Philosopher's Zone

With the climate heating up and our planetary support systems breaking down, how does an eco-philosopher manage to stay cheerful? This week's guest has been living and breathing these issues for many decades, which you'd think might make it difficult for him to get out of bed in the morning. But get out of bed he did, for a surprisingly upbeat conversation about optimism, pessimism and ecological identity.

AI is like all new technology, insofar as many people are afraid of it. When it comes to AI and education, scare stories abound of students using ChatGPT to write their essays, and a possible future where teachers are replaced by bots. But according to this week's guest, there's much to be excited about.

Ancient China seems like a place and a time far removed from our own - but when we look at how ancient and medieval Chinese scholars thought about the role and practice of history, we find some striking modern parallels.

Extremists used to be easy to spot: they were seen as irrational, unstable and... well, extreme. But in recent years, we've seen extremists on the political right laying claim to traditional Enlightenment values - reason, free speech, autonomy, human rights - that were traditionally used as bulwarks against extremism.

Few English language writers enjoy the position of authority, even reverence, that the journalist, essayist, novelist George Orwell does.While Orwell is best known for his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, he can also be read as developing a provocative moral sensibility — perhaps even an ethical system — in dialogue with the exigencies of war that framed his life, as well as the philosophical traditions that were “in the air” in English culture in the first half of the twentieth century.

Ever since Plato’s cave, the darkness has been considered something to be left behind. This is the founding myth of philosophy, the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition.But how might philosophy be different if it had, from the beginning, learned to see in the dark? If it had embraced, rather than sought to tame, the emotions that sometimes overwhelm us when we experience the too-muchness of life?

Over the last decade, liberalism has found itself on the ropes. Even many liberals seem to regard it as too soft a political disposition for hard times. This has led some of its most passionate advocates to make the case for its importance with a degree of desperation commensurate with their sense of the existential threat it faces from resurgent forms of authoritarianism, intolerance, populism and political violence.But there is another way of making the case for liberalism — and that is to point to its benevolent effects all around us, the extent to which its influence is written all over those social practices and dispositions we hold dear. In other words, maybe liberalism doesn’t have to be defended at all, but simply acknowledged, and lived-into, as a way of life that both reflects and sustains our hard-won commitment to fairness, decency and equality.

Whatever else artificial intelligence is, according to Professor Shannon Vallor, it is first and foremost a projection of the human. And so whatever threat it poses, is a threat from within our humanity.

The project of bringing extinct animals back into being is sexy, hi-tech and could confer significant environmental benefits - but at what cost? Some argue that resurrecting extinct species could actually work against the conservation of threatened species that currently exist. Why worry about their possible extinction, if we can just bring them back?

Gene technology has brought us to the point where it's theoretically possible to bring back extinct animals from the "species grave". But the science is not straightforward - and neither is the philosophy.

If you're like most people, you probably think about your life as a story - it has a beginning, a middle and an end, and the main character in the story is... you. But this seemingly "natural" main character thinking is deeply culturally determined, and it can limit us in the ways that we evaluate our own lives and the lives of others.

Historians are commonly thought of as being a little like archaeologists or scientists - they're in the business of uncovering facts, and then presenting those facts to the public as accurately as possible. But this week we're considering history as a species of narrative, and the historian as someone who doesn't "discover" the meaning of the past but constructs it.

Most of us aspire to achieve happiness in life, but is our understanding of happiness somewhat misguided? Could the wisdom of the ancient philosophers hold the key to modern happiness?

What moral judgements are made in philosophical thinking about fat bodies, and how does that culturally impact how we move through the world?

Philosophers have long debated how to define emotions and their relationship to our bodies. So, what are the different schools of thought? Why is there such a lack of consensus?

How should we engage with politics and protest? We explore the history of political engagement and ask what role civil disobedience plays in our lives today.

Most of us experience time as something that passes, or flows like a river - or at least we think we do. Could it be that the sense of time passing is just an illusion? This week we're getting to grips with a theory of time that denies the reality of "flow" - and we're asking why time seems to speed up or slow down in certain situations.Guest: Heather Dyke, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Otago NZProducer: David RutledgeExperience of Passage in a Static World - Heather Dyke at the London School of Economics, June 2017This episode was first broadcast on July 30, 2023.

Life is hard — disappointment, regret and suffering come with the territory — and if the projections of climate scientists and epidemiologists are correct, it's not going to get easier any time soon. But then, life has always been hard. What do philosophical traditions have to say about the incurable toughness of human existence?

When we think of 19th century German philosophy, we perhaps think first of Nietzsche, or Hegel, and then some other men - but Germany in the 1800s was also home to a number of women philosophers.

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?

Humility is the capacity for acknowledging that your own wisdom may be flawed, and that your epistemic commitments may be misplaced - but how can that acknowledgement honestly take place if you believe that the things you know are true?

"Freedom" has become a familiar catchcry in Western democracies, as individuals and protest groups increasingly push back against government restrictions of any and all kinds. The problems this poses for communal life and social cohesion are obvious - so how should freedom be properly understood?

How does a woman philosopher deal with the challenges posed by conservative, masculinist culture within her own academic discipline? Our guest this week turns to the work of Immanuel Kant, the 18th century German thinker who formulated a fine-grained philosophy of hope.

When you think about the music you like (or don't like), what does it tell you about your taste? Do you think you have good taste? And if you do, why? What is it about music that determines good or bad taste, and is it possible to cultivate the former?

This week we're exploring our enduring cultural fascination with identical twins, asking what drives it, and what philosophical questions around selfhood and identity are raised by twinship.

Digestive disorders are a common source of distress and social anxiety - which might seem to be an odd topic for philosophy, until you start to think about why we attach such stigma, shame and silence to issues of the gut. What does the gut tell us about our own experience of embodiment - and how can disability theory be used to shape healthier attitudes to the gut issues that plague so many of us?

The global pornography industry is getting bigger, more mainstream and more nasty - but does this mean it should be regulated? Many feminist philosophers would say yes - but this places them at odds with liberal defenders of pornography, who worry that regulation would constitute an attack on free speech.

Australian philosophy has been punching above its weight in recent decades - but does there exist something that we could call an identifiably Australian philosophical tradition? And how does the future of Australian philosophy look, at a time when the academic Humanities are under siege, and universities are being pushed to turn out "job-ready graduates"?

For a long time there's been an ambivalent relationship between LGBTQ communities and the state. Even in liberal democracies, which supposedly exist to protect the interests of all their citizens, examples of the state-sanctioned persecution of sexual minorities can be found right up to the present day. And the intellectual project of queer theory has had an anti-state scepticism baked into it from its earliest inception.

What exactly is it about swearing that gives it its offensive power? None of the standard philosophy-of-language explanations really gets to the bottom of why we swear, why we don't, and what we're doing when we use "obscene" language. This week, the author of a new book offers some thoughts.

What makes a true friend? Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics outlines certain conditions for virtuous friendship, but he sets the bar high, and his estimation of women's capacity for friendship is low. This week we're putting Aristotle in dialogue with Mary Astell, an early modern (and proto-feminist) English philosopher who also wrote extensively on friendship.

Transgender is commonly invoked as an identity, but this week we're asking if it is better understood as something that points to experience.

If you're a gamer, you might be interested to hear that according to a new study, female characters speak approximately half as much as male characters in video games. But why should philosophers be interested?

In 1998, the American philosopher Richard Rorty predicted dark days for democracy and the rise of a Trump-like figure in the USA. This week, with the publication of a new collection of Rorty's essays, we're considering the ongoing relevance of his work.

If you don't know much about women philosophers in the ancient Graeco-Roman world, you have a good excuse. They're known to have existed, but hardly any of their works have survived, and historical accounts of their lives tend to come from biographies written by men. This week we try to unravel the mystery.

During the lockdowns at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, people started to experience a strange sense of temporal distortion - time slowing down, time speeding up, time getting bent out of shape. This week we hear from a philosopher, a historian and a sociologist about how that might have happened, and what it might mean.

Mary Graham is one of Australia's most distinguished Aboriginal academics and authors. In this conversation, she articulates a political philosophy of relationality, conflict management and much more.

Libertarians are hard to pin down – they have a number of seemingly contradictory commitments that we normally associate with people on either the left or the right of politics. Libertarians like small government, low taxes and free markets – but they also favour things like same-sex marriage and drug legalisation. So what exactly is libertarianism, and where did it come from?

Cynicism is a philosophical tradition that existed for centuries in the ancient Graeco-Roman world. Its influence can be found in the Christian gospels, throughout the Western philosophical tradition, and arguably up to the present day in the work of such protest groups as Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion - not bad for a philosophical school whose most famous early practitioner lived in a wine jar and masturbated in public. But what exactly did the Cynics believe? and what can we learn from them today?

Biology is a scientific discipline, notionally given to the pursuit of hard facts and empirical evidence - so what can philosophy bring to the table?

Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" thesis has been hugely influential in moral philosophy, but how well does it hold up today? This week we're asking if Arendt's characterisation of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as a mindless functionary, devoid of ideology, was accurate - and whether or not it's still important to understand evil as something that doesn't always appear as dramatic of colourful.

The legal definition of Aboriginality is a complex issue, raising questions that have to do with identity, epistemology and politics. And while "race" as a biological category has been scientifically discredited, it still persists in Australian society, culture and law. So how should Aboriginality be defined?

The idea that race is a "natural" category, grounded in biology, has long been discredited - and yet it persists in a surprising number of places. This week we're looking at how medical practice has been shaped by outmoded assumptions about race, and how these assumptions directly affect the health of racialised people.

To many people, the notion that the universe has consciousness and purpose belongs back in the pre-scientific era. This week we're exploring the possibility that cosmic purpose is defensible not only philosophically, but also scientifically.

When billionaires want to make a positive difference in the world, many of them turn to philanthropy. Which is fine in principle, but this week we're asking if giving away money via huge global philanthropic foundations is really an unalloyed good.