Boreas Podcast
Mimetic theory takes on everything.
Boreas Podcast
Latest Episodes
Explaining Everything and Nothing (Part V)
The fifth and final part of the "Metaphysics Scandal" series asks what happened after Scholasticism broke. The answer is two roads — empiricism and rationalism — that look like opposites but in the extreme arrive at the same destination: a worl...
Mimesis and Scholasticism (Part IV)
Parts I through III traced mimesis in Ancient Greek philosophy, René Girard's mimetic theory, the Scripture and the Church Fathers. Here in Part IV, we arrive at Medieval Scholasticism. It is said to have baptized Aristotle. With that, it also ...
Eden and the Mimetic Crisis (Part III)
Parts I and II covered the role of imitation in philosophy: essential, but incomplete. In this Part III we compare the account of imitation in René Girard's mimetic theory to the scriptural narrative of the Fall.We are made to imitate: S...
Role Models and Philosophers (Part II)
Part 2 after René Girard and the Philosophers. Girard argued that Plato and the philosophers who followed him sidelined imitation — neglecting the rivalrous, appropriative mimesis that drives human conflict. Plato did quiet over the da...
René Girard and the Philosophers (Part I)
While Plato was teaching his students to contemplate the eternal forms, the theatre portrayed women of Thebes tearing a king apart with their bare hands. I talk about how the founding gesture of philosophy was walking away in silence from archa...