Podcast Episodes
You can also browse the descriptions (oldest episodes, middle, most recent) or see them organized by topic.
Ep. 0: Introduction to the Podcast: What is the format, and why are we doing this? (very short)
Ep. 1: Plato’s Apology. Part 2.
Ep. 2: Descartes’s Meditations
Ep. 4: Camus: “The Myth of Sisyphus” and “An Absurd Reasoning”
Ep. 5: Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics
Ep. 7: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Part 1
Ep. 8: More Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Carnap’s “The Rejection of Metaphysics”
Ep. 10: Kant’s Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
Ep. 11: Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals
Ep. 13: Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy
Ep. 14: Machiavelli’s The Prince and Discourse on Livy.
Ep. 15: Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History.
Ep. 16: Arthur Danto’s The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art
Ep. 17: Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Ep. 18: Plato’s Theaetetus and Meno
Ep. 19: Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Ep. 20: William James’s Pragmatism plus C.S. Peirce
Ep. 21: Essays on mind by Alan Turing, Gilbert Ryle, John Searle, Thomas Nagel, Dan Dennett
Ep. 22: William James’s “The Will to Believe” and more Pragmatism
Ep. 23: Rousseau’s Discourse in Inequality
Ep. 26: Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents
Ep. 27: 2nd century Buddhist Nagarjuna’s Reasoning and Emptiness
Ep. 28: Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking
Ep. 29: Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death
Ep. 30: Schopenhauer’s On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason
Ep. 31: Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations
Ep. 32: Heidegger’s Being and Time
Ep. 34: Frege’s “Sense and Reference,” “Concept and Object,” and “The Thought”
Ep. 35: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Ep. 36: More Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Ep. 37: Locke’s Second Treatise on Government
Ep. 38: Bertrand Russell’s Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
Ep. 39: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s On Religion; Speeches to its Cultured Despisers
Ep. 41: Patricia Churchland’s Braintrust (with her as a guest), plus Hume
Ep. 42: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice
Ep. 43: J.L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God
Ep. 44: Selections on atheism by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Dan Dennett.
Ep. 45: Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, Book III and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments
Ep. 47: Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego
Ep. 48: Merleau-Ponty’s World of Perception and “The Primacy of Perception”
Ep. 49: Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish
Ep. 50: Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Ep. 53: Owen Flanagan’s The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (with Flanagan as guest)
Ep. 54: More Owen Flanagan’s The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized
Ep. 55: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations
Ep. 56: More Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations
Ep. 57: Henri Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
Ep. 59: More Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue
Ep. 61: Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”
Ep. 63: Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men
Ep. 66: W.V.O Quine’s “On What There Is” and “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”
Ep. 67: Rudolph Carnap’s The Logical Structure of the World
Ep. 68: David Chalmers’s Constructing the World, with him as a guest
Ep 70: Karl Marx’s The German Ideology
Ep 71: Martin Buber’s I and Thou
Ep. 73: Why Do Philosophy? The podcasters expound their own views and histories
Ep. 76: Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?
Ep. 77: George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty.
Next up will be Ayn Rand (these readings) and Heraclitus (this book). The tentative next topics after that are philosophy of science (some Popper, Kuhn, and something else), later Heidegger (this), John Rawls, and Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism.”
Bonus Content:
Highlight Reel: 7 min of clips through episode 45, released 11/8/12
Episode 69 Supplemental Audiobook: Plato’s Gorgias
For discussion and supplementary material on the episodes, look first at the trackbacks at the bottom of the episode post to see which other posts refer to it, or do a keyword search on the author’s name or other term, or you can use the Archives links on the right side of the page (scroll down) to see posts put up immediately following the episode’s release date.
!!!Important Post Alert!!!
For some unknown reason, I think of you guys as corresponding to Seinfeld characters. Roughly, my mind correlates Mark = Jerry, Wes = George, Seth = Elaine, Dylan = Kramer. Sometimes I wish that Jerry had a little more Kramer but Kramer is Kramer and not Elaine. As for George, he mixes two parts Jerry with a pinch of Elaine and a sprinkling of Kramer. Elaine is amusing despite being a minor character from time to time.
!!!End Important Post!!!
Ha!
Some suggestions: John Balguy, Ralph Cudworth******, Samuel Clarke, Richard Price (all these 4 wrote important works on morality, which I can refer you to, but Cudworth and Clarke had important things to say about metaphysics, etc.).
Also: Suarez, Malebranche, Arnauld, Louis de La Forge, Arnold Geulincx, Pufendorf.
Locke’s ‘Essay’… Leibniz’s ‘New Essays’…etc.
Thanks for the suggestions. However, tell me a bit about what major themes we’re missing by not covering these folks. The only ones I’m really familiar with here are the moral rationalists you mention, which I tried to cover enough for our purposes in the Hume on moral sense episode. Likewise I tried to get some juice out of Locke in covering Hume on epistemology, though we have a perpetually planned ep on personal identity that would pull out another chunk of Locke’s essay. More Leibniz is definitely a possibility, and if we ever do a series on the history of logic we’d hit Arnauld, but the rest of those guys aren’t on our radar; give me some more motivation to consider one or two of them seriously!
Any chance for an episode on the Marquis de Sade? Interested to hear a discussion about an amoralist and how his ideas represented the most extreme rejection of society, morality and religion. The historical context is intruguing, as Enlightenment ideals and the idolization of reason by the likes of Rousseau were facing turbulent chaos amidst the French Reolution. In a way, de Sade’s chaotic ideas were a clever satire of Rousseau and the historical context itself seems to manifest these ideas.
Ok, some more ideas:
Anscombe’s – Intention
Kripke’s – Naming and Necessity
Kant’s Critique of Judgement
Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
A unitary episode of German (the metaphysics of Hegel, Fichte and Schelling) and British (McTaggart [his Unreality of Time in particular], Bradley [excerpts of his Appearance and Reality]) Idealism
And an episode dedicated to the pre-Socratics and/or the various Greek philosophers (Parmenides, Heraclitus, the Pythagoreans, Diogenes, Epicurus, Sextus etc.) maybe…