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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):
➤ philosophical uncertainty, selfhood, consciousness • race as social/scientific category; genetics, eugenics, natural kinds • statistics, Bayesian modeling, machine learning • linguistics and meaning • moral judgment in culture • religion, Thomism • political history (Argentina, Perón)This podcast is a long-form, essayistic exploration of how people make sense of the world when certainty is unavailable or undesirable. Across seasons framed as “books,” it returns to recurring questions about what counts as a real “thing”—a self, a category, a moral judgment, a scientific claim—and how those things are produced, defended, revised, or abandoned over time.
A major thread is philosophy of mind and selfhood, including debates about consciousness, personal identity, narrative selves, and the relationship between brain, experience, and belief. Another central theme is the status of race as a scientific and social category: how concepts become institutionalized, how genetics and history interact with inherited cultural labels, and whether “race” can be used responsibly in domains like medicine or public policy. These discussions often draw on linguistics and the philosophy of language, treating words and classifications as tools that shape perception and social reality.
The show also devotes sustained attention to science and its boundaries—what makes reasoning scientific, how values and rhetoric enter inquiry, and how statistical modeling, machine learning, and probabilistic thinking influence what we think we know. Interviews with scholars, journalists, and practitioners are mixed with reflective narration and experiments in audio form.
More recent material folds these concerns into politically and historically oriented storytelling, using episodes that range across ideology, labor, religion, and modernity—engaging figures and ideas associated with Marx, Hegel, Thomism, empiricism, and state power—while keeping the emphasis on ambiguity, competing frameworks, and the costs of reductionism.
