Podcasts
Briefs of philosophy podcast episodes: the arguments made, with timestamps, and the primary texts behind them.
Recent briefs 77
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Arnauld vs Malebranche on Ideas and Vision in God
Peter Adamson examines the dispute between Malebranche and Arnauld over whether ideas are representations seen in God or direct acts of the mind.
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MacIntyre's Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry
The host walks through Alasdair MacIntyre's argument that all moral reasoning, including claims of neutrality, comes from within a tradition.
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Occasionalism: Why Only God Truly Causes Anything
Stephen Nadler talks with Peter Adamson about occasionalism, the 17th century view that God alone is a true cause, and its roots in Cartesian metaphysics rather than the mind-body problem.
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Malebranche's Occasionalism: God as the Only True Cause
Peter Adamson explains Nicolas Malebranche's argument that God alone truly causes anything, with bodies and minds serving only as occasions for divine action.
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Salmieri on Free Speech, Rights, and Cancel Culture
Greg Salmieri, drawing on Ayn Rand's objectivism, argues that free speech is a narrow political right against force, not a right to a platform or to escape social consequences.
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Tarun Khaitan on Decolonizing the Indian Constitution
Tarun Khaitan examines and challenges the argument that India's and South Africa's post-colonial constitutions are illegitimate colonial artifacts.
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Chike Jeffers on Africana Philosophy
Chike Jeffers talks with David Edmunds and Nigel Warburton about what Africana philosophy is and how it includes African, African American and Afro-Caribbean thought.
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Hamlet as a Play About Nothing
The host explores Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster's reading of Hamlet as a study in paralysis, surveillance, and nihilism.
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Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet on Honor, Violence, and Love
The host of Philosophize This! examines how Romeo and Juliet critiques honor-based violence and stages competing ideas about love's rationality and meaning.
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Can AI Music Be Creative?
Barry Lam explores AI vocal emulation, AI composition, and AI improvisation with Robin James, Theodore Gracyk, and two guitarists to ask what counts as human creativity in music.
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Gig Work, Algorithms, and the Ethics of Pay
Host Barry Lam hears from Shipt shoppers Heidi and Willy Solis, data scientist Dan Calacci, organizer Drew Ambrogi, and philosopher Daniel Halliday on whether opaque pay algorithms treat gig workers unjustly.
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Can You Love an AI Chatbot? Replika and Theories of Love
Barry Lam talks with Ellie Anderson and David Peña-Guzmán about whether people who fall in love with Replika chatbots are experiencing real love or projection.
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Animal Personhood and the Zoopolis Model of Rights
Historian Gabriel Rosenberg, attorney Monica Miller, and philosopher Kristin Andrews trace animal rights from medieval trials to modern habeas corpus cases and a proposed zoopolis framework.
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Cannibalism, Resurrection, and Personal Identity
Christina Van Dyke and Barry Lam explore a real cannibalism performance and a classical theological puzzle about whether God can resurrect both a cannibal and his victims with their own bodies.
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Zombies and the Line Between Mind and Machine
Barry Lam and guests trace the zombie from Haitian vodou through Romero's films to David Chalmers's philosophical zombie, asking what consciousness has to do with moral status and AI.
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Gene-Edited Species and the Ethics of Wildness
Barry Lam talks with scientists and philosophers Evelyn Brister and Ron Sandler about whether releasing genetically engineered mosquitoes and chestnut trees into the wild is defensible conservation or a troubling new form of control over nature.
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Is Human Altruism Real, or Just Evolved Hypocrisy?
Barry Lam questions evolutionary psychologist Michael McCullough and philosopher Kieran Setiya about whether a kidney donated to a stranger can be explained by evolution at all.