Episode 57: Free Willie

David and Tamler return to the Southern Gothic well and talk about Flannery O'Connor's short story masterpiece "Good Country People." A nihilistic atheist philosophy PhD named Joy or Helga (depending on who you ask) lives with her mother and some tenants on a farm in rural Georgi ...  Show more

Are you a college student or about to be one? Do you have friends or family in college? This is the most important episode of your life. David and Tamler do something a little different this episode and tier rank a wide range of academic fields from engineering to art history, co ...  Show more

Does anyone have any real agency? What do McDonald’s and Oxford University have in common? And why did Angela give up on philosophy?

What is the relationship between free will and religion? Historically, theistic religions have been dogged by questions concerning the nature of human agency. Do we make the choices we have in life because we can freely choose or does God somehow map life for us? If we don’t have ...  Show more

Sam Harris speaks with Robert Sapolsky about the widespread belief in free will. They discuss the limits of intuition, the views of Dan Dennett, complexity and emergence, downward causation, abstraction, epigenetics, predictability, fatalism, Benjamin Libet, the primacy of luc ...

On The Vocation of Man (1799), Books I and II. What is reality? Fichte's armchair journey starts him considering nature and thus himself as determined, but then he backtracks to say that actually, experience doesn't tell us whether we're determined or free. In Book II, he argues ...  Show more