Philosopher's Zone

Mar 06 2025 241 ep. 30 mins 2.9k
Philosopher's Zone Podcast artwork

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.

  Society & Culture
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What is a conspiracy theory?

Mar 06 2025 28 mins  
We all feel we know what a conspiracy theory is: it's a belief held by other people about a conspiracy or conspiracies. Nobody likes being identified as a conspiracy theorist - including conspiracy theorists - and this makes life difficult for social scientists, psychologists and other researchers. When it comes to philosophy and the business of nailing down exactly what a conspira

Getting past post-truth

Feb 26 2025 38 mins  
Our current "post-truth" environment means it's getting harder to trust what we see, hear and read - and this is a problem for all of us, but especially for educators and anyone in the business of teaching younger people about the world. This week we hear from a scholar who's looking to a modern philosophical tradition to come up with critical thinking strategies for students.

Expanding our moral circle

Feb 19 2025 39 mins  
Our "moral circle" encompasses fellow humans, other primates, dogs, cats and other animals to which we attribute feelings and interests. But as science teaches us more about the inner lives of insects, marine animals and even microbes, it becomes more and more apparent that we might need to include them in our moral circle as well. Furthermore, we may need to bestow moral significa

Knowing what things are like

Feb 12 2025 31 mins  
Conventional wisdom has it that if you've never fallen in love, if you've never given birth to a child, if you've never tasted Vegemite... then you can't know what these experiences are like. But is the conventional wisdom correct? This week we're asking if there could in fact be various kinds of what-it-is-like knowledge, not all of which require direct first-hand experience.

How important is aesthetic education?

Feb 05 2025 28 mins  
It's often said that we're experiencing a crisis in the arts and Humanities, with declining student numbers in subjects that aren't deemed suitable for creating "job-ready graduates", and funding cuts slashing support for the arts. In a world of tight job markets and increasing importance given to STEM subjects, what can we do about it?

Rediscovering Wilfrid Sellars

Jan 30 2025 29 mins  
The American thinker Wilfrid Sellars died in 1989, and has been remembered as a primarily analytic philosopher. But today, Sellars is being rediscovered by a new generation of Continental philosophers - and, perhaps surprisingly, Marxists. What do these thinkers find in Sellars, and how are his thoughts on science and knowledge being applied to questions of politics and society?

Auschwitz: experiencing what can't be experienced

Jan 23 2025 33 mins  
This week marks 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz at the end of the Second World War. Representation in literature and cinema of the horrors that took place at Auschwitz is fraught with ethical ambiguities, as is the experience of actually visiting Auschwitz, which many people do today. The place stands as a famous memorial, known to all - and yet, this week's guest fears

Summer season: History and narrative

Jan 15 2025 33 mins  
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.

Summer season: Libertarianism and freedom

Jan 08 2025 40 mins  
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?

Summer season: What is swearing?

Jan 01 2025 34 mins  
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 very sweary philosophy book offers some thoughts.