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Part 1 of Episode 1: “The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living.”
Discussing Plato’s “Apology.” Does studying philosophy make you a better person? No.
Part 2 of Episode 1: “The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living.”
More discussion of Plato’s “Apology.”
Episode 2: Descartes’s Meditations: What Can We Know?
On Descartes’s Meditations 1 and 2.
Episode 3: Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Social Contract
Discussing Hobbes’s Leviathan, Chapters 13-15.
Episode 4: Camus and the Absurd
Discussing Camus’s “An Absurd Reasoning” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942).
Episode 5: Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics
Discussing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Books I and II.
Episode 6: Leibniz’s Monadology: What Is There?
Discussing Liebniz’s Monadology.
Episode 7: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: What Is There and Can We Talk About It?
Discussing the beginning (through around 3.1) of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Episode 8: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (and Carnap): What Can We Legitimately Talk About?
Continuing last ep’s discussion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with some Rudolph Carnap from his 1935 book Philosophy and Logical Syntax.
Episode 9: Utilitarian Ethics: What Should We Do?
Discussing Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation chapters 1-5, John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, and Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”
Episode 10: Kantian Ethics: What Should We Do?
Discussing Fundamental Principles (aka Groundwork) of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785).
Episode 11: Nietzsche’s Immoralism: What Is Ethics, Anyway?
Discussing The Genealogy of Morals (mostly the first two essays) and Beyond Good and Evil Ch. 1 (The Prejudices of Philosophers), 5 (Natural History of Morals), and 9 (What is Noble?).
Episode 12: Chuang Tzu’s Taoism: What Is Wisdom?
On the “Chuang Tzu,” Chapters 2, 3, 6, 18, and 19. With guest Erik Douglas.
Episode 13: What Are the Metaphysical Implications of Quantum Physics?
On Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy. Dylan Casey’s first appearance (as a guest).
Episode 14: Machiavelli on Politics
Discussing Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince and Ch. 1-20 of The Discourse on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy
Episode 15: Hegel on History
Discussing G.W.F Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History.
PREVIEW-Episode 16: Danto on Art
Discussing three essays by Arthur Danto from The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986): the title essay, “The Appreciation and Interpretation of Works of Art,” and “The End of Art.” I understand you may not have heard of Danto, and you may think modern art is goofy, but you’ll definitely enjoy this discussion and the reading anyway. Note that Danto listened to this episode and liked it.
PREVIEW-Episode 17: Hume’s Empiricism: What Can We Know?
On David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Hume thinks that all we can know are our own impressions, but that no experience shows us one event causing another event. So, causality must just be regular patterns of conjoined events.
PREVIEW-Episode 18: Plato: What Is Knowledge?
Discussing Plato’s Theatetus and Meno. In the Theaetetus, Plato considers and rejects a series of mostly very lame conceptions of knowledge and replaces them at the end with… NOTHING. In the Meno, knowledge is “remembrance” (maybe).”
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