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Podcast: Tony Talks Back: Philosophy and Literature
Episode: Philosophical Pessimism, Buddhism, and...Hope?
Description: True Detective very much helped to popularize the view of pessimism as tenable philosophical ground to the national television-viewing audience. The story of Rust Cohle is one of bleak reality almost too real to bear. Thomas Ligotti, likewise, broadcast his own philosophical pessimism to horror-savvy readers with his book “The Conspiracy Against The Human Race”. In this episode I discuss both popular accounts of pessimism and my own experience and investigations into the abyss. It’s impossible to mention the philosophy of Ligotti without mentioning his predecessor, H.P. Lovecraft, and his incomprehensible creations like Cthulhu. Perhaps the reality of exi...