The Living Philosophy
Episodes
🎙️#12 Dr. Erik Goodwyn: Who Creates the Dream? The Invisible Storyteller
24 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Erik Goodwyn is a practising psychiatrist with a background in neurobiology who bridges the worlds of neuroscience, Jungian psychology, and fantas...
🎙️#11 Adriana Forte: Menstrual Futurism
05 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Adriana Forte is a Brazilian-born writer, facilitator, and developmental thinker currently based in a rural intentional community in Bellingen, New So...
🎙️#10 Michael Montgomery: Psychophobia and Bridging East and West in Therapy
02 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Michael R. Montgomery (PhD, MA, MSc, MSW, LCSW) is an existential psychoanalyst who represents a radical wing of contemporary depth psychology—o...
#9 Layman Pascal - Metashamanic Nietzsche
19 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Layman Pascal is a Canadian "feral philosopher" and host of The Integral Stage podcast who has become a central connector and theorist in th...
#8 Stefano Carpani: Jungians vs. Post-Jungians vs. Neo-Jungians
12 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Dr Stefano Carpani is an Italian Jungian psychoanalyst, lecturer at the C.G. Jung Institute Zürich, and scientific consultant at Pacifica Graduate In...
#7Jon Mills: The Psychology Behind Our Self-Destructive Civilisation
02 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Get Jon's book "End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate": https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/end-of-the-world-9781538189016/_____________...
#6 PF Jung: What is Enlightened Centrism
18 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
PF Jung is a YouTube content creator renowned for making the meme of "Enlightened Centrism" great again. He's a self-styled "memeti...
#5 Brendan Graham Dempsey: Can We Scientifically Measure Worldviews?
02 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Brendan Graham Dempsey is a metatheory researcher at the Institute of Applied Metatheory and host of the Metamodern Meaning podcast. His work bridges ...
#4 Greg Dember: Metamodernism and the Defence of Interiority
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
"The protection of interiority is the central motivation of Metamodernism." So says Greg Dember, a Seattle-based musician, songwriter and in...
Erik Goodwyn: Dreams, Metaphor and Fantasy Writing
20 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Erik Goodwyn is a practising psychiatrist with a background in neurobiology who bridges the worlds of neuroscience, Jungian psychology, and fantas...
CJ the X: Play, Pragmatism and Jordan Peterson
03 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
https://cjthex.com/subscribe → subscribe to CJ's mailing list for all things CJ the X https://tinyurl.com/asdi708uo → buy tickets to CJ's ...
Gary Clark: 'Jung Was 100 Years Ahead!' How Psychedelics Are Proving the Collective Unconscious is Real
23 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
"Jung was essentially an evolutionary theorist". These are the words of Gary Clark, a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Medical Sciences at th...
Carl Jung Was Racist.
12 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is an exploration of the allegations of racism against Jung and looks at some possible defences of Jung. Since Dalal published Jung: A...
Jung on Americans: the Illusion of Freedom
15 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jung describes Americans as having an “astonishingly feeble resistance to collective influences” which he found “positively terrifying”. His 1...
Carl Jung’s Synchronicity: Meaningful Patterns in Life
24 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Synchronicity was coined by psychological pioneer Carl Jung. Its meaning is simple: a Synchronicity is a “meaningful coincidence”. But it seems t...
One must imagine Sisyphus happy
13 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
________________ 📚 Further Reading: - Camus, Albert, *The Myth of Sisyphus* - Camus, Albert, *The Outsider* - Camus, Albert, *The Rebel* - Camu...
Can Neuralink Destroy What Makes Us Human?
15 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Could Neuralink accidentally turn all its users into a hive mind? That’s what we’re going to be exploring in this episode where we take a look ins...
Why Leftists Should Have Loved Rich Men North of Richmond (But Didn't)
25 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If an alien arrived on this planet having read only the writings of Marx, Proudhon and other great leftist socialist thinkers, they would be very su...
Self-Actualisation is Not Enough
11 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this video we are going to tackle a challenging question: what is self-actualisation isn't what we should be doing; what if instead it is a b...
Enlightenment, Non-Attachment and Other Toxic Spiritual Con Jobs
28 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we look at why you should listen to South Park's Butters over modern Buddhist gurus. We talk about the sales pitch used by spirit...
Books Saved My Life
14 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode I talk about the books that rescued me in my darkest times by giving me the breath of heroic inspiration I needed to get moving out of...
How to Think Like Nietzsche
30 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The aphoristic style of Friedrich Nietzsche is a wellspring of inspiration. In this episode, we explore the connection between this style and Nietzsch...
Karl Marx: Capitalism's Weirdest Fanboy
16 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Karl Marx is the most (in)famous critic of Capitalism. Or is he? As with all stories, it's not so simple. Marx isn't a reactionary dreaming of...
Our Tragic Hero - the Mistborn Jordan Peterson
09 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Following on from the last episode on Jordan Peterson's brilliant 2005 essay on "Peacemaking" this time we look at what went wrong and a...
Jordan Peterson's Bizarre (and Brilliant) Manifesto
19 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 2005, long before he became a household name, Jordan Peterson wrote an article with the title "Peacemaking Among Higher Order Primates" ...
The Edge of the Inside — How to Change the Superstructure
05 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why it Matters is back (kind of). This video revisits the Prophet archetype with a bit more passion and a little less bookishness. It is great to have...
Subconscious vs. Unconscious
21 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In approaching the underworld there are a couple of terms that people use. Sometimes it can get a bit confusing who's using what and what we shoul...
Reality vs Archetype — The Two Types of Romcom
07 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this palette cleanser we are going to talk about the philosophy of romcoms for a change. I reckon this should remove any accusations of important w...
An (Ancient) New Theory of Happiness
10 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
You can get "Become Who You Are" here: http://designingthemind.org/becoming It's rare that you encounter a fresh take on a path as wel...
The Lost Art of Leisure
03 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We modern serfs have forgotten something: we've forgotten how to live. You don't question the meaning of life when leisure is the heart of lif...
The Prophet — the Archetype of Societal Renaissance
28 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Before the Axial Age the religious archetypes were those of the Priest and the Magician. But with the increased complexity and evolution of society a ...
Justice vs. Vengeance — Is There a Difference?
31 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Philosopher and anthropologist Rene Girard once described justice and public vengeance. Nietzsche expressed the same in his Genealogy of Morals. Why t...
Is Equality the Enemy?
17 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Would you rather live in a better world or a happier one? In this video we are going to explore how equality has made the world a better place but als...
Liminality and the Values of the Left
19 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In The Ritual Process the anthropologist who put Liminality on the map Victor Turner gave a list of contrasts between Liminality and Structure. There ...
The Homelessness Crisis — Where Individualism Breaks Down
22 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"When all you have is a hammer every problem begins to look like a nail." Good philosophy is always trying to break up and recreate its map ...
Liminality X Nihlism — The Real Cause of the Meaning Crisis
08 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Is Liminality the real root of the crisis of Nihilism? In this episode we are going to explore this question and whether Liminality is a better diagno...
The Last Man — Nietzsche
24 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For Nietzsche The Last Man stood as the opposite of the Ubermensch and the great danger of the "levelling" tendency of modernity. In this ep...
Liminality — Our World in One Word
10 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We live in an age of Liminality. It's at the roots of the Meaning Crisis of Nihilism and Leftist value structures. Coming from the same Latin wor...
Addicted to Apocalypse: Our Psychological Need for the End
27 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Apocalypse is traditionally a religious idea but the secular age has been more alight with an Apocalyptic fervour than any preceding age. In this epis...
Why Jung Hated Philosophers
13 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Jung once described himself as a failed philosopher. Instead he chose the path of science with psychology. It is surprising then to see what Walter Ka...
Camino de Santiago: Why I Hiked and What I Learned
12 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A summary of my Camino experience: what I hiked, why I hiked and what I learned. ________________⭐ Support the channel (thank you!)▶ Patreon: htt...
The Rural vs the Far Left — from Marx to AOC
18 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
83% of America's counties voted for Trump in the 2020 but these counties account for only 29% of America's GDP. Why aren't this lesser ...
Structure vs. Communitas — the Two Modes of Human Society
28 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Anthropologist Victor Turner, who popularised the term Liminality, found that human society has two modes of interrelatedness that function like a yin...
Reactionary: Not Just a Right Wing Phenomenon
07 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The term "reactionary" is associated with the right-wing but like the term radical this term is a concept that transcends the one-dimensiona...
What is a Radical? — the Political Archetype of Our Time
16 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Radical is a word that's thrown around a lot these days but whose meaning is left a bit vague. This episode explores the meaning of the term radi...
God is Dead: What Nietzsche REALLY Meant
10 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
God is dead - Nietzsche's most notorious line and also one of his most commonly misunderstood. The Nietzsche God is dead statement is a New Athei...
A Cure for Nihilism? | Everything Everywhere All At Once
26 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Spoiler Alert - this look at the philosophy of the Metamodern masterpiece Everything Everywhere All At Once deals with the whole movie so there will b...
Vegans vs Carnivores: the Culture War's Strangest Frontier
26 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It's become common to appeal to our evolutionary past to justify present ideologies. In this episode we are honing in on a vegan account of human...
Ego: A Defence
05 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is an attempted revaluation of the much maligned Ego. Drawing on Jung, Freud, New Age thinking and the myth of Icarus and Daedalus we pic...
Nietzschean Spirituality — Dionysus vs. The Buddha
15 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we are going to explore Nietzschean spirituality in contrast to Buddhist spirituality (and other Ascetic Ideal spiritualities and reli...
Why it Matters: Nietzsche
03 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Why it matters is back! And this time we're talking about why Nietzsche matters. We're going to look at why I find Nietzsche so important an...
Friedrich Nietzsche | The Long Version
14 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this deeper dive into philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche we are going to look at his big ideas and his overall philosophy through the orienting genera...
Friedrich Nietzsche
30 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Friedrich Nietzsche is commonly known as the Father of Existentialism but he could just as well be called the Father of Psychoanalysis or the Father o...
The Living Philosophy is 2!
15 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Living Philosophy is two years old! Two years ago the 100 videos in 100 days began. But before there was the Living Philosophy, there was The Livi...
Soren Kierkegaard - Introduction to the Father of Existentialism
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This is a deeper dive into the Father of Existentialism Soren Kierkegaard. Following on the 5-minute introduction to Kierkegaard, this episode looks i...
Soren Kierkegaard in 5 Minutes - The Father of Existentialism
25 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Soren Kierkegaard is commonly known as the "Father of Existentialism". This brief introduction to Kierkegaard looks at why you should care a...
A Psychological Mirror — Jordan Peterson and Olivia Wilde
04 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Immature heroic complexes and us and them dynamics — after reading The Cut's article "Did Olivia Wilde Just Make Jordan Peterson Cry?"...
Martin Heidegger: His Life and Philosophy
21 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Martin Heidegger is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century for many — from Giles Deleuze to the alt-right and undoubtedly one of the most cont...
Why Humanity is Special - de Chardin and the Birth of the Noosphere
04 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's theory of evolution posits that with the emergence of the Noosphere (the thinking or mind sphere which transcended t...
A Conflict of Visions: Thomas Sowell's Constrained vs Unconstrained Vision
23 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In A Conflict of Visions Sowell distinguishes between the two visions that have shaped the landscape of the modern era (and beyond): the Constrained V...
How to Become an Übermensch — Nietzsche's Three Metamorphoses
08 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Three Metamorphoses is Nietzsche's map of the development of Re-Valuers of Values — the Übermensch. At the beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathu...
Nietzsche: The Many Uses of the Gods
24 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the episode on Foucault we touched briefly on the question of what might happen if we combined Jung's analysis of the gods with Foucault'...
The Philosopher's Philosopher | Heraclitus of Ephesus | Presocratic Philosophy
11 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Presocratic Heraclitus of Ephesus is a philosopher's philosopher. His work was beloved by Socrates, Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Th...
Power | Michel Foucault's Groundbreaking Theory of Power
06 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For Michel Foucault Power is critical to understanding the world we live in. Foucault's theory of power revolutionised the way we look at power f...
Feminism vs. Womanism — A Revaluation of All Values
01 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we explore a potential Nietzschean revaluation of all values in the form of a distinction. If we separate the ideas of femininity and ...
The Four Quadrants: A Map of All Knowledge and Human Experience
06 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Four Quadrants model developed by Ken Wilber is an exceptional map of knowledge and of the human experience. It gives us a language for understand...
Postmodern Neo-Marxism — Jordan Peterson’s Shadow
07 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Jordan Peterson’s idea of Postmodern Neo-Marxism is a conspiracy theory. It is also the Shadow in the Jungian sense of Jordan Peterson. Nothing whip...
Buddhism Isn't a Philosophy (It's a Religion)
30 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Is Buddhism a religion or philosophy? I have debated many times over the years with people who are fond of Buddhism but tend to dislike religion. Of c...
What is Metamodernism?
23 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Metamodernism might be the most important idea you come this year. According to Hanzi Freinacht, the pioneer of political metamodernism, metamodernism...
Humanity is NOT a Cancer; We're Bacterial
16 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Is humanity a cancer? It’s a perspective that’s growing increasingly popular. It tells us a lot about humanity’s self-perception in the 21st cen...
Modernism vs. Postmodernism
09 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Modernism and Postmodernism are two cultural stages with their own worldviews. In this episode we talk about the emergence and differences between the...
Why Baudrillard HATED The Matrix (And Why He Was Wrong)
21 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Ahead of the release of the Matrix 4 I thought a second run into the world of postmodernism’s high priest was due and so today we look at Jean Baudr...
Self-Reliance | Ralph Waldo Emerson
12 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Self Reliance, Emerson’s classic essay is one of the gems of philosophical literature. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the leading light of the American Tra...
Do We Live in a Simulation? Baudrillard's Simulation and Simulacra
05 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In his 1981 book Simulation and Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard makes the claim that we are all living in a simulation. Baudrillard’s conception of simu...
What is Structuralism? Levi-Strauss, Barthes and Lacan
28 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What is Structuralism? In this episode, we are going to break down the Structuralist theory pioneered by Claude Lévi Strauss and explored by the like...
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn
21 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was one of the most controversial books of the 20th century as well as being one of the most r...
Carl Jung: What is the Collective Unconscious?
14 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Carl Jung's Collective Unconscious is his biggest and most commonly misunderstood concept. The Collective Unconscious Jung tells us goes deeper t...
Why French Postmodernists were Pro-Paedophilia in the 1970s
11 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of the Paris 1968 student protests, Le Monde published a petition from a group of French intellectuals including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone ...
Freud's Id, Ego and Superego Explained
08 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the work of the great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Id Ego Superego form the tripartite structure of the mind. This three-part structure is illustra...
Thomas Kuhn — What is a Paradigm?
19 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was one of the most controversial books of the 20th century as well as being one of the most r...
Why the Masterpiece of Medieval Philosophy was Never Finished
12 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Thomas Aquinas was the shining light of medieval philosophy. He worked on his masterpiece the Summa Theologica from 1265 until the year of his death i...
The Moth and the Flame: Can Reason Compete with Instinct?
07 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
21st-century humanity is threatened by numerous self-generated existential threats to its continued survival. These include socio-political disintegra...
Ekstasis vs. Catharsis
22 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The etymology of philosophy leads to the love of wisdom. The paths to wisdom can be divided into two: ekstasis and catharsis. Jamie Wheal is a thinker...
Enlightenment = Higher Cognitive Development? The Piagetian Ken Wilber
12 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development has an important place in the system of Integral Philosopher Ken Wilber. Wilber’s theory of everythi...
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
05 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Jean Piaget was the second most referenced psychologist of the 20th century whose work was dedicated to mapping out the stages of human development th...
Semiotics of Spirituality | What Zen Masters Know that We Don’t
22 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In his masterpiece Sex Ecology and Spirituality, Ken Wilber applies the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in Semiotics to the question of spiritual experi...
The Life of Plato
15 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“The European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” — A.N. Whitehead. Plato is the greatest philosopher that ever ...
What is Semiotics? Saussure on Langue/Parole and Signifier/Signified
08 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Semiotics came into being with the publishing of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics in 1916. It contained distinctions such as la...
How Bertrand Russell Saved Ludwig Wittgenstein's Life
25 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein told his lover David Pinsent that Russell’s words of encouragement at the start of his dabbling with ph...
Analytic vs. Continental Philosophy — the Schism in Modern Philosophy
14 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Analytic Philosophy vs Continental Philosophy divide is a faultline running through modern philosophy. In this episode we explore the origins of t...
What is Empiricism? The Philosophy of Locke, Berkeley and Hume
27 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When asking ourselves what is empiricism in philosophy we cannot help but speak of the Empiricism vs. Rationalism debate that began with Descartes’...
The Living Philosophy of Simone Weil
20 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Albert Camus called the philosopher Simone Weil “the only great spirit of our times.” T.S. Eliot said she was the greatest saint of the 20th centu...
What is Phenomenology? The Philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger
13 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Phenomenology philosophy is a school of philosophy that originated in the 20th century. With Edmund Husserl Phenomenology was born but it was the ...
Why Nietzsche REALLY Went Mad
06 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There are many legends and lies surrounding the question of why Nietzsche went mad. After the German philosopher had a mental breakdown in a Turin squ...
Nihilism vs. Existentialism vs. Absurdism — Explained and Compared
30 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What is the difference between Nihilism vs. Existentialism vs. Absurdism? The common ground they share is that they are all responses to philosophy’...
Albert Camus vs. Jean-Paul Sartre
23 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The friendship of Camus and Sartre went from bromance to bitter hatred. The two giants of 20th-century philosophy first became friends during WW2 but ...
Nietzsche's Surprising Love of Ralph Waldo Emerson
16 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Nietzsche and Emerson don’t seem like they should go together. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a spiritual nature-loving Transcendentalist and Friedrich Nie...