How can we find meaning in city life? How can we imbue our lives with a significance that extends beyond the securing of our physical and material well being? This is the question that the philosopher Shane Epting takes up in his latest book, Meaning and the Metropolis: Toward an Urban Existentialism, published in 2024 by Routledge Press. Epting is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Missouri University of Science and technology. He has written extensively on issues related to city life and is the co-founder of the Philosophy of the City Research Group, an international organization of scholars engaged sophisticated philosophical analysis of all things urban. I’m very happy to have in on the podcast. Here is our conversation.

Last week, Mayor Eric Adams delivered his annual State of The City address (apparently it's in a very good state), and so I thought it fitting that we take up the matter here. But rather than take a deep dive into the details and lack thereof of the Mayor’s speech, I wanted to zoom out for a somewhat wider perspective on the condition of the city and some of the issues that it is currently facing. To do so, I invited the New York-based writer Ross Barkan to join me. Ross is not only a prolific writer, but one of tremendous breadth. He is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, authors a weekly political column for Crain’s New York Business, and his work appears frequently in New York, The Atlantic, The Nation, among other outlets. He has authored three books, among them the novel The Night Burns Bright, and a book that Publisher’s Weekly described as "an excoriating takedown" of New York’s former governor entitled The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York. He is the author of a Substack newsletter on New York and national affairs called “Political Currents by Ross Barkan.”

Discussed in this episode:

"The Zeitgeist is Changing. A Strange, Romantic Backlash to the Tech Era Looms" by Ross Barkan

"The Three Segments of American Culture," by Ross Barkan

"26 Empire State Buildings Could Fit Into New York's Empty Office Space. That's a Sign." by Edward L. Glaeser and Carlo Ratti

The long wait is over! Phi on New York is back and hopefully better than ever. The aim, as always, is to bring you conversations that take a philosophical look at the issues and ideas that shape our city and inform our lives within it. For this episode I wanted to take a look at the idea of the right to the city, an idea introduced by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in 1968, and enthusiastically adopted by many activists and organizations ever since. My guest for this episode is Margaret Cuonzo, a philosopher at Long Island University in Brooklyn, who recently took up this idea and provocatively argues that to adequately understand any such right that we can claim over the city we need to acknowledge that the city itself has rights that we need to respect. I enjoyed this conversation immensely, and hope you do as well.