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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. Login to Add this to your PlaylistPrimary 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 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 2009-12-19 - 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 2009-12-26 - 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 2009-12-12 - 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