Philosopher's Zone

ABC

The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.

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34 episodes
weekly
Avg 37 min
English

Episodes 34

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Wednesday · 37 min
What is pleasure?
Is everything we do just for pleasure? For the Ancient Greek hedonists, and utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), pleasure is what motivates us. And for most of us, if we think of a good life, we're probably imagining one filled with things that bring us pleasure. Because of its role in motivation, pleasure is now a major topic in psychology, biology and neuroscience - but pleasure is a surprisingly ambiguous concept. Not all pleasures are good, and in fact some can make us worse off.
October 29 · 41 min
05 | Unsteady State | Politics for the future and the past
When your political system runs to a three-year electoral cycle, it's hard to avoid the kind of short-term thinking that aims to please today's voters, while paying little more than lip service to future generations. And while this has long been a concern for liberal democracies, today it's an existential issue, as the decisions we make now about climate change will affect the lives of citizens over decades and even centuries from now. Indigenous philosophies have long recognised the importance
October 21 · 43 min
04 | Unsteady State | Confucianism and crisis
With liberal democracy in crisis around the world, we're talking about Confucianism and how Confucian political theory addresses such problems as economic inequality and rampant individualism. This week's guest is interested in developing a reconstructed Confucianism that incorporates aspects of American pragmatist philosophy — in particular the work of John Dewey, who visited China in the 1920s and made a huge intellectual and cultural impact there. This episode is fourth in a five-part series
October 14 · 39 min
03 | Unsteady State | What the Right gets wrong about Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche is a difficult figure to pin down politically. He's popularly known as the favourite philosopher of the architects of the Holocaust, and of today's neo-Nazis and far-right ideologues who venerate strength, domination and the exercise of traditionally male-coded virtues. But then there's the other Nietzsche, the Nietzsche who was a fierce critic of German nationalism and antisemitism, and whose work has gone on to become central to feminism and queer theory. What can Nietzsche
October 7 · 34 min
02 | Unsteady State | Who owns Antarctica?
What can Antarctica teach us about statehood and sovereignty? The continent has no government, no citizens, no permanent human population. Its native inhabitants are mostly seals and penguins who, as far as we know, take little interest in politics. But according to this week's guest, Antarctica offers a remarkable political experiment, one that challenges some of our most basic assumptions about territory and political community. Since the Antarctic Treaty came into force in 1961, the usual
September 30 · 1 hr 10 min
01 | Unsteady State | Politics and the good life
What if your government decided what 'the good life' looks like, then rewarded you for living it and penalised you for straying? In a growing number of countries, that's already happening. Liberal democratic theory has long held that the good life is for each citizen to define for themselves, and that the state should stay out of it. But some governments are now rejecting that idea, defining the good life for their citizens and using a mix of incentives and penalties to bring people into line.
September 23 · 45 min
Technology and the lure of ancient Athens
One of the more utopian promises of technology has always been that it will free us from the necessity of work - but not having to work poses its own problems. What will we do instead? how will we make money? and what might a leisure-oriented society look like? Technophiles - from the early cybernetics enthusiasts to today's AI promoters - have looked to ancient Athens as an example of a society where citizens were free to engage in culture, reflection and political participation. But was ancien
September 16 · 38 min
Sympathy, himpathy and feminism
Australian feminist philosopher Kate Manne memorably coined the term "himpathy" to describe what happens when a man commits a crime against a woman and finds himself the object of disproportionate sympathy. But as useful as this description is, the psychological mechanism behind himpathy remains unexplored in Manne's account. To remedy this, we're turning this week to Catharine Macaulay, a fascinating late 18th century English philosopher whose work on sympathy provides some valuable psychologic
September 9 · 30 min
Signal, noise and interpersonal conflict
If someone's behaving badly, it can be hard to know how much of their behaviour stems from a deep character flaw, and how much of it is incidental - the stuff we might charitably filter out as unreflective of their true self. And the same goes for achievement: how much credit for a Nobel prize should go to the person themselves, and how much to their fortunate circumstances, or to the people who helped them? This week we're asking if philosophy can help us discern the signal from the noise. Gue
September 2 · 38 min
Feminism, generosity and cross-cultural support
Western feminists often express support for women in Muslim majority countries, but sometimes that support is couched in the language of pity, as though Muslim women were held captive by their religion and culture, and in need of 'rescue'. This week, a conversation about how to offer cross-cultural support without paternalism, and how the insight of Simone de Beauvoir can illuminate the issue. Guest: Sameema Zahra, psychotherapist and Lecturer in Philosophy, Australian Catholic University Brisb
August 26 · 36 min
Getting angry at the system
If I pick up a tree branch and smash your window with it, you're going to be angry, and your anger will rightly be directed at me. But if a tree branch smashes your windscreen during a cyclone whose intensity has been caused by global warming, you're still going to be angry — but who or what exactly should you be angry with? This week, a conversation about responsibility for systemic injustice. Guest: Stephanie Collins, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Monash University Melbourne Producer: D
August 19 · 45 min
Who's afraid of Cultural Marxism?
Cultural Marxism is many things to many people — at one end of the political spectrum, it's the hidden force behind political correctness, identity politics and 'wokeness', while at the other end it's a shopworn conspiracy theory that explains nothing much at all. So what is Cultural Marxism? Did a group of Marxist intellectuals in the mid-20th century really set out to reshape Western culture? And if they did, how convincingly does their story stack up as a tale of secret plots and calculated i
August 12 · 42 min
Habermas and the retreat of reason
The great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who died in March, wrote in his later works about what he called Unheimlichkeit — roughly translated as "the unease of the times" — to describe the global retreat of liberal democracy, the fraying of the rules-based international order, and the increasing polarisation and hostility of public discourse. And yet, to the end he defended Enlightenment reason and the utility of rational debate. In a world that seems to be losing its democratic bearings, h
August 5 · 32 min
Visual art as philosophy
When it comes to the ideal philosophical medium, most of us would identify the written word - or maybe the spoken word, if we're fans of Socratic dialogue - and this is because for centuries, philosophy has been a linguistic practice. But this week we're arguing that visual art can be philosophy, and looking at how visual art can represent concepts in ways that haven't traditionally been recognised by Western epistemic traditions. Guest: Taylor-Jai McAlister, clinical psychologist and postdocto
July 30 · 32 min
How smart are machines, anyway?
Ever since AI was founded in the 1950s, people have talked and written about 'intelligence' as though we all broadly agree on what that word means. But there's considerable debate on that score, and among the debaters are philosophers - like this week's guest - who question the degree to which machines can be said to be intelligent at all, and think that claims of intelligence can all too easily deflect attention from the real ethical issues around AI. Guest: Tim Crane, Professor of Philosophy
July 23 · 36 min
Hegel: The philosopher with the (one) big idea
GWF Hegel (1770-1831) wanted to construct nothing less than a complete explanation of reality - nature, consciousness, art, history, politics, the lot - based on a single self-explanatory idea. Whether or not he succeeded is an interesting question (spoiler: he didn't), but more interesting is the question of why philosophy has become so much less ambitious since then, and what we can learn from Hegel today.
July 16 · 28 min
Eco-grief and environmental loss
Philosophers have traditionally thought of grief as something that attaches to immediate loss - the death of a loved one, something terrible that's happened to us personally. But as the environmental crisis continues to wreak havoc on human and non-human lives, the philosophy of emotions needs a concept that captures a response to loss that perhaps hasn't happened yet, or loss that affects other people we may never meet: eco-grief.
July 9 · 32 min
Colonising space
There's something about space that's always captured the human imagination, but what happens when space begins to capture the imagination of billionaire tech entrepreneurs? In the past, we've visited space for scientific purposes, but now the grand vision is colonisation, permanent human settlement on the Moon, Mars and even further afield, with such ventures along the way as asteroid mining, which promises to deliver untold riches. The technical challenges are immense - as are the ethical ones.
July 2 · 32 min
Can pregnancy be a job? the ethics of commercial surrogacy
Commercial surrogacy - the practice of paying someone to gestate your child and then hand it over when it's born - is banned in Australia, but it has its supporters. Defenders of commercial surrogacy argue that it should be legal for someone to receive payment for the labour of carrying a child, on the grounds that surrogacy constitutes a legitimate form of work. But are there some things that just shouldn't be for sale? This week we're testing the arguments.
June 24 · 35 min
Belief, emotion and trust
The traditional philosophical view of belief is that it's a rational cognitive affair, evidence based and directed toward truth. According to this account, things like delusion and religious belief are "edge cases", exceptions that prove the rule. But this week we're considering not only that belief may be closely tied to emotion, but that it may actually be a form of emotion itself.

Showing 1–20 of 34 episodes