Philosopher's Zone Podcasts

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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 Also Listed as: Talk City : Unknown State/Province : Unknown Country : Australia Country : OC User Tags: Australia News Philosophy User Votes: RSS Feed Website People found this Podcast Searching for: Australian News | Car talk | Radio | news | Talk | View this Podcast on a Google Map. Add to iTunes Text Only listing of Philosopher\'s Zone Podcasts Trumix.com listings available of Philosopher\'s Zone Podcasts Click Here to Update the directory of this podcasts programs.

Trumix.com listings available of Philosopher\'s Zone Podcasts Build your own playlists with this podcast. 2008-08-23 - 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 2008-08-16 - 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 2008-08-09 - 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 2008-08-02 - 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 2008-07-26 - 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 2008-07-19 - 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 2008-07-12 - 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 2008-07-05 - 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 2008-06-28 - John Gray at the Writers' Festival 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 2008-06-21 - 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. Also this week a French philosophy teachers puts the b ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2008-06-14 - 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 2008-06-07 - 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 2008-05-31 - 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 2008-05-24 - 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 2008-05-17 - 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 2008-05-10 - 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 2008-05-03 - 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 2008-04-26 - 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 2008-04-19 - 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 2008-04-12 - 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 2008-04-05 - 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 2008-03-29 - 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 2008-03-22 - 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 2008-03-15 - 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 programme 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 2008-03-08 - 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 2008-03-01 - 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 2008-02-23 - 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? We also hear more from Philip Pettit about philosophers as government advisers. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2008-02-16 - 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 2008-02-09 - 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 2008-02-02 - The emergence of science 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 2008-01-26 - 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 2008-01-19 - 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 2008-01-12 - 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 2008-01-05 - 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 2007-12-29 - 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 2007-12-22 - The Apology of Socrates The Apology of Socrates is not about saying sorry but it is one of the great speeches in the history of philosophy. The Greek philosopher defends himself against his accusers and ultimately invites them to condemn him to death. But why does he do that? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 2007-12-15 - 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 2008-08-30 - 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