Episodes
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"Freedom" has become a familiar catchcry in Western democracies, as individuals and protest groups increasingly push back against government restrictions of any and all kinds. The problems this poses for communal life and social cohesion are obvious - so how should freedom be properly understood?
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How does a woman philosopher deal with the challenges posed by conservative, masculinist culture within her own academic discipline? Our guest this week turns to the work of Immanuel Kant, the 18th century German thinker who formulated a fine-grained philosophy of hope.
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Missing episodes?
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When you think about the music you like (or don't like), what does it tell you about your taste? Do you think you have good taste? And if you do, why? What is it about music that determines good or bad taste, and is it possible to cultivate the former?
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This week we're exploring our enduring cultural fascination with identical twins, asking what drives it, and what philosophical questions around selfhood and identity are raised by twinship.
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Digestive disorders are a common source of distress and social anxiety - which might seem to be an odd topic for philosophy, until you start to think about why we attach such stigma, shame and silence to issues of the gut. What does the gut tell us about our own experience of embodiment - and how can disability theory be used to shape healthier attitudes to the gut issues that plague so many of us?
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The global pornography industry is getting bigger, more mainstream and more nasty - but does this mean it should be regulated? Many feminist philosophers would say yes - but this places them at odds with liberal defenders of pornography, who worry that regulation would constitute an attack on free speech.
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Australian philosophy has been punching above its weight in recent decades - but does there exist something that we could call an identifiably Australian philosophical tradition? And how does the future of Australian philosophy look, at a time when the academic Humanities are under siege, and universities are being pushed to turn out "job-ready graduates"?
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For a long time there's been an ambivalent relationship between LGBTQ communities and the state. Even in liberal democracies, which supposedly exist to protect the interests of all their citizens, examples of the state-sanctioned persecution of sexual minorities can be found right up to the present day. And the intellectual project of queer theory has had an anti-state scepticism baked into it from its earliest inception.
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What exactly is it about swearing that gives it its offensive power? None of the standard philosophy-of-language explanations really gets to the bottom of why we swear, why we don't, and what we're doing when we use "obscene" language. This week, the author of a new book offers some thoughts.
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What makes a true friend? Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics outlines certain conditions for virtuous friendship, but he sets the bar high, and his estimation of women's capacity for friendship is low. This week we're putting Aristotle in dialogue with Mary Astell, an early modern (and proto-feminist) English philosopher who also wrote extensively on friendship.
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Transgender is commonly invoked as an identity, but this week we're asking if it is better understood as something that points to experience.
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If you're a gamer, you might be interested to hear that according to a new study, female characters speak approximately half as much as male characters in video games. But why should philosophers be interested?
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In 1998, the American philosopher Richard Rorty predicted dark days for democracy and the rise of a Trump-like figure in the USA. This week, with the publication of a new collection of Rorty's essays, we're considering the ongoing relevance of his work.
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If you don't know much about women philosophers in the ancient Graeco-Roman world, you have a good excuse. They're known to have existed, but hardly any of their works have survived, and historical accounts of their lives tend to come from biographies written by men. This week we try to unravel the mystery.
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During the lockdowns at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, people started to experience a strange sense of temporal distortion - time slowing down, time speeding up, time getting bent out of shape. This week we hear from a philosopher, a historian and a sociologist about how that might have happened, and what it might mean.
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Mary Graham is one of Australia's most distinguished Aboriginal academics and authors. In this conversation, she articulates a political philosophy of relationality, conflict management and much more.
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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?
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Cynicism is a philosophical tradition that existed for centuries in the ancient Graeco-Roman world. Its influence can be found in the Christian gospels, throughout the Western philosophical tradition, and arguably up to the present day in the work of such protest groups as Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion - not bad for a philosophical school whose most famous early practitioner lived in a wine jar and masturbated in public. But what exactly did the Cynics believe? and what can we learn from them today?
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Biology is a scientific discipline, notionally given to the pursuit of hard facts and empirical evidence - so what can philosophy bring to the table?
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Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" thesis has been hugely influential in moral philosophy, but how well does it hold up today? This week we're asking if Arendt's characterisation of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as a mindless functionary, devoid of ideology, was accurate - and whether or not it's still important to understand evil as something that doesn't always appear as dramatic of colourful.
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