Who’s afraid of zombification? Apparently not analytic philosophers. In episode 99 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk all about zombies and their unfortunate legacy in the thought experiments of academic philosophy. Their portrait as brain-eating and consciousness-lacking mobs is a far cry from their origins in the syncretic sorcery at the margins of Haitian Voodoo. This distance means that the uncanny zombie raises provocative questions about the problematic ways philosophy integrates and ap...
Hello, and welcome to Overthink, the podcast.
Where two philosophy professors sometimes tie our own weird professional debates to pop culture and history.
David Pena Guzman.
And I'm Ellie Anderson.
David, the HBO show the Last of Us, got super popular when its first season came out pretty recently, I think last year.
And this show has, I think, kind of reinvigorated the discourse around zombies.
Granted, zombies kind of never really go away in pop culture since 1968 when Night of the Living Dead came out.
We'll talk a little bit more about that later.
But this show, which in fact has a girl named Ellie as its protagonist,
I swear to God, all the young people these days are named Ellie.
It was, like, a somewhat unusual name when I was growing up,
and now everybody in Gen Z and Gen Alpha has my name,
and I'm just like this weird older person with the trendy kid's name.
I do not know what the trends are for naming, so I'll just take your word for that.
The Ellie.
The Ellies are coming for you.
Like zombies.
Exactly.
Oh, my God.
I was going there.