Monads, Humor, and the Last Great Polymath
with Dr. Jeff McDonough, Philosophy Dept. Chair, Harvard
show notes
What does a 17th-century polymath have to say about ChatGPT? More than you'd expect. We're joined by Dr. Jeffrey McDonough — Harvard philosophy chair and one of the world's leading scholars on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the man who co-invented calculus, designed the binary system, and is considered to be the last great polymath.
We tackle why there's something rather than nothing, Leibniz's claim that this is the "best of all possible worlds," and an unexpected parallel between his monads and the tokens powering today's AI. Then we turn to Jeff's sabbatical project on the philosophy of humor: what makes something funny, why thinkers from Plato onward distrusted laughter, and whether you can ever really separate the art from the artist.