Episode 148, 'Divine Commands' with Paul Tayl...

The meaning of life is, as Albert Camus put it, the most urgent question in philosophy – the one on which everything else depends. Yet, when Western philosophy looks to answer this question, it paces up and down the same old libraries – the same shelves filled with the same assum ...  Show more

The meaning of life is, as Albert Camus put it, the most urgent question in philosophy – the one on which everything else depends. Yet, when Western philosophy looks to answer this question, it paces up and down the same old libraries – the same shelves filled with the same assum ...  Show more

Immanuel Kant is a profoundly influential figure in modern philosophy, and was one of the earliest proponents for universal democracy and international cooperation. He also thought that women have no place in civil society, that it was okay to kill illegitimate children, and that ...  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

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant's work of ethics, The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Specifically it examines his discussion of what he calls "heteronomy" in moral theories other than his own. He examines empirical princ ...  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 ...