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Reasonable DoubtAuthor: Mackenzie D. Taylor
Mackenzie D. Taylor interviews academics, creatives and artists on a broad range of humanities topics monthly - on psychology, philosophy, theology and art. Language: en Genres: Philosophy, Science, Social Sciences, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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#3 - "Doppelgänger": Dr. David Bentley Hart On Dostoevsky's "The Double" and the Problem of Modern Identity
Episode 3
Sunday, 17 May, 2026
Visiting Professor David Bentley Hart zooms in with UWA Philosophy Society to deliver a dynamic, stimulating and interesting lecture on Dostoevksy's The Double. Throughout and in the following discussion we talked about AI, personal identity, Christianity and universal salvation. I speak for the class of 2026 when I say that all of us tremendously enjoyed it. Thank you David.From DBH:"Inspired by a comic--though also quite serious--article I published about a year ago at Leaves in the Wind (https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com...,) Mackenzie Taylor, on behalf of the Philosophy Club of the University of Western Australia in Perth, invited me to give a talk by Zoom on Dostoevsky's The Double and on whatever reflections the novella had occasioned in me. I delivered the first part of the original piece before taking my talk in a direction of its own. Along the way, both in my address and in the exchanges that followed, we talked about Dostoevsky's text, but also about Kafka's Metamorphosis, Nabokov's Despair, and some of my own travails in being haunted for many years by my own (online) Doppelgänger. We also discussed the age of AI, the question of artificial consciousness, Richard Dawkins's touching romance with Claudia, our shared sense of personal identity in the virtual age, cultural fragmentation, political contentions, the nature and history of nihilism, Russian Orthodoxy, and even theological universal salvation. By the way, excuse a misstatement: Christ kisses Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor, not the reverse. It was good of the club to convene on a Saturday morning (though it was still Friday night at my end) and I enjoyed the encounter immensely. I was saddened to see that my dear friend Byron the Koala was not in attendance, but he lives on the other side of the country, near Sydney, and he warned me he probably would not be able to make it. C'est la vie."
