Philosopher's Zone

Speech acts - utterances that have the power to make things happen in the world - are increasingly being created by AI, especially in certain workplaces where it's not uncommon to receive orders and instructions from an algorithm. The power of a speech act is often understood as emanating from the intention of its author - but if AI lacks the capacity for intention, how much authority do AI-generated workplace commands really have?

Caring for a terminally ill person can place huge pressure - financial, emotional, physical - on the caregivers, who are often family members. And it's not uncommon at the end of life for someone for feel as though they're a 'burden' to those around them. But how should perceptions of burdensomeness play into decisions around medically assisted dying?

The supposed evils of postmodern culture have been endlessly catalogued: moral relativism, the loss of shared values, ironic detachment, a pathological aversion to sincerity, and all rooted in a philosophical worldview that casts a sceptical eye on master narratives and the concept of transcendent truth. But have we finally moved on from postmodernism? This week we explore the concept of metamodernism, a cultural disposition that seeks to reintroduce interiority and feeling to postmodern playfulness.

Most of us have Male or Female registered on our birth certificates - but what does this certification mean, in terms of its effect on our lives? There are many other things about us that have at least as much significance as our gender - our sexuality, our ethnicity - but only gender has legal status. This week we're talking about the pros and cons of uncoupling gender from the law.

We secular moderns sometimes make the assumption that philosophy is what you do when you're interested in the Big Questions of human existence, but not interested in religious answers. But the sacred/secular divide is itself a modern invention, and would not have made sense to medieval thinkers. This week we're exploring medieval Jewish philosophy - its fascinating cross-fertilisation with the Islamic culture of its day, its primary philosophical concerns and the things it can teach us about navigating a precarious and challenging world today.

Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) is widely celebrated as the founder of International Women's Day, yet she saw herself first and foremost as a socialist revolutionary. Far from embracing the mainstream women's movement of her day, she had limited sympathy for what she viewed as its bourgeois priorities. This week we explore the tensions between class and gender politics in her work, and what her legacy means for how we understand International Women's Day today.

Nick Land is one of the more interesting contemporary philosophers, and one of the most disturbing. This week we're talking with the author of a new book that sets out Land's ideas, from cybernetic capitalism to the collapse of Enlightenment reason.

Most of us are a little anxious these days - and for good reason, as advances in technology and the rising intensity of climate change are set to cause massive upheavals on our planet. But this week we're hearing a 'post-humanist' perspective on global issues that's positive without being blindly optimistic, and critical without giving in to despair.

It's a well-rehearsed argument that systemic, structural racism has more significant bearing on the lives and opportunities of racialised minorities than the attitudes of individual racists. But systemic racism is harder to shift, being deeply entangled in the structures of capitalism and democratic liberalism - even the enlightened 'diversity' programs of such liberal institutions as universities and businesses can be put to the service of perpetuating racial regimes.

There has never been as much art around as there is today - digital tools are incredibly cheap, artistic production and distribution can bypass the traditional institutional gatekeepers of galleries, museums and curated spaces. And yet, there's a sense today in which art is devalued currency, and the potential for art to bring people together is being eroded. This week we're talking art, politics and what we lose when we stop loving culture.

The question of identity, and whether each of us is best understood as an individual or a member of a collective, has vexed philosophers for centuries. This week we're getting into it with a thinker who's also a leading light in the teaching of philosophy in schools.

Of course, education has a point - but establishing exactly what that point is, can be a surprisingly difficult task. Do we educate children in order to foster autonomy and independent thinking, or to teach respect for certain norms, values and hierarchies? Is education about creative thinking and developing curiosity about the world, or is it about getting ready for the job market? Plenty of tension to explore this week, in a panel discussion on the aims of education.

Living and writing through the years before, during and after the Second World War, French author and philosopher Albert Camus witnessed the rise of fascism and its terrible endgame in German National Socialism. Today, amid fears of a neo-fascist resurgence in the USA, his work well is worth revisiting.

For decades, primatologists believed that primate societies were structured around aggressive alpha males - until a remarkable push from feminist scientists in the 1960s and 70s changed the narrative. So why does the "dominant alpha male" story persist in human culture?

We tend to think of time as a universal experience, something that carries us all along in the same direction at the same pace. So it might seem strange to think of time in terms of 'temporalities', different concepts and experiences of time that reflect different cultural values. In Australia, Indigenous temporalities are deeply interwoven with notions of justice, sovereignty and care for country - but these temporalities exist in tension with settler-colonial notions of time.