cadadr: Selfie, I am wearing a coat, a hoodie, an orange beanie, a pair of round glasses. I have light skin, dark hair, dark beard (tho with natural highlights around my chin and in my moustache). Behind me a street with greenery on the one side and houses and parked cars on the others. (Default)

You may have encountered me endorsing the "Philosophize This!" podcast before, saying something along the lines of "it's a very white podcast but a good intro to the canon of philosophy as it would be taught in universities, thus useful to go thru".

I retract that endorsement because for the second time I notice the host talking about a philosopher who has deeply fascist and Nazi roots, without mentioning these facts. First it was Heidegger, who he talked about in multiple episodes and only ever mentioned the Naziness in the end. Recently I noticed the same repeated with the episodes on Emil Cioran, whose interactions with fascists and Nazis was never mentioned. I only learned about it when I decided to read the wiki page on the guy.

The most important fact about a nazi-fascist philospher is that he's a nazi-fascist philosopher. No amount of contributions to anything neutralises, overshadows, or excuses that. I thus can't recommend a podcast which is aimed at people who don't know much about these people's lives, especially lesser known ones like Cioran, talking about them without mentioning their ties to these "movements".

If you know about 20th century European history, you probably can tell from the ideas and historical clues that, oh, this guy probably was a Nazi, but that relies on the listener looking for it (and I've been looking for it since the Heidegger episode), and is knowledgeable enough, as the host doesn't mention when these philosophers were born, which years they were active in, or when they died.

I don't know if the host has sympathies or if he has bought into some very nonsensical and harmful interpretation of separating the art from the artist, so to speak, but honestly I don't really care, it's irresponsible either way to not mention this.

April 2025

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