You can be of two—or more—minds about things . . . and be okay with it.
A Million Little Gods premiered in 2015, and though it‘s changed over time, it has had one consistent guiding principle: You’re better off embracing uncertainty—not because things are unknowable, but because things that are true are often also mutually contradictory. The Romantic poet John Keats thought embracing uncertainty, which he called the “negative capability,” was ennobling. He believed, however, you should do it “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Here at the podcast, we’re more inclined to follow Kant and lean into fact and reason until we find the true antinomies.
In October 2018, A Million Little Gods relaunched with co-host Ben Feddersen and student producers from the English and American Studies department of the University of Hamburg, Germany. In 2022, Ben stepped back regular co-hosting duties to pursue a career evangelizing solid-state batteries for a better future. But he’ll still pop in now and then.
Though we have the occasional Special Episode of the podcast with guests , the show is otherwise divided into seasons that we call books:
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What is this thing in the world that seems so urgent to each of us? Why do we care about our subjective experiences? Why do we care what other people think of us? Why do we have goals? How much deference do we owe the world outside our wills?
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How deep do the categories we use to navigate the world go? Are they more transient than we normally think? Does the reality of natural things depend on how we regard them? When people talk about things as social constructs, is that a dismissal?
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What’s the difference between how machine-learning tools make categories and the way we do it? If our subconsciouses—both individual and collective—learn from the past, making ad hoc categories based on contingencies, are those categories the origin of basically all of the things that populate the world? We finally unpack just how difficult it is to justify using our cultural inheritance of "race" to talk about our genetic inheritance.
AARON GOWEN
Aaron is the creator, producer, and co-host of A Million Little Gods. He is a lecturer in Applied Linguistics and English Language Practice at the University of Hamburg. In past lives he has been a textbook editor, a teacher, and a translator. He is also a proud father and fastidious separator of trash, recyclables, and compost, which in Germany makes him completely unexceptional.
Ben Feddersen
Ben was producer and co-host of A Million Little Gods ftom 2018 to 2022. He has been a lecturer in the English language at the University of Hamburg since 2017. He was previously at the University of Passau for two years. He earned his B.A. in philosophy from Indiana University and his M.A. in political science from George Mason University in 2013, before deciding to pursue a career teaching a subject that students are actually interested in.