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What Is X?

“What Is X?” has been described as “a cross between a Platonic dialogue and ‘The Price Is Right.’” It combines dialectical inquiry of the sort perfected by Socrates and his interlocutors with a distinctly ludic spirit. Here’s how it works: For each episode, host Justin E. H. Smith invites on a guest distinguished in their field (or occasionally a “regular” person who really likes to talk). Smith asks the guest to answer a question of the form “What is X?” (for example, “What is beauty?” “What is nature?” “What are dreams?”), after which the two partners in dialogue undertake a Socratic inquiry into the nature of X, in search of a definition that satisfies both of them. There are three possible outcomes: agreement, disagreement, and aporia (Greek for “dead end”), each with its own sound effect: if we arrive at agreement, a church bell will chime; disagreement is signaled by a bleating goat; if aporia is the best we can do, we will hear naught but a gust of wind. Rigorous but freewheeling, fun and serious at once, accessibly highbrow, these conversations model rational inquiry in a new way, providing answers for truth-seekers... or perhaps just more questions. /// Host: Justin E.H. Smith (justinehsmith.substack.com) /// Presented by The Point Magazine (thepointmag.com)

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What Is X?

What Is Authorship? | Jonathan Egid

June 14, 2022 • Justin E.H. Smith | The Point Magazine • Season 2 • Episode 8

What counts as authorship? Why does it matter? Should we stop putting our names on what we write and sign off instead, as early scribes preferred to do, as nothing more than humble servants of God? In this episode, Justin E.H. Smith thinks through these questions with Jonathan Egid, writer and doctoral student in comparative literature at King’s College London. The two consider the Hatäta Walda Heywat—which, depending on who you ask, is either a seventeenth-century philosophical treatise by little-known Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob, or a forgery composed in the nineteenth century by the Italian monk who claimed to have discovered it. Was Zera Yacob a real person? If the monk did write the Hatäta, why would he choose to renounce his authorship, given how much work it would have taken? Smith and Egid discuss the motives behind self-effacement and self-promotion, the postmodernist idea of the death of the author, and why we keep reading Homer when we don’t know if he even existed. What does this all mean, they ask, for issues of representation and efforts to meaningfully diversify the philosophical canon?