Site • RSS • Apple PodcastsDescription (podcaster-provided):
A Million Little Gods: A podcast on the consolation of uncertainty. It's about being of two—or more—minds about things and being okay with that. Hosted by Aaron Gowen of the Institute for English and American Studies at the University of Hamburg. amillionlittlegods.comThemes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ Philosophy, uncertainty, selfhood, consciousness • Race as social construct; genetics, eugenics, data, Bayesian stats, machine learning • Language/linguistics, natural kinds, epistemology • Politics, history, ideology, religion—Marx, Hegel, Aquinas, Perón-era Argentina • Moral judgment in culture/artThis podcast is an essayistic, often literary-leaning exploration of how people build meaning amid uncertainty, and how they live with conflicting interpretations of the world. Across its seasons, it blends philosophy, cultural criticism, linguistics, and the history of ideas, using interviews with scholars and writers alongside narration that treats audio as a creative medium—closer at times to radio play, sound collage, or narrated longform than to a conventional talk show.
A recurring concern is how categories come to feel “real.” The podcast examines what it means for something to count as a thing, how “kinds” are formed, and how language and concepts shape perception. This frames extended engagement with race as both a cultural inheritance and a contested object of scientific inquiry. Discussions draw on philosophy of science, genetics, statistics, and the social experience of racialization, including questions about whether race has an essence, whether multiple practical concepts can coexist, and what happens when scientific methods like Bayesian inference, machine learning, and statistical modeling are asked to answer human questions.
Another thread looks at the self and consciousness: whether personhood is best understood through narrative identity, brain-based explanations, religious or communal accounts, or more counterintuitive positions in philosophy of mind. The show also returns to the problem of moral judgment—how evaluations shift over time, what sources they draw on, and whether it’s possible to separate artistic achievement from ethical appraisal.
Later material expands into political and intellectual history, moving through debates between materialist and idealist accounts of human life and social change, and tracing tensions among religion, Enlightenment empiricism, and modern ideologies. Throughout, the podcast favors ambivalence over closure, treating disagreement, competing frameworks, and the limits of explanation as central features of inquiry rather than obstacles to be eliminated.
