About this podcast
The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.
Episodes
The newest 50 of 241 episodes
- What is pleasure? · 38 minIs everything we do just for pleasure? For the Ancient Greek hedonists, and utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), pleasure is what motivates us. And for most of us, if…
- 05 | Unsteady State | Politics for the future and the past · 42 minWhen your political system runs to a three-year electoral cycle, it's hard to avoid the kind of short-term thinking that aims to please today's voters, while paying little more…
- 04 | Unsteady State | Confucianism and crisis · 44 minWith liberal democracy in crisis around the world, we're talking about Confucianism and how Confucian political theory addresses such problems as economic inequality and rampant…
- 03 | Unsteady State | What the Right gets wrong about Nietzsche · 39 minFriedrich Nietzsche is a difficult figure to pin down politically. He's popularly known as the favourite philosopher of the architects of the Holocaust, and of today's neo-Nazis…
- 02 | Unsteady State | Who owns Antarctica? · 35 minWhat can Antarctica teach us about statehood and sovereignty? The continent has no government, no citizens, no permanent human population. Its native inhabitants are mostly…
- 01 | Unsteady State | Politics and the good life · 1 h 10 minWhat if your government decided what 'the good life' looks like, then rewarded you for living it and penalised you for straying? In a growing number of countries, that's already…
- Technology and the lure of ancient Athens · 45 minOne of the more utopian promises of technology has always been that it will free us from the necessity of work - but not having to work poses its own problems. What will we do…
- Sympathy, himpathy and feminism · 38 minAustralian feminist philosopher Kate Manne memorably coined the term "himpathy" to describe what happens when a man commits a crime against a woman and finds himself the object…
- Signal, noise and interpersonal conflict · 31 minIf someone's behaving badly, it can be hard to know how much of their behaviour stems from a deep character flaw, and how much of it is incidental - the stuff we might charitably…
- Feminism, generosity and cross-cultural support · 38 minWestern feminists often express support for women in Muslim majority countries, but sometimes that support is couched in the language of pity, as though Muslim women were held…
- Getting angry at the system · 37 minIf I pick up a tree branch and smash your window with it, you're going to be angry, and your anger will rightly be directed at me. But if a tree branch smashes your windscreen…
- Who's afraid of Cultural Marxism? · 46 minCultural Marxism is many things to many people — at one end of the political spectrum, it's the hidden force behind political correctness, identity politics and 'wokeness', while…
- Habermas and the retreat of reason · 42 minThe great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who died in March, wrote in his later works about what he called Unheimlichkeit — roughly translated as "the unease of the times" —…
- Visual art as philosophy · 33 minWhen it comes to the ideal philosophical medium, most of us would identify the written word - or maybe the spoken word, if we're fans of Socratic dialogue - and this is because…
- How smart are machines, anyway? · 32 minEver since AI was founded in the 1950s, people have talked and written about 'intelligence' as though we all broadly agree on what that word means. But there's considerable…
- Hegel: The philosopher with the (one) big idea · 36 minGWF Hegel (1770-1831) wanted to construct nothing less than a complete explanation of reality - nature, consciousness, art, history, politics, the lot - based on a single…
- Eco-grief and environmental loss · 29 minPhilosophers have traditionally thought of grief as something that attaches to immediate loss - the death of a loved one, something terrible that's happened to us personally. But…
- Colonising space · 33 minThere's something about space that's always captured the human imagination, but what happens when space begins to capture the imagination of billionaire tech entrepreneurs? In…
- Can pregnancy be a job? the ethics of commercial surrogacy · 33 minCommercial surrogacy - the practice of paying someone to gestate your child and then hand it over when it's born - is banned in Australia, but it has its supporters. Defenders of…
- Belief, emotion and trust · 36 minThe traditional philosophical view of belief is that it's a rational cognitive affair, evidence based and directed toward truth. According to this account, things like delusion…
- Communication in an age of crisis · 34 minCollins Dictionary made "permacrisis" their word of the year in 2022 - a prescient choice because since then, the crises have just kept coming. Permacrisis is forcing us to take…
- Can sport survive AI? · 38 minElite sport is traditionally a celebration of the human, but for how much longer? We watch in awe as athletes perform feats of skill, strength and endurance, and experience the…
- Purity, filth and 'promiscuous defecators': why we're weird about poo · 36 minWhy are we so repelled yet fascinated by bodily waste? Today we're talking purity, pollution, colonial sanitation regimes, medicine and public health, and how they've been shaped…
- Bad faith and 'just asking questions' · 29 minThere's a certain kind of question that raises suspicion as to the motives of the person asking it. 'Was the Holocaust really as bad as historians have made out?' 'Is there…
- 'Natural' disasters and climate justice · 32 minTo call the effects of a fire, flood or cyclone these days a 'natural' disaster only tells part of the story, as climate change makes us realise that vulnerability to harm is…
- Where am I? Buddhist philosophy and the self · 39 minBehind the familiar Buddhist doctrine that "there is no self" lies a centuries-long tradition of dispute and disagreement. Reductionists believe that the self is no more than a…
- Common sense vs reason: when philosophy gets weird · 35 minThere are certain things about the world that we think we know for sure, and yet philosophical reason tells us cannot be true. Can you fly? are you real? is the world a…
- Adam Smith, economics and moral philosophy · 32 minScottish philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790) is often described as an arch capitalist, the "father of modern economics" - and at a glance it's easy to see why. His Inquiry Into…
- Can AIs be friends? · 36 minArtificial intelligence is beginning to revolutionise many aspects of human existence - but how does it rate on friendship? The question is less theoretical than it seems: media…
- Kant and religion · 35 minIt's often claimed that the Enlightenment was a time when Europeans awoke from their superstitious slumber, discovered rationality, got started on science and threw religion in…
- Speech acts and AI · 35 minSpeech acts - utterances that have the power to make things happen in the world - are increasingly being created by AI, especially in certain workplaces where it's not uncommon…
- 'Being a burden' and assisted dying · 29 minCaring for a terminally ill person can place huge pressure - financial, emotional, physical - on the caregivers, who are often family members. And it's not uncommon at the end of…
- Sincerity, irony and metamodernism · 38 minThe supposed evils of postmodern culture have been endlessly catalogued: moral relativism, the loss of shared values, ironic detachment, a pathological aversion to sincerity, and…
- Is it time to get rid of legal gender status? · 35 minMost of us have Male or Female registered on our birth certificates - but what does this certification mean, in terms of its effect on our lives? There are many other things…
- Medieval Jewish philosophy and the lessons of history · 31 minWe secular moderns sometimes make the assumption that philosophy is what you do when you're interested in the Big Questions of human existence, but not interested in religious…
- The reluctant feminist: Clara Zetkin and International Women's Day · 38 minClara Zetkin (1857-1933) is widely celebrated as the founder of International Women's Day, yet she saw herself first and foremost as a socialist revolutionary. Far from embracing…
- Move fast, break everything: Nick Land and accelerationism · 34 minNick Land is one of the more interesting contemporary philosophers, and one of the most disturbing. This week we're talking with the author of a new book that sets out Land's…
- Can 'planetary civics' save us from techno-catastrophe? · 43 minMost of us are a little anxious these days - and for good reason, as advances in technology and the rising intensity of climate change are set to cause massive upheavals on our…
- Racism and racial regimes · 48 minIt's a well-rehearsed argument that systemic, structural racism has more significant bearing on the lives and opportunities of racialised minorities than the attitudes of…
- Do we still love art? · 36 minThere has never been as much art around as there is today - digital tools are incredibly cheap, artistic production and distribution can bypass the traditional institutional…
- Who am I? Individual and collective identity · 40 minThe question of identity, and whether each of us is best understood as an individual or a member of a collective, has vexed philosophers for centuries. This week we're getting…
- What's the point of education? · 28 minOf course, education has a point - but establishing exactly what that point is, can be a surprisingly difficult task. Do we educate children in order to foster autonomy and…
- Albert Camus, fascism and America · 46 minLiving and writing through the years before, during and after the Second World War, French author and philosopher Albert Camus witnessed the rise of fascism and its terrible…
- How feminism changed primatology · 35 minFor decades, primatologists believed that primate societies were structured around aggressive alpha males - until a remarkable push from feminist scientists in the 1960s and 70s…
- What's the time? Indigenous temporalities and the 'Everywhen' · 30 minWe tend to think of time as a universal experience, something that carries us all along in the same direction at the same pace. So it might seem strange to think of time in terms…
- Buddhism and nationalism · 33 minBuddhism in the West is often thought of as an ethical or philosophical system first and foremost, based on principles of non-self and impermanence, and universalist in its…
- Innocence and 'child rescue' in the colonial imagination · 37 minThe forced removal of First Nations children from their families was active government policy in Australia between the 1910s and the 1970s, and still continues today under the…
- Distributed intelligence and the problem with 'doing your own research' · 33 minConspiracy theorists are turning out to be a resilient bunch, and no amount of refutation or mockery will make them go away. It's a problem, because as well as being ethically…
- Can atheists be virtuous? The moral philosophy of Catharine Trotter Cockburn · 41 minCatharine Trotter Cockburn (1679-1749) is best known as a contemporary and defender of John Locke - but she was also a fascinating philosopher in her own right. Writing at a time…
- What are we doing when we read? · 29 minReading seems like a simple, uncomplicated activity that most of us enjoy without thinking too much about it - but how simple is it really? Literary theorists have been arguing…
