Philosopher's Zone
Episodes
Pop, philosophy and politics
26 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When philosophy turns its attention to music, it’s traditionally an exercise in high culture. Questions about the nature and function of music are ...
Edmund Burke, revolution and reform
19 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The 18th century British parliamentarian and philosopher Edmund Burke is routinely referred to as "the founder of modern conservatism", and at a glan...
Hegel, nature and the Anthropocene
12 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Modernity has us in a terrible bind. We know that our Western habits of growth and consumption are destroying the planet, and that we need to stop ex...
The phenomenology of love
05 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
There’s a venerable philosophical tradition devoted to explaining what love is, and it stretches back to the ancient Greeks. It deals with question...
Conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism and fun
29 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
You don’t have to be stupid to be a conspiracy theorist. Many people who buy into paranoid fantasies about stolen Presidential elections and global...
Adoption and moral obligation
22 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
There are an estimated 16.2 million documented orphans worldwide, with as many as 100 million more children living on the streets. It’s a problem o...
Identity politics
15 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Identity politics is grounded in the appeal to a stable, unified self and the authority of testimony. But this week we’re asking whether that found...
Beauty: aesthetic or moral ideal?
08 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
These days, beauty is a moral imperative, an ideal to live by, and one according to which we judge ourselves and others. As a result, we increasingly...
Rupture and hope
01 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In a world shaken by war, pandemic and climate crisis, hope is a precious resource. It can be fragile, fleeting and hard to find. But what exactly do...
Sex, death and chilli sauce
24 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week, a conversation about death, and the ways in which our reluctance to face mortality results in the creation of “immortality constructs”...
Philosophy and myth
17 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
There was once a time when mythology and philosophy got along perfectly well together. But since the Enlightenment, philosophy has come to regard myt...
The predicament of existence
10 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Most of us agree that pain is part of life, that none of us can escape it, and that death comes for all of us in the end. And yet many of us feel tha...
Moral beauty and art
03 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Movies and TV series increasingly feature leading characters that are morally repugnant, and yet we respond positively to their charisma. Why do we l...
Philosophers in love
27 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Philosophy can sometimes be an exercise in abstract, "pure" reason, unsullied by the demands of the body or the contingencies of history. But this we...
The ethics of uterus transplantation
20 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If a woman wants to experience pregnancy but can't, the answer could be a uterus transplant. The technology is promising, if still very new — but h...
Extremism
13 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Can all people who hold extreme views be fairly described as "extremists"? Extremism is a slippery concept. Its connotations are pejorative but at a ...
Trans-national adoption and "blending in"
06 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
At the end of the Korean War in 1953, the government launched an adoption program for orphans, most of whom went to white families in the USA and wes...
Efficiency, productivity, excess
27 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
These days we’re constantly pushed to be more efficient – at work, of course, but also in our leisure pursuits and even while we sleep (“hackin...
Consciousness and contemplation
20 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Consciousness is one of those phenomena that combine the everyday with the ineffable. We experience consciousness intimately, and yet in many ways it...
Art and climate
13 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Our current climate crisis is, as much as anything else, a crisis of communication. Artists have a unique opportunity to step in and deliver environm...
China, Confucius and the courtyard
06 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For more than three millennia, most buildings in China were configured around a central courtyard. This week’s guest believes that the courtyard he...
Stuff
30 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Many of us these days are buried beneath an avalanche of stuff – everyday objects that seem to proliferate in the cupboard while our back is turned...
What we talk about when we talk about race
23 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The 19th century notion of race as something rooted in biology and genetics is a well-debunked idea whose time has passed. But the more recent libera...
The death of analytic philosophy?
16 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The death of analytic philosophy has been confidently predicted for almost as long as analytic philosophy has been around. But today, with profound c...
Restlessness
09 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Feeling a little distracted lately? Most of us are, and not just lately. We tend to view withering attention spans and the compulsion to seek change ...
Structural injustice and individual responsibility
02 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Who is responsible for structural injustice? The answer is “practically everybody” - but that can be just another way of saying “effectively no...
Derrida and difficulty
26 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 1960s Michel Foucault, on being asked to grade an undergraduate dissertation written by Jacques Derrida, remarked “Well, it’s either ...
The many worlds of David Lewis
19 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Many believe that David Lewis had one of the finest minds of any modern philosopher. His concept of modal realism – the idea that infinite alternat...
Mathematics and the good life
12 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Mathematics is often understood as something technical – essential to making sure our buildings and bridges don’t fall down, but not offering muc...
Bad thinking and good people
05 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The sheer persistence of conspiracy theory and other forms of irrational thinking gets more baffling with each passing day. How did we get to this po...
The individual and the collective
28 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Climate change has landed us in a collective action dilemma – a situation where cooperation would benefit us all, but conflicting individual intere...
Philosophy and psychedelic experience
21 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In some ways, you could say psychedelics and philosophy share a similar set of purposes. But does that mean they're different expressions of the same...
Buddhist logic
14 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Logic in the Western philosophical tradition is often viewed as something abstract and universal – a bit like mathematics, involving formulas and e...
Care ethics
07 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
If there's one thing the COVID-19 pandemic has underlined, it's the importance of looking out for each other. But these days the network of our relat...
Philosophy and children
31 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Children are sometimes perceived as "defective adults", empty epistemic vessels that need to be filled with the knowledge of their elders. In fact, c...
Gender and gaming
24 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Gender has long been an issue in the world of video games, but since the "Gamergate" online harassment campaign of 2014 - where women gamers, develop...
What is dignity?
17 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Dignity is something we recognise and respect in others, and we feel it deeply when our own is threatened or attacked. But what exactly is it? This w...
Yan Fu: China meets Western liberalism
10 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Yan Fu was a late 19th century naval officer and writer who was fascinated with Western philosophy. His translations of works by Thomas Huxley, Adam ...
The trouble with our moral evolution
03 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Morality is always evolving. But what if social evolution happened so fast and so radically that our moral evolution couldn’t keep pace? According ...
RN Presents: This Much Is True
29 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
You might have noticed there's some bizarre stuff circulating out there these days, under the guise of "knowledge" or "fact". And we need to take it ...
About time, part 4: The insect clock
26 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When a person dies under suspicious circumstances, it can be hard to determine exactly what happened and when. Enter the forensic entomologist, whose...
About time, part 3: Time and perception
19 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For something that we commonly consider to be as regular and predictable as clockwork, time sure can feel weird. Sometimes it drags, sometimes it rus...
About time, part 2: Time in fiction
12 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
During the early 20th century, physicists and philosophers were discovering strange things about time. And these ideas were being picked up by noveli...
About time, part 1: Newton's exploding clock
05 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Most of us think of time as something that divides neatly into seconds, minutes and hours, in a way that’s as regular and predictable at the farthe...
The abominable heretic
29 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In July 1656, the young philosopher Baruch Spinoza was cast out of his Jewish community for "abominable heresies". We don't know what those crimes we...
How should we treat insects?
22 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Insect farming, we’re told by its proponents, is the next big thing in edible protein production, and it may just save the environment. But an inse...
Was the market economy inevitable?
15 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Today, market capitalism is so deeply woven into the fabric of everyday existence that it seems as natural and inevitable as the movement of the plan...
Structural injustice and individual responsibility
08 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Who is responsible for structural injustice? The answer is “practically everybody” - but that can be just another way of saying “effectively no...
Women, the alt-right and the liberal centre
01 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Why do women join white nationalist and other far-right movements? Misogyny is rampant on the alt-right, along with the notion that women's primary r...
Nietzsche and transfiguration
25 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Friedrich Nietzsche engaged closely with Christian themes and concepts, re-casting them for a secular age. One of these was transfiguration, the stra...
Trust, risk and experts
18 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Public trust in experts is on the wane. And when we consider that a key role of experts is the assessment and management of risk, this mistrust becom...
Mathematical objects
11 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We all use numbers every day of our lives, and most of us fail to appreciate how mysterious they are. What exactly is a number? You can't trip over t...
Misogyny
04 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It's strange to think that in a supposedly egalitarian democracy like Australia, we could have a misogyny problem. But the never-ending toll of intim...
Analytic philosophy: the leading brand
27 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A quick scan of leading philosophy journals reveals that what passes for "philosophy" is selectively screened, with analytic philosophy clearly the d...
The death of analytic philosophy?
20 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The death of analytic philosophy has been confidently predicted for almost as long as analytic philosophy has been around. But today, with profound c...
Marxism pt 2: Black Marxism
13 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There’s an influential critique of Marx that accuses him of failure to take sufficient account of race in his analysis of capitalism. But is this a...
Marxism pt 1: Marx the philosopher
06 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Karl Marx's interest in philosophy took an early swerve into journalism, and he famously wrote that "philosophers have only interpreted the world - t...
Ethics, philosophy and immigration
30 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Does anti-racism require open borders? Should refugees be selected on the basis of the skills they offer? Can immigration restrictions conform to the...
Women and the Dhamma
23 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Buddhist teaching is radically egalitarian, and yet the need for a Buddhist feminism is pressing. Is gender irrelevant to Buddhist teaching? And for ...
What can David Hume teach us?
16 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Scottish philosopher David Hume was an amiable 18th century gentleman - cultured, generous, well liked by all who knew him. And yet he's become somet...
Chronomobilities
09 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Going from one country to another is mostly thought of as a movement in space - a change of one physical location for another. But migration can also...
Logic in Indian philosophy
02 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Logic in Western philosophy can have formal perfection, but limited epistemic value. "All chairs are 50 feet tall, my mother is a chair, therefore my...
Ecocultural identity
25 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Each of us is made up of a mix of identities - political, sexual, class, gender and so on. But how often do we stop to think of our ecocultural ident...