Philosopher's Zone ABC listen

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?