Western Philosophy For Beginners

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From Heraclitus’ fire of constant change to Aristotle’s roadmap for flourishing, from Epicurus’ surprisingly modern self-care tips to Sartre’s radical call to own our freedom. We reveals how ancient insights can ground today’s wellbeing practice, enrich civic discourse, and help us build sturdier selves. You’ll meet philosophers as people—rebels, mystics, gadflies—whose arguments shaped science, psychology, and democracy.

  1. 09/10/2025

    Michel Foucault

    Michel Foucault is the philosopher who taught us to question how knowledge itself can be a form of power. He was a French thinker who didn’t look like a typical academic sage studying timeless truths from an armchair. Instead, he prowled through archives of asylums, prisons, and clinics to uncover how modern society quietly defines what is normal and what is deviant. Born Paul-Michel Foucault in nineteen twenty-six in the provincial city of Poitiers, France, he came of age in a country rebuilding after World War Two. He studied philosophy and psychology in the elite halls of Paris, just as existentialist ideas and structuralist theories were buzzing. But Foucault would soon strike off on his own path. By the time of his death in nineteen eighty-four, he had become one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, a historian of ideas and social critic whose works unsettled our understanding of sanity, punishment, sexuality, and even the nature of truth. Produced by Selenius Media

    Michel Foucault

  2. 17/09/2025

    Arendt

    Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany, to a secular Jewish family. She grew up in Königsberg (Immanuel Kant’s city), raised largely by her mother after her father died when she was seven. Brilliant and strong-willed, Arendt studied philosophy at university under some of Germany’s greatest thinkers – including Martin Heidegger at Marburg (with whom she had a youthful love affair) and Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg. She completed a dissertation on St. Augustine’s concept of love. But Arendt’s academic career in Germany was cut short by the rise of the Nazis in 1933. As an outspoken Jew, she could no longer live freely in her home country. Arendt fled to Paris, where she worked aiding Jewish refugees. There she met literary and Zionist circles, married Heinrich Blücher (her second marriage; her first had been brief). When the Nazis invaded France, Arendt was interned in a camp as an “enemy alien” – but she managed to escape. In 1941, she and Blücher secured passage on one of the last ships out of Europe to America. Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory

    Arendt

  3. 17/09/2025

    Beauvoir

    Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 into a bourgeois Parisian family. Her father was a traditionalist who once ruefully said, “Simone thinks like a man!” – noticing her fierce intellect. Beauvoir was indeed precocious and very independent-minded. After World War I, her family lost much of its wealth, but they still prioritized a good education for Simone. Deeply religious as a child, Beauvoir experienced a loss of faith in adolescence and thereafter declared herself an atheist – but one with a strong sense of ethical drive. Beauvoir studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where in 1929 she became the youngest person (and only woman that year) to pass the agrégation in philosophy, coming second in the nation. Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory

    Beauvoir

  4. 17/09/2025 • Subscribers Only

    Camus

    Albert Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi, French Algeria. His background was humble: his father was an agricultural worker who died in World War I when Camus was a baby, and his illiterate mother of Spanish origin raised him in a poor neighborhood of Algiers. Despite hardship (they lived in a two-room apartment; Camus later said he never forgot the silent suffering of his mother, which informed his outlook on human resilience), Camus excelled in school. He was a bright, athletic young man – passionate about football (soccer) and the outdoors of the Mediterranean. Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory

    Camus

  5. 17/09/2025 • Subscribers Only

    Descartes

    Today we enter the seventeenth century, a moment when philosophy took a decisive turn into what we now call modernity. Our guide is René Descartes, born in 1596 in La Haye in France, a man whose restless mind and relentless pursuit of certainty reshaped the intellectual map of Europe. He is remembered for his famous declaration, cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am – a phrase that became the rallying cry of rationalism and the cornerstone of modern philosophy. But Descartes was not only a philosopher. He was also a mathematician, a scientist, and a moral thinker who wrestled with questions of faith, doubt, method, and how to live a steady life in a time of upheaval. Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory

    Descartes

  6. 17/09/2025 • Subscribers Only

    Heidegger

    Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in Messkirch, a rural Catholic town in southwestern Germany. His upbringing was humble; his father was a sexton. Young Heidegger was initially headed for the priesthood – he even started seminary – but he developed an intense interest in philosophy (spurred by reading Brentano) and switched to studying that at the University of Freiburg. He earned his doctorate and then worked under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. By the 1920s, Heidegger’s own philosophical ideas were taking shape. In 1927, he published Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), a groundbreaking and notoriously difficult work. In it, Heidegger essentially asks the question: What is the meaning of Being? Philosophers had long discussed beings (entities), but Heidegger wanted to revive the question of Being itself – what does it mean for something to exist? He starts with the human mode of being, which he calls Dasein (literally “Being-there”). Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory

    Heidegger

  7. 17/09/2025

    Hume

    A stout, rosy-cheeked old man lies propped up in bed, greeting his visitor with a gentle smile. It is the summer of 1776 in Edinburgh, and David Hume knows he is dying. Yet there is no fear in his clear grey eyes—only mild amusement at the anxious expression on young James Boswell’s face. Boswell has come to see whether the great skeptic is frightened to meet his Maker at last. But Hume, ever composed, chuckles softly. He spins an imaginary tale for Boswell: perhaps, he says, he might bargain with Charon, the ferryman of Hades, to grant him a few more years of life. Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory

    Hume

  8. 17/09/2025 • Subscribers Only

    Kant

    Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, a provincial capital on the Baltic Sea (today Kaliningrad). He was raised in a modest artisanal family and educated in a pietistic Lutheran tradition that stressed duty and virtue. Young Kant was intellectually precocious. He studied at the University of Königsberg (never venturing more than a hundred miles from his birthplace his entire life). After some years as a private tutor, he became a professor at Königsberg and taught there for four decades. Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory

    Kant
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About

From Heraclitus’ fire of constant change to Aristotle’s roadmap for flourishing, from Epicurus’ surprisingly modern self-care tips to Sartre’s radical call to own our freedom. We reveals how ancient insights can ground today’s wellbeing practice, enrich civic discourse, and help us build sturdier selves. You’ll meet philosophers as people—rebels, mystics, gadflies—whose arguments shaped science, psychology, and democracy.

Information

  • Channel
    Selenius Media
  • Creator
    Selenius Media & The Artificial Laboratory
  • Years Active
    2025
  • Episodes
    27
  • Copyright
    © https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/philosophy-now/id1820335276
  • Provider
    niklas Osterman

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