Episode 54: Pooping on Ecstasy (Pain, Pleasur...

Tamler and David discuss the action-packed books 9 & 10 of The Odyssey, in which Odysseus makes some questionable choices, the crew encounters cannibal giants, and Circe casts her porcine spells. 

Since well before the big bang, people have been bitching about Tamler's chosen field. We talk about Bernard Williams' (qualified) defense of analytic philosophy in his essay "On Hating and Despising Philosophy." We also dig into Lily Hu's review of a recent book by Christoph Sch ...  Show more

Professor David Benatar is a South African philosopher, academic and author, and head of the philosophy department at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He is best known for his defence of antinatalism, the view that it is immoral to have children (though more specif ...

Most of us agree that pain is part of life, that none of us can escape it, and that death comes for all of us in the end. And yet many of us feel that life is worth it; that the pleasure of life outweighs the suffering. Anti-natalist philosophy takes a different view. The anti-na ...  Show more

David Benatar is the world’s leading ‘antinatalist’ philosopher. His controversial book ‘Better Never To Have Been’ argues that the suffering of existence always outweighs any potential good and that it is morally wrong to bring new human beings into the world. A small but gro ...

Sam Harris speaks with David Benatar about his philosophy of "anti-natalism." They discuss the asymmetry between the good and bad things in life, the ethics of existential risk, the moral landscape, the limits and paradoxes of introspection, the "experience machine" ...