The Nietzsche Podcast

Neema Parvini is well known on Youtube for his channel, Academic Agent, and for his para-academic work at the Academic Agency. He discusses a broad range of topics in political philosophy, and does not shy away from any topic, from elite theory to Marxism, from Julius Evola to Guy Debord. We discuss how he moved from literary theory to political philosophy; what politics really demands and why it is not the same as theorizing, the "take economy", or expressions of individualism; we discuss the difference between Evola & Nietzsche; and we try to come to an understanding of how it is that politics as most people experience it and understand it is fake. Join us for what I believe to be a fascinating conversation about the illusions of politics, and hopefully a step in the direction of disillusioning ourselves.
Neema's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AcademicAgent
Academic Agency: https://www.academic-agency.com/

Melanie Coughlin, a scholar whose work focuses on Nishitani and the Kyoto school, joined me for a conversation that will hopefully provide a nice conclusion to the recent focus on Buddhism. We discussed karma, the misleading nature of intentions, Nishitani's theory of affect, emptiness-as-affect, the important difference between Nietzsche & Feuerbach, and the insights of Nishitani regarding technology and the modern world. Melanie's latest article: https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/speculative-philosophy/article/doi/10.5325/jspecphil.40.3.0269/411454/Cripping-Epistemic-Justice-Yoritaka-s-Model-of?guestAccessKey=57a4823a-0672-4798-aff3-1a0d6f49f975

How did the bicameral mind emerge, and how did consciousness eventually take its place? Join me for an exploration of ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, in which Julian Jaynes traces the evidence over the centuries that suggest a disappearance of the gods and the emergence of subjectivity. The episode concludes with a brief tour of the shift to subjectivity found in the Old Testament.

What is consciousness? Julian Jaynes rejects all of the popular answers: that consciousness is thinking, reason, memory, or the capacity for learning. Nor does he think it can be accounted for as a merely accumulative development of "sentience" through evolution. In his controversial work, Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes puts forward the hypothesis that consciousness is generated out of language, and therefore that language predates consciousness. Jaynes' argument has sweeping implications for human history and civilization, and he presents evidence for his case through psychological experiments on consciousness, the neurology of schizophrenia, and through the analysis of ancient texts such as the Iliad of Homer. The shocking claim made in this book is that the Greeks of the Iliad were not conscious in the way that we are, but experienced their volition in the form of admonitory voices - actually, a communication from the right hemisphere of the brain to the left, using language as a kind of code - but which the ancients experienced as the voices of gods.

In this episode, we're going to discuss what is likely the founding text of the Zen tradition, the Laṅkāvatāra Sutra. According to some of the earliest sources on Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen in China, the "Lanka" was the teaching whose "abstruse principle" he passed down to his successor, Huike. Within the same story, Huike laments that within only a few generations, the sutra will pass into obscurity - which is exactly what has happened. Though few read this text today, during my time in Zen, I found the Lanka's philosophical presentation of the "mind only" teaching to be uniquely intriguing among all the Buddhist scriptures I'd read. Join me on this exploration of the Buddha's teaching in Lanka, including an analysis of the eight consciousness model of the mind, the concept of paravrrti, the non-reliance on either existence or non-existence, and sublime teaching that the world is nothing other than mind.
My Diagram:
https://untimely-reflections.blogspot.com/2026/09/lankavatara-sutra-my-diagram-of-eight.html