Episode 89, Dostoevsky's Notes from Undergrou...

Hey, it's Jack here – I'm currently in the snowy hills of Switzerland, recording this from the back of my campervan, so forgive the audio quality. (It won't be like this beyond the introduction.) I've been busy producing new content for YouTube, with some exciting conversations c ...  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

Today we talk about the philosophical themes of one of Dostoevsky's most famous books: Notes From Underground. We talk about contemplative inertia, the "stone wall" of rationality, utopian socialism, the tension between love and freedom in the modern world, self-loathing as a def ...  Show more

In this extended extract from their series 'Conversations in Philosophy', part of the LRB's Close Readings podcast, Jonathan Rée and James Wood look at one of Friedrich Nietzsche's early essays, 'Schopenhauer as Educator'. For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s genius lay not in his ideas ...  Show more

Feelings of burnout and boredom have become prevalent in modern life. To understand the roots of and solutions to these issues, we can turn to both ancient philosophers and contemporary thinkers. Among the latter is Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose thought-provo ...

The Thirty Tyrants were a ruthless group that crushed anyone who opposed them. Socrates had personal ties to some of its leaders but refused to take part in their brutal actions. Yet, his silence in the face of their regime would later come back to haunt him when he was put on ...