Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world.
Peter Godfrey-Smith knows his cephalopods. His truly capacious career includes books such as Theory and Reality (2003; 2nd edition in 2020), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009) Metazoa and most recently Living on Earth (John raves about that book here.)
Ivan Kreilkamp, Indiana University English professor and no stranger to Recall This Book, is the author of two books on Victorian literature and one about Jennifer Egan. For this episode of Recall This Story, Ivan reads Sylvia Townsend Warner‘s “Foxcastle. It was first published in The New Yorker in 1975 and became the final story in her final book, Kingdoms of Elfin.
In his marvelous new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness, David Peña-Guzmán (SF State as well as the lovely philosophical podcast Overthink) offers up something new in animal studies–“a philosophical interpretation of biological subjectivity.” Although we share no linguistic schema with animals there is lots more evidence than just You Tube (octopuses, dogs, signing chimpanzees, brain scans of dreaming birds etc) to suggest oneiric behaviors and underlying mental states occur all over the animal kingdom. Here is what it means that we are not alone in our dreams…
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