Peter Godfrey-Smith
speaker
184 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 24 Aug
Peter Godfrey-Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Yeah.
So here's the first paragraph of the book.
She says
If I can be called a bird watcher, my spark was a pair of burrowing owls painted on the narrow storefront gate of a shuttered real estate business on one hundred and forty fifth Street in Harlem.
That brokers single room occupancy housing for two hundred dollars a week.
So she begins with the first the first of these bird images that become a frame for the book.
And I must say th the photos that she takes herself and then discusses I think are very interesting.
I think so.
And me, Peter Godfrey-Smith, professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney.
Sure.
He's an interesting person.
He grew up in Oregon and sort of roamed as a young man.
He joined the army, served in Iraq, and after that moved into academia.
He is now an associate professor of English at Notre Dame, where he's also the founding director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative.
He's written quite a few books, including a couple of novels, I Love Oklahoma and War Porn, and various nonfiction books, including two climate-focused books that are precursors to the one we'll discuss today, a collection of essays called We're Doomed, Now What?, and another one called Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.
The book we're discussing today, Impasse, he says, differs from Learning to Die in the Anthropocene in that it is a more pessimistic book, despite the title of the earlier one.
And this really is a pessimistic book.
Let's just go through the rough structure here.
The long part one called The Broken Thread lays out the idea that global civilization has arrived not just at a problem or a network of problems, but what he calls an impasse.
It's a particular kind of problem as he sees it.
Showing 41–60 of 184 · page 3 of 10
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