Kim talks with Gina Dominick about Ursula Le Guin’s short story “Schrödinger’s Cat” and the philosophical stakes of Schrödinger’s thought experiment.

Le Guin’s story was published in her collection, The Compass Rose (Harper Collins, 1982). There are many PDFs of it scattered across the internet.

Gina mentions Jacques Derrida’s writing on “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago UP, 1981). Much the same is true of the PDF scattering here.

Gina Dominick is a medievalist, anti-capitalist rebel, and co-conspirator in the original high theory. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at NYU, who teaches high school philosophy and spent Halloween afternoon re-caulking her tub. She knows way more about Adorno than Kim does. By far.

Image: “Leo was rescued off the streets of Harlem 3.5 years ago and has lived comfortably in a town house with two humans ever since.”

Tagged : Cats / Halloween Special

Kim talks with George Gibson about Schrödinger’s cat. This cat is a thought experiment proposed by Erwin Schrödinger, and taken up in correspondence with Albert Einstein, in the 1930s.

Schrödinger’s original paper on the subject, “Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik” (Naturwissenschaften 23 no. 48 (November 1935): 807–812) doi: 10.1007/BF01491891 was translated by John D. Trimmer and published as “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics: A Translation of Schrödinger’s ‘Cat Paradox’ Paper.”  (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124, No. 5 (Oct. 1980): 323-338) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/986572>. Schrödinger presents the cat as something of a joke.

George Gibson is a professor of physics at the University of Connecticut and an excellent pianist.

Image: “Leo was rescued off the streets of Harlem 3.5 years ago and has lived comfortably in a town house with two humans ever since.”

Tagged : Cats / Halloween Special

In part one of our Halloween Special on Cats, Kim talks with John Guilliory about Montaigne’s essay “An Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Montaigne asks us: “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?”

John Guillory is a professor of English at New York University. He is a scholar of Renaissance literature, who is known for his work on why we read what we read, in Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (University of Chicago Press: 1993).

Image: “Lyra is half-seductress, half-glutton, all puss.”

Tagged : Cats / Halloween Special