Philosopher's Zone
চ্যানেল বিস্তারিত
Philosopher's Zone
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.
সাম্প্রতিক এপিসোড
245 টি এপিসোড
Slopaganda
Are you troubled by the way that social media has enabled the spread of propaganda? Well, get ready for slopaganda, which is propaganda that's AI-powe...
Indigenous literature and the academy in Australia
As an academic discipline, Australian literature has been a largely white affair, with the canon of "great Australian authors" dominated by Anglo-Euro...
Albert Camus, fascism and America
Living and writing through the years before, during and after the Second World War, French author and philosopher Albert Camus witnessed the rise of f...
What beauty apps are doing to us
Beauty apps are becoming more and more miraculously high-tech, but also more and more invasive. You might feel OK about an app that gives your face a...
Are babies conscious?
Babies cry, smile, laugh and react to their environment - so it seems odd to look at a baby and wonder whether or not it's conscious. But consciousnes...
How AI could transform reading
If there's one thing AI has in common with all new technology, it's that a lot of people are scared of it. When it comes to AI and education, horror s...
Is it time to get rid of legal gender status?
Most of us have Male or Female registered on our birth certificates - but what does this certification mean, in terms of its effect on our lives? Ther...
Who's responsible for extreme beliefs?
It's easy to say that people who hold extreme antisocial beliefs should be held responsible for those beliefs. But in fact, many extremists operate wi...
Is a blobfish beautiful or ugly? Science, aesthetics and the natural world
The 2019 bushfires that devastated the east coast of Australia had one upside: the smoke in the atmosphere made for some stunning sunsets. But is a be...
Who's responsible for solving the world's problems—me, or The System?
When it comes to global problems like climate change, it can be easy to feel as though your own individual efforts to stop it are too small to make a...
Disability, discrimination and disgust: why gut issues are a philosophical problem
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...
Nature, gender and discomfort with 'woke' language
When someone complains about feeling pressure to use 'woke' language, their discomfort is that of a stranger in an unfamiliar world. For people in mar...
What's the time? Indigenous temporalities and the 'Everywhen'
We tend to think of time as a universal experience, something that carries us all along in the same direction at the same pace. So it might seem stran...
Is it time to bring back natural philosophy?
Once upon a time, what we now call scientists were known as "natural philosophers". These were people who studied the physical universe through observ...
Judgement and remorse: a conversation with Raimond Gaita
Is it possible to have judgement without blame? And what does it mean to say - as Socrates did - that it's better to suffer evil at the hands of other...
Freud, Wittgenstein and the unconscious
We routinely refer to "the unconscious" in a way that suggests we all agree on what it means - but in fact, the unconscious is a highly contested doma...
Buddhism and nationalism
Buddhism in the West is often thought of as an ethical or philosophical system first and foremost, based on principles of non-self and impermanence, a...
Philosophy's problem with its history
Analytic philosophy has often understood itself as being in some sense "above" history - using reason and logic to explore problems that are timeless...
Authority and medical diagnosis
Medical diagnosis these days is not as straightforward as it seems. Doctors still diagnose, but so do a great many people who previously didn't - well...
Nationalism and immigration
Nationalism is often associated with rightwing politics and anti-immigration sentiment - but is that a necessary connection? This week we're looking a...
Speech acts and AI
Speech acts - utterances that have the power to make things happen in the world - are increasingly being created by AI, especially in certain workplac...
Belief, emotion and trust
The traditional philosophical view of belief is that it's a rational cognitive affair, evidence based and directed toward truth. According to this acc...
In defence of workism
"Workism" is defined as the tendency to put work at the centre of one's identity and life meaning - and according to many recent commentators, it's a...
How feminism changed primatology
For decades, primatologists believed that primate societies were structured around aggressive alpha males - until a remarkable push from feminist scie...
History and the left
The defeat of the Democrats in last November's Presidential election has prompted much soul-searching on the political left. But according to this wee...
Henri Bergson, philosopher of past and future
100 years ago, Henri Bergson was the most famous philosopher on earth, drawing traffic-stopping crowds to his public lectures and scandalising the Fre...
Style wars pt 2: Scandals and hoaxes
What should we think when an academic Humanities journal unsuspectingly publishes a paper that's been written as a hoax, full of fashionable jargon an...
Style wars pt 1: Postwar France and a new philosophical mode
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 ph...
LIVE EVENT: What use is philosophy?
Does philosophy answer questions, or just keep asking them over and over again? Some say that compared to the sciences, philosophy has few runs on the...
Queer theory and animal rights
This week we're exploring links between queer liberation and animal subjugation, and discovering how the struggles for acceptable queer identity are o...
AI, reliability and trust
AI is making all kinds of important decisions for us these days, but how far can we trust it? Or rather, what kind of trust is appropriate to bring to...
Innocence and "child rescue" in the colonial imagination
The forced removal of First Nations children from their families was active government policy in Australia between the 1910s and the 1970s, and still...
What is a conspiracy theory?
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...
Getting past post-truth
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 especial...
Expanding our moral circle
Our "moral circle" encompasses fellow humans, other primates, dogs, cats and other animals to which we attribute feelings and interests. But as scienc...
Knowing what things are like
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 ca...
How important is aesthetic education?
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 fo...
Rediscovering Wilfrid Sellars
The American thinker Wilfrid Sellars died in 1989, and has been remembered as a primarily analytic philosopher. But today, Sellars is being rediscover...
Auschwitz: experiencing what can't be experienced
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...
Summer season: History and narrative
Historians are commonly thought of as being a little like archaeologists or scientists - they're in the business of uncovering facts, and then present...