Passages – Details, episodes & analysis

While a lot has changed since 1867, something that stands the test of time in Karl Marx’s Capital is its aspiration to comprehensively understand the world by bringing to bear every intellectual and literary tool available. 

Perhaps fitting then that, on one present-day account, Marx structured his masterpiece with the inspiration of an equally grand thinker more than 500 years his predecessor.

This is a conversation with McGill political theorist William Clare Roberts about Marx’s theoretical ambition and his apparent debt to Dante. Will’s book is Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a 20th century philosopher whose work weaves readers back into the fabric of their lives. In this conversation, Dave Ward immerses the listener in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception in just the way that Merleau-Ponty re-immerses the mind in the world.

Dave Ward is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.

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One of the powers of language is to permit us to conceptually parse the world with significant degrees of precision. This conversation with humour writer Eli Burnstein shows how our ability to distinguish is not just of practical significance but also a major source of joy and wonder.

Eli Burnstein’s book is Dictionary of Fine Distinctions.

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Plato’s Symposium is a dialogue about members of a community sharing what they know across differences, disruptions and decades.

This conversation with Hilary Ilkay works through the narrative and philosophy of Symposium, illuminating along the way the enduring connection between learning and community.

Hilary Ilkay is a Senior Fellow in the Foundation Year Programme at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

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Solitude is often invisible to us, but this conversation with Ron Haflidson brings to light the internal dynamics of solitude and some of the ways that we all can cultivate and benefit from solitude in our own lives.

Ron Haflidson’s book is On Solitude, Conscience, Love and Our Inner and Outer Lives.

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For Andrew Coyne, Canadian democracy has become more ceremony than substance. His 2025 book The Crisis of Canadian Democracy maps the imbalances between government and Parliament, leaders and caucus, prime ministers and cabinets. And he shows the fundamental risks posed by these asymmetries, particularly as declining legitimacy diminishes action and initiative, at a moment when the country badly needs each.

Andrew Coyne writes for the Globe and Mail.

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Richard Kearney is keenly aware of the power and appeal of vision, but shows that it’s rather touch that we find at the heart of the senses, and the heart of philosophy.

Kearney’s work is profoundly ethical, and puts an emphasis on how living well entails tactful touching, with the demand that we permit ourselves to be touched even as we touch.

Richard Kearney is Charles Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College, and the author of numerous books, including Touch: Recovering our Most Vital Sense.

The final passage that Kearney shares in this episode is from the conclusion of his novel Salvage.

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Human beings are forever drawn to simplify in thought what it is that makes us individuals. But there is an alternative, one that Shannon Hoff articulates in her forthcoming book How to Read Hegel Now. 

Shannon Hoff is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University. She is author of The Laws of the Spirit: A Hegelian Theory of Justice, and has published in the areas of political philosophy, feminism, and the tradition of European philosophy more broadly.

This episode concludes with a portion of the song “Clarissa in the Mirror,” written and performed by Hoff, with instrumental credits to Tania Gill and Don Scott.
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If we dig deeply into and think richly about any particular topic, we usually unearth a perspective much wider than our planned excavation.

Herodotus wrote in the fifth century BCE about the invasion of mainland Greece by Xerxes and the Persian Empire. But though he takes that conflict as focal point, his vision unfolds in all directions. 

James Romm is the author of numerous books about the ancient Greek and Roman world, including his forthcoming Plato and the Tyrant. Of note for this conversation and amongst other works on Herodotus, Romm edited and introduced Pamela Mensch's translation of the Histories, included Herodotus in his co-edited collection The Greek Histories, and wrote a book of his own on the Histories simply titled Herodotus. James Romm is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics and Director of the Classical Studies Program at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

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With winter solstice upon us, here's some holiday reading connecting up to themes from across this season of Passages.

Depending on edition, this abridgement is of either chapter 34 or 35 of Herman Melville's Moby Dick: "The Mast-Head."

The show will be back with new episodes in the new year.