IN THE RAW 27, it’s Nietzsche we’re talking about: his enduring importance, his use and misuse by the online right, and much more. It was a fascinating conversation.
You may also have read his fantastic essay in MAN’S WORLD Issue Eleven about the Tom Hardy film Warrior and how this fight film, which might easily be dismissed as unsophisticated and unthinking, actually explores important philosophical and existential themes from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The essay was one of the featured essays for the issue and received a huge amount of positive feedback from readers. Athenian will be writing for the magazine again soon!
Follow Athenian on Twitter @athens_stranger.
IN THE RAW 27: Athenian Stranger II