Philosopher's Zone ABC listen
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- Society & Culture
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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.
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Neofeudalism: techno-lords and peasants
For many on the political left, the end of capitalism is a cherished ideal - but what if capitalism ended and we found ourselves with something worse? This week we're exploring the possibility that Western liberal democracies could be sliding in the direction of "neofeudalism" and devolving into a much nastier set of economic and social structures than the ones we presently have.
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Obedience
Is obedience a virtue? History is littered with instances where obedience to bad rulers or unjust laws has resulted in catastrophe. But then it's hard to imagine raising or educating children without obedience being a fundamental requirement. This week we're exploring obedience in the moral domain - and in the domain of classical music, where disobedience to tradition can be the hallmark of genius.
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Style wars pt 2: Scandals and hoaxes
What should we think when an academic Humanities journal unsuspectingly publishes a paper that's been written as a hoax, full of fashionable jargon and deliberately specious arguments? Does this demonstrate that the Humanities set a higher value on shallow intellectual trends than on rigorous scholarship - or is there something more nuanced and complicated going on?
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Style wars pt 1: Postwar France and a new philosophical mode
In the aftermath of the Second World War, France was in a state of creative ferment that affected politics, culture - and philosophy. A new mode of philosophical writing emerged in the form of the review, and it was being done in an idiom that we've since come to recognise as typical of modern French theory: dense, experimental, multivocal, open-ended, very much the opposite of traditional analytic philosophical style. It grabbed scholarly attention then, and is still controversial today.
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The predicament of existence
Pain is part of life, and none of us can escape it. And yet most of us feel that the deal is worth it, that the pleasure of life outweighs the suffering. Anti-natalist philosophy takes a different view.
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Mary Midgley, public philosophy and plumbing
British thinker Mary Midgley (1919-2018) believed that philosophy should be a public undertaking, concerned with issues that have their genesis out in the world rather than within the academy. But what is the proper relationship between public and academic philosophy? And why are we talking about plumbing this week?
Customer Reviews
Generally good but where are the theists?
These guys present so many great ideas and ask so many great questions. I can’t help but think it’s a little one-sided, but they’re definitely doing a good job of getting certain backwards and forwards conversations happening. I would appreciate some more respected theists on the show having heard, well not really much from that side. But perhaps this is not the place to be talking about those arguments when there are 1000 different podcast talking about those things really. Otherwise really top stuff and thought-provoking.
Made me think
Women in Philosophy guest said “She also had an extremely violent death, which of course made her famous in her own life time”…
I’ll have to think about that one for a while.
Extremist nonsense
The latest episode ("Race, biology and medicine") is nonsense. I don’t mean that I disagree with it, I mean it is actual nonsense: incoherent rambly sentences, highly fallacious/unsound reasoning to achieve logical conclusions that contradicted the premise, et cetera. It seems to be an exercise in oratory 'sleight-of-hand' to push an extremist identity-politics agenda. What’s more scary than the extremism itself, is that anyone could take it seriously. It is reminiscient of some other extremist populist movements that gained traction…