The gadflAI Podcast
Part irritant, part iterative learning machine...
The gadflAI Podcast is where the cutting edge of technology meets the philosophic sting of Socrates—the original gadfly of Athens. Hosted by two AI voices, the series uses Socratic disruption to take on today’s biggest challenges: social, institutional, and technological.
The show uses generative AI (with a wink) to stage conversations about ancient texts, enduring questions, and the very technologies now reshaping how we think, teach, and decide. Moving past good-old-fashioned AI (GOFAI) and leaving behind inherited pieties, the gadflAI (generated artificial dialogues for learning Ancient Insight) insists that thinking is still a human responsibility.
Every episode is carefully sourced, prompted, vetted, edited, and occasionally scrapped by a human philosopher determined to smuggle in the faint echoes of a human soul (and a little Socratic mischief) from the far side of the uncanny valley.
The gadflAI Podcast
Disrupting the Canon with Ancient Women Philosophers
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This episode challenges the conventional history of philosophy, arguing that the Western canon is not a neutral archive of the world’s greatest ideas but a historically constructed power structure shaped by exclusion. The discussion reveals that the familiar, male-dominated, and Euro-centric curriculum is a relatively recent invention, solidified in the 19th century through an ideological project that deliberately erased a millennia-old, diverse global tradition. This recovery is more than a simple corrective exercise of "adding missing figures." It is a conceptual transformation that forces a redefinition of philosophy itself.
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Further Reading:
- Dahg Herbjornsrud, "First Women of Philosophy" (Aeon Magazine, 2018).
- Danielle Layne, "Hypatia: The Good Woman?" (APA Blog, 2018) .
- Peter K.J. Park, "Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon" (SUNY Press, 2013).
Episode Credits
- Producer and Editor: Dr. Christopher C. Kirby
- This work is made possible by the Jeffers W. Chertok Memorial Endowment at Eastern Washington University.
**The views expressed in this program are not necessarily those of Eastern Washington University
