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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:

View the full archive of Philosopher's Zone 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 2009-07-18 - 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 2009-07-25 - 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 2009-07-04 - 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 2009-07-11 - 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 2009-06-27 - 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