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
That is, he thinks, intractable.
He thinks we have little hope of overcoming a network of problems involving climate change, perhaps first and foremost, but also habitat destruction, global political problems of various kinds that make action on the other problems especially difficult.
He thinks this impasse is a sort of thoroughgoing, large-scale, historically very unusual problem in its complexity.
He talks about that and also criticizes what he sees as a pervasive bias towards optimism.
and a civilizational faith in a myth of progress.
He thinks that we pretty much, we reliably, almost inevitably in virtue of how we've been brought up and encultured into contemporary society,
think there will be a fix.
We think there'll be a solution, even though the problems that we face are so extraordinary.
And in this first group of chapters, he argues that we have to abandon that kind of myth of progress and the bias towards optimism.
And then in the second large part of the book, he embraces, essentially, he embraces pessimism.
He tries to work out how we might live in a rational and humane way as pessimists, as people who don't think there's a way out.
The overall framework he defends he calls ethical pessimism.
There's also an afterword, but the heart of the book is that first collection of chapters in which he describes the problems as he sees them, and the second part in which he tries to outline a defensible and ethical form of pessimism.
You think that the tainter theory about complexity is really a foundation for the book then?
I guess I didn't see it that way.
I thought that was just one angle.
And if he thought that tainter was wrong in thinking that complexity eventually overcomes societies in this particular way, if tainter was wrong, it wouldn't mean that that much was different in Scranton's view.
You see the tainter thing as more foundational?
Close Readings · Nature in Crisis: ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer · 28 Jun 2026
podcast
Welcome to another episode of Nature in Crisis, a London Review of Books podcast.
Your hosts are me, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney, though currently in the forests of North Carolina, near Pilot Mountain.
Showing 61–80 of 184 · page 4 of 10
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