11: Master & Slave Morality

"You, whoever you are, reading me - take your own chance. Just as, at the moment of writing, I gamble with you." The much-awaited conclusion to season six is here! The year is 1944, and we follow Georges Bataille through the months of February to August as he recounts the end of ...  Show more

The two-part conclusion of season six begins. We're delving into the work of Georges Bataille, with a focus on his book, "On Nietzsche". Bataille is one of the most interesting intellectual nodes of 20th century philosophy. For a long time, his work was obscure in the English-spe ...  Show more

On The Basis of Morality (1840), Part III: "The Founding of Ethics," Ch. 5: "Statement and Proof of the Only True Moral Incentive." Everything up to this point in the book has been negative: Morality can't be founded on pure reason as Kant thinks, or on the idea of the good life ...  Show more

In a world of conflicting values, polarized opinions, and ever-shifting cultural norms, it’s no wonder morality feels... broken. In this episode of Rethink, Anderson, Sayenne, and Jose explore how our traditional moral frameworks are being challenged—from the decline of religious ...  Show more

In this episode, we discuss Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark book After Virtue. MacIntyre, an ex-Marxist and committed anti-liberal, offers a defense of the Aristotelian tradition and its search for the truly common good against the dominant tendency of liberal societies ...

We talk a bit more about David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), and add some parts of A Treatise of Human Nature (1739): sec. 3 "Of the Influencing Motives of the Will" within the third part of Book II, "Of the Passions," and the first two sections of ...  Show more