Internet Radio Podcast Directory Radio Playlists

By Keyword

By Location

By Genre

By Popularity
Trumix.com : Podcast : Society and Culture : Blogs and Commentary

Philosopher's Zone

Network:
Language: English
Category: Society and Culture / Blogs and Commentary
Visit Website

Alan Saunders explores the big questions and arguments; he looks at the world of philosophy and at the world through philosophy.


RSS FeedView RSS | RSS FeedView in iTunes

Previous1 2 NEXT

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....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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 personality, hi...

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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?...

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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 relevan...

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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?...

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 29 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 22 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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?...

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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 deep. T...

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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 Phil...

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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 grind...

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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 tells ...

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


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....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


2009-06-20 - 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....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


2009-06-13 - A conversation with Isaiah Berlin

Last week, we commemorated the centenary of the birth of the greatest British philosopher and historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin. This week, we raid the ABC archives for a long interview in which Berlin talks about human freedom: are we free and, if we are not free, can we be moral? Are we responsible for what we do or can circumstances let us off the hook?...

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


2009-05-23 - Jekyll and Hyde and criminal responsibility

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published in 1886. It was hugely successful and has given us one of the archetypes of our time, but what does it have to tell us about our attitudes to guilt? Was Dr Jekyll a murderer or does the fact that the crimes were committed by his alter-ego, Edward Hyde, get him off the hook? This week on The Philosopher´s Zone, we examine the problem of guilt and responsibility....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 23 May 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


2009-05-16 - 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....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 16 May 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


2009-05-09 - 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....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 09 May 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


2009-05-02 - The philosophy of the quantum spook

Does physics offer us a fuzzy picture of a clear reality or a clear picture of a fuzzy reality? In 1947, Albert Einstein told Max Born -- a great physicist and the grandfather of Olivia Newton-John -- that he couldn´t accept quantum theory because it involved `spooky actions at a distance.´ But does having quantum theory without the spooks mean believing in time travel? Huw Price, philosopher and physicist, helps us boldly go....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 02 May 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


2009-04-25 - Philosophy and The Wealth of Nations - P.J. 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 P.J O´Rourke, the American political commentator, wit and author of a recent study of Smith....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


2009-04-18 - Ideals and dirty hands - C.A.J. Coady

What´s wrong with moralism in politics? Can you be moral and advocate morality while at the same time being aware of your own moral failings? Can you at the same time be an idealist and a realist? And what about dirty hands? Do the supreme emergencies of political life sometimes mean that you might have to do things that you would normally regard as immoral? Some hard questions about the realities of political life this week on The Philosopher´s Zone....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 18 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]


2009-04-11 - Getting down to reality: Raymond Geuss

Lenin divided people into two kinds: `who´ and `whom´. For him, the important question in politics was who does what to whom? But is this grimly realistic view of power neglected by philosophers with too much of an interest in justice, equality, rights and other ideals? This week, we look at realism and what it means for political philosophy....

MORE... | LISTEN | DOWNLOAD | MOBILE DEVICE

[ Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +1000 ]

Previous1 2 NEXT





O2 Arsenal Podcast
Sports
Listen to all the build-up ahead of Arsenal's next match with the O2 ARSENAL PODCAST!Dan Roebuck will bring you news, interviews and features before every Arsenal fixture - plus the chance to win great prizes in our exclusive competitions.

Happy House of Hentai
Arts
The weekly show for hentai news & reviews!

Ultima Thule Ambient Music Radio
Alternative
A weekly programme of ambient and atmospheric music from across the ages and around the world, broadcast on Australian public radio since 1989. Ultima Thule features a blend of ambient, trance, drone and chillout electronica, spacemusic, ancient, mediaeva

  Powered by PenguinRadio & PodcastDirectory.com  |  About Trumix  |  Terms of use  |  FAQs  |  Contact Us