Theoryish

Hegel’s short essay “Who Thinks Abstractly?” (1808) argues that “abstract thinking” is something the ‘uneducated’ partake in, not the educated. Through a string of vivid scenes – a crowd sneering at a condemned murderer, an old market woman reducing a rival to a single insult, a servant reduced to nothing but his function – Hegel shows how flattening a person into one label (“just a murderer,” “just a servant”) is itself the crude, abstract move, while genuine thought holds a person’s full, contradictory concreteness together.  
In this episode of Theoryish, we work through Hegel’s essay, unpacking why he insists thinking concretely is harder than it sounds; what his examples reveal about class, judgment, and moral condemnation, and why this brief, almost comic, piece has become one of the most quoted entry points into Hegelian thought. Along the way, we ask what “abstraction” means for Hegel versus how we use the word today, and why an essay about a hanged man and some rotten eggs still has something to say about how we categorize each other now.  
Sources and Media 
You kind find all source material discussed in the episode here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SrRXq57UaEje1zPYSi2evh_cAsy36PCyyvqZCt3-u84/edit?usp=sharing 
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You can get in touch with us via our email: theoryishpodcast@gmail.com 
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We are on Twitter  and Instagram at theoryish_pod | Facebook at theoryishpod 
Music 
My Tiny Love by Soundroll

In 1910, architect Adolf Loos stood before a Viennese audience and declared ornament a crime, a moral failing, a symptom of degeneracy and a drag on cultural progress. “Ornament and Crime” remains one of modernism’s founding manifestos, the text that helped strip architecture down to clean lines and bare surfaces. This set the tone, for better or for worse, for everything from the Bauhaus to the glass towers of today.  
This week on Theoryish, we’re joined by Dr. Matthew Bliss to dig into Loos essay, thinking about what it argues, why he reached for the language of crime and degeneracy to make an aesthetic point, and how his comparisons to “primitive” tattooing reveal the racial and evolutionary assumptions baked into his theory of progress.  
We also confront the uncomfortable question that shadows any serious engagement with Loos: he was a convicted pedophile, and that fact sits uneasily – impossible to ignore, difficult to reconcile – alongside his outsized influence on modern design. What do we do with a foundational text when its author’s life implicates him in real harm to child?  
It’s a conversation about ornament, morality, empire, and the limits of seperating the art from the artist. 
Content note: This episode includes discussion of child sexual abuse in the context of Adolf Loo’s biography. Listener discretion advised.  
Sources and Media 
You kind find all source material discussed in the episode here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zkJBZYKU5COfEwbDmJ17-gUiZf7-4O7iiyRoIJP2yWk/edit?usp=sharing  
Contact Us 
You can get in touch with us via our email: theoryishpodcast@gmail.com 
Socials 
We are on Twitter  and Instagram at theoryish_pod | Facebook at theoryishpod 
Music 
My Tiny Love by Soundroll

Hello all! We have an incredible episode for you today. In this episode of Theoryish, we’re joined by Akane Kanai, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, to discuss her new book The New Politics of Online Feminism. Drawing on interviews with young feminists in Australia, Kanai’s research moves past familiar stories of online feminism as pure activism and resistance, instead tracing the everyday dilemmas young women face as they try to be “good” feminists in digital spaces. This is a candid, theoretically rich conversation about what feminist politics actually feels like to live inside, online, right now. 
Sources and Media 
You kind find all source material discussed in the episode here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VmgsLnSrc_y8RDgxAyCH_QRYlmPAZnp46MMoQDJNjcg/edit?usp=sharing  
Contact Us 
You can get in touch with us via our email: theoryishpodcast@gmail.com 
Socials 
We are on Twitter  and Instagram at theoryish_pod | Facebook at theoryishpod 
Music 
My Tiny Love by Soundroll

Hello all, welcome to our first video episode! This is a shorter episode that aims to explain our year long hiatus in a bit more detail.
We have a backlog of new episodes to share with you, and we look forward to sharing more theory with you soon.
Contact Us 
You can get in touch with us via our email: theoryishpodcast@gmail.com 
Socials 
We are on Twitter  and stagram at theoryish_pod | Facebook at theoryishpod 
Music 
My Tiny Love by Soundroll

Updating the trailer now that me and Paola are both doctors!
Contact Us 
You can get in touch with us via our email: ⁠theoryishpodcast@gmail.com⁠ 
Socials 
We are on ⁠Twitter⁠  and ⁠Instagram⁠ at theoryish_pod | ⁠Facebook⁠ at theoryishpod 
Music 
Food For The Soul by ⁠Soundroll⁠