This one’s going to rock your world. In episode 132 of Overthink, Ellie and David dig into the topic of earth for the third part of their four-part series on the elements. They discuss everything from earthworms and carbon dating to the earth as a living being. They look to Foucault, Freud, and Husserl for their ideas on how the earth can act as a metaphor for the past. Are there limitations to thinking about the Earth as a solid substance? What are the similarities between humans and earth? And what is it that we actually mean when we talk about earth as an element? In the bonus, your hosts talk think through Heidegger’s notion of the earth as round and Western association of land with earth.

Works Discussed:

Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge
Martin Heidegger, “ The Origin of the Work of Art”
Edmund Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences
David Macauley, Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas
Thomas Nail, Theory of the Earth
James Lovelock, Gaia hypothesis
Dorian Sagan and Lynn Margulis, “God, Gaia, and Biophilia”

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