Ep. 324: Plato's "Cratylus" on Language (Part...

On. G.W.F. Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), sec. 438-463. What constitutes society? We're beginning a multi-episode arc here on the "Spirit" chapter of the book, so we learn what Spirit actually is and how it relates to individuals. We also talk about the two layers of ...  Show more

John has released at least fifteen albums, more than half of these under the name King Missile, but even this name covers three different bands, since John until recently didn't play any instruments, so his music is always collaborative with one or more music writers. Apart from ...  Show more

This week we talk about the prosperity of athens and how it led to the rise and ideas of a group of philosopher teachers called the Sophists, we tied up some loose ends and helped put all that we've learned in the last two episodes into context with a graph of the presocratics, a ...  Show more

In this week's episode, we learn about Plato's "Symposium", which you might think of as philosophy's version of fan fiction. We also learn about Plato's "Theory of Forms" and ask ourselves what makes a tree, well, a tree. This leads to discussion of Plato's famous "Allegory of th ...  Show more

An episode interesting from every point of view, we train our eyes on Jorge Luis Borges' "The Aleph." The first segment wins the kudos of the learned, the academician, the Hellenist, as we talk about the favorite things we saw this year. The second segment — baroque? decadent? ...

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Harris speaks to Kieran Setiya about the relevance of philosophy to living a good life. They discuss the existence of objective moral truths, being happy vs living well, our response to grief, the difference between "telic" and "atelic" acti ...