The Philosopher's Zone - Program podcast
By ABC Radio National
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Podcast Description
The Philosopher's Zone with Alan Saunders looks at the world of philosophy and at the world through philosophy. The program addresses the big philosophical questions and arguments. It also explores what philosophical analysis can contribute to our understanding of some of the fundamental and perplexing issues that face the world today.
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1 |
Buddhism and science: Talking past each other? | This week, we look at the convergence – or perhaps not – of two philosophies: Buddhism and modern science. Buddhism has attempted to redefine itself in relation to neuroscience . A case in point is the ‘dialogue’ between Buddhism and neuroscience promoted by the Dalai Lama and his Western followers. But before talking of a possible convergence between neuroscience and Buddhism, do we need to acknowledge the divergences? | 27 5 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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2 |
Who owns your genes? | You might think that, if anybody owns your genes, it’s you, but if you know anything about your genes it will be because of professional gene testing. And in cases of a genetically transmitted disorder, should genetic counsellors breach patient confidentiality to disclose the results of genetic tests to relatives who are likely to be affected by the same disorder? Is genetic information personal information, which belongs to the patient being tested, or does it belong to all the patient’s genetic relations? | 20 5 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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3 |
Shakespeare, Identity and Religion | What was Shakespeare’s religion and what did he think about personal identity? Did he believe that the personal identity we have is had because we are this living body rather than that? How does commitment to religious faith or to marriage affect your identity? And should we think of Shakespeare not just as an inventor of characters but as a thinker? | 13 5 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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4 |
Reflections on cultural identity | Ethnic groups across the planet are beginning to act like corporations that own a 'natural' copyright in their 'culture' and 'cultural products' which they protect, often by recourse to the law, and on which they capitalise in much the same way as do incorporated businesses in the private sector. | 6 5 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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5 |
The Problem of Evil | The Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik argues that he killed to do good for his country. Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organisers of the Holocaust, displayed neither guilt nor hatred, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was simply 'doing his job'. It was for him that the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ was coined. Ivan Milat, however, had a life-long history of behavioural disturbance and a propensity for sadistic violence. So how do we understand the problem? Is it just a lack of empathy or is there more than this to the problem of evil? | 29 4 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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6 |
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: The Chinese room argument, Pascal's wager and the ontological argument for the existence of God are among the nominees. This week we examine some implausible ideas with the help of two connoisseurs of bad arguments. | 22 4 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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7 |
A Dangerous Method | This week on the Philosopher’s Zone, we’re looking at a couple of people you might not think of as philosophers at all. One of them aspired to be a scientist of the mind. The other, though, was something of a philosopher, something of a mystic and something of a shaman. His name was Carl Gustav Jung and his relationship with an older man, Sigmund Freud, is the subject of A Dangerous Method, a new film directed by David Cronenberg, written by Christopher Hampton and starring Michael Fassbender as Freud, Viggo Mortensen as Jung and Keira Knightley as the woman who presence proves to be something of a catalyst in their relationship. | 15 4 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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8 |
Honourable intentions | Human consciousness is intentional – it’s about something – but what is the relationship between my consciousness and the objects of which I’m conscious? And, in particular, how does this work when the objects don’t even exist, like Santa Claus and Pegasus? This week, we investigate an old philosophical issue. | 8 4 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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9 |
Philosophy for Representationalists | Over four decades, the Gavin David Young Lectures in Philosophy at the University of Adelaide have become a very significant series with many distinguished contributors from across the globe.. This year, the speaker was Frank Jackson, Professor of Philosophy at ANU. His subject was ‘Philosophy for Representationalists’: perceptual experiences represent the way things are. For example, visual perceptual experiences typically represent how things are in front of us. We can pass this information on in many ways, but we humans most often pass it on using words and sentences. What do these commonplaces about experiences and language tell us about the contents of our experiences and the contents of our words and sentences? | 1 4 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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10 |
Extending the 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. We hear from two proponents of the extended mind thesis from one of its critics, Robert Rupert, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. | 24 3 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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11 |
Thomas Pogge and global fairness | In a world in which many humans do not have all their human rights fulfilled, who has what obligations to help bring a better world about? This is a question that, for many years, has exercised the mind of Thomas Pogge, Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale and Professorial Fellow at the Australian National University. This week, we talk to him about it by way of a chat about two influences on his thought: the great eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and one of his teachers, John Rawls, the distinguished American moral philosopher who died in 2002. | 17 3 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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12 |
The Myth of Plato and Plato the Myth-maker | There’s been a change in the interpretation of Plato. For centuries, he was admired for his inspiration and vision, rather than for his theories and argumentation. Then the pendulum swung hard in the other direction. | 10 3 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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13 |
Kafka and Philosophy | Franz Kafka—author of The Trial, in which a man is unjustly accused and tried, and Metamorphosis, in which a man becomes a giant insect—is perhaps the modernist author most often discussed by philosophers. What has been so alluring about Kafka that philosophers have a compulsion to return to his writings? This week we investigate with the help of Henry Sussman, Visiting Professor in German Language and Literature at Yale University and one of the world’s great Kafka scholars. | 3 3 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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14 |
Group agents | On this Philosopher’s Zone we’re looking at agents. Not secret agents but rather public agents: an agent is just somebody who does something for a purpose and an agent is distinguished from a patient. The agent is the person who does things and the patient is the person to whom things are done. But do we have to be talking about individual persons here or can groups of people be agents in the way that individuals can? This week, we investigate. | 25 2 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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15 |
Beating and nothingness: Philosophy and the Martial Arts | There are many areas of human endeavour with which philosophy can be connected: the law, religion, science, mathematics -- but martial arts? This week we talk to Damon Young, Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, who is both a philosopher and a grappler, about what martial arts have to tell us of thinking and being. | 18 2 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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16 |
Michael Dummett: a philosopher's philosopher | Michael Dummett, one of the greatest English philosophers of the twentieth century, died late in December at the age of 86. | 11 2 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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17 |
Philosophy and the Environment | In a world of environmental crisis, what can philosophy tell us? Who is qualified to pronounce on the subject and how do the institutions of science (peer-reviewed journals the like) help? How do we model the situation in which we find ourselves and how do we decide which species to save, the most endangered or the easiest to save? | 4 2 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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18 |
The inconsistency of Hannah Arendt | Hannah Arendt’s life describes a tragically typical twentieth century trajectory. Born in Germany and, fleeing the Nazis, she ended up in the United States, where she died in 1975. As a philosopher – a title she disclaimed – she insisted on the importance of thinking in the world and not trying to be above it and she thought that understanding the richness and variety of the world was more important than attaining a consistent view of it. This week, we look at a very worldly thinker. | 28 1 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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19 |
The ethics of Kevin Rudd's heart | This program was first broadcast on 6 August 2011. | 20 1 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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20 |
The evil of the Daleks | This program was first broadcast on 18 June 2011. | 13 1 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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21 |
Meeting Martha Nussbaum | This program was first broadcast on 20 August 2011. | 6 1 12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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22 |
How do octopuses think? | This program was first broadcast on 9 April 2011. | 30 12 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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23 |
An atheist's God: the paradox of Spinoza | THIS PROGRAM WAS FIRST BROADCAST ON 4 June 2011. | 23 12 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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24 |
On authenticity - Beate Roessler | Strangers, people from other countries immigrating to our territory, endangering 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. | 16 12 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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25 |
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 the literal trials and tribulations of Bradley Manning. | 9 12 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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26 |
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. | 2 12 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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27 |
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. | 25 11 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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28 |
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. | 18 11 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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29 |
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. | 11 11 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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30 |
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. | 4 11 11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 30 Episodes |
Customer Reviews
What a great show
Excellent - A show that explores philosophy fully: with an eye for seeing how it is active in the world today. Fans of 'In Our Time' will love this. Look at other ABC stuff too!
Fantastic Podcast!
This is the best philosophy podcast I've come across and one of my favourites regardless of genre. Our host interviews a different thinker each week and does so with great skill and respect. Arguments are presented plainly, clearly, without over-simplification nor with too much jargon. All in all great work; I look forward to this each week. I don't know if this is read by the producers of the show, but if it is: thank you.
Philosopher's Zone
I love this podcast - huge thanks to all involved in producing it. They ask good questions of very interesting people, alternating between looking at the cutting edge of modern ethical questions and the history of philosophy. It's pitched well so that they don't assume much prior knowledge but don't over-simplify. Not always the safest thing to listen to while cycling to work as it can take a little more attention than wise in heavy traffic but would recommend to anyone interested in philosophy and ethics! For one thing it's given me a much greater appreciation of what academics actually do - hearing someone describe just how many versions they had to read in how many languages to get a good interpretation of an ancient chinese text brought home how reliant we can be on the hard work of such folks, where we easily take for granted the distilled version we read that took years of effort. Don't let any academics know I said that, though - they still have an easy life relative to real work!
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- Category: Philosophy
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