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Alan Saunders explores the big questions and arguments; he looks at the world of philosophy and at the world through philosophy. Primary Format : Blogs Language : Unknown Also Listed as: City : Unknown State/Province : Unknown Country : Australia Region : OC User Tags: User Votes: RSS Feed Website People found this Podcast Searching for: View this Podcast on a Google Map. Podcast iTunes Link Text Only listing of Philosopher\'s Zone Podcasts Methings.com listings of Philosopher\'s Zone Podcasts If you like this podcast, you might also like:

On authenticity - Beate Roessler Strangers, people from other countries immigrating into our,  endanger our authentic culture, destroying what is valuable, good and familiar. But do they and does that idea make any sort of sense at all?  And if we can’t talk about the authenticity of cultures, what about the authenticity of individual persons?  This week, we investigate authenticity, the personal and the political. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The trials and tribulations of private Bradley Manning We’ve heard a lot in recent times about the legal wrangles of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange but there is another Wikileaker facing life in prison who has been given much less attention: Private Bradley Manning. Bradley Manning is accused of leaking thousands of classified defence documents and faces life in prison if found guilty. Over two hundred legal scholars and philosophers have signed a petition claiming his treatment has been unconstitutional and unethical. This week we look at ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The morality of robo-wars: PW Singer These days, you can go to war without shouldering a pack and carrying a rifle: you can take out the enemy’s installations (and, indeed, take out the enemy) just sitting in an office not far from home.  But what are the ethics of a war fought for us by machines, where the only deaths we see are on TV monitors?  This week, we ask how we can bring a moral imagination to bear on a world of robot wars. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Apology for duplicate podcasts We have just upgraded to a new website, and the move has caused some podcast subscribers to download duplicate mp3s. We apologise for this issue and hope you continue to listen to Radio National podcasts in the future. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-11-26 - Daniel Dennett on human consciousness and free will This week on The Philosopher´s Zone, we meet one of the foremost thinkers of our time. Daniel Dennett is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Described as the great de-mystifier of consciousness, Dennett has been quoted as saying he developed a deep distrust of the methods he saw other philosophers employing and decided that before he could trust his intuitions about the mind, he had to figure out how the brain could possibly accomplish the mind´s work. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-11-19 - The artist and the philosopher - Gustav Klimt and Ludwig Wittgenstein In the last decades of the Hapsburg empire, from 1895 to 194, the city of Vienna was opulent, elegant and daring. A group of radical young artists, architects, writers, musicians, designers and thinkers were busy overturning all the rules. This week, we meet two of the brightest stars to have arisen in this febrile world, the enigmatic artist Gustav Klimt and the elusive philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and we look at Klimt through the changing gaze of Wittgenstein. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-11-12 - Pascal's Wager - betting on God This week on The Philosopher´s Zone we´re wagering on God. Well, why not? What have we got to lose? If God doesn´t exist, we lose nothing; if he does, we gain everything. This is the famous argument known as `Pascal´s wager´ after the great seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal. This week, we examine the wager and try to work what our odds are. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-11-05 - Jewish philosophy: Martin Buber Martin Buber was born in pre-Nazi Austria and emigrated to Israel in 1938 where he spent much of the rest of his life. He grappled with Zionism, Jewish thought, secular philosophy and politics and the result is a body of thought very much based on relationships. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-10-22 - Jewish philosophy: Moses Mendelssohn Moses Mendelssohn scandalised his more pious fellow 18th century Germans when he said: 'My religion recognises no obligation to resolve doubt other than through rational means; and it commands no mere faith in eternal truths.' This week we look at the life and ideas of one of the great proponents of Judaism as a rational religion. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-10-15 - Jewish philosophy: Maimonides Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon, also known as Maimonides, became a hugely important figure in that great era of Moorish cultural flourishing, 12th century Spain (Cordoba). Maimonides adapted the ideas of Aristotle, was a significant influence on Thomas Aquinas, and became one of the leading Rabbinical scholars of his time, and perhaps of all time. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-10-08 - Jewish philosophy: Overview part 2 In part two of our introduction we take up the story during the 17th century, with the great European thinker Baruch Spinoza. Tamar Rudavsky from Ohio State University is again our guide. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-10-01 - Jewish philosophy: Overview part 1 We begin this series with an introduction to Jewish philosophy, from Ancient times onwards - an attempt to explore some of the key thinkers and recurring philosophical questions. Our guide is Tamar Rudavsky from Ohio State University. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-09-24 - The Mind of Jacques Lacan Jacques Marie Emile Lacan, who died in 1981, was a French psychoanalyst and follower of Freud, but his influence has extended far beyond the boundaries of psychiatry: to philosophy, critical theory, literary theory, sociology, feminist theory, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis. And all this despite a literary style of forbidding complexity. This week, we take courage and try to penetrate his thought. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-09-17 - A very American philosophy Pragmatism was a philosophical doctrine devised by Americans and to a large extent for Americans. This week, we examine its origins, the stories of the men behind it, what it means and its enduring significance, not just for America but for the world. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-09-10 - Zombies and consciousness Zombies have been enjoying a bit of a revival, lately (though perhaps `enjoy´, which implies inner consciousness, is not the word we want here). The Hollywood zombie is a revenge-seeking corpse with a fervent hunger for human flesh, the traditional Haitian zombie is a kind of robotic slave but the philosophical zombie is a hypothetical figure: a creature like us in every respect but with no inner life. So what does the zombie have to teach us about the nature of human consciousness? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-09-03 - Philosothon 2011 - the first Australasian high school philosophy competition The Philosothon is an event that encourages high school students to investigate ethical and other philosophical questions in the context of `communities of inquiry´. It´s investigative and competitive, and everybody gets to watch the movie Groundhog Day for its Nietzschian undertones. This week, The Philosopher´s Zone´s Kyla Slaven visits the Philosothon to talk to the kids and eavesdrop on their inquiries. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-08-27 - The medieval Islamic philosopher Averroes Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd, better known in the Latin West as Averroes, is one of the greater thinkers in the Islamic/Arabic tradition. This week we discuss the life and times of Averroes with Peter Adamson, Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at King's College London. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-08-20 - Meeting Martha Nussbaum This week, we meet one of the foremost philosophers of the age: Martha Nussbaum, professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago. In a wide-ranging conversation, we discuss emotion and the moral law, how religious ritual aids concentration on the moral law, and the role of literature in philosophy. And we ask a few questions: have the ancient Greek Cynics have a bad press, can you really be a citizen of the whole globe and who was the greatest philosopher of the classical world? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-08-13 - The Philosophical Baby - Alison Gopnik THIS PROGRAM WAS FIRST BROADCAST IN JANUARY 2011. Given that we all begin our lives as children, it is perhaps surprising that philosophy has paid such little attention, relatively speaking, to childhood. This week, we meet the American philosopher and psychologist Alison Gopnik, who argues that in some ways young children are actually smarter, more imaginative, more caring and even more conscious than adults are. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-08-06 - The ethics of Kevin Rudd's heart Inserting of a pig valve into Kevin Rudd´s heart is is not a new medical technique but is it part of a general move towards xenotransplantation? Xenotransplantation is when you take living cells, tissues and organs from one species and transplant them into another. Human xenotransplantation offers a potential treatment for end-stage organ failure, but it also raises many novel medical, legal and ethical issues. This week, we explore some of them. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-07-30 - The moral judgement of psychopaths Our guest this week says psychopaths are rarely high functioning corporate executives with a taste for downsizing. More often, they are low functioning and far more prone than to violent crime than the rest of the population. Today we explore moral judgement, neuroscience, psychopathy and the criminal justice system with ethics Professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong from Duke University in the United States. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-07-23 - Tree of Life - The cinema of Terrence Malick Terrence Malick is, perhaps, unique: a film director who is well-trained in philosophy and who has published an English translation of a book by the great German philosopher Martin Heidegger. But should we see his movies as philosophical statements? In particular, what are we to make of his latest, The Tree of Life, which is set in Texas in the fifties but also takes us back to the creation of the world and the age of the dinosaurs? Metaphysics or pretension? This week, a philosophical inve ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-07-16 - The Conservative Marshall McLuhan Since the 1960s, McLuhan famously avoided taking what he called a 'moralistic' stance on the goodness or badness of electric media. But close readers of his major writings are in for a surprise. What emerges is distinctively conservative: tribalistic, stringently moralistic and opposed to the liberal, modernist, individualist age of modernity. This week, The Philosopher's Zone investigates McLuhan the right-wing moralist. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-07-09 - Climate change, geoengineering and the perfect moral storm A perfect storm is an unusual convergence of independently harmful factors whose convergence is likely to result in substantial, possibly catastrophic, negative outcomes. Are we now sailing into a perfect moral storm created by the challenge of climate change? And why might it be morally questionable to try to do something about it by means of what´s known as geoengineering? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-07-02 - The puzzlement of Ludwig Wittgenstein Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great Anglo-Austrian philosopher, who died fifty years ago this year, often looked puzzled. In fact, puzzlement, about the world and about the concepts with which we try to grasp the world, was to a large extent his stock-in-trade. This week, we investigate how useful it can be to share Wittgenstein´s puzzlement when turning our attention to human society and the possibility that there might be a science of human society. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-06-25 - High school philosophy The Victorian Association for Philosophy in Schools has a vision of schools around Victoria stimulating open and inquiring communities of philosophical exploration, in which students develop the art of questioning and acquire conceptual and reasoning tools. This week, we visit their annual conference and discover how even a difficult thinker like Simone Weil - French philosopher, tortured Christian mystic and social activist - can have a place in the classroom. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-06-18 - The evil of the daleks They are among the most loved, or most feared, villains in science fiction. But what is it that makes Daleks such great baddies? What constitutes evil and why do the Daleks represent a very specific idea about rationality and morality? This week, we talk to a philosopher about what the Daleks have to tell us - in their mechanical, screechy voices - about who we are. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-06-11 - Who was Plotinus? He believed in the One, a fundamental principle of the universe. He believed in the Intellect and the Soul. He also thought that matter was evil. This week, the Philosopher´s Zone enters the strange world of Plotinus, a great philosopher who kept the pagan flame alight at a time when the Roman empire was about to give itself up to Christianity. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-06-04 - An athiet's God: the paradox of Spinoza This week on The Philosopher´s Zone, we meet Spinoza´s god, which might seem an odd thing to do: Baruch Spinoza, one of the greatest philosophers of his day, was expelled from the Amsterdam synagogue in 1656 because of his unorthodox religious views. Ever since, he has been regarded as the great atheist of the Western tradition. Yet he mentions God very often throughout his writings. So this week, we try to reconcile the paradox in Spinoza between his perceived atheism and his constant re ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-05-30 - Anime - the philosophy of Japanese animation This program is a REPEAT - it was first broadcast on 16 October 2010. Japanese animation is not just for children. It can be dark, incredibly violent and sexually explicit. But does it represent a distinctly Japanese worldview? And is it philosophical? Yes and yes, according to Jane Goodall from the University of Western Sydney. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-05-23 - Japanese philosophy - a short overview This program is a REPEAT - it was first broadcast on 9 October 2010. Since the 5th century, Japanese philosophy has assimilated and adapted foreign philosophies to its native worldview: picking and choosing ideas about self, government and social order from Confucianism, Buddhism and Western thought. But does this mishmash of thinking create a unique Japanese philosophy? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-05-14 - Hume and God Hume would probably not have owned up to being an atheist but he was certainly sceptical of the claims of religion. In particular, he was dubious about the miracles. If somebody claims to have witnessed a miracle, which is more likely, that a miracle occurred or that the person claiming to witness it was mistaken? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-05-07 - Hume on sentiment and morality Hume insisted that reason alone cannot be a motive to the will and that moral distinctions must therefore be derived from the moral sentiments: feelings of approval (esteem, praise) and disapproval (blame). It is essentially a very social theory of morality. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-04-30 - Hume on cause, effect and doubt The sun rose today and it has risen on every morning that we know about. But is that a reason for thinking that it will rise tomorrow? Hume thought not and today we examine the reasons for his scepticism. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-04-23 - The life of David Hume A conversation with Roderick Graham, Hume´s most recent biographer, about how a boy brought up in rural Scotland became a major figure in European thought Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-04-16 - Free Will and the Courts Suppose I had committed a quick robbery or even a murder on the way in to work. I´d end up in court, of course, and here´s my plea in mitigation of my offence: I couldn´t help it, your honour, because I am genetically predisposed to wrong-doing. Don´t blame me, blame my genes. I have no freewill in these matters and it is not just to punish somebody for doing something that he did not really choose to do. That´s the idea that we´re putting on trial in the Philosopher´s Zone, not ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-04-09 - How do octopuses think? How do animals think? Do they have consciousness? If your answer to that question is `yes´, you´re probably thinking of your pet dog. But dogs are easy: they´re domesticated, they more of less co-evolved with us. Apes are easy too: they´re our cousins. But what about octopuses? An octopus has neurons in its arms, and it has eight arms, so does it have eight brains, or nine counting the one in the head? This week on The Philosopher´s Zone, we investigate an intelligence very unli ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-04-02 - At the movies with Gilles Deleuze (part 2) This week, The Philosopher´s Zone goes to the movies. In the second of two programmes devoted to the great French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, we examine what he had to say about cinema. He was one of the first philosophers to turn their attention to films and he saw film as a philosophical medium. But what did that mean and why, in his view, did film become more philosophical after World War II? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-03-26 - Who was Gilles Deleuze? Gilles Deleuze, who died by his own hand in 1995, was one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. He wrote influentially not just on philosophy, but on literature, film, fine art and the environment as well. But his writing style - highly allusive, peppered with neologisms - is not easy-going. This week, we try to get to grips with a significant and important thinker. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-03-19 - The Age of Innocence Innocence is a good thing, isn´t it? It´s certainly better than guilt, but our idea of what constitutes innocence may be a construct, and it may be a construct that we project onto the weakest amongst us, children. Do we want to think of children as innocent because we´ve lost faith in our own innocence? And why do artistic photographs of naked children worry us so much? This week, The Philosopher´s Zone examines something that troubles us but which we tend not to think about. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-03-12 - Robert Boyle - God, atoms and alchemy If you did physics at school, or beyond, you might be familiar with Boyle´s law, first propounded by the Honourable Robert Boyle in 1662. But Boyle was interested in much more than the pressure of gases. He called himself a `Christian virtuoso´ and devoted a lot of his time to philosophical activities: proving the existence of God and showing that you could believe in atoms without being an atheist. This week, Boyle´s biographer introduces us to an extraordinary and prolific thinker. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-03-05 - The Sound of Music What do we mean when we say that the hills are alive to the sound of music? Isn´t the point not that music has sound but that it is sound? And does this mean that the source of the sound - the singer, the violinist, the guitarist - doesn´t, from a musical point of view, really matter? This week, we explore some difficult questions in the philosophy of music. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-02-26 - The Julian Assange Conspiracy - Networks, power and activism The object of Wikileaks is to dismantle the conspiracies that, according to its founder, rule the world. But what is a conspiracy and are you part of one? According to Assange, it´s possible to be a member of conspiracy without even knowing that you are. This week, we look at Julian Assange´s political philosophy and his view of the world as a network of conspiracies. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-02-19 - Julian Assange and the rise of nerd supremacy This week Jaron Lanier -- composer, performer, computer scientist, philosopher and pioneer of virtual reality -- gets seriously sceptical about somebody a lot of people think of as a hero: Julian Assange. The Internet, according to Lanier, was influenced in equal degrees by 1960s romanticism and cold war paranoia. If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet, then the world will be restructured around secretive digital power centres surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachievin ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-02-12 - Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and Sayyid Qutb The Society of the Muslim Brothers, otherwise known as the Muslim Brotherhood, has been banned in Egypt for many years. Nevertheless, after the recent upheavals, the Brotherhood was among the opposition groups invited to talk with Vice President Omar Suleiman. So today on The Philosopher's Zone we're exploring the life and times of the Egyptian thinker, Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood´s great theorist. Qutb spent many years in jail during the '50s and'60s, but before his execution by the E ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-02-05 - The philosophy of wine - aethetics, taste and smell Can a wine really have notes of chocolate, truffle and violets? Can wines be feminine, pretentious or cheeky? Can wines express anything? Or, more philosophically, are the senses of taste and smell as structured as sight? What is the role of metaphor in the language of taste and smell? Is the production of tastes and smell an expressive art and can objective statements be made about these things? This week on The Philosopher´s Zone we hit the bottle to find out. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-01-29 - The Philosophical Baby - Alison Gopnik Given that we all begin our lives as children, it is perhaps surprising that philosophy has paid such little attention, relatively speaking, to childhood. This week, we meet the American philosopher and psychologist Alison Gopnik, who argues that in some ways young children are actually smarter, more imaginative, more caring and even more conscious than adults are. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-01-22 - Yes, but how do you know? Scepticism and philosophy THIS PROGRAM FIRST AIRED ON 5 JUNE 2010. This week, we meet Stephen Hetherington, Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, who believes that sceptical thinking is one of the most authentic forms of philosophical thinking there is. Scepticism isn´t just any old refusal to believe: it´s an orderly reconsideration of what we know and why we think we know it. How much can we know about our surroundings? Do we in fact have any surroundings or could we just be disembodi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-01-15 - Kurt Gödel and the limits of mathematics THIS PROGRAM WAS FIRST AIRED ON 20 FEBRUARY 2010. Kurt Gödel was one of the foremost mathematicians and logicians of the 20th century, best known for his famous incompleteness theorem, which tells us that there are mathematical 'blind spots': parts of mathematics that traditional methods of proof cannot access. The theorem has far-reaching consequences for computing and even for our understanding of the nature of the human mind. This week, Mark Colyvan from the University of Sydney i ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-01-08 - Nietzsche and the will to power THIS PROGRAM WAS FIRST AIRED ON 22 MAY 2010. Friedrich Nietzsche was the son of a preacher who came to despise Christianity. He was a scholar of the Greek and Roman classics who became better known as a philosopher. And he was a philosopher whose ideas -- rejecting the idea of pity, embracing the will to power and the ideal of the superman -- cast long shadows over the twentieth century. This week, we take a sympathetic look at this troubling, and troubled, thinker. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2011-01-01 - Alexander McCall Smith and the philosopher detective THIS PROGRAM WAS FIRST AIRED ON 13 FEBRUARY 2010. This week, a conversation with writer Alexander McCall Smith. He´s best known for his series of novels about Precious Ramotswe and her No. 1 Ladies´ Detective Agency in Botswana. However, McCall Smith is also the creator of Isabel Dalhousie, a trained philosopher and editor of The Review of Applied Ethics, who solves mysteries in her native Edinburgh and contemplates the ethical problems behind them. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-12-25 - A philosophical history of Russia THIS PROGRAM FIRST WENT TO AIR ON 24 JULY 2010. This year marks the centenary of the death of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy wrote works of fiction that had considerable philosophical depth. In fact he thought his most famous book, War and Peace, was not a novel at all but an examination of social and political ideas. This week we take a look at Russian philosophical thinking, mainly in the 19th and early 20th century. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-12-18 - Bah humbug - Why Ebenezer Scrooge is actually a man of principle Ebenezer Scrooge is one of the few people you are allowed to hate at Christmas, or at least you´re allowed to `dislike´ what he stands for. Miserly and lacking in empathy, Scrooge is essentially a joyless, friendless, humourless, lonely old man. But was he morally bad as common wisdom would have it? Our guest this week says NO. Ebenezer Scrooge was as a man of ethical principle. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-12-11 - The Athenian philosopher Epicurus born in 341 BC, Epicurus set up a philosophical school which was unusual for its time - it allowed women and slaves to join. He also developed ideas about pleasure and the good life, but would likely turn in his grave were he to know how the term 'Epicurean' has come to be used in the 21st century. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-12-04 - The way of the Dao It is of uncertain date and the name of its author is not known. Its title does not easily translate into English. In China, where it is known as the Dao De Jing, it has been hugely influential for more than two and a half thousand years. This week, we explore this enigmatic masterpiece and ask what it has to say to the world today. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-11-27 - Hegel and Hegel's God This week, in another trek through the luxuriant and fascinating jungle that is the thought of one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, we turn to Hegel´s god and look at Hegel as a rational mystic. Our guest again is Robert M. Wallace, a philosopher best known for his book Hegel´s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom and God, and a man with a keen interest in philosophical mysticism. Liberal theologians during the last century and a half ha ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-11-20 - The Mystery of Hegel His thought was hugely influential and hugely difficult. The philosopher Bertrand Russell once described him as the single most difficult philosopher to understand. He was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Though he enjoyed relative fame during his lifetime, in the decades after his death in 1831, according to one writer, Hegel´s ideas were treated with "a mixture of contempt, horror and indifference." But something happened during the 20th century that brought Hegel back into sight for phi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-11-13 - The Art Instinct - evolution and aesthetics Peacocks have tails; we have art. Dennis Dutton, Professor of Philosopher at the University of Canterbury, argues that art is a form of costly display designed to attract members of the opposite sex. But there´s more to it than that: the arts take us into the minds of the people that made them and so they´re an aspect of social life that is beneficial to human beings. This week, we explore a subtle, Darwinian approach to the painting of paintings and the telling of tales. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-11-06 - The human machine: Julien Offray de La Mettrie Are you body and soul, mind and matter, or is it matter all the way through? Sounds like a modern sort of question, but in fact it was asked and answered -- at least to his own satisfaction -- way back in 1748 by the French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie. His book Man a Machine was a bold and quite bald announcement that people are just that: machines. This week on The Philosopher´s Zone we explore the life and ideas of a strange and daring thinker. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-10-30 - Doing good and causing harm: Euthanasia and the doctrine of double effect A study of Australian surgeons found that 36% of reported giving drugs at doses higher than necessary to relieve suffering, but also aware that this would hasten the death of the patient. This week, with euthanasia back on the public agenda, The Philosopher´s Zone takes on the doctrine of double effect: the ethics of doing good and, perhaps bad, at the same time. We´re joined this week by a cancer surgeon and a medical ethicist, to explore this grey area. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-10-23 - The Best of all possible worlds - Steven Nadler In 1672 a German secret agent arrived in Paris and the result was fierce philosophical debate. The secret agent was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and he locked horns with two lesser-known but formidable thinkers: Antoine Arnauld and Father Nicolas Malebranche about some of the great philosophical issues of the day. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-10-16 - Anime - the philosophy of Japanese animation Japanese animation is not just for children. It can be dark, incredibly violent and sexually explicit. But does it represent a distinctly Japanese worldview? And is it philosophical? Yes and yes, according to Jane Goodall from the University of Western Sydney. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-10-09 - Japanese philosophy - a short overview Since the 5th century, Japanese philosophy has assimilated and adapted foreign philosophies to its native worldview: picking and choosing ideas about self, government and social order from Confucianism, Buddhism and Western thought. But does this mishmash of thinking create a unique Japanese philosophy? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-10-02 - The Extended Mind Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? Some philosophers are now arguing that thoughts are not all in the head. The environment has an active role in driving cognition; cognition is sometimes made up of neural, bodily, and environmental processes. Their argument has excited a vigorous debate among philosophers and this week we discover what the fuss is about. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-09-25 - The responsible scientist - John Forge on ethics in pure science The bomb that exploded above Hiroshima in 1945 was the product of many of the greatest scientific minds in the world and we´re still arguing about the moral implications of what they did. But that´s just the start of it. Today, technological advances in areas such as pharmaceuticals, biosciences, communications and the defence industry channel a vast amount of scientific activity into applied research. What does this mean for the scientist as a moral being? This week, we ask what it t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-09-18 - Philosophy in Afghanistan This week, with the Afghan parliamentary elections about to take place, The Philosopher´s Zone explores philosophy in Afghanistan, both within the universities and informally in the broader culture. Is there a philosophical tradition that managed to remain constant during all of Afghanistan´s recent upheavals? Is there an Afghan philosophy at all and what do Afghan intellectuals think about the condition of their country? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-09-11 - Thinking about other cultures - Anita Herle Philosophy is a way of grasping our visible and invisible social world. But there is another way, and it´s called anthropology, which studies the way in which various human cultures extend their grasp. This week, we take a philosophical look at what anthropologists get up to. Do they just observe people in grass huts or do the people have a say in what they get to observe? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-09-04 - Being a person in West Africa - Ajume Wingo When the President of Zambia Kenneth Kaunda said that Margaret Thatcher was "truly a person," what on earth did he mean? He was invoking a concept central to the philosophy of the Akan people of West Africa. This week, we look at what it means to be a person in a culture where the community matters more than the individual and why the idea has very immediate practical implications. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-08-28 - Spoilt for choice or spoilt by choice? Renata Salecl Now that Australia has made its choice - sort of - The Philosopher´s Zone looks as the very idea of choice. Much more than previous generations, we can pick and choose where we live, how many children we have or don´t have, what type of bread we would like to eat and even what our gender will be. But the flipside is that that these choices don´t always seem to fulfil us. This week we look at the connections between choice and contemporary capitalism and freedom, and the ideologies that u ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-08-21 - The philosophy of astronomy - Simon Schaffer What is the ideology that propels scientists to go to so much trouble? Think, for example, of the hazards involved in a voyage from Europe to our part of the world in the 18th century. Why would you go to all that effort just to observe the transit of Venus? For Science Week, we explore the philosophy of northern astronomy in the Southern Hemisphere with Simon Schaffer, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-08-14 - Philosophy on the campaign trail Tony Abbott has been admiring cows at the Brisbane Show, Julia Gillard has, it´s said, been patronising Mark Latham by brushing him down the front, but is there anything ideological happening in this election? This week, we go in search of political philosophy and ask whether the world we live in - not just Australia, but the whole of the West - is any longer a world in which political elites can articulate the issues and meet the challenges of the age. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-08-07 - Criminal responsibility and the rational mind The criminal law defines a range of public wrongs and it provides for those who commit such wrongs to be called to answer for them through the criminal process of trial and punishment. We also allow for a number of conditions which mute or nullify our responsibility for a given crime: intention, causation, omission etc. This week on The Philosopher´s Zone, we look at criminal responsibility and its assumptions about rationality. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-07-31 - Leo Strauss - Philosophy's mystery man According to some commentators, there was a mysterious, dark presence lurking behind the Bush administration. He was, said his critics, elitist, illiberal and anti-democratic. He encouraged American´s leaders in imperialist militarism, neo-conservatism, Christian fundamentalism and the deliberate deception of those they led. And he did all this despite having died in 1973. He was Leo Strauss, professor of political science at the University of Chicago. But was this passionate student of ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-07-24 - A philosophical history of Russia This year marks the centenary of the death of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy wrote works of fiction that had considerable philosophical depth. In fact he thought his most famous book, War and Peace, was not a novel at all but an examination of social and political ideas. This week we take a look at Russian philosophical thinking, mainly in the 19th and early 20th century. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-07-17 - It's all about me, the philosophy of self part 2: The Quiz This week it's all about me and it's all about you as we explore a few perspectives on philosophy of self. And be sure to take a look at our quiz first as it forms the basis for this week's discussion. It's all about me! The QuizIs there a moral way to live our lives? Is there an absolute truth? Consider these questions and more in our special quiz, before you tune in for the second part of our forum this week. Click here to read the quiz. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-07-10 - It's all about me - a forum on the philosophy of self This week it's all about me and it's all about you as we explore a few perspectives on philosophy of self. And more personally still, do you have a consistent principle that guides your life? Or are you philosophically all over the shop? It's all about me! - The QuizIs there a moral way to live our lives? Is there an absolute truth? Consider these questions and more in our special quiz, before you tune in for the second part of our forum next week. Click here to read the quiz. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-07-03 - The Politics of Painting - John Barrell Whether it´s an installation by Damien Hirst or a painting by John Olsen, these days we do not quite know how to talk about art. Whether we´re artists, art critics or philosophers, there is no agreed language. But this was not always the case. In the commercially bustling land that was eighteenth-century Britain, there was a common philosophical language with which art could be discussed. This week, we explore a language of art that was political and had no ambition to be anything els ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-06-26 - Derrida - the father of deconstruction Did you know there´s a recipe out there for deconstructed Caesar salad? Or that you can buy a pair of deconstructed jeans? But deconstruction is not really about ripping the hems or serving all the ingredients separately instead of together in a bowl. It´s a way of reading philosophical texts and this week we examine the work of the man who coined the term (and sometimes wished he hadn´t): the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-06-19 - China's Confucian future Today we find out whether the most influential philosophical tradition in China, Confucianism, is making a comeback in the world´s largest nation. Professor Daniel Bell from Tsinghua University in Beijing says the political future of China is up for grabs and a hybrid Confucian political structure could well win out. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-06-12 - Confucius - A very Chinese philosopher Three of the greatest teachers in history never wrote a book. They were Socrates, Jesus Christ and Confucius. As part of Radio National´s China Week, The Philosopher´s Zone is looking at one of them: Confucius. He was one the most Chinese of thinkers of all time and one of the most influential - perhaps indeed the most influential - of all philosophers. His thought has coloured Chinese thought and the Chinese way of life for millennia and, despite attempts to suppress it at various times ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-06-05 - Yes, but how do you know? Scepticism and philosophy This week, we meet Stephen Hetherington, Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, who believes that sceptical thinking is one of the most authentic forms of philosophical thinking there is. Scepticism isn´t just any old refusal to believe: it´s an orderly reconsideration of what we know and why we think we know it. How much can we know about our surroundings? Do we in fact have any surroundings or could we just be disembodied brains in vats being fed what feels lik ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-05-29 - Enlightened eccentrics in the age of reason This week, we´re revisiting one of the greatest epochs in the history of philosophy. It lasted more than a hundred years from the seventeenth century and the whole length of the eighteenth. It was called the Enlightenment, its heroes were Hume, Kant, Voltaire and many more and it was one of the most hopeful periods in the history of humanity. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-05-22 - Nietzsche and the will to power Friedrich Nietzsche was the son of a preacher who came to despise Christianity. He was a scholar of the Greek and Roman classics who became better known as a philosopher. And he was a philosopher whose ideas -- rejecting the idea of pity, embracing the will to power and the ideal of the superman -- cast long shadows over the twentieth century. This week, we take a sympathetic look at this troubling, and troubled, thinker. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-05-15 - The philosophy of mathematics You can count from one to two, from two to three and so on without end. You know that you´re not going to run out of numbers to count but how do you know? Did we make all these numbers up, do they obey the laws that we set down, or do they exist in some sort of philosophical heaven waiting for us to discover truths about them? These week, we look at the various ways in which philosophers have tried to make sense of the strange world of numbers. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-05-08 - The philosophy of illness - Havi Carel Philosophers have paid a lot of attention to death but rather less to illness. Yet illness is an almost universal human experience and can make us think deeply about who we are and what our relationship is to our bodies and to the world we live in. This week we talk to a philosopher whose own experience of devastating chronic illness transformed her view of her own life and of philosophy itself. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-05-01 - Ethics in the classroom - an alternative to scripture and non-scripture classes? Should children taking non-scripture classes in primary school be offered an ethics course instead? In NSW, ten schools have just begun a ten week trial of ethics for children not taking religious education. We´re joined by one of the creators of the ethics course as well as a Professor of Theology at the Australian Catholic University. We find out what they will learn in terms of the two `R´ words - reason and relativism. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-04-24 - The Universal Genius - Gottfried Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is known as the last "universal genius". In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, he made important contributions to the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of religion, as well as mathematics, physics, geology, jurisprudence, and history. He is also famous for saying that this is the best of all possible worlds. This week, we talk to a couple of experts about the subtle and strange ideas of this great philosopher Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-04-17 - Confronting Theory These days, if you go to university to study humanities or media studies, you will encounter something called theory. It´s a bit philosophical and a bit French and it maintains that there is no universal human nature and that science cannot be truly objective. This week, we meet Philip Bell, whose new book, Confronting Theory - The psychology of cultural studies comes to grips with what somebody has called `Theory only dogs can hear´. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-04-10 - Cultural capital - the story of Pierre Bourdieu He was a poor boy from a poor home, and being a poor boy from a poor home was important to his thought. Before the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu died eight years ago, he was the most quoted social scientist alive, and the most lauded public intellectual in France. He was trained in philosophy but decided that philosophy was not enough. Find out why this week in The Philosopher´s Zone. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-04-03 - The Watch and the Watchmaker: Philosophy and Intelligent Design It´s an old question: could there be a watch without a watchmaker? In other words, could there be a universe without a god who made it? These days, the proponents of what is known as Intelligent Design argue that there must have been a designer and that the theory of natural selection cannot tell us how we and other animals got to be here. This week we meet a philosopher who argues that though the Intelligent Design camp is wrong, the philosophical Darwinians are not always right. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-03-27 - What are the odds? Philosophy and probability There´s no getting away from probability. If you´re worried about global warming, there´ll be somebody out there to tell you the chances of a significant increase in temperature over the next few years. Then there are crime rates, the probability of being knocked down by a drunk driver - there´s no end to it. But what exactly are we doing when we´re attributing a probability, low or high, to an event? What does fifty-fifty really amount to? This week, we explore the philosophical ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-03-20 - A Very Public Philosopher This week, a conversation about the role of the public intellectual with A.C. Grayling, one of Britain´s foremost philosophers and public intellectuals. An extraordinarily wide-ranging writer, Grayling has written plays, he´s written works of technical philosophy and he´s written about great philosophers: including books on Berkeley, Russell and Wittgenstein and a biography of René Descartes More recently, he´s turned his attention to historical topics, with a book on the Allied bo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-03-13 - The liar's paradox and other philosophical absurdities What I am telling you is false. But if I tell you that what I am saying is false and it is false, then what I am now saying is true, but if it´s true then to say that it´s false is false. Join us today as we go around in paradoxical circles with Peter Cave, who teaches philosophy in the UK at the Open University and City University, London. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-03-06 - In defence of the Enlightenment The Enlightenment, that great ferment of ideas in eighteenth-century Europe, has its enemies today on both left and right. This week, we hear a talk from the Franco-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, author of the recently published `In Defence of the Enlightenment´, who argues for an Enlightenment approach to developing and understanding an open and just modern society. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-02-27 - Seeing Red - Perception, sensation and consciousness You are in a darkened lecture hall looking at a patch of red projected onto a screen in front of you. What's involved in "seeing red"? This week, we meet the philosopher and psychologist Nicholas Humphrey who uses the phenomenon of seeing red as way into the mystery of consciousness. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-02-20 - Kurt Gödel and the limitsof mathematics Kurt Gödel was one of the foremost mathematicians and logicians of the 20th Century, best known for his famous incompleteness theorem, which tells us that there are mathematical "blind spots": parts of mathematics that traditional methods of proof cannot access. The theorem has far-reaching consequences for computing and even for our understanding of the nature of the human mind. This week, Mark Colyvan from the University of Sydney introduces us to this strange and paradoxical result ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-02-13 - Alexander McCall Smith and the philosopher detective This week, a conversation with writer Alexander McCall Smith. He´s best known for his series of novels about Precious Ramotswe and her No. 1 Ladies´ Detective Agency in Botswana. However, McCall Smith is also the creator of Isabel Dalhousie, a trained philosopher and editor of The Review of Applied Ethics, who solves mysteries in her native Edinburgh and contemplates the ethical problems behind them. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-02-06 - The right to property and the right to health Is it morally permissible to impose strong patent protections where doing so prices important new medicines out of the reach of many poor people? This week on The Philosopher´s Zone, Thomas Pogge, professor of philosophy at Yale University, talks about the morality of the global trade in medicine. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-01-30 - Albert Camus and The Absurd 2010 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of the French-Algerian novelist Albert Camus, who died in a car crash at the age of just 46. Author of The Outsider, The myth of Sisyphus, and The Plague, Camus explored human attempts to find meaning in what for him was a meaningless universe. A person's freedom rests upon a recognition of this ultimately 'Absurd' situation. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-01-23 - Thinking about the lives of the great thinkers Ray Monk from the University of Southampton in the UK is something unusual in philosophers of the English-speaking world: he´s a biographer. This week, he tell us about the challenges of writing the lives of Bertrand Russell and of the great Ludwig Wittgenstein and why the thinks that biography is a very Wittgensteinian genre. This program was first broadcast on 16 May 2009 Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-01-16 - The unhappy family of Ludwig Wittgenstein Sometimes it´s easy to forget that long dead philosophers had families; a world beyond the cocoon of their thinking and writing; a life with all the joy and sadness and conflict that a family can provide. The 20th century Viennese philosopher's family might today be described as deeply dysfunctional, as well as cultured and hugely wealthy. We're joined by Alexander Waugh, author of, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War. This program was first broadcast on 9 May 2009 Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-01-09 - The Philosopher and the Novelist This week, we look at a philosopher and at a novelist, and we find out what the one had to say to the other. Moira Gatens an Australian Professorial Fellow in the philosophy department at the University of Sydney. And she has just been appointed to the very important Spinoza Chair for 2010 at the University of Amsterdam. This means, amongst presenting the annual Spinoza lecture at Spinoza House in Rijnsburg, where the benches on which Spinoza worked in the seventeenth century at his trade ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2010-01-02 - The Romantic Movement and rock music Romantic ideas and philosophy live on in certain strains of modern rock music, according to this week's guest, Craig Schuftan, author of Hey Nietzsche - Leave them kids alone. David Bowie, The Cure, The Smiths, Queen, and more contemporary bands like My Chemical Romance and Weezer share some seriously Romantic tendencies with people like Byron, Schopenhauer, Wagner and even Nietzsche - and it's not just because they all viewed the world through the same gloomy prism. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-12-26 - Philosophy and The Wealth of Nations, PJ O'Rourke Adam Smith is known today as the father of economics, but he was, by profession, a philosopher. His book The Wealth of Nations is an attempt to apply philosophy to the world of money-making and commerce. This week, we dip into his great work with the help of PJ O´Rourke, the American political commentator, wit and author of a recent study of Smith. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-12-19 - A tribute to Isaiah Berlin Isaiah Berlin was born in Russia a hundred years ago, on 6 June 1909. He grew up to be a distinguished philosopher, a great historian of ideas - tracing the origins and vicissitudes of liberal thought over the last few centuries - and an eloquent defender of liberty. He was a man with very many friends and, this week, we talk about him with one of them: the British political philosopher John Gray. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-12-12 - A tribute to Claude Levi-Strauss Claude Levi-Strauss, the great French anthropologist died not long ago, just a few weeks short of his 101st birthday. We look at his work and find out why he was one of the great thinkers of the 20th century. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-12-05 - How political idealism threatens civilisation In the eighteenth century, advanced thinkers took up the idea that society was imperfect and that what you do with imperfections is get rid of them. The result was that the growth of large radical projects aimed at transforming things - the French Revolution being a dramatic case. The basic issue was how to transcend conflict and achieve harmony. But is the search for harmony compatible with a free society? This week, Kenneth Minogue, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the Londo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-11-28 - From Athens to Baghdad - Greek meets Arabic philosophy This week, we follow the journey of the classics as they spread from Greece to the Arab world and beyond. At a time when Europe still hadn´t got its act together philosophically speaking, Arabs were busily translating and debating the ideas of Aristotle and others. We´re joined by Professor Peter Adamson from King's College, London, co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-11-21 - Aristotle after Aristotle Just a few centuries after their deaths, Plato was thought questionable while his pupil Aristotle was all but canonised: there was almost a fear of criticising him. Everybody used his logic and Christians were drawn to him by his arguments about a first cause of all things. This week Han Baltussen from the University of Adelaide looks at the legacy of Aristotle and at why that legacy was worth preserving. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-11-14 - Seneca - philosophy and tragedy Lucius Annaeus Seneca popularised the philosophy of the Stoics, the Greek Hellenistic school. This week, Rick Benitez from the University of Sydney examines Seneca's teaching that contentedness is achieved by a simple, unperturbed life in accordance with nature and that human suffering should be accepted. He looks at Seneca as a writer of tragedies, and at the tragedy of Seneca's own life: he was tutor and later adviser to the Emperor Nero, who eventually ordered him to take his own life. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-11-07 - The Therapy of Desire - Epicureans and Stoics on the good life Can philosophy be practical and compassionate? Can it exist for human beings and not just for its own coldly logical reasons? This was a question asked by the philosophers of the Hellenistic age, that´s the period following Aristotle, who died in 322BC. This week, Martha Nussbaum from the University of Chicago, talks about desire and Hellenistic ethics. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-10-31 - Human cures and animal sacrifices This week Denise Russell from the University of Wollongong argues that animals held for experimental purposes are in the same moral condition as human beings held as slaves. Secrecy and the status of science protect these practices from critical scrutiny. So millions of animals suffer and die in Australian experiments each year, though in other countries alternative ways of seeking knowledge have been developed. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-10-24 - Beethoven and the modern Music can make us happy or sad, it can present us with fascinating complex patterns, but can it make us think? Ludwig van Beethoven believed that it could and this week we look at his relationship to the philosophy of his day and his legacy to the modern world. Liberation and heroic defiance, spiritual alienation and transcendence, personal autonomy and a new conception of musical time - all these distinctive aspects of modern thought are intimately bound up with Beethoven, his personalit ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-10-17 - What would Karl Marx think? Commodities, capitalism and computers. At a time when the Berlin Wall has fallen but Wall Street is decidedly shaky, a self-described lapsed Marxist takes us through some of the key philosophical and practical ideas of Karl Marx and argues for what is still useful today. What is worth keeping in Marx? He had his limitations but later thinkers have built on his core concepts and used his methods to produce results that still speak to the changing nature of work in contemporary Australia. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-10-10 - Gandhi and philosophy - the centenary of Hind Swaraj One hundred years ago the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi took a boat from London to South Africa. Over ten days he wrote a long essay that for the first time melded his ideas about civilisation, violence, truth and the aims of life into a cohesive whole. The work is called Hind Swaraj and this week we explore it´s philosophical importance. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-10-03 - In search of civilisation This week, we polish up a tarnished idea and ask whether it´s really as tarnished as all that. The idea is civilisation and our guide to it is the Melbourne philosopher John Armstrong, author of a new book called In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea. Why does he think that it´s a tarnished idea? And isn´t the very idea a bit messy? After all, civilisation has brought us lots of things, from the Mona Lisa to good plumbing, so what really does the word mean? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-09-26 - "I can't go on, I'll go on" - Samuel Johnson and the Stoics Three hundred years ago this month, the great Samuel Johnson was born. He was a lexicographer, a poet, an essayist, a heroically good man and a tortured depressive. But was he also a philosopher? This week, we look at Johnson and at the ancient Stoics, whose sober philosophy combined with Christianity in Johnson´s view of the world. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-09-19 - Forging ahead - the philosophy of authenticity, fakes and forgers If a painting, a sculpture or even a recording of a musical performance has been widely admired, has given delight to many, and is then revealed to be a forgery or a copy, why reject it? The object itself hasn´t changed, so what has? When he find out that something is a forgery, we feel cheated, but do we have reason to feel like that? This week, The Philosopher´s Zone looks at this nagging question in the philosophy of art. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-09-12 - Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilisation: 50th anniversary Exactly fifty years ago, a 33-year-old Frenchman named Michel Foucault completed what would become one of the most influential works on the history of psychiatry: Madness and Civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. The book made a philosophical star of its author and changed our view of madness. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-09-05 - 150th anniversary of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty This year, we´re celebrating the 150th birthday of Darwin´s Origin of Species, but that wasn´t the only significant book to be published in 1859. That year also saw the publication of On Liberty by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill. It´s a striking book, which finds the threats to liberty not in the tyranny of kings or dictators but in the oppressive weight of public opinion. This surely makes it a very modern work. Today, we investigate what Mill had to say, where it´s still re ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-08-29 - What makes a world class philosophy department? - The case of Melbourne University We´re often told that, when it comes to philosophy, Australia is punching above its weight. A country as small as ours ought not to be producing so many fine philosophers as we have. But have those days come to an end? Over in Chicago, the Philosophy Gourmet Report, which ranks philosophy departments in the English-speaking world, has demoted the University of Melbourne's department out of the top fifty. What does this mean for the University and for philosophy in Australia? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-08-22 - Power, prejudice and the murder of Stephen Lawrence In London in 1993, a black teenager named Stephen Lawrence was fatally stabbed by a small gang of white teenagers. His friend Duwayne Brooks was a witness but the police failed to take his testimony seriously. When someone speaks but is not heard because of accent, sex, or colour, that person is undermined as a knower. This week, we look at was it means to do justice to someone´s status as a knower. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-08-15 - The epistemology of blogging Blogging has changed the way in which people acquire knowledge and justify their beliefs. But are these changes good or bad? Do we know more and do we know differently as a result of blogging? And is it all beneficial for democracy? Some philosophers have their doubts, but this week we meet one who thinks that blogging is good news. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-08-08 - Are ethicists ethical? If philosophical moral reflection improves moral behaviour, then you might expect professional ethicists to behave especially well. So why are books on ethics more likely to be stolen from university libraries than other books? Why don´t people who study ethics participate more in the life of the community? And if the study of ethics doesn´t make them better people, what hope is there for the rest of us? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-08-01 - The Philosopher and the Wolf For more than ten years, Mark Rowlands, currently professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, lived with his pet wolf, Brenin. This week on The Philosopher´s Zone, he talks about their shared life and what it has to tell us about how we view other animals, and how we think of ourselves. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-07-25 - Governance and the Yuck Factor In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama expressed an ambition to bridge the divide between predominantly conservative `red states´ and predominantly liberal `blue states´ and to unite all Americans in a common purpose of remaking the nation for the new century. Stephen Clarke from the University of Oxford argues that his will not be easy to do as liberal and conservative demands often pull in opposite directions. Furthermore, the divide between liberals and conservatives goes de ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-07-18 - The Rebirth of Nature In the seveteenth century, the great French philosopher Rene Descartes devised a picture of the world in which we are isolated egos dwelling in a world of lifeless matter with creates life by its motion. But what does this have to do with our reaction to the threat of global warming? In a talk called `The Rebirth of Nature and the Climate Crisis´, delivered this month at the University of Sydney Hamilton, Clive Hamilton, Charles Sturt Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-07-11 - The Philosopher and the Novelist This week, we look at a philosopher and at a novelist, and we find out what the one had to say to the other. Moira Gatens an Australian Professorial Fellow in the philosophy department at the University of Sydney. And she has just been appointed to the very important Spinoza Chair for 2010 at the University of Amsterdam. This means, amongst presenting the annual Spinoza lecture at Spinoza House in Rijnsburg, where the benches on which Spinoza worked in the seventeenth century at his trade ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-07-04 - Philosophy - The great divide (Continental / Analytic) This week, we examine a division in the philosophical world, between what´s called analytic philosophy, as practised in the English-speaking world and the Nordic nations, and continental philosophy. If you´re an analytical philosopher, all that French and German stuff looks vague, verbose and romantic. If you´re sitting Paris, the analytical stuff is likely to seem abstract, dry and quite unconnected with human realities. Professor Paul Patton straddles the divide and this week he t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-06-27 - Is philosophy irrelevant to science? Scientists get on with the job – they do stuff with test tubes or with computers – but can philosophers help them? Do they need help and, if so, do they think they need help? This week, we examine what philosophers of science talk about and what effect it might have on what scientists actually do. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-06-20 - The Romantic Movement and rock music Romantic ideas and philosophy live on in certain strains of modern rock music, according to this week's guest, Craig Schuftan, author of Hey Nietzsche - Leave them kids alone. David Bowie, The Cure, The Smiths, Queen, and more contemporary bands like My Chemical Romance and Weezer share some seriously Romantic tendencies with people like Byron, Schopenhauer, Wagner and even Nietzsche - and it's not just because they all viewed the world through the same gloomy prism. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-06-13 - A conversation with Isaiah Berlin Last week, we commemorated the centenary of the birth of the greatest British philosopher and historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin. This week, we raid the ABC archives for a long interview in which Berlin talks about human freedom: are we free and, if we are not free, can we be moral? Are we responsible for what we do or can circumstances let us off the hook? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A tribute to Isaiah Berlin Isaiah Berlin was born in Russia a hundred years ago, on 6 June 1909. He grew up to be a distinguished philosopher, a great historian of ideas - tracing the origins and vicissitudes of liberal thought over the last few centuries - and an eloquent defender of liberty. He was a man with very many friends and, this week, we talk about him with one of them: the British political philosopher John Gray. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Happiness Machine Philosopher Caroline West believes the word 'happiness' should be abolished because it has become a catch all for such a wide variety of states of being and ways of living that it has lost all meaning. But where to from there? What are our alternatives? And how might a happiness machine help us think about the problem? Join Caroline West as she addresses the recent Sydney Writers' Festival. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-05-23 - Jekyll and Hyde and criminal responsibility The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published in 1886. It was hugely successful and has given us one of the archetypes of our time, but what does it have to tell us about our attitudes to guilt? Was Dr Jekyll a murderer or does the fact that the crimes were committed by his alter-ego, Edward Hyde, get him off the hook? This week on The Philosopher´s Zone, we examine the problem of guilt and responsibility. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-05-16 - Thinking about the lives of the great thinkers Ray Monk from the University of Southampton in the UK is something unusual in philosophers of the English-speaking world: he´s a biographer. This week, he tell us about the challenges of writing the lives of Bertrand Russell and of the great Ludwig Wittgenstein and why the thinks that biography is a very Wittgensteinian genre. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-05-09 - The unhappy family of Ludwig Wittgenstein Sometimes it´s easy to forget that long dead philosophers had families; a world beyond the cocoon of their thinking and writing; a life with all the joy and sadness and conflict that a family can provide. The 20th century Viennese philosopher's family might today be described as deeply dysfunctional, as well as cultured and hugely wealthy. We're joined by Alexander Waugh, author of, The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-05-02 - The philosophy of the quantum spook Does physics offer us a fuzzy picture of a clear reality or a clear picture of a fuzzy reality? In 1947, Albert Einstein told Max Born -- a great physicist and the grandfather of Olivia Newton-John -- that he couldn´t accept quantum theory because it involved `spooky actions at a distance.´ But does having quantum theory without the spooks mean believing in time travel? Huw Price, philosopher and physicist, helps us boldly go. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-04-25 - Philosophy and The Wealth of Nations - P.J. O'Rourke Adam Smith is known today as the father of economics, but he was, by profession, a philosopher. His book The Wealth of Nations is an attempt to apply philosophy to the world of money-making and commerce. This week, we dip into his great work with the help of P.J O´Rourke, the American political commentator, wit and author of a recent study of Smith. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-04-18 - Ideals and dirty hands - C.A.J. Coady What´s wrong with moralism in politics? Can you be moral and advocate morality while at the same time being aware of your own moral failings? Can you at the same time be an idealist and a realist? And what about dirty hands? Do the supreme emergencies of political life sometimes mean that you might have to do things that you would normally regard as immoral? Some hard questions about the realities of political life this week on The Philosopher´s Zone. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-04-11 - Getting down to reality: Raymond Geuss Lenin divided people into two kinds: `who´ and `whom´. For him, the important question in politics was who does what to whom? But is this grimly realistic view of power neglected by philosophers with too much of an interest in justice, equality, rights and other ideals? This week, we look at realism and what it means for political philosophy. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-04-04 - Hypatia of Alexandria - a philosophical martyr Hypatia of Alexandria was beautiful and clever, and, as far we know, never did anybody any harm, so why was she torn to pieces by an angry mob, armed (so some stories tell) with oyster shells? This week, we look at the woman and the heritage of what is probably the longest-standing philosophical tradition in Western civilisation: that rational yet mystical, sometimes Pagan, sometimes Christian, body of doctrines known as Neo-Platonism. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-03-28 - Voice in the wilderness - R.G. Collingwood R.G. Collingwood—philosopher, archaeologist, historian—was a man difficult to place, who felt very much an outsider in the philosophical world at the time of his death in 1943. Yet, today what he was interested in is very much like the sort of thing we're interested in: the hidden presuppositions behind our ways of thought and doing history as a form of re-enactment. The world looks very different when seen from the point of view of this neglected figure. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-03-21 - Understanding and blame while the money runs out It´s not a good time to be a big noise in banking or the motor industry, but who are the really guilty parties here and do the media help us to understand what´s going on? Can business ethics enable us to draw lines between culpability, incompetence and culpable incompetence? And are the ethics of the media totally compromised by spin and image manipulation? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-03-14 - Talking to the animals You can talk to the animals till the cows come home but will they talk back? Perhaps they do and you just don´t get the message. Either way, the fact that animals don´t seem to possess language has, since ancient Greek times, encouraged the view that they´re not capable of being rational and therefore not fit to be members of the community. This week, the Dutch philosopher René ten Bos questions our time-honoured views of animals and how to behave towards them. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-03-07 - A rear view of Alfred Hitchcock A rear view of Alfred Hitchcock is a view that takes in what lies behind and beneath. And what we find is a profoundly pessimistic, though not hopeless, view of the world and a keen interest in the way we see it. How do we interpret what we see? And can we see without interpretation? Can life approach perfection or are we doomed to get it wrong? Serious philosophical questions, all addressed by the fat Englishman who made movies for Hollywood. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-02-28 - Providence lost? `Providence´ is not a word of which we make much use these days. For us, it tends to be a synonym for good fortune or perhaps a sense that somebody is watching over us. But what is providence if it isn´t whatever deliveries you a prize in the lottery? To the ancient Greeks, providence was the inherent purpose and rational structure of the world, and this week we meet the Australian philosopher Genevieve Lloyd, who argues that the idea can still help us clarify the ideas of freedom and a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-02-21 - Burning issues: the ethics of firefighting You´re a firefighter and you have a choice: do you save the old person, who´s relatively easy to save, or do you go for the child when your attempt might not be successful and you might lose your own life trying? Fire fighting has been much on all our minds lately. There are a lot of practical and emotional issues here, but is there anything philosophical to talk about? We meet a philosopher who has been battling with the ethical issues of the firefighter´s life. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-02-14 - Charles Darwin - The Philosopher's Zone and All in the Mind Special The human animal is a complex beast - we mate, fight, emote, and socialise in curious ways. Charles Darwin´s theories continue to provoke controversy over how and why we behave the way we do. Join leading evolutionary scientists and philosophers in this one hour special, as presenters Alan Saunders and Natasha Mitchell consider how Darwin radically influenced the life of the mind. From the philosophical and historical excavations of Darwinian thought, to contemporary adventures of Darw ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-02-07 - Philosophy in the mountains - Arne Naess Arne Næss, who died in January just a couple of weeks short of his ninety-seventh birthday, was a great mountaineer and part of the history of twentieth-century philosophy. He started out as a member of the great philosophical school the Vienna Circle but was better known as the founder of the movement known as deep ecology. This week, we pay tribute to the man and his work. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-01-31 - Radical hope Jonathan Lear, author of Radical hope - ethics in the face of cultural devastation, takes us through the story of an American Indian nation, the Crow, and their last great chief, Plenty Coups. Plenty Coup died an old man in 1932, having lived through the complete upheaval of Crow life and culture. So how did he show courage and hope when his very framework for understanding those concepts had disappeared? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2009-01-24 - Gavagai! This week, we continue our look at translation by examining the extreme case of radical translation. How do you translate from a language which has no connection with yours and of which you do not speak a single word, and what does all this have to do with the mysterious word 'gavagai'? We also continue our look at the challenges of translating philosophy this week focusing on translating French, German and English. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophy in another tongue Philosophy aspires to universal truths but it has to do so in a particular language. How does the language in which philosophy is expressed affect what can and cannot be said, and how does translation affect our understanding of it? This week, we ask a Chinese philosopher how different Confucius is in English and we consider attempts to make Plato sound as though he came from Oxford. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Islam and philosophy - Tariq Ramadan The holy Koran is held by Muslims to be the literal word of God, and if you've got that, who needs philosophy? This week we put that question to the distinguished and controversial Muslim thinker Tariq Ramadan, who tells us that Islam not only needs philosophy but has already shared its insights with the West. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Emergence of Science, Part 2 Why did the great scientific revolution occur in the West and not in China or the Arab-Islamic world? This week, in the second part of an interview with Stephen Gaukroger from the University of Sydney, we find out why it happened, where it happened and how science became the bearer of general standards of rationality. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Emergence of Science, Part 1 In the twenty-first century, science doesn't just explain the world, it dominates the world. Religion, art, human relationships, history -- we expect them all to be explained in scientific terms. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Doing without a ruler: in defence of anarchism The word derives from the Greek; it means 'without a ruler' and the idea is that all forms of government are oppressive and undesirable and should be abolished. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Merleau-Ponty and the lived body 2008 is the centenary of the birth of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He was a friend of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre and a man who wanted to get philosophy back to its basics and the physical reality of the lived body. This week, we pay tribute to his work and his influence on modern cognitive science. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Teaching children to be philosophers How young is too young to think philosophically? Philosophers like Philip Cam from the University of New South Wales say there's no developmental reason why primary school age children can't be taught to think and to reason, and that developing these skills has a significant effect on their lives both in and out of the classroom. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Martha Nussbaum - Part 2 - Thinking about Animals We'd don't put pigs on trial and gazelles don't sue lions, so it looks as though it doesn't make sense to talk about animal rights. But can we do what we like with them or should we recognize not just that they have interests— such as an interest in not being eaten—but that they have capabilities; of enjoyment, for example, or of engaging in social life with others of their kind? In the second part of our conversation with the distinguished American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, we ask w ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Martha Nussbaum - Part 1 - The Social Contract How much of your personal liberty would you be prepared to give up in exchange for drains that work and trains that run on time? The idea of the social contract has been with us for many centuries now. It embodies the idea that society is a trade-off between liberties and benefits. This week, we discuss the contract and its shortcomings with one of the greatest moral and political philosophers of the age, Martha C. Nussbaum. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Scapegoats and sacrifices - Rene Girard Have you ever found that you didn't want something until you noticed that somebody else wanted it? Were you picked on at school, or were you one of the pickers on? Welcome to the world of the French thinker Rene Girard, who claims that desire needs to be learned and that, once learned, it leads to the finding of scapegoats. And what do we do with scapegoats? We sacrifice them. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The philosophy of cold hard cash There's not much money in philosophy, but then there's not much philosophy in money, either. In classical times and the Middle Ages, philosophers were often interested in money (in thinking about it, that is) but since then they've tended to ignore the subject. This week, we meet an Australian philosopher who has turned his attention to the neglected subject of cash and its role in our practical and moral lives. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The John Anderson lectures John Anderson, the famous and inflential professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney from 1927 to 1958, taught on a wide range of topics, from the ancients to the moderns. This week, we find out what he had to say about the Greeks and about political philosophy. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Karl Popper and the logic of the market Karl Popper was one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century and a great advocate of scientific rationality, but what happened when he turned his attention to the more disorderly world of politics and economics? This week, we look at Popper and the free market. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Why Asian philosophy? For a long while, Western philosophy has had little to do with the philosophical traditions of India and China. A common view amongst Western philosophers was that all thought in the Asian traditions was not philosophy, but religion or mysticism. But now, slowly, Western philosophers are starting to engage with Asian thought. This week, Graham Priest, Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University, talks about what these philosophers are finding there, and why it's often challenging for so ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bailouts, capitalism and the financial markets We are now faced with the seemingly incongruous situation of having an industry that sings the praises of capitalism, and the free markets wanting the state to come in and help prevent its own losses. We'll also find out about the division between moralists and technicians, and why the artist Damien Hirst might even be partly to blame for letting things get this bad. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Music and the Enlightenment The age of a great movement of ideas, the Enlightenment, was also a great age of music: Bach and Handel, Mozart and Haydn. But how did Enlightenment thinkers reflect on music and how does their belief in progress relate to our views of art today? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 'It's alive!' Frankenstein, science and philosophy in the Romantic period Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is more than just the story of a man bolting together his own creature from bits of pre-loved human beings; it's a serious examination of the science and philosophy of its day. This week, we look at the ideas behind the book and how a new enthusiasm for electricity and the spirit world animated the young author's work. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The ethics of keeping your mouth shut - the case of the buried bodies This week The Philosopher's Zone looks at what happens when lawyers know more than they are able to tell. What should you do when ethical duty collides with personal morality? We'll take an infamous American murder trial from the 1970s as our case study Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Justify my love The finely tuned minds of philosophers become curiously blunt and obtuse when the turn their attention to love. Can we talk philosophically of love? Do we love people for their qualities? If so, why we go on loving them when those qualities change? This week, a philosopher looks at one of the most mysterious forces in life. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sayyid Qutb and Islamist ideology This year marks the 25th birthday of Al Qaeda and its particular brand of Islamist ideology and philosophy. So this week The Philosopher's Zone explores the life and times of a man who greatly influenced al Qaeda and the modern Islamist movement: the Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Light from the North - The Scottish Enlightenment Much of the modern world was created in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. The Scottish Enlightenment was more than just the Scottish branch of that great eighteenth-century European movement of ideas known as the Enlightenment: it was essentially Scottish and wholly important. This week, we explore some tartan ideas with Arthur Herman, author of Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots' Invention of the Modern World. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Worrying about China To the outside world, China might look a self-confident, if pushy, country. But how confident are Chinese intellectuals after a century of tumultuous history? This week, we examine the state of critical inquiry in China, what Chinese intellectuals do with Western philosophy and the rediscovery of the Confucian heritage. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Uprootedness and national conflicts The French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil identified the basic human need for roots as crucial. Uprootedness and disapora in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians have shaped the narratives about the past and the future on both sides. Jonathan Glover, a Professor of Philosophy at King's College London has been in Australia to deliver the annual Simone Weil lecture on human value and joins us. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Objective truth For a long time now, it has been fashionable to say that what science offers is not a true mirror of nature but a distorting mirror, reflecting our presuppositions, prejudices and politics. But can we take the criticisms on board while still maintaining a belief in objective truth? We meet a philosopher who says we can. Also, objectivity and the arts: can artistic judgments ever be objective or is it all down to just knowing what you like? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Stoics at war Recent philosophical debate on war has focused on the idea that you don't just have to fight by the rules; you also have to be fighting in a just cause. But does this ignore much of the moral context of a soldier's life. What binds comrades in arms together? What about stress and what about grief, and what does the ancient Roman philosophy of Stoicism have to tell us about it? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Literature, law and ethics - The case of Billy Budd A visiting legal ethicist talks to us about why a novella by Herman Melville, involving mutiny and an execution at sea, has become required reading for those interested in the intersection of literature, law and ethics. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Damned if you do and damned if you don't What happens if you're in one of those situations where you're faced with a choice and, whatever you choose, it's going to be a bad choice? This is what's known as a moral dilemma, but do moral dilemmas actually occur in real life? Moral philosophers tend to say they don't - if you think you've got a dilemma, you haven't understood the situation - but can life really be that easy? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Taking God for granted (or not) Some people take God (or, at least, God's existence) for granted; their belief comes from faith. But some of them still think that they can learn from philosophers. This week, we meet somebody who teaches philosophy to evangelical Protestant students and a Sydney lawyer who, taking nothing for granted, argues for God in an increasingly sceptical philosophical world. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website John Gray at the Writers' Festival - Part 2 The celebrated British philosopher and political theorist John Gray discusses the ways in which the Utopian aspirations of the secular left and right reflect the Christian heritage of Western political thought. From Stalinist Russia to contemporary Iraq, he argues, the road to perfection is built over the bodies of the innocent. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website John Gray at the Writers' Festival - Part 1 The celebrated philosopher and critic John Gray is one of Britain's most prominent thinkers. In such books as Straw Dogs and Black Mass, he argues that apocalyptic religion has returned as a major force in global conflict. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Egalitarianism and fairness Australia prides itself on its egalitarianism, but what do we mean by 'egalitarianism'? Is it about treating everybody alike or just about treating like cases alike? Does inequality matter if nobody gets hurt? It is about fairness, and can we talk about fairness if there isn't actually anybody who's being unfair? (Can a roulette wheel be unfair?) This week, a philosophical look at one of the leading beliefs (or myths) of our time. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The only good philosopher is a dead one Or the only truly tested philosophy is that of a dead philosopher. When the philosopher dies, the philosophy is put to the test. Does is still seem valid? Or does it fade into irrelevance in the face of eternity? From the Sydney Writers' Festival, a conversation with Simon Critchley, author of The Book of Dead Philosophers. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ethics in the public realm - Bill Henson and drug-resistant tuberculosis This week, The Philosopher's Zone looks at a couple of current, public ethical issues. It's said that the photographer Bill Henson, whose images were recently seized by the police, didn't intend to produce pornography. Does this mean that the images in question can't be pornography? What is it that makes art art? And tuberculosis, which kills almost as many people each year as AIDS; should we forcibly and indefinitely separate people infected with TB and refuse them access to their family a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mai '68 In May 1968, the universities of France and Germany erupted. There were protests, there were sit-ins, there were riots and, among students of philosophy, there was a total rejection of the older generation. Jean-Paul Sartre found himself outflanked from an unexpected direction: the left. This week on The Philosopher's Zone, we look at the consequences of 'les evenements' of 1968 on two influential thinkers: Paul Ricoeur, who suffered at first hand at the University of Nanterre, and Michel F ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Suicide - To be or not to be (part 2) In the second part of our philosophical study of suicide, we look at how attitudes to the act altered when religion began to feature less in philosophers' views of the subject and the focus turned to the autonomy of the individual: it's your life so you can do what you like with it, can't you? And, if not, why not? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Suicide - To be or not to be (Part 1) Suicide has been a focus of philosophical examination in the West since at least the time of Plato, and for good reason. It raises a lot of difficult questions. What makes behaviour suicidal? Is suicidal behaviour rational and - the question that has obsessed philosophers down the ages - is it morally permissible? This week, the first part of a two-part investigation of this enigmatic and disconcerting phenomenon. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Practical philosophy and speculative fiction The philosophy of Vedanta, which derives from the ancient Hindu Scripture, aspires to scientific knowledge about how life is to be lived. This week, we examine its claims. We also look at a new novel that asks what might happen if the work of Plato were to be put into practice. The result? Totalitarianism plus genetic engineering. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Doing without a ruler: in defence of anarchism The word derives from the Greek—it means 'without a ruler'—and the idea is that all forms of government are oppressive and undesirable and should be abolished. This week we are looking at anarchism and why it has mostly played a minor role in political life and philosophy. The autonomous collective that is The Philosopher's Zone investigates. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Morality and political violence War, rebellion and terrorism - together, they constitute a major challenge to the world today. But they also constitute a challenge to morality itself. This week, we talk to the Melbourne philosopher C.A.J. Coady about morality and political violence. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Time for philosophers Time, as we all know, is money, but what else is it? Would it exist if nothing were changing or moving? Does it really have a direction? Are the future and the past real? Will the future be infinite? Was (or is) the past infinite? These and other questions will be tackled this week on The Philosopher's Zone - if there's time. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Steam-age philosophy Two of the inventors of the steam engine differed hugely about the theory behind what they were doing. Did that make a difference to what they did, or does philosophy not matter at all? This week's program stares into the gap between theory and practice. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Queensland - Beautiful one day, metaphysical the next Many Australian trends in philosophy of mind, environmental philosophy, logic and social thought began in Queensland or had a fruitful infancy there. So this week, with the help of Dr Gary Malinas, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Queensland, we celebrate the history of deep thought in the sunshine state. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Buffy the Concept Slayer The problem of evil, the nature of knowledge, the moral demands of duty -- all of them big-time philosophical issues and all of them dealt with in one of the most sucessful TV shows of the last decade: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This week, The Philosopher's Zone heads off to Sunnydale to find out what the vampire slayer has to tell us about the most pressing philosophical questions. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Islam and philosophy - Tariq Ramadan The holy Koran is held by Muslims to be the literal word of God, and if you've got that, who needs philosophy? This week we put that question to the distinguished and controversial Muslim thinker Tariq Ramadan, who tells us that Islam not only needs philosophy but has already shared its insights with the West. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophy and the Natural World - Val Plumwood How do our ideas about the nature of thought and the nature of the human mind affect our view of the environment and of the other beings with whom we share it? This week we ponder on these issues in a program about Val Plumwood, the feminist and environmentalist philosopher who died suddenly a couple of weeks ago. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Gavagai! This week, we continue our look at translation by examining the extreme case of radical translation. How do you translate from a language which has no connection with yours and of which you do not speak a single word, and what does all this have to do with the mysterious word 'gavagai'? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophy in another tongue Philosophy aspires to universal truths but it has to do so in a particular language. How does the language in which philosophy is expressed affect what can and cannot be said, and how does translation affect our understanding of it? This week, we ask a Chinese philosopher how different Confucius is in English and we consider attempts to make Plato sound as though he came from Oxford. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Why there's no getting away from beauty... This week The Philosopher's Zone turns its attention to aesthetics, the study of art (and entertainment) and why it affects us in the way it does. What is it that captures our attention in art, and why is there no getting away from beauty? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophers advising government This week two examples of philosophers providing ideas and advice to governments. One has been successful, the other less so. The Australian philosopher Philip Pettit has the ear of the current Spanish president, but what has he achieved? We also look at the role Machiavelli tried to play advising rulers in fifteenth century Florence. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Emergence of Science, Part 2 Why did the great scientific revolution occur in the West and not in China or the Arab-Islamic world? This week, in the second part of an interview with Stephen Gaukroger from the University of Sydney, we find out why it happened, where it happened and how science became the bearer of general standards of rationality. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Emergence of Science, Part 1 In the twenty-first century, science doesn't just explain the world: it dominates the world. Religion, art, human relationships, history - we expect them all to be explained in scientific terms. How did science acquire this dominance over our way of thinking? Today, in the first episode of a two-part special, we examine the rise of science in the western mind. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophical love stories This week, Friedrich Nietzsche meets the Frankenstein monster and Simone de Beauvoir hangs out with the Desperate Housewives, in a philosophical look at some stories of attraction and love. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophy for lunch Earlier this year, the Australasian Association of Philosophy did something very unusual: it held a press conference. It was a lunch too and as the tables were cleared, I chatted about mind and morals with three philosophers: David Chalmers from the Australian National University, Susan Dodds from University of Wollongong and Raimund Gaita from the Australian Catholic University and King's College London. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Minds and computers Could a computer have a mind? Is our mind a sort of computer? And what do we mean by 'mind' anyway? This week, we talk about these mind-numbing issues with Matt Carter, Fellow of the Philosophy Department at Melbourne University. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophy in schools Philosophy is about asking childlike questions - how do we know the world exists? How do we know it hasn't just started existing? Why can't we go back in time? So why not teach philosophy in schools? It doesn't happen much in this country (it doesn't much happen anywhere) but it does go on in Queensland, and this week we talk to a Queensland teacher who's teaching philosophy to high school children. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Molyneux's problem Who was Molyneux and what was his problem? He was an Irish physician of the eighteenth century interested in the psychology of sight and his problem was this: could a person born blind, who knew shapes only by feeling, recognize those shapes by sight if his sight were suddenly restored to him? In other words, how are our senses connected? The Philosopher's Zone explores some connections Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The music of Hades Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo isn't the first opera, but it is the first great opera. Today, we celebrate its four-hundredth birthday by talking to a philosopher who's also a musician (or a musician who's also a philosopher) about the ideas underlining the work and about the philosophy of musical performance. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The anatomy of a discovery The great physiologist and anatomist William Harvey died three hundred and fifty years ago this year. In today's Philospher's Zone, we examine the thinking behind his greatest discovery - the circulation of the blood - and reveal the philosophy that guided his hand when he wielded the scalpel. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What's social (and what's just) about social justice? With a new government running the country, can we hope for more social justice, or will there be less of it? This week we ask what social justice is and whether we really need more of it. Also, are museums still places of exploration, discovery and philosophical reflection? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Considering consideration Do you hold doors open for others? Then you're being considerate. Do you let your mobile phone ring during movies? Then you're being inconsiderate. This week we analyse a form of conduct that seems trivial, but helps to keep civilised society together. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The dangers of teaching philosophy This week, Tony Coady from the University of Melbourne talks about the establishment of philosophy in Australia and the dangers of teaching philosophy. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophy, treason, plot The murder of Julius Caesar, the Gunpowder Plot, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the German generals' plan to kill Hitler, September 11 - history seems to be full of conspiracies, yet the gerat philosopher Karl Popper argued that no major historical change can ever be explained on the basis of conspiracy.  This week: a critical look at the anti-conspiracy conspiracy. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ethics on the Couch Non-maleficence, beneficence, respect for autonomy, justice - these are supposed to be the ethical principles according to which all clinicians conduct their professional lives.  But are they suitable for psychiatry in a global, multicultural environment?  We investigate the philosophy of shrinks. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosopher Kings Plato said that in a well-ordered state, philosophers would be kings, but how do philosophers fare when they get their own little kingdom to rule - a university, say, or a faculty or even just a department?  This week, Paul Thom, a philosopher and also Executive Dean of Arts at Southern Cross University, talks about whether being a good philosopher can help you to be a good manager. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Thinking and judging with Hannah Arendt Attending the trial of Adolph Eichmann, the war criminal, the philosopher Hannah Arendt was struck not by his satanic evil but by how unthinking he was. This week Max Deutscher, author of a recent book on Arendt's work, discusses her views on thought, thinking and judging. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The great divide There are two philosophical traditions in the Western world: the analytical tradition of the English-speaking nations and the tradition of philosophy as practised in continental Europe. Few philosophers straddle both but Max Deutscher, foundation professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, is one. This week he talks about his analytical education and how it led him to the study of some very continental philosophical problems arising out of the horrors of World War II. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The naming of things Much of philosophy is about how we divide the world up - into things, ideas, species, breeds, genera - and the people at the coal-face of this work are the naturalists. This week, we learn about the great Swedish naturalist Linnaeus, who invented the the modern system of plant classification and, in doing so, changed the world. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sentimentality from Adam Smith to Alfred Hitchcock In the eighteenth century, the word 'sentimental' didn't mean what we mean; it meant seeing things from somebody else's point of view, which is why there is a line of descent from an eighteenth-century philosopher like Adam Smith to an twentieth-century film maker like Alfred Hitchcock. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Morality and restraint There are poor children starving in Africa, so you should really eat up your food, shouldn't you? Perhaps you should, but why are their needs morally more significant than your desire for enjoyment. This week, The Philosopher's Zone looks at morality, restraint and the case for selfishness. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Can environmental philosophy save the world? What can we learn from Easter Island and the collapse of other civilisations? Environmental philosopher, political activist and ecofeminist Val Plumwood believes that we need a new ethics to bring us into harmony with the natural world and perhaps avoid the devastation presently facing us on a global scale. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Metaphysics Down Under John Anderson kept the flame of metaphysics alive when most of the English-speaking world would have none of it. He was one of Australia's most influential philosophers though he didn't publish much. Some of his lectures have just been published as a book called Space, Time and the Categories, and this week, we talk to the editor of the lectures, Creagh Cole, and one of Anderson's former students, philosopher David Armstrong. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The strange case of Australian idealism In the early years of the last century, if Australia had a public philosophy it was idealism: the view that ultimate reality was about ideas, not brute matter. It has had an impact in this country that went beyond the academy and now it has almost vanished. This week, The Philosopher's Zone investigates its rise and fall. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The strange birth of Idealism The Irish philosopher George Berkeley, born in 1685, was responsible for what it many respects a very strange theory: he thought that matter didn't exist. This week, we investigate, or we think we do. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What is the worst argument in the world? Philosophy is all about arguing, but some arguments are worse than others. In fact, some are so awful that only really intelligent people can believe them. This week we examine some implausible ideas with the help of two connoisseurs of bad arguments. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Paraconsistency: the wilder shores of logic If yesterday was Friday and tomorrow will be Sunday, today must be Saturday - that's logic, right? Not necessarily. This week, in the second part of a talk on modern logic, Greg Restall from the University of Melbourne tells us that things don't always turn out in the logical way that we expect. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Logic in Australia Mathematicians use it, computer engineers use it, web designers use it - what is it? It's logical and this week, Greg Restall from the University of Melbourne talks about the most fundamental of philosophical disciplines and why it's, well, fun. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophical love stories This week, Friedrich Nietzsche meets the Frankenstein monster and Simon de Beauvoir hangs out with the Desperate Housewives, in a philosophical look at some stories of attraction and love. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophy from a female point of view Across the world, philosophy is a lot like physics - female practitioners are seriously outnumbered by men - and Australia is no exception. However, Australia's feminist philosophers are vibrantly energetic and creative. This week, we learn about their important contribution to philosophy. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Beginning philosophy right here and now This week, we talk to Stephen Hetherington, whose book Self-Knowledge invites us to ask ourselves what, sitting alone in a room, we can claim to know about who we are and the world in which we live. It shows how profound philosophy can emerge from self-reflection. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophy for Lunch Last week, the Australasian Association of Philosophy did something very unusual: it held a press conference. It was a lunch too and this week, as the tables are cleared, we chat about mind and morals with three philosophers: David Chalmers from the Australian National University, Susan Dodds from University of Wollongong and Raimund Gaita from the Australian Catholic University and King's College London. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website American philosophy or philosophy in America? There is plenty of philosophy in American universities but is there a specifically American philosophy? This week, we look at how white America's reaction to the landscape and the growth of democracy resulted in a distinctive American approach to philosophy. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophy in a test tube This week the Cairns Convention Centre was host to the 5th Annual Meeting of International Society for Stem Cell Research. One of the principal speakers this was Insoo Hyun , Assistant Professor of Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He talks to The Philosopher's Zone about the vexed ethical issues that arise from stem cell research. Should you be paid for your cells? And what happens when you fuse human and animal cells? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Richard Rorty (1931 - 2007) This week on The Philosopher's Zone we pay tribute to Richard Rorty, the controversial American philosopher who died last week at the age of 75. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What do we know and how do we know we know it? Is it one thing to see a red image in front of you, another to believe that you're seeing a red apple, another to see a red apple and yet another actually to know that you're seeing a red apple? These are the strange questions asked in the branch of philosophy known as epistemology and this week The Philosopher's Zone asks whether there are any answers and whether these questions are worth asking in the first place. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Finding a new market for philosophy Why teach philosophy in a graduate school of management? Well, that's what Professor Robert Spillane does and it seems to be working, except for those junior Gordon Gekkos who just don't get it. This week, we talk to him about the philosophers who have caught his interest and what's it like to teach philosophy to the business leaders of tomorrow. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Shakespeare the philosopher Shakespeare's plays reflect the ferment of the post-Reformation world. New ideas of human nature, the rise of science and the conflict between the bourgeois individual and the old feudal order of rank and duty are played out in the complex psychology of his characters and their social and political problems. Shakespeare turns philosophy into drama. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Ethics of Economic Rationalism Does economic rationalism maximise human happiness? Does it result in equality and does that matter? Does it make for more individual liberty? And, for that matter, what exactly is it? This week, a philosophical look at one of the buzz concepts of the age. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Minds and Computers Could a computer have a mind? Is our mind a sort of computer? And what do we mean by 'mind' anyway? This week, we talk about these mind-numbing issues with Matt Carter, Fellow of the Philosophy Department at Melbourne University. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophy in schools Philosophy is about asking childlike questions - how do we know the world exists? How do we know it hasn't just started existing? Why can't we go back in time? So why not teach philosophy in schools? It doesn't happen much in this country (it doesn't much happen anywhere) but it does go on in Queensland, and this week we talk to a Queensland teacher who's teaching philosophy to high school children. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Masters of Emotion Masters of Emotion is the title of an exhibition currently on at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery. It is devoted to revealing how the portrayal of emotions has provided a challenge for artists since the time of classical antiquity and, especially, since the Renaissance. To mark the event there is to be a symposium and today we talk to one of the participants, Associate Professor John Armstrong from the University of Melbourne, for a philosopher's take on art and emotion. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What's wrong with slavery? We all agree that slavery is a bad thing but can we say why? Precisely what rights are being offended and why are they worth defending? So, 200 years since the British parliament voted to abolish the slave trade we ask what exactly is wrong with slavery. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophy, spirituality and the self - Part 2 Charles Taylor, the distinguished Canadian philosopher, has just been awarded the Templeton Prize, the world's most highly endowed award for intellectual achievement. This week, we hear the second part of his conversation with ABC Radio National's Tom Morton, about how a moral view of the human self might be possible in an age of scepticism and neo-Darwinism. And Danny Postel, senior editor of opendemocracy.net returns to the program with news of Iranian dissident journalist, Akbar Ganji, w ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophy, spirituality and the self - Part 1 Charles Taylor, the distinguished Canadian philosopher, has just been awarded the Templeton Prize, the world's most highly endowed award for intellectual achievement. This week on The Philosopher's Zone, he talks to ABC Radio National's Tom Morton, about how we are intellectually and how we got to where we are. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Molyneux's problem Who was Molyneux and what was his problem? He was an Irish physician of the eighteenth century interested in the psychology of sight and his problem was this: could a person born blind, who knew shapes only by feeling, recognize those shapes by sight if his sight were suddenly restored to him? In other words, how are our senses connected? The Philosopher's Zone explores some connections Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The many worlds of David Lewis The American philosopher David Lewis was an important and puzzling figure. Many philosophers believe that we can talk about different possible worlds (a world in which John Kerry won the last US presidential election, for example, or a world in which Tom and Nicole are still married) but Lewis held that there is a sense in which this multitude of other worlds can be said to exist. And he barracked for Essendon too. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Let's get metaphysical Metaphysics is the study of the ultimate nature of reality. It aims to establish what does and does not exist. This week, Professor Mark Colyvan from the University of Sydney, discusses some of the critical metaphysical questions throughout history as well as some contemporary challenges facing philosophers today. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophy in the year of the pig Can classical Chinese philosophy address environmental issues or is it too much about family and not about anything else? This week, The Philosopher's Zone looks at what various philosophical schools have to tell us about our relationship with the natural world around us. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philosophy: where to now? This week, Graham Priest, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, asks where philosophy has got to at the start of the 21st century and where it may go from here. What were the major influences that brought us to where we are now, and what will these be in the years to come? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What's the Persian for 'liberal'? In the headlines, Iran is a rogue state ruled by Islamic fundamentalists. Inside, though, things look different: Iranian intellectuals are rediscovering their nation's liberal traditions, and they're doing so by way of the works of western philosophers. The Philosopher's Zone talks to the American commentator Danny Postel about liberalism in Iran. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The examined life This week we talk to Dr Vera Ranki, Founding Director of the Examined Life Institute, about the use of classical philosophy as a way of finding out how to live the good life. Ranki seeks to bring philosophy out of the ivory tower and directly into our lives, helping us with the dilemmas we face. We also talk to Dr John Demartini about another of life's dilemmas: whether homemaker should be paid for the work they do, which involves knowledge of a great number of paid professions. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Utilitarianism Two hundred years after the birth of John Stuart Mill, one of the most famous proponents of the ethical and political theory known as utilitarianism, we talk to its best known modern exponent, the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, about the moral life and our relations with our fellow creatures. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The question of consciousness This week on The Philosopher's Zone, John Searle, one of the foremost philosophers in the English-speaking world today, discusses the question of consciousness. What is it to be conscious? And is there really a problem here at all? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Do Animals Think? Do animals think? is the title of Dr Clive Wynne's book in which he sets out his views on anthropomorphism and animal consciousness. Are they conscious in the way we are conscious? And, if not, what does consciousness mean for an animal? That's the discussion on this week's Philosopher's Zone. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website