We are living through a peculiar moment in the long, complicated history of humans and mind-altering substances. After decades of prohibition and stigma, psychedelics have staged a remarkable comeback — not just in underground culture, but in university laboratories, clinical trials, and mainstream news. Researchers are exploring psilocybin and MDMA as treatments for depression and PTSD, and a growing number of philosophers are asking whether the altered states these substances produce might tell us something important about the nature of consciousness, reality, and the self. It turns out that drugs have always been philosophically interesting — but we haven’t always been willing to admit it.

What does it mean to be “sober,” and why has Western philosophy treated sobriety as a prerequisite for truth? If a drug dissolves your sense of self, is there still a philosopher in there doing philosophy — or has philosophy left the building? Is the category of “drug” even coherent, or is it an artifact of colonial trade routes, the war on drugs, and cultural anxieties that have very little to do with what’s actually happening in your brain?

In this episode, we sit down with Justin Smith-Ruiu, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Université Paris Cité, whose new book On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality takes exactly these questions seriously. Drawing on the history of philosophy, his own experiences, and a genuinely eclectic range of intellectual sources, Smith-Ruiu makes the case that the mainstream philosophical tradition has been too quick to sweep altered states of consciousness under the rug — and that taking them seriously might force us to rethink some of our most basic assumptions about mind, knowledge, and reality.

Grab a drink and join us as we tune in, turn on, and ask what it means to do philosophy with your whole person.

This week’s jukebox picks:

From Jen: “Another World” by Meduza and Hayla

From Bob: “Drugs” by Talking Heads

From Justin: “More Than A Feeling” by Boston

From Leigh: “Because I Got High” by Afroman

In this episode, we mention the following thinkers, texts, ideas, etc.:

• Psychedelics
• The hard problem of consciousness
• Altered states of consciousness
• The Eleusinian Mysteries
• The Oracle at Delphi
• Rationalism and the early modern philosophical tradition
• René Descartes
• William James and nitrous oxide
• Sigmund Freud and cocaine
• Mike Jay, Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind
• Benjamin Franklin and citizen self-experimentation
• Behaviorism
• John Raymond Smythies — analytic philosopher, psychiatrist, and neuroscientist who openly wrote about psychedelic experience
• “Drug” as a natural kind — and why it isn’t one
• Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
• Richard Nixon and the War on Drugs
• Claude Lévi-Strauss on mushrooms and Norse Berserkers
• Fly agaric (Amanita muscaria)
• Psilocybin and cultural context
• Johannes Kepler, Somnium, and fly agaric
• John Locke on personal identity and continuity of memory
• Ayahuasca
• Ned Block and paradigm cases in philosophy of mind
• DMT and endogenous production in rats
• Ego dissolution
• Michel Foucault tripping in Death Valley and its influence on The History of Sexuality
• Aristotle and the limits of expressibility
• Ineffability and mystical experience
• R.C. Zaehner, Mysticism Sacred and Profane — and his claim that alcohol “awakens drives” while psychedelics “awaken capacities” 
• Aldous Huxley and The Doors of Perception
• Ken Kesey and “the doors of perception”
• Jacques Derrida and pharmakon (from Plato’s Phaedrus) — every drug as both poison and cure
• Doom scrolling and social media addiction as the drug of choice for younger generations
• The opioid crisis and OxyContin
• Terence McKenna and the Stoned Ape theory of human evolution
• Simone Weil — “each religion is alone true” 
• Cathentheism
• Karl Marx — religion as the opiate of the masses
• Justin Smith-Ruiu, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types
• Justin Smith-Ruiu, On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality