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 Civil Obedience with Modern Gadflies
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**PLEASE NOTE** This episode was produced in December 2025, prior to recent acts of violence in the United States. Its discussion of dissent is historical, philosophical and pedagogical, not a commentary on current events.
In this episode we consider the political and personal costs of philosophy through Plato’s Apology.
By examining Socrates’ trial, conviction, and refusal to escape Athens, the discussion challenges simplistic notions of civic duty and legal obedience. Socrates emerges not as a martyr to abstract principle, but as a thinker who forces his community to confront the tension between law, justice, and conscience. The episode frames Socratic dissent as a civic necessity rather than a threat, disrupting contemporary assumptions that stability requires conformity.
Sources
· Ahmadov, Anar. (2011). "When great minds don't think alike: using mock trials in teaching political thought." PS: political science & politics, 44(03), 625-628.
· Anton, J. P. (1965). "John Dewey and ancient philosophies." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 25(4), 477–499.
· Betz, J. (1980). "Dewey and Socrates." Transaction of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 16, 329–356.
· Deardorff, Michelle Donaldson, and Jilda Aliotta. (2000). "Playing Justice: The Role of Simulation in Teaching and Assessing the Teaching of Public Law." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.
· Dewey, John. The Early Works and The Later Works. Southern Illinois University Press.
· Fesmire, Steven. (2003). John Dewey & Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics. Indiana University Press.
· Kirby, Christopher. (2021). "‘Out of Order… This Whole Trial is Out of Order!’ The Defense and Jailing of Socrates." Medium.
· Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.
· Press, Gerald A. (1995). "Plato's Dialogues as Enactments." In The Third Way: New Directions in Platonic Studies.
· Randall, J.H. (1970). Plato: Dramatist of the Life of Reason. Columbia University Press.
· Smith, Elizabeth T., and Mark A. Boyer. (1996). "Designing In-Class Simulations." PS: Political Science and Politics, 29(4), 690–94.
· Spencer, Albert R. (2012) "The Dialogues as Dramatic Rehearsal: Plato’s Republic and the Moral Accounting Metaphor." In Dewey and the Ancients
· Wolz, H. (1963). "Philosophy as drama: an approach to the dialogues of Plato." International Philosophical Quarterly, 3, 236–270.
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
