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Hosted by Jeffrey Howard, editor-in-chief of Erraticus, Damn the Absolute! is a show about our relationship to ideas.Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ Pragmatist philosophy of truth, language, inquiry • Democracy, polarization, trust, uncertainty, collective trauma • Race, racism, beloved community • Science and mind: metaphor, narrative naturalism • Ethics, spirituality: Buddhism, Stoicism, Levinas • Commons, localism, climate, agriculture, educationThis podcast explores how people relate to ideas, with an emphasis on resisting intellectual “absolutes” that can block inquiry. Conversations are largely rooted in pragmatist and adjacent traditions, treating beliefs, language, and theories as tools to be tested in lived experience rather than as final representations of reality. Across the episodes, the host interviews philosophers, scholars, and practitioners about how truth claims form, how disagreement persists, and how communities can deliberate and act amid uncertainty, pluralism, and changing social conditions.
A recurring thread is the role ideas play in democratic life: how polarization and distrust develop, what public reasoning and deliberation can look like, and how political communities might process collective trauma and historical catastrophe. The show frequently connects philosophical debates to concrete issues in American society, including racism, economic injustice, historical memory, education, and the health of democratic institutions. It also examines moral and spiritual orientations—such as Buddhist and Stoic approaches to suffering and character—alongside questions about responsibility to others.
The podcast often moves between theory and practice, engaging topics like scientific knowledge and metaphor, the human sciences and interpretation, and contemporary intellectual movements beyond postmodernism. It also addresses ecological and place-based concerns, including climate change responses, food systems and subsistence agriculture, the commons as an alternative to market/state management, and how local scale and placemaking shape community wellbeing. Throughout, the unifying focus is on fallibilism, humility, and building better ways of living together without treating any single framework as unquestionable.
