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A Million Little Gods: A podcast on the consolation of uncertainty. It's about being of two—or more—minds about things and being okay with that. Hosted by Aaron Gowen of the Institute for English and American Studies at the University of Hamburg. amillionlittlegods.comThemes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ philosophy of uncertainty and selfhood • race as social/scientific category • natural kinds, language, categorization • statistics, Bayesian modeling, machine learning • science skepticism, ethics, moral judgment • religion vs modernity • political history, ideologyThis podcast is an essayistic, often interview-driven exploration of how people make sense of the world when categories, values, and “facts” don’t line up neatly. Across its seasons (“Books”), it returns to foundational questions in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, linguistics, and cultural criticism: what it means to be a self over time, what counts as scientific explanation, and how concepts become real in social life even when their boundaries are unstable.
A major through-line is uncertainty as a condition to be examined rather than resolved. Conversations and audio essays probe how knowledge is built—from perception and consciousness, to logic and evidence, to statistical inference and machine learning—and how those tools shape (and sometimes distort) what we think we can say about human beings. The show repeatedly focuses on classification: natural kinds versus human-made kinds, the power of labels, and the ways inherited concepts can persist even as moral and empirical standards change.
Race is treated as a central case study, approached through genetics, history, philosophy, and the lived experience of Black Americans, with attention to the legacy of eugenics and the difficulty of separating biological variation from cultural taxonomies. Other strands move between moral judgment and art, the sources of ethical evaluation, and the tension between materialist and religious-metaphysical accounts of reality, sometimes framed through intellectual history (e.g., debates around Enlightenment empiricism, Marx, Hegel, and Thomism) and political history.
The tone blends academic analysis with literary narration and sound design, aiming to use language and audio form as part of the inquiry itself.
