PEL Episodes by Topic

All 403 numbered episodes of the podcast, grouped by subject. Updated 2026-10-14.

Ethics

Episode 402: Plato Talks Homer: Hippias Minor and Ion — Whether someone who does wrong knowingly is better than one who errs from ignorance, and whether a collection of skills amounts to virtue.
Episode 390: Diderot Debates a Cynic — A candid, amoral sponger argues against a philosopher that getting by in a corrupt world requires flattery and deceit, testing whether virtue is needed for happiness.
Episode 381: Aquinas on Ethical Psychology — What is virtue, which parts of the soul can possess it, and why does loving something greater than ourselves require a virtuous will?
Episode 379: Egyptian Philosophy with Chike Jeffers — What did ancient Egyptian texts teach about justice and the good life? The concept of maat in royal instructions, a monotheist hymn, and dialogues on injustice and suicide.
Episode 372: Kant’s Ethics Lectures — Kant's lecture notes on ethics offer practical guidance on duties to oneself and others, moral motivation, sex, charity and punishment beyond his abstract categorical imperative.
Episode 371: Christine Korsgaard on Normativity — Why is morality binding? Korsgaard grounds obligation in our need for practical identities, above all our identity as human beings, and in the public nature of reasons.
Episode 370: Christine Korsgaard on the History of Ethics — How can obligations exist in a scientific world of mere facts? Korsgaard traces answers from voluntarism through Hume, moral realism and Williams toward reflective endorsement.
Episode 369: Philippa Foot’s Naturalistic Ethics — Can ethics be modeled on biological health? Foot argues moral goodness is a form of natural goodness specific to human practical reason.
Episode 368: Hume on Reason in Ethics — Can reason alone motivate moral action? Hume argues reason is the slave of the passions and moral judgment rests on sentiment.
Episode 367: Hume on the Foundations of Ethics — Is morality grounded in reason or feeling? Hume argues our moral approvals rest on sentiment and track utility, with justice an artificial virtue.
Episode 365: Scheler on Love — Scheler's account of love as a spontaneous movement toward higher value in the beloved, and hatred as its destructive counterpart.
Episode 364: Max Scheler on Sympathy — What is it to feel for another? Scheler distinguishes genuine fellow feeling from identification and emotional infection, against sentimentalist and monist accounts.
Episode 363: Franz Brentano’s Moral Epistemology — Can moral truths be given in experience yet be as certain as mathematics? Brentano grounds ethics in evidently correct love and preference.
Episode 358: Max Stirner’s Egoism — Stirner's radical egoism rejects morality, rights, liberalism and humanism as disguised religion, claiming only what the individual has power to own.
Episode 351: Guest Sophie Grace Chappell on Transgender — An argument, by analogy to adoption and naturalized citizenship, that justice and compassion require recognizing trans people, with concepts treated as historical rather than essential.
Episode 341: Guest Karyn Lai on Daoism in the Zhuangzi — How should the Zhuangzi be read, what is its Daoist model of virtue and wu wei, and should a sage engage in politics at all?
Episode 332: Kierkegaard’s “Either/Or”: The Ethical Self — How does ethical commitment through marriage, friendship and work form a coherent self that is both universal and individual, according to Kierkegaard's Judge William?
Episode 331: Kierkegaard’s “Either/Or”: The Ethical Life — Kierkegaard's Judge William argues that the aesthete must choose himself absolutely, using despair as a springboard into a committed ethical life.
Episode 327: Harry Frankfurt on Bullshit and Authenticity — What distinguishes bullshit from lying, namely indifference to truth, and what it means to care about something as part of oneself.
Episode 314: Mengzi (Mencius) on Moral Psychology — Is human nature innately good, and how does love of one's parents ground all moral development according to Mengzi?
Episode 313: Mozi’s Political Ethics — Mozi argues for impartial love, meritocratic rule, and judging doctrines by their benefit to the people, against Confucian partiality, elaborate funerals, music, and fatalism.
Episode 312: The Dao De Jing on Virtue — What actions and attitudes characterize the Daoist sage, and how do Daoist inner virtues differ from Confucian behavioral ones?
Episode 301: Is Abortion Morally Permissible? — Is abortion morally permissible, even granting that the fetus is a person, and what grounds a being's moral status or a future like ours?
Episode 263: Lise Van Boxel’s “Warspeak” on Strategies for Valuing — A reading of Nietzsche's critique of asceticism that seeks a lighter, life-affirming counter-ideal, drawing on his neglected remarks about women as seducers.
Episode 262: Nietzsche on Self-Denial — What do ascetic ideals mean? Nietzsche on self-denial as a tool of the will to power, serving priests, artists, philosophers and scientists alike.
Episode 260: Locke on Moral Psychology — What makes a moral claim true, and are we free? Locke's account of moral law, sanctions, pleasure and pain, and liberty as the power to deliberate.
Episode 233: Plato’s “Protagoras” on Virtue — Can virtue be taught, and are the various virtues ultimately one thing, namely wisdom or knowledge?
Episode 213: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra — The first half of Zarathustra: the Overman, the Last Man, self-overcoming, and Nietzsche's oblique, poetic ethics of creating one's own values.
Episode 208: Epicurus on Seeking Pleasure — If pleasure is our only natural motive, how should we live, which desires are vain, and can philosophy work purely as therapy for tranquility?
Episode 205: Suicide with Dr. Drew (Durkheim et al) — Is suicide ever morally permissible or rational, or is it a symptom to be explained by sociology, psychoanalysis and psychology rather than judged?
Episode 201: Marcus Aurelius’s Stoicism with Ryan Holiday — What does Stoicism look like in practice, and can repeating wise maxims really reshape our instincts and help us act well amid power and ambition?
Episode 181: Hannah Arendt on the Banality of Evil — How ordinary people come to take part in atrocity, whether they remain culpable when their whole society is corrupt, and why genocide is a distinctive crime.
Episode 178: Nietzsche as Social Critic: “Twilight of the Idols” — Nietzsche's attack on traditional morality, free will, and Socratic reason: what does he want instead, and is saying yes to life coherent?
Episode 176: Situationism in Psych: Milgram & Stanford Prison Experiments — Do psychology experiments on obedience and role-playing show that situations, not stable character virtues, determine whether people act well or badly?
Episode 159: Confucius on Virtuous Conduct — What can the Analects' teachings on ritual, filial piety, and virtuous conduct tell us today about acting well and serving in a corrupt political order?
Episode 150: Guest Peter Singer on Famine, Affluence, and Morality — If we must save a drowning child at the cost of our shoes, are we equally obligated to give away money to prevent distant deaths from poverty?
Episode 148: Aristotle on Friendship and Happiness — Why are friends necessary for the good life, why must true friends be virtuous, and how does friendship fit with Aristotle's praise of contemplation?
Episode 147: Aristotle on Wisdom and Incontinence — Aristotle distinguishes intellectual faculties, especially practical wisdom, to explain how someone can see what is good yet fail to pursue it.
Episode 145: Emmanuel Levinas: Why Be Ethical? — Levinas's phenomenological argument that our passive, pre-reflective relation to the Other makes ethical obligation prior to all knowledge and ontology.
Episode 144: Guest Martha Nussbaum on Anger — Does anger always involve a desire for payback, and should it have any role in personal relationships, social justice, or systems of punishment?
Episode 140: Beauvoir on the Ambiguous Human Condition — Can existentialism, denying any pre-given moral law, ground an ethics? Beauvoir argues that embracing our ambiguous freedom means willing the freedom of others.
Episode 132: Living Stoically with Seneca and Massimo — Seneca's letters on death, pleasure, hardship and the happy life, and how Stoic teaching that only virtue matters can guide modern practice.
Episode 124: The Stoic Life with Epictetus — Is freedom found by caring only about what we control—our own judgments and attitudes—and refusing to be disturbed by externals?
Episode 103: Thoreau on Living Deliberately — What life suits a thoughtful person? Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond tests living simply, close to nature, and free of social obligations.
Episode 102: Emerson on Wisdom and Individuality — Emerson urges us to reject conformity and trust ourselves, claiming that honest self-expression taps into something universal.
Episode 100: Plato’s Symposium Live Celebration! — What is love, and does it make us better? Plato's dialogue stages competing speeches on eros, from Aristophanes' myth of halves to Socrates' ascent to the good.
Episode 93: Freedom and Responsibility (Strawson vs. Strawson) — Is blame ever justified if our characters are unchosen, or are resentment and reactive attitudes beyond the reach of philosophical critique?
Episode 88: G.E.M. Anscombe: Should We Use Moral Language? — Anscombe argues that talk of moral obligation makes no sense without a divine lawgiver, and examines intention, action descriptions and the killing of innocents in war.
Episode 78: Ayn Rand on Living Rationally — Whether Rand's foundations for knowledge and her ethics of rational self-interest hold up under critical scrutiny.
Episode 72: Terrorism with Jonathan R. White — How terrorism should be defined and whether violence that harms innocents or targets the state can ever be morally justified.
Episode 69: Plato on Rhetoric vs. Philosophy — Is persuasive speech a genuine art conferring power, or mere flattery, and why should one choose philosophy and justice over rhetoric and pleasure?
Episode 59: Alasdair MacIntyre on Moral Justifications — Whether moral claims can be objectively justified by restoring Aristotelian teleology through practices, coherent life narratives and cultural traditions.
Episode 58: What Grounds Ethical Claims? (Moore, Stevenson, MacIntyre) — Whether "good" names an indefinable property known by intuition or merely expresses preferences, and whether emotivism now pervades modern moral language.
Episode 46: Plato on Ethics & Religion — Whether things are good because the gods approve of them or approved because they are good, and whether morality depends on religion.
Episode 45: Moral Sense Theory: Hume and Smith — Where moral ideas come from, on the view that they arise from sympathy and reflecting on how we and others judge our judgments.
Episode 42: Feminists on Human Nature and Moral Psychology — Whether human nature and moral psychology differ by sex, and whether standard accounts of morality reflect only male experience.
Episode 41: Pat Churchland on the Neurobiology of Morality (Plus Hume’s Ethics) — What brain science and evolution reveal about the origins of moral sentiments, and whether such facts bear on what we ought to value.
Episode 11: Nietzsche’s Immoralism: What Is Ethics, Anyway? — Nietzsche's genealogy of master and slave morality and bad conscience, his critique of Christianity, and what, if anything, he positively recommends.
Episode 10: Kantian Ethics: What Should We Do? — What does Kant's Categorical Imperative demand of us, and how does it bear on free will, duties to animals, and other practical cases?
Episode 9: Utilitarian Ethics: What Should We Do? — Should we always act to maximize happiness? Classical utilitarianism, measuring pleasure, higher pleasures, animals, and our obligations to distant famine victims.
Episode 5: Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics — Aristotle on happiness as the human good and virtue as a mean between extremes acquired through habit.
Episode 1: “The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living.” — Socrates on trial: why the unexamined life is not worth living and whether knowing that you know nothing is a kind of wisdom.

Politics & Society

Episode 397: Federalist Papers LIVE — Whether the American founders' design against corruption, faction, and tyranny has held up, and whether slavery corrupted the constitutional project from the start.
Episode 391: Habermas Defends Modernity — Whether Enlightenment reason and its ideals can be salvaged through intersubjective deliberation, against the Frankfurt School's wholesale critique of reason as domination.
Episode 389: Hegel on Wealth and Power — How do state power and wealth converge in the monarch, and why does the nobles' dependent devotion breed resentment, cynicism, and moral debasement?
Episode 388: Hegel on Culture — How do individuals give themselves content by taking on cultural roles, and why does this acculturation leave the self alienated?
Episode 387: Hegel on Law — How does the clash between human and divine law in Antigone dissolve harmonious ethical life and produce alienated individuals with mere legal rights?
Episode 386: Hegel on Society — Why is society rather than the individual the basic unit for Hegel, and how do custom and unarticulated divine law sustain a harmonious community?
Episode 380: Josiah Royce on Community — Can a community of interpretation, bound by shared history and hope, count as a literal mind, and does belonging to one give human life meaning?
Episode 376: Plato’s “Laws” — What is government for and what should real laws look like? Plato's late dialogue argues laws should make citizens virtuous, persuading them through reasoned preludes.
Episode 375: Luce Irigaray’s Feminism — What role should sexual difference play in philosophy and society? Irigaray argues male-built language and theory erase women's subjectivity and treat women as commodities.
Episode 374: Discussing Liberalism (Lincoln, et al) with Walter Sterling — Is liberal democracy in crisis? Lincoln's warnings about mob rule set against Deneen's critique of liberalism, Fukuyama's defense and Pinker's optimism.
Episode 373: Michael Walzer on Just Wars — When is it morally justified to go to war? Walzer's account of aggression, preemption and intervention, applied to Israel, Ukraine and Vietnam.
Episode 361: Marx on Machines — Why automation under capitalism worsens rather than frees labor, and what Marx's sparse remarks on communism imply about production without commodities.
Episode 360: Karl Marx on Economic Value — What makes a commodity valuable? Marx's opening chapter of Capital locates value in socially necessary labor and diagnoses commodity fetishism.
Episode 359: Karl Marx’s Project — Marx argues that supposedly natural economic laws reflect capitalism's historical moment, treating production, consumption, distribution and exchange as one system.
Episode 355: Marx on Alienation — Marx's early account of how wage labor alienates workers from their products, their activity, each other and their own human essence.
Episode 349: Rorty’s Pluralistic Pragmatism — Can democracy and truth do without appeals to non-human authority like God, Reason, or Truth, and how should pragmatists treat religion?
Episode 328: Guest Yascha Mounk Against Identity Politics — A liberal critique of the identity synthesis: its intellectual origins, its claims about truth and group identity, and whether universalist liberalism offers a better path.
Episode 315: Mengzi (Mencius) on Virtuous Leaders — How does Mengzi connect personal virtue to effective rule, and what does it mean that the state exists to serve the people?
Episode 306: Dworkin and the Dobbs Decision — Does the U.S. Constitution guarantee a right to abortion? Dworkin's account of abstract constitutional rights set against the Dobbs majority and dissent.
Episode 304: Dworkin v. Hart on Legal Judgment — How do judges decide hard cases when the rules run out? Dworkin argues that legal principles with moral content undermine Hart's separation of law and morality.
Episode 303: H.L.A. Hart on the Foundations of Law — What is law founded on if not morality? Hart's legal positivism, primary and secondary rules, the penumbra of hard cases, and the internal point of view.
Episode 300: Nietzsche on Relating to History — What is the healthiest way to relate to the past: monumental, antiquarian and critical history, and when historical awareness helps or hinders life and action.
Episode 295: Kant on Preventing War — What principles and institutions could ground just relations among nations and prevent future wars, from republican government to a federation of states?
Episode 278: Derrick Bell on the Dynamics of Racism — Bell's argument that American racism is permanent, sustained by economic interests, and that Black rights advance only when they serve white interests, as dramatized in "The Space Traders."
Episode 269: Arendt on Totalitarianism — Is totalitarianism a new form of government? Arendt on ideology, terror, and the loneliness of modern life as the ground of total domination.
Episode 256: Kropotkin’s Anarchist Communism — Can an egalitarian society do without the state, relying on voluntary cooperation and mutual aid to provide for everyone?
Episode 255: Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” — What philosophy of conflict lies in the ancient Chinese military treatise, which counsels calm, knowledge of enemy and self, and winning without fighting?
Episode 254: Michael Sandel Interview: Against Meritocracy — Even a perfect meritocracy would be harmful, breeding arrogance among winners and humiliation among others, so how should we value contribution to the common good?
Episode 251: Simone Weil’s Ideal Society — Given human nature and the demands of necessity, what society would do least damage, with freedom understood as consciously grasping goals and the steps toward them?
Episode 250: Simone Weil on Human Needs — What needs of the soul should a good society serve, and how can contrasting needs like liberty and obedience, equality and hierarchy, both be fulfilled?
Episode 249: Dewey on Education and Thought — What model of human nature should ground education? Dewey on thinking as inquiry, education as growth and cultural transmission, and schooling for democratic life.
Episode 248: Racism and Policing (Al-Saji, Merleau-Ponty, et al) — Can phenomenology of embodied habit explain unconscious racialized seeing, and could hesitation help reform policing and how we perceive others?
Episode 241: Political Philosophy and the Pandemic — Whether a global pandemic reveals truths of political philosophy or merely reinforces existing beliefs, applying theories of justice and liberty to an uncertain crisis.
Episode 239: Montesquieu Invents Political Science — What principles keep republics, monarchies and despotisms functioning, how climate shapes peoples, and why separation of powers secures liberty.
Episode 238: Lingering Questions — A look back at recent discussions of social construction and gender, the value of the idea of grievable lives, and listener objections to identity politics.
Episode 237: Walter Benjamin Analyzes Violence — Benjamin's analysis of law-making, law-preserving, mythical and divine violence, and whether state power is inseparable from violence.
Episode 236: Judith Butler Interview: “The Force of Nonviolence” — What nonviolence requires once we recognize our interdependence, how claims of self-defense expand, and why all lives should be treated as equally grievable.
Episode 235: Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” — Is gender an essence or a performance, is even biological sex shaped by gender concepts, and what does this mean for feminist politics?
Episode 234: Beauvoir on Romance in “The Second Sex” — Why romantic love under patriarchy is asymmetrical and unstable, and how men's existential anxieties are projected onto cultural myths of woman.
Episode 232: Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” — How society constructs woman as the Other, denying her freely chosen projects and the status of a subject, and how upbringing and marriage shape this situation.
Episode 228: Social Construction of Race (Appiah, Mills) — Is race a biological reality, a social construction with real effects, or an empty concept, and what follows for racial identity?
Episode 227: What Is Social Construction? (Hacking, Berger) — What does it mean to call something socially constructed, can it still be objective, and what are such arguments trying to achieve?
Episode 225: Simone Weil on War and Oppression — How does force dehumanize both victors and victims, and why do war and economic oppression persist even through revolutions?
Episode 224: Kierkegaard Critiques the Present Age — Is modern society too reflective and passive, with the press, and now the internet, breeding anonymous chatter instead of committed action?
Episode 211: Sartre on Racism and Authenticity — Sartre's analysis of anti-Semitism and racism as inauthentic flights from freedom, and what an authentic response to oppression would look like.
Episode 210: Frantz Fanon’s Black Existentialism — How growing up in a racist, colonized society distorts the psyche, and whether liberation requires black solidarity or a post-racial humanism.
Episode 209: Guest Francis Fukuyama on Identity Politics — How does the demand for recognition and dignity drive identity politics, and can a creedal national identity keep group resentments from undermining liberal democracy?
Episode 200: Kant/Mendelssohn/Foucault on Enlightenment — What is enlightenment: thinking for yourself free of authority, a balance of theory and cultivation, or an ongoing historical critique of our own limits?
Episode 199: Guest Elizabeth Anderson on Private Government — Are employers private dictatorships over workers' lives, and what would democratic equality require of the workplace and economy?
Episode 193: The Theory and Practice of Liberal Education w/ Pano Kanelos — What a liberal education is for, whether a shared Great Books curriculum liberates or indoctrinates, and whether it should be available to everyone.
Episode 192: “The Closing of the American Mind”: Allan Bloom on Education — Has democratic culture left university students relativistic and nihilistic, and can a Great Books education restore serious thought about the good?
Episode 187: The Limits of Free Speech — What limits on speech are legitimate, whether harm and offense justify restriction, and whether free speech is a neutral principle or always a political position.
Episode 183: Mill on Liberty — When society may restrict or shame behavior, Mill's harm principle, and why free thought, free speech and experiments in living are needed for truth and progress.
Episode 177: Guest Russ Roberts on Adam Smith and Libertarian Economics — Is the economy an emergent order rather than a machine to be steered, and how does Smith's economics fit with his moral philosophy?
Episode 174: Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” — How do the division of labor and exchange produce wealth, and should government stay out of trade through tariffs and other restrictions?
Episode 170: Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” — Has consumer capitalism turned all of culture, including our leisure, into a passive spectacle that isolates us and blocks real political opposition?
Episode 166: Spinoza on Politics and Religion — What role should the state play in religion and morality, what is the essence of true religion, and how far should freedom of speech extend?
Episode 162: James Baldwin on Race in America — What can Baldwin's testimony about racism teach philosophy, and how can one oppose others' inhumanity without becoming inhuman oneself?
Episode 161: White Privilege (Peggy McIntosh, Charles Mills, et al) — Does the rhetoric of white privilege usefully name systemic racial injustice, or does it confuse matters with claims about group responsibility and guilt?
Episode 160: Orwell on Totalitarianism and Language — How does control of language enable totalitarian power, and does Orwell's dystopia illuminate real political tendencies or merely offer an extreme thought experiment?
Episode 157: Richard Rorty on Politics for the Left — Rorty argues the cultural left abandoned economic reform and national hope, leaving room for right-wing demagogues, and urges a return to reformist politics.
Episode 156: Philosophy and Politics Free-Form Discussion — How can philosophy help us understand the current political landscape, argue with opponents about the public good, and decide how to act?
Episode 152: Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy in America (PEL Live!) — Tocqueville's account of American democracy's strengths and dangers: civic association, materialism, individualism, equality over freedom, and vulnerability to demagogues.
Episode 151: Edmund Burke’s Conservatism — Why Burke's critique of the French Revolution, favoring tradition, stability and inherited wisdom over abstract rights, became a founding text of modern conservatism.
Episode 149: Plato’s “Crito”: A Performance and Discussion — Unjustly condemned to death, should Socrates escape Athens? A performance of the dialogue and discussion of his argument that he owes obedience to the laws.
Episode 141: Beauvoir’s Existentialism: Moral and Political Dilemmas — How should an existentialist act against oppression, when violence may be necessary yet inexcusable and no external moral standard offers justification?
Episode 139: bell hooks on Racism/Sexism — How racism and sexism interact to silence black women, and why reclaiming narratives and critiquing media representation matter for liberation.
Episode 137: Bourdieu on the Tastes of Social Classes — How aesthetic tastes in art and music reflect and reinforce social class, serving as tools for distinguishing oneself within the social order.
Episode 136: Adorno on the Culture Industry — Whether mass entertainment is imposed from above to lull audiences into conformity, as the Frankfurt School critique of the culture industry claims.
Episode 125: Hannah Arendt on the Political & Private — How has the line between public and private shifted since Athens, and has modern society reduced politics to economic housekeeping by a society of laborers?
Episode 123: Economics with Hayek and Sen (Intro by Seth Benzell) — Can economics model society scientifically, given dispersed knowledge that no planner can gather and simplifying assumptions about rational, self-interested agents?
Episode 104: Robert Nozick’s Libertarianism — What limits should constrain government? Nozick argues for a minimal state and an entitlement theory of justice judged by how holdings were acquired, not their pattern.
Episode 98: Guest Michael Sandel Against Market Society — Are some goods degraded by being bought and sold even without coercion, and can neutral liberalism resist the spread of market values?
Episode 97: Michael Sandel on Social Justice and the Self — Does liberal justice rest on a false picture of the self as an unencumbered chooser detached from family and community?
Episode 85: Rawls on Social Justice — What makes a society just? Rawls's original position asks what principles we would choose without knowing our place in society.
Episode 83: New Work with Guest Frithjof Bergmann — Can we replace the dysfunctional job system with work people genuinely want to do, and build institutions that help us discover what that is?
Episode 70: Marx on the Human Condition — Whether human nature and history are driven by economic conditions and labor rather than ideas, and how ideology reflects the interests of the ruling class.
Episode 65: The Federalist Papers — The case for the US Constitution's centralized but separated powers, and whether Madison's safeguards against factions have worked.
Episode 64: Celebrity, with Guest Lucy Lawless — Why do we revere and attack celebrities, and do they fill a social need that is part religion and part aggression?
Episode 60: Aristotle: What’s the Best Form of Government? — Aristotle's taxonomy of constitutions and his practical advice on keeping states stable, with the state seen as a natural outgrowth of human nature.
Episode 52: Philosophy and Race (DuBois, Martin Luther King, Cornel West) — What philosophical lessons emerge from black oppression in America, from double consciousness and racist aesthetic norms to strategies for gaining political and economic power.
Episode 49: Foucault on Power and Punishment — Whether the shift from public torture to rehabilitative imprisonment marks progress in liberty or a subtler, more pervasive form of power.
Episode 40: Plato’s Republic: What Is Justice? — What justice is, whether it is more than the interest of the stronger, and how a just soul mirrors Plato's ideal ruled-by-reason state.
Episode 37: Locke on Political Power — What makes political power legitimate, and how far does a social contract born of a milder state of nature limit the state?
Episode 23: Rousseau: Human Nature vs. Culture — How did humanity develop from natural savagery to corrupted civilization, and could any form of government make social life tolerable?
Episode 15: Hegel on History — Is history a random sequence of events or the purposive unfolding of spirit toward freedom, as Hegel's introduction to his lectures on history claims?
Episode 14: Machiavelli on Politics — What makes a government successful, and must political success be judged apart from conventional morality, according to The Prince and the Discourses on Livy?
Episode 3: Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Social Contract — Hobbes's account of the state of nature and the laws of nature, and whether we have implicitly agreed to a social contract with the sovereign.

Knowledge

Episode 396: Peirce on Knowledge — Peirce denies we have intuitive or introspective knowledge, holding that all cognition, including knowledge of the self, is inference through signs.
Episode 354: Guest Tim Williamson on Philosophic Method — Should philosophers treat intuitive counterexamples as products of fallible heuristics and avoid overfitting theories, borrowing the model-building methods of science instead of conceptual analysis?
Episode 353: Reid on Visual Knowledge — Do visual sensations resemble the objects they reveal, or act as natural signs, and how is trusting perception like trusting testimony?
Episode 352: Thomas Reid on Smelling and Knowledge — Reid uses the sense of smell to argue against the theory of ideas and Humean skepticism, holding that sensations bring us immediately to real objects.
Episode 350: Rorty on Justification and Essentialism — Can democracy and inquiry do without objective Truth or essences, and does Rorty's pan-relationalism and refusal of a theory of truth escape relativism?
Episode 348: Tim Williamson’s Knowledge-First Epistemology — Should knowledge be treated as basic rather than defined via belief and justification, and is a deceived believer justified or merely excused?
Episode 347: Nyaya Sutra Against Buddhist Skeptics — Can Buddhist claims that the world is illusion and the self unreal be answered by arguing that illusion depends on reality and properties need a bearer?
Episode 346: Nyaya Sutra on Knowledge — What are the legitimate sources of knowledge—perception, inference, comparison, and testimony—and how does Nyaya's externalist account of perception work?
Episode 344: Gettier and Goldman on Justified True Belief — Is knowledge justified true belief, and can a reliable-process account of justification answer Gettier cases where true justified beliefs are merely lucky?
Episode 342: Zhuangzi on Knowledge and Virtue — Can we know other minds, even a fish's, and how does Daoism's view of changing reality and opposites shape its flexible, non-rule-based virtue?
Episode 310: Wittgenstein On World-Pictures — What is Wittgenstein's notion of a world-picture, how does it differ from a world-view, and does it amount to a philosophy of science?
Episode 309: Wittgenstein On Certainty — Can we meaningfully claim to know that this is a hand? Wittgenstein argues that such propositions lie beyond doubt and knowledge, framing the language games we play.
Episode 308: Moore’s Proof of Mind-Independent Reality — Can holding up one's hands prove mind-independent objects exist? Moore's proof against idealism and skepticism, and his analysis of certainty versus infallibility.
Episode 307: G.E. Moore Defends Common Sense — Can we really know the external world? Moore defends common-sense certainties against skeptics and idealists, and weighs theories of how sense data relate to objects.
Episode 294: Quine on Science vs. Epistemology — Should epistemology stop trying to ground science on indubitable foundations and instead become part of natural science itself?
Episode 285: Nicolas Malebranche on Knowledge — Malebranche's rationalist epistemology: we never perceive bodies directly but see ideas in God, and the idea of infinity proves God's existence.
Episode 276: Hegel on Perception — Hegel's argument that raw sense certainty already depends on universal concepts, and the puzzles of substance and properties in perceiving things.
Episode 275: Hegel’s Project in “The Phenomenology of Spirit” — Hegel's method in the Phenomenology: inhabiting successive theories of knowledge to show how each fails and gives rise to a more adequate one.
Episode 259: Locke Clarifies Misleading Complex Ideas — How are complex ideas like modes and substances built from simple ones, and what can we really know about substance, causation, infinity, and personal identity?
Episode 258: Locke on Acquiring Simple Ideas — How do we acquire simple ideas like color, space, and thinking through sensation and reflection, and how do they relate to the qualities of things?
Episode 257: Locke Against Innate Ideas — Are we born with any ideas or principles, such as God or non-contradiction, or must all knowledge come from experience?
Episode 231: Descartes’s “Discourse” on Wisdom and Certainty — Descartes's autobiographical account of doubting everything to find a secure foundation for knowledge, including the cogito, his proofs of God and soul, and a provisional ethics.
Episode 229: Descartes’s Rules for Thinking — Can careful method modeled on mathematics, breaking problems into simple intuited elements, guarantee certain knowledge in philosophy and science?
Episode 220: 10-Year Retrospective of The Partially Examined Life — A look back over ten years of the podcast: public philosophy, academic outreach, changing interests, and whether to cover more literature and poetry.
Episode 196: Guest Simon Blackburn on Truth — Rather than defining truth, how do claims to truth actually work across domains like science, ethics, and art without collapsing into mere opinion?
Episode 155: Richard Rorty Against Epistemology — Rorty argues that a philosophical theory of knowledge is impossible, since no foundation outside our conversational practices can ground justification.
Episode 154: Wilfrid Sellars on the Myth of the Given — Sellars argues knowledge cannot rest on foundational, given experiences, since anything able to justify belief must already be propositional and conceptually laden.
Episode 138: Guest John Searle on Perception — Searle's direct realist theory that we perceive objects themselves rather than representations, and how conditions of satisfaction explain illusion.
Episode 106: Pyrrhonian Skepticism According to Sextus Empiricus — Can we suspend judgment on every theoretical question by balancing opposing arguments, and does that bring tranquility while still letting us live?
Episode 99: Looking Back on 100 Discussions and 5+ Years — A look back over five years and a hundred discussions at what reading and discussing philosophy has taught the participants.
Episode 84: Nietzsche’s “Gay Science” — Nietzsche's cheerful, subversive inquiry questions belief in God, the will to truth and systematic philosophy, urging us to create our own character and values.
Episode 76: Deleuze on What Philosophy Is — Whether philosophy is the creation of concepts on a plane of immanence, distinct from science's functions and art's percepts and affects.
Episode 73: Why Do Philosophy? (And What Is It?) — What philosophy is, how it differs from science, religion and art, and why anyone would pursue unbounded self-questioning inquiry.
Episode 67: Carnap on Logic and Science — Carnap's attempt to reconstruct all knowledge logically from momentary experiences, and whether science can set aside metaphysical questions.
Episode 61: Nietzsche on Truth and Skepticism — Does Nietzsche deny truth altogether, or is he a skeptic showing that all knowledge is laden with human interests and that the will to truth is puzzling?
Episode 48: Merleau-Ponty on Perception and Knowledge — Whether all knowledge, even science and mathematics, is grounded in embodied perception, and whether art can yield knowledge too.
Episode 31: Husserl’s Phenomenology — Can bracketing the external world and describing the structures of consciousness give science a secure foundation, including objectivity and other minds?
Episode 30: Schopenhauer on Explanations and Knowledge — What kinds of explanation are legitimate, and how does confusing causal with logical reasons produce philosophical error in a modernized Kantian theory of knowledge?
Episode 20: Pragmatism – Peirce and James — Is truth a correspondence between ideas and the world, or a process by which beliefs prove their worth through usefulness and fit with experience?
Episode 19: Kant: What Can We Know? — Can metaphysics be done at all, given how the mind's sensibility and understanding shape experience, including space, time, and causality?
Episode 18: Plato: What Is Knowledge? — What is knowledge? Plato's Theaetetus tests and rejects several definitions, while the Meno suggests that learning is a kind of recollection.
Episode 17: Hume’s Empiricism: What Can We Know? — If all knowledge comes from impressions and we never perceive causation, what can we know about cause, free will, miracles, and the external world?
Episode 2: Descartes’s Meditations: What Can We Know? — What can we know with certainty? Descartes's method of doubt in the first two Meditations and the cogito, compared to The Matrix.
Episode 0: Introduction to the Podcast — An introduction to the podcast: who the hosts are, how the episodes work, and whether you need prior philosophy to follow along.

Metaphysics

Episode 393: Kant vs. Hegel — Hegel argues that Kant's idea of an intuitive intellect and his account of purposiveness and imagination commit him to an infinite, divine reason he refused to affirm.
Episode 392: Early Hegel Elevates Reason — The young Hegel attacks Kant's restriction of reason to experience, arguing that reason can grasp the Absolute and unite subject and object.
Episode 385: Guest Graham Harman on Object vs. Continuum — Is reality made of discrete objects or a continuum, and how do continua like space mediate causal contact between objects that never touch?
Episode 384: Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology — What counts as a real object, why can objects never directly touch or be known, and is philosophy closer to art than to knowledge?
Episode 357: Feuerbach on the Evolution of Philosophy — Feuerbach traces philosophy from theism through Spinoza and Hegel to his own sensuous materialism, anticipating phenomenology's embodied, situated account of experience.
Episode 343: Plotinus the Neo-Platonist — How does Plotinus's hierarchy of the One, Intelligence, and Soul explain our relation to the good, and why would the soul descend into matter?
Episode 340: Brian Ellis on the Implications of Essentialism — What follows if there are objective natural kinds: are laws of nature just descriptions of things' dispositions, and are they necessary in all possible worlds?
Episode 338: Aristotle on Potential vs. Actual and the Unmoved Mover — Aristotle explains change through potentiality and actuality and argues that the cosmos is oriented toward an unmoved mover, thought thinking itself.
Episode 337: Aristotle on Primary Being — What makes an individual thing primary being: its matter, a Platonic form, or the substantial form that constitutes its essence?
Episode 336: Aristotle on Being and Non-Contradiction — How can we study being as such, and why does Aristotle ground the logical principle of non-contradiction in the nature of things?
Episode 335: Aristotle on Fundamental Explanations — What counts as a fundamental explanation of the world, and why does Aristotle think earlier philosophers' accounts fall short of his four causes?
Episode 297: Heidegger on the Human Condition — What is Dasein's distinctive way of being, and how is our being-in-the-world prior to treating things as objects for scientific study?
Episode 296: Heidegger Questions Being — A close reading of Being and Time's introduction: why the question of Being must be raised again and what Heidegger's phenomenological method involves.
Episode 286: Malebranche on Causality and Theology — Malebranche's occasionalism holds that God is the only true cause; is this theology, or a way of grounding the necessity of natural law?
Episode 282: Alain Badiou: What Is Philosophy? — What is philosophy for, if truths arise in politics, art, science and love? Badiou argues philosophy gathers these truths against sophistic denial of truth.
Episode 279: Aristotle’s “Categories” of Being — Aristotle's classification of the kinds of being, centered on substance, and puzzles about what is "said of" versus "present in" a thing.
Episode 273: Friedrich Schelling’s Foundationalist Idealism — Schelling's idealist account of how mind and world arise together in the act of self-consciousness, and how transcendental philosophy and natural science mirror each other.
Episode 271: Johan Gottlieb Fichte’s Transcendental Idealism — Fichte's attempt to remove Kant's thing-in-itself, moving from fear of causal determinism to an idealism that restores freedom but threatens meaninglessness.
Episode 264: Plato’s “Timaeus” on Cosmology — How is nature put together? Plato's likely story of a divine craftsman modeling the cosmos on the Forms, from geometric atoms to the balanced human soul.
Episode 240: David Lewis on Possible Worlds and Language Games — What makes claims about possibility and necessity true, whether possible worlds are real, and how possible-world talk illuminates conversation and fictional truth.
Episode 206: Lucretius’s Epicurean Physics — Can a world of atoms and void explain mind, perception and free will, and why should such a picture free us from fearing death and the gods?
Episode 198: Plato’s Forms in the “Parmenides” — Plato puts his own theory of Forms under attack: how do Forms relate to particulars, and can we know them at all?
Episode 197: Parmenides on What There Is — Why Parmenides concluded that only a single unchanging Being exists, that change and difference are illusion, and why he still offered a cosmology of appearances.
Episode 173: Relating to American Indian Philosophy — What do American Indian traditions teach about relationality, process over substance, knowledge through experience and story, and our duties to nonhuman nature?
Episode 163: Guest Stewart Umphrey on Natural Kinds — Are there real natural kinds with essences that explain things' behavior, and can reviving them resist the reduction of biology to chemistry and physics?
Episode 143: Plato’s “Sophist” on Lies, Categorization, and Non-Being — What is a sophist? The Eleatic Stranger's method of division for defining terms, and the puzzle of how false statements about non-being are possible.
Episode 135: Hegel on the Logic of Basic Metaphysical Concepts — How Hegel's dialectic generates basic categories like Being, Becoming, Quality and Quantity, and his distinction between Understanding and Reason.
Episode 134: Hegel on Thought & World (or “Logic”) — Hegel's claim that thought's categories mirror reality's, and his response to Kant that rigorous conceptual analysis can yield metaphysical knowledge.
Episode 127: John Dewey on Experience and the World — Are experience and the world science studies one and the same, and should philosophy stop treating experienced qualities as distortions of a truer reality?
Episode 122: Augustine on Mind and Metaphysics — What is memory, how does it relate to time and being, and how can it be a route to knowledge of God?
Episode 114: Schopenhauer: “The World Is Will” — Schopenhauer's claim that the reality behind appearances is a single blind, striving Will, known from the inside through our own willing.
Episode 110: Alfred North Whitehead: What Is Nature? — Whether nature should be understood as events rather than substances in space and time, and how space, time, and objects can be abstracted from experience.
Episode 92: Henri Bergson on How to Do Metaphysics — Bergson argues metaphysics grasps reality from the inside through intuition of flowing duration, unlike science, which freezes things into concepts.
Episode 89: Berkeley: Only Ideas Exist! — Berkeley argues that material substance is incoherent, that tables and trees are ideas, and that their persistence proves they exist in God's mind.
Episode 80: Heidegger on our Existential Situation — Heidegger argues that humanism rests on a metaphysics that forgets Being, and that being human depends on a proper relationship to Being itself.
Episode 79: Heraclitus on Understanding the World — How Heraclitus' logos makes a world of tension and transformation intelligible, and whether paradoxes and opposites can truly coexist.
Episode 68: Guest David Chalmers on the Scrutability of the World — Whether all truths about the world are knowable from a small base of truths about physics, consciousness, indexicals and a that's-all clause.
Episode 32: Heidegger: What is “Being?” — What does it mean to exist at all, and how has asking what things are, scientifically, obscured our understanding of ourselves and our world?
Episode 27: Nagarjuna on Buddhist “Emptiness” — Is the world of experience ultimately real, or is everything empty of inherent existence, and why act ethically if so?
Episode 24: Spinoza on God and Metaphysics — Spinoza's immanent, impersonal God: if God is everything, how are extension and mind attributes of one substance, with our minds as modes?
Episode 6: Leibniz’s Monadology: What Is There? — Leibniz's claim that reality consists of simple, mindlike, windowless monads coordinated by God in a pre-established harmony.

Mind & Psychology

Episode 401: Mind/Brain Identity Theory (U.T. Place, J.J.C. Smart) — Can mental states simply be brain processes, identical in the way lightning is electrical discharge, and what objections face this identity theory?
Episode 400: Dennett Rejects Qualia — Whether qualia and the self are real components of mind or useful fictions, with Dennett's replies to Block's phenomenal consciousness and Nagel's bat argument.
Episode 399: Dan Dennett’s Model of Mind — Dennett rejects the idea of a central place where consciousness happens, proposing that the brain produces competing parallel drafts with no sharp conscious/unconscious line.
Episode 398: Donald Davidson on Mind vs. Body — Davidson argues mental events are physical events yet not governed by strict laws, and that reasons can genuinely be causes of actions.
Episode 383: Freud on Love and the Primal Horde — How do love, identification, and a mythic primal father explain our readiness to follow leaders and to be hypnotized?
Episode 382: Freud on Group Psychology — Why do people in crowds become less inhibited and less thoughtful, and is it because libidinal ties to a leader replace individual conscience?
Episode 366: Edith Stein on Empathy — How can we directly grasp another person's experience without confusing it with our own? Stein's phenomenology of empathy, in dialogue with Scheler.
Episode 326: Guest Michael Tomasello on the Evolution of Agency — What makes a creature an agent, and how did self-regulating, deliberative agency evolve from simpler feedback loops in animals to human shared intentionality?
Episode 284: Mark Twain’s Philosophy of Human Nature — Is a person merely a machine shaped by temperament and training, always acting to win self-approval? Twain's bleak, mechanistic view of human nature.
Episode 274: Schelling on Self-Consciousness — Why Schelling thought the self-creating act of self-consciousness is the unconditioned ground of all knowledge, uniting the subjective and objective.
Episode 266: Jonathan Lear’s Plato: Psyche and Society — A psychoanalytic reading of Plato arguing that soul and city shape each other through internalization and externalization, with eros as a failed reach toward the divine.
Episode 261: Derek Parfit on Personal Identity — What makes a person the same over time? Parfit tests memory, brain, and soul criteria against thought experiments and concludes identity is not what matters.
Episode 223: Guest Ned Block on Consciousness — Should we attribute consciousness to a robot that is a functional duplicate of a person, and does consciousness depend on a creature's history?
Episode 222: Debating Functionalism (Block, Chalmers) — Could a functional duplicate of a person lack consciousness, or does the fading qualia thought experiment show functional organization guarantees experience?
Episode 221: Functionalist Theories of Mind (Putnam, Armstrong) — Can mental states be defined by what they do rather than what they are made of, and does functionalism make materialism about the mind coherent?
Episode 219: The Harder Problem of Consciousness (Block & Papineau) — Whether we could ever have rational grounds to believe a robot or alien is conscious, and whether our concepts of experience are simply too vague to say.
Episode 218: The Hard Problem of Consciousness (Chalmers, et al) — Why physical explanation seems unable to account for subjective experience, and Chalmers's survey of materialist and non-materialist responses to the hard problem.
Episode 202: Julia Kristeva on Disgust, Fear and the Self — How does violently rejecting what disgusts us, from corpses to the mother's gift, constitute the self, and how does this shape horror, religion and art?
Episode 180: More James’s Psychology: Self and Will — James's account of the self as "Me" and "I," his physiological theory of emotion, and will as a matter of sustained attention, with questions about free will.
Episode 179: William James’s Introspective Psychology — Can psychology be scientific while doing justice to experience, treating consciousness as a continuous stream and habit as the groundwork of character?
Episode 172: Mind, Self, and Affect with Guest Dr. Drew — How does early attachment to caregivers give us the ability to read other minds and form a coherent sense of self?
Episode 171: Buddhism vs. Evolution with Guest Robert Wright — Does evolutionary psychology vindicate the Buddhist claims that the unified self is an illusion and that meditation lets us see reality more truly?
Episode 153: Richard Rorty: There Is No Mind-Body Problem — Rorty argues the mind-body problem is not a real puzzle but an artifact of a historically contingent conceptual scheme inherited from Descartes and Locke.
Episode 133: Erich Fromm on Love as an Art — Whether love is an art requiring discipline and psychological maturity rather than something one falls into, and how capitalist society undermines it.
Episode 131: Aristotle’s “De Anima”: What Is the Mind? — Book 3 of De Anima: how sensation, imagination and the intellect work, and whether the intellect can be separated from the body.
Episode 120: A History of “Will” with Guest Eva Brann — Is the will a real faculty we find by introspection, or a historical artifact that breeds philosophical confusion and has damaged our culture?
Episode 116: Freud on Dreams — Freud's claim that dreams reveal the structure of the mind through disguised repressed desires, and whether this theory counts as science.
Episode 81: Jung on the Psyche and Dreams — Jung's account of the psyche: an unconscious full of archetypes that shape dreams and religious imagery, and the danger of neglecting it.
Episode 74: Jacques Lacan’s Psychology — How the ego as imaginary construction differs from the split subject, and how language and the unconscious shape the psyche and its disorders.
Episode 47: Sartre on Consciousness and the Self — Whether consciousness requires an 'I', or whether the ego is an object posited through reflection that others might know better than we do.
Episode 36: More Hegel on Self-Consciousness — The master-slave dialectic and its sequel: how meeting another person shapes self-consciousness, leading on to stoicism, skepticism and the unhappy consciousness.
Episode 35: Hegel on Self-Consciousness — How does self-consciousness arise, and why does the self have to be formed through reflection and interaction with others rather than existing ready-made?
Episode 26: Freud on the Human Condition — Why does happiness elude us when civilization demands we repress our innate desires, and what strategies offer some compensation?
Episode 25: Spinoza on Human Nature — How Spinoza relates mind and body, explains knowledge and the emotions, and proposes a rational ethical ideal grounded in our relationship to God.
Episode 21: What Is the Mind? (Turing, et al) — What is the mind and how can it be the brain? Can computers think, and can science fully explain conscious experience?

Language & Logic

Episode 325: Paul Grice on Meaning and Conversation — How speaker intentions determine what an utterance means, and the cooperative principle and maxims that let listeners infer implied meanings in conversation.
Episode 324: Plato’s “Cratylus” on Language — Are names merely conventional, or can words correctly capture the nature of what they name? Plato's dialogue on etymology, flux, and language as a tool.
Episode 323: Acquiring Language: Tomasello vs. Chomsky — Is language an instinct? Tomasello's usage-based account of how children learn language through shared attention, set against Chomsky's universal grammar.
Episode 290: Susanne Langer on Our Symbol-Making Nature — Are humans fundamentally symbol-making creatures, and how do symbols, not just literal language, shape how we know the world and how language developed?
Episode 252: Habermas on Communication as Sociality — Is language what binds individuals into society, carrying a built-in aim of mutual understanding that distinguishes communicative from strategic action?
Episode 247: Aristotle on Rhetoric and Emotions — What is persuasion good for? Aristotle's account of rhetorical argument, enthymemes and maxims, and his cognitive theory of emotions, especially anger.
Episode 195: Truth-The Austin/Strawson Debate — Is truth a property of statements corresponding to facts, or does calling something true merely signal our endorsement of it?
Episode 194: Alfred Tarski on Truth — Can truth be defined, and what does Tarski's formal definition of truth for a language actually accomplish?
Episode 191: Conceptual Schemes: Donald Davidson & Rudolf Carnap — Does it make sense to say different cultures or theories see the world through untranslatable conceptual schemes, and are ontological questions outside a framework meaningful?
Episode 186: J.L. Austin on Doing Things with Words — Austin's claim that utterances like promises are actions rather than descriptions, and his analysis of speech acts into locution, illocution and perlocution.
Episode 142: Plato’s “Phaedrus” on Love and Speechmaking — Plato's dialogue on love as divine madness, the chariot myth of the soul, what makes a good speech, and why live dialogue beats written texts.
Episode 128: Hilary Putnam on Linguistic Meaning — If meaning is not a description in the head, what is it? The Twin Earth argument suggests reference depends partly on the stuff around us.
Episode 126: Saul Kripke on Possibilities, Language & Science — What makes a name or kind term pick out its referent, and can scientific identities like heat being molecular motion be necessary truths?
Episode 111: Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: How to Interpret — Why there is no single correct interpretation of a text, and how our prejudices make understanding possible rather than blocking it.
Episode 66: Quine on Linguistic Meaning and Science — Quine's criteria for ontological commitment and his attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction in favor of a holistic web of belief tested by experience.
Episode 56: More Wittgenstein on Language — Family resemblance concepts, philosophical problems as grammatical mistakes, and the private language argument that talk of inner states like pain must be public.
Episode 55: Wittgenstein on Language — Whether linguistic meaning is a public matter of using words appropriately within language games, and how misusing words generates bogus philosophical problems.
Episode 51: Semiotics and Structuralism (Saussure, et al) — How meaning arises from differences within a language's structure, how structuralism extends this to culture, and how Derrida unsettles the link between language and reality.
Episode 34: Frege on the Logic of Language — What makes sentences true or false, and what are the strange non-physical, non-mental entities like senses and thoughts that Frege's logic of language requires?
Episode 8: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (and Carnap): What Can We Legitimately Talk About? — What can legitimately be said? Whether the Tractatus rules out metaphysics and ethics as nonsense, as Carnap held, or points mystically beyond language.
Episode 7: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: What Is There and Can We Talk About It? — Wittgenstein's opening claim that the world is made of facts, not things, and how facts break down into atomic facts.

Science & Technology

Episode 339: Brian Ellis on the Metaphysics of Science — Are laws of nature necessary because things have essential dispositional properties, against the Humean picture of passive matter and brute regularities?
Episode 293: Donna Haraway on Feminist Science — Can scientific objectivity survive the recognition that all knowledge is partial and politically situated, and how should we relate to technology?
Episode 281: Paul Feyerabend’s Anarchist Philosophy of Science — Is there any single scientific method, or does the history of science show that "anything goes" and that epistemic anarchy fosters progress and freedom?
Episode 280: Imre Lakatos on Scientific Progress — Can scientific progress be rational if scientists don't abandon theories when refuted? Lakatos proposes research programmes judged progressive or degenerating, between Popper and Kuhn.
Episode 277: Hegel on Our Understanding of Physics — Hegel on whether scientific force and natural law name things in the world or patterns structured by the understanding, and why there is no hidden thing-in-itself.
Episode 268: Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” — How does the medium shape thought? Postman argues television turned public discourse into entertainment, eroding reasoning, attention, and education.
Episode 230: Bruno Latour on Science, Culture, and Modernity — Does modernity's strict separation of objective science from human-made politics hold up, or are scientific ideas and technologies always hybrids of nature and culture?
Episode 226: Francis Bacon Invents Science — Does Bacon's new method of inductive tables and his idols of the mind amount to the scientific method, and what is his project of mastering nature?
Episode 168: Darwin’s “Origin of Species” — What are the philosophical consequences of explaining apparent design through variation and natural selection, and is evolutionary theory teleological or anti-religious?
Episode 130: Aristotle’s “De Anima”: What Is Life? — Aristotle's account of the soul as the first actuality of a natural organic body, and what kind of explanation of biological life that offers.
Episode 108: Dangers of A.I. with Guest Nick Bostrom — If machines become smarter than us and self-improving, how can we shape their goals in advance so they don't resist correction or harm humanity?
Episode 96: Oppenheimer and the Rhetoric of Science Advisers — What role should scientific advisers play in politics, and are figures like Oppenheimer modern prophets whose authority citizens accept on faith?
Episode 95: Gödel on Math — What do the incompleteness theorems imply for philosophy, and did they show that mathematics describes a real though non-physical world?
Episode 91: Transhumanism (Plus More on Brin) — Should we use technology to enhance human lifespan, intelligence and emotional range, or is such enhancement hubristic and dangerous?
Episode 86: Thomas Kuhn on Scientific Progress — Does science simply accumulate truth? Kuhn argues it moves through paradigms and revolutions, complicating the traditional picture of scientific progress.
Episode 82: Karl Popper on Science — What separates science from pseudo-science? Popper argues scientific theories must be falsifiable and knowledge grows through bold conjectures and critical refutation.
Episode 50: Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” — Whether value judgments, which Pirsig calls Quality, are a basic part of experience that grounds rationality and can reconcile us with technology.
Episode 38: Bertrand Russell on Math and Logic — Can mathematics be derived from logic, with numbers defined as classes of similar classes, and how do mathematical concepts relate to the world?
Episode 13: What Are the Metaphysical Implications of Quantum Physics? — Does quantum physics, with its uncertainty principle and wave-particle duality, force us to abandon metaphysical realism, as Heisenberg argues?

Art & Beauty

Episode 322: Schelling on Art vs. Nature — Whether art should imitate nature, and why Schelling thinks art, unlike discursive philosophy, lets us intuitively grasp the infinite and complete self-consciousness.
Episode 321: August Schlegel on Beauty — A Romantic reply to Kant's aesthetics, arguing that beauty and the sublime both relate us to the infinite, and examining genius, style, and art's idealizing of nature.
Episode 320: Friedrich Schlegel on Romanticism — What makes art Romantic: Schlegel's view of poesy as universal and progressive, the call for a new mythology, irony, and art as a path to the infinite.
Episode 319: Schiller on Experiencing Beauty — How does the experience of beauty balance our sensuous and rational drives, granting freedom through play and preparing us for abstract thought?
Episode 318: Friedrich Schiller on the Civilizing Potential of Art — Can an education in beauty make people free and rational enough to be citizens of a representative government?
Episode 292: Langer on Symbolic Music — Is music a language, and if it expresses something, what—feelings, the sense of time—can non-literal art symbolize that words cannot?
Episode 289: Aesthetic Sense Theory: Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume — How can taste be grounded in feeling yet not be merely relative? British sense theorists on an inner sense of beauty and the true critic.
Episode 288: Scruton on Ethical Art — Scruton argues that modern art's flight from beauty and the democracy of tastes reflect a moral flight from responsibility and maturity.
Episode 287: Roger Scruton on Beauty — Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Scruton's platitudes about beauty suggest aesthetic judgments are personal yet claim universal validity.
Episode 246: Susan Sontag on Interpreting Art — Should criticism decode art into its meaning? Sontag rejects the form-content split, defends style as essential, and asks why classical tragedy has faded.
Episode 245: Fashion (Derrida, Foucault) w/ Shahidha Bari — Is appearance merely surface? Clothing, nakedness, and style as part of how selves are made, with Foucault on freedom versus liberation.
Episode 243: Aristotle’s “Poetics” on Art and Tragedy — Aristotle's account of art as imitation and his formula for tragedy—plot, reversal, recognition, catharsis—and whether it still applies to modern storytelling.
Episode 216: Game of Thrones’ Fantasy Politics — What a mass-consumed fantasy series does for its audience: moral prompt, cathartic fantasy, or spectacular distraction.
Episode 207: Herder on Art Appreciation — What social conditions make an era's artistic taste flourish and decline, and how should aesthetic education cultivate the senses and the whole soul?
Episode 190: Film Analysis: “mother!” — How a polarizing allegorical film about humanity and nature conveys meaning, and whether an auteur's own explanation should guide our interpretation.
Episode 189: Authorial Intent (Barthes, Foucault, Beardsley, et al) — Whether an author's intentions settle what a work means, or whether meaning lies in the text itself or with the reader.
Episode 169: Analyzing Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” — What does Vertigo reveal about love, desire, and the objectifying gaze, and does its vertigo depict something essential to the human condition?
Episode 119: Nietzsche on Tragedy and the Psychology of Art — Nietzsche's account of Greek tragedy as a fusion of Apollonian order and Dionysian chaos, and its decline under Socratic rationalism.
Episode 118: The Musical Life with Guests from Camper van Beethoven — What it means for a musician to have integrity or be authentic, and whether internet-era access to music undermines identity built through taste.
Episode 115: Schopenhauer on Music with Guest Jonathan Segel — Why Schopenhauer thinks music directly expresses the Will itself, and how art requires will-less contemplation beyond personal striving.
Episode 107: Edmund Burke on the Sublime — Are human tastes basically the same? Burke roots beauty and the sublime in shared responses to pleasure and pain.
Episode 105: Kant: What Is Beauty? — How can judgments of beauty be subjective, grounded in pleasure, yet claim universal agreement? Kant distinguishes the beautiful from mere liking.
Episode 94: Schopenhauer on Reading, Writing, and Thinking — Should thinkers build on others' work, or do true geniuses think and write alone, reading little and following their own original insight?
Episode 77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty — What we mean in calling something beautiful, and how immediate aesthetic experience can be analyzed into matter, form and expression.
Episode 57: Henri Bergson on Humor — What makes things funny, testing Bergson's view that laughter corrects mechanical rigidity in people slow to adapt to social demands.
Episode 28: Nelson Goodman on Art as Epistemology — Can understanding art count as knowledge, with art as a symbol system that builds distinct worlds without collapsing into anything-goes relativism?
Episode 16: Danto on Art — What does avant-garde art reveal about what art is, why has philosophy tried to disenfranchise art, and in what sense has art ended?

Literature

Episode 317: Character Philosophies in Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov” — How do the Karamazov brothers each face existence in an imperfect world, and can local acts of love answer the problem of evil?
Episode 316: Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov”: PEL Live in NYC — How can we reconcile ourselves to evil and innocent suffering, as Ivan Karamazov's rebellion and Grand Inquisitor challenge, and does Alyosha's active love answer him?
Episode 305: Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” — What role does violence play in human life? McCarthy's anti-Western and Judge Holden's philosophy that war is man's telos and the truest expression of agency.
Episode 299: Philosophy in Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens” — What does Shakespeare's Timon of Athens reveal about money, generosity, and friendship, and is the embittered Timon really a Cynic?
Episode 244: Camus on Strategies for Facing Plague — How should people face adversity and death? Camus's novel embodies rival responses—faith, love, sainthood, art, profiteering—and argues for solidarity and common decency.
Episode 242: Stanley Cavell on Tragedy via King Lear — What tragedy is and how King Lear shows people avoiding love and being acknowledged, read through Cavell's psychological interpretation.
Episode 217: Discussing Calderón’s “Life Is a Dream” — Calderón's play on life as a dream: skepticism, Christian versus Greek destiny, the ethics of honor, and theater that reveals its own artifice.
Episode 215: Brave New World: PEL Live 10th Anniversary Show — What happens if society uses technology to engineer happiness, and whether Huxley's dystopia refutes utilitarianism or only a pleasure-based version of it.
Episode 212: Sartre on Literature — What literature is for: Sartre distinguishes poetry from prose and argues that writing is an appeal to the reader's freedom and therefore political.
Episode 203: Kristeva vs. Lovecraft on Horror and Abjection — Does Lovecraft's nameless cosmic terror capture or improve on Kristeva's account of abjection as the disintegration of the self?
Episode 188: Discussing “Lysistrata” and Politics with Lucy and Emily — Lysistrata's sex strike as a clash between household and city, and what the play's feminist and anti-feminist elements suggest about women, sex and political power.
Episode 185: Ethics in Homer’s “Odyssey” Feat. Translator Emily Wilson — Whether the Odyssey teaches ethics, through hospitality, the household, status and slavery, Odysseus's dubious heroism, the gods' role, and the problems of translation.
Episode 182: Reflections on PEL 2017 — A retrospective on the show's year: how texts are chosen, how politics shaped the discussions, and what it means to read non-philosophical works philosophically.
Episode 175: Blade Runner: Androids and Humanity — What makes us human, and are we justified in denying personhood to androids that resemble us but supposedly lack empathy?
Episode 164: Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” on Perfection — Could a morally perfect person survive in the modern world, and can modern society's pursuit of status and money satisfy human needs without sliding into nihilism?
Episode 117: Discussing Sophocles’s “Antigone” — What Sophocles's Antigone, with its clash between family duty and the law of the state, can still teach about ethics and politics.
Episode 90: Sci-Fi and Philosophy with Guest David Brin — Can humanity survive its technological adolescence, and how can science fiction, philosophy and open accountability help us become good ancestors?
Episode 75: Lacan & Derrida Criticize Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” — How philosophers should read literature, through Lacan's psychoanalytic reading of Poe's story and Derrida's deconstructive critique of that reading.
Episode 63: Existentialist Heroes in Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” — What morality can mean after the death of God, as explored through the hero and villain of McCarthy's novel, and how fiction tests philosophical worldviews.
Episode 62: Voltaire’s Novel “Candide” — Voltaire's satire of the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds, and its counsel to tend one's garden despite life's suffering.

Religion

Episode 395: C.S. Lewis Argues for Christianity — Lewis argues from our inescapable sense of moral law to a supernatural lawgiver, and presents Christianity as the answer to our failure to live up to it.
Episode 394: Hegel on Faith vs. The Enlightenment — Hegel portrays Enlightenment critique and religious faith as two sides of one retreat into pure thought, and points toward a faith rooted in Spirit.
Episode 378: Aquinas on God and Mind — Can finite minds know and speak about God? Aquinas's proofs of God, eternity, divine simplicity and analogy, then his account of will and free choice.
Episode 362: Ecclesiastes: Biblical Existentialism? — Ecclesiastes read as philosophy: is everything under the sun fleeting and absurd, why is death a harm, and what remains worth enjoying?
Episode 356: Feuerbach Against Theology — Feuerbach's claim that God is a projection of what humans value in themselves, and his critique of theology's abstract philosopher's God.
Episode 345: William James on Religious Experience — What is religion as a lived, emotional response to the world, and do mystical experiences give us knowledge or justification for religious beliefs?
Episode 333: Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling” on Faith — Can Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac be understood, and can faith justify suspending ethics for a purely private relation to God?
Episode 311: Understanding the Dao De Jing — How should we read the Daodejing's claims that the Dao cannot be spoken, that rulers should act through non-coercion, and that emptiness is useful?
Episode 302: Erasmus Praises Foolishness — Does foolishness make life better? Erasmus's satirical speech by Folly mocks Stoic rationalism and scholastic theologians while praising emotion, humility and moderation.
Episode 298: Marsilio Ficino on Love — How did Renaissance Neoplatonism reinterpret Plato's Symposium, making love a desire for beauty that leads the soul back toward God?
Episode 291: Cassirer and Langer on Myth and Ritual — Why do people create ritual, myth, and religion, and are these spontaneous symbolic self-expression rather than failed attempts at science?
Episode 272: Fichte’s Idealist Theology — How Fichte uses practical reason and faith in conscience to escape idealism's apparent solipsism and nihilism, arriving at God as the moral harmony of finite minds.
Episode 270: Classical Indian (Vedanta and Nyaya) Design Arguments for God — How classical Indian Vedānta and Nyāya philosophers argued that the world, as a product, must have an intelligent maker, and how their logic differs from Western design arguments.
Episode 267: Avicenna on God and Soul w/ Peter Adamson — Avicenna's proof of God as the necessary being behind all contingent things, and his flying man thought experiment for the soul's independence from matter.
Episode 253: Leibniz on the Problem of Evil — Why would a good, all-powerful God permit evil, and can this world still be the best of all possible worlds?
Episode 204: The Bhagavad Gita’s Hindu Theology — What grounds duty and wise action, as Krishna urges Arjuna to fight, and can a monistic metaphysics accommodate a personal God and free will?
Episode 184: Pascal on Human Nature — Pascal's picture of human beings as morally and epistemically wretched, and how it underlies his wager and his case for faith over reason.
Episode 167: Hume on Intelligent Design — Does the apparent order and complexity of nature give good reason to believe in a designer God, let alone an infinite and good one?
Episode 165: Spinoza on Biblical Criticism — How should scripture be read so as to permit honest theological disagreement, and what do prophecy, miracles, and divine law amount to in a world governed by natural law?
Episode 158: Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy — Facing execution, Boethius asks whether bad things really happen to good people, concluding that true happiness lies in virtue and the good, which is God.
Episode 129: Is Faith Rational? — Is religious faith reasonable without evidence, and what standards of rationality apply to belief in God when the evidence seems inconclusive?
Episode 121: Augustine on Being Good — Why do we fail to do what we know is right, and how does orienting the will toward God rather than worldly things heal that division?
Episode 113: Jesus’s Parables — Whether Jesus's parables are riddles, moral homilies, or protests against the status quo, and what they offer moral philosophy without religious commitment.
Episode 112: Ricoeur on Interpreting Religion — How hermeneutics applies to the Bible, requiring both historical reading of scripture and putting our own scientific presuppositions at risk.
Episode 101: Maimonides on God — If God is truly one, can we attribute any properties to God at all, or can we only say what God is not?
Episode 54: More Buddhism and Naturalism — Whether Buddhist teachings on karma, nirvana, emptiness, no-self and the four noble truths are compatible with a scientific, naturalist outlook.
Episode 53: Buddhism and Naturalism with Guest Owen Flanagan — What a scientifically minded naturalist can learn from Buddhism, especially by putting Buddhist ethics in dialogue with virtue ethics while doubting claims about Buddhist happiness.
Episode 44: New Atheist Critiques of Religion — Whether religion is superstition we should outgrow, whether faith breeds deference and violence, and whether a reasonable person can be religious.
Episode 43: Arguments for the Existence of God — Whether the ontological, cosmological and design arguments give any good reason to believe that God exists.
Episode 39: Schleiermacher Defends Religion — Does religion conflict with science, or is its essence an emotional response to life, giving neither knowledge nor rules but needed for a whole life?
Episode 22: More James’s Pragmatism: Is Faith Justified? What is Truth? — Can pragmatism justify religious belief as a forced choice, and does James's claim that we create truth make him a relativist?

Meaning & Existence

Episode 377: Emil Cioran’s Pessimism — Can we bear the truth about the human condition? Cioran's aphoristic pessimism condemns fanaticism and faith, praises sloth and solitude, and doubts authenticity is possible.
Episode 334: Gabriel Marcel’s Christian Existentialism — Marcel distinguishes technical problems from lived mysteries and argues that hope, presence and fidelity answer a basic human need for meaning.
Episode 330: Kierkegaard’s “Either/Or”: The Aesthetic Life — What would it mean to live life as a work of art, and why does Kierkegaard's aesthete end up bored, ironic and in despair?
Episode 329: Kierkegaard on Irony — What is irony? Kierkegaard reads Socrates as the ironist of pure negation, contrasts him with Romantic irony, and asks how irony belongs in a well-lived life.
Episode 283: Alain Badiou on Love — Badiou's account of love as a truth procedure: a shared viewpoint of the Two that bridges, without erasing, the difference between lovers.
Episode 265: Plato’s “Phaedo”: Philosophy as Training for Death — Should we fear death? Plato's account of Socrates' last day, arguments for the soul's immortality, and philosophy as preparation for dying.
Episode 214: More Nietzsche’s Zarathustra — How to avoid nihilism without God: eternal recurrence, the creation of new values, and why Nietzsche chose poetic allegory over exposition.
Episode 146: Emmanuel Levinas on Overcoming Solitude — How does an individual emerge from undifferentiated Being, and how can encountering the Other overcome the solitude of existing and transform our sense of time and death?
Episode 109: Jaspers’s Existentialism with Guest Paul Provenza — Science provides facts, but can it give a world-view? Jaspers argues philosophy and a leap toward transcendence are needed for authentic existence.
Episode 87: Sartre on Freedom and Self-Deception — Sartre denies a fixed human nature, holding that we are radically free and that excusing ourselves by character or circumstance is bad faith.
Episode 71: Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” — How genuine encounter with another, as opposed to treating the world as an object, forms the self and connects us to God.
Episode 33: Montaigne: What Is the Purpose of Philosophy? — What is philosophy for? Essays on learning to die, experience, cannibals, education and solitude, mixing skepticism with practical wisdom about living.
Episode 29: Kierkegaard on the Self — Kierkegaard's account of the self as a tension of opposites and why we are all in despair until we embrace our dependence on God.
Episode 12: Chuang Tzu’s Taoism: What Is Wisdom? — What does it mean to "make all things equal," and how does the Taoist sage of the Zhuangzi differ from other ideals of wisdom and virtue?
Episode 4: Camus and the Absurd — Does the inevitability of death make life meaningless? Camus on the absurd, suicide, and imagining Sisyphus happy.

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