The Philosopher's Zone - Program Podcast

As refugees from the former colonies make their way to Europe, notions of “European life” and “European values” are facing unprecedented challenges. As postcolonial subjects, how should these migrants be received and understood?

The West has a history of colonisation and empire-building. How has this shaped the discipline of philosophy? This week – first in a five-part series – we look at racism and the unfortunate legacy of Immanuel Kant, who believed the non-white races were incapable of philosophical reflection.

When individuals and communities today still suffer the consequences of past wrongs — slavery, dispossession, invasion, the theft of land and resources — what exactly is owed to them, and who should pay?

How well does humanism's account of itself hold up in philosophical terms?

The climate debate isn't just about science; it's also about gender and power. Ecofeminism takes this seriously - but does it also perpetuate negative stereotypes about women's supposedly "natural" connection to the earth and to nurturing?

The prospect of human genetic enhancement raises moral concerns. Will a genetically enhanced human in 2060 will be rendered “obsolete” by technological advances that come along in 2070? What happens when we blur the distinction between person and product?

A professional academic philosopher, the American neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty was also a provocative critic of his own discipline. He had little time for what he saw as the pretensions of analytic philosophers and their ambitions to transcendence. But his work is tangled up in its own ambitions and fascinating contradictions.

Plato and Aristotle were acute observers and analysts of the world around them, but they never had to deal with climate change. Trust, virtue and reason seem to be in short supply today. Can the ancients show us how to recover these essential aspects of social harmony?

Sigmund Freud had mixed feelings about philosophy – he thought that philosophers and people experiencing psychosis had a lot in common. So how has contemporary philosophy come to owe such a huge debt to the father of psychoanalysis?

Our reactions to suicide often depend on the era in which it takes place: when practised by ancient philosophers, it has a noble lustre. When practised by modern celebrities, it’s an emblem of the emptiness of fame and fortune. And now, the advent of voluntary euthanasia is changing our perceptions once again.

Politics has never been a gentle pursuit - but these days the gloves are well and truly off. How did we get here? What are the implications for political philosophy, and for politics in general? As for where we might be headed, there are fascinating – if rather terrifying – clues in the work of French thinker René Girard.

If you’re caring for a person with dementia, what do you do if they demand to see their spouse, who in fact died long ago? If you resort to telling the person that their spouse has just gone to the shops and will be back soon, you’re not alone. “Therapeutic deception” is a time-saver for carers, and it can also be humane, a means of alleviating distress. But like all lying, it’s morally problematic.

In an era of university funding cuts, economic rationalism and the creeping perception that human progress comes to us principally via science and technology, who needs the Humanities?

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is perhaps the most famous Danish depressive, but Soren Kierkegaard gives him a run for his money. He wrote uncompromisingly difficult philosophical works, so it’s not surprising that he’s an outsize but rather remote figure in the popular cultural imagination. This week’s guest wants to change all that – she’s written a biography of Kierkegaard that brings the man and the work into sharp, sympathetic focus.

Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller was a Holocaust survivor, a dissident under Hungary’s communist regime, and one of the great modern political thinkers. She was also a wonderfully engaging speaker, and this week we hear her in conversation from 2013, as well as the reflections of a close friend and colleague.

Early 20th century French thinker Henri Bergson was a celebrity. Today he’s a more obscure figure, but we're asking if his ideas should be restored to the intellectual map of the 20th century. Also: a philosopher-geologist on rocks, science and climate change.

Buddhist teaching is radically egalitarian, and yet the need for a Buddhist feminism is pressing. Is gender irrelevant to Buddhist teaching? And for women who have been denied agency or a sense of identity, how reasonable is the doctrine of non-self?

In a century that produced a dizzying array of philosophers and philosophical approaches, few philosophers were as distinctive, and stood out quite so conspicuously, as Iris Murdoch (1919-1999).

What constitutes a "philosophical" conversation? You might reasonably expect such a conversation to be conceptual, exploring abstract notions of self, time, being, ethics and so on. For indigenous Australian philosophers, the conversation gets real very fast.

What happens when we take philosophy into the field? This week we’re talking archaeology, with focus on feminism, tensions between indigenous and Western scientific knowledge, and the principles of reconciliation.