Philosophy Everyday

Tara Isabella Burton is a novelist, theologian, and former religion correspondent for Vox. She holds a doctorate in theology from Oxford and is the author of the nonfiction books Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made, as well as three novels, most recently Here in Avalon. She is a lecturer and visiting research fellow at the Catholic University of America, where she co-dir...

Liv Boeree is a science communicator, former professional poker player and host of the Win-Win podcast. She studied astrophysics at the University of Manchester before winning titles on both the European Poker Tour and the World Series of Poker. In recent years she has focused on game theory, AI risk and Moloch, the trap behind races to the bottom, from the Cold War nuclear arms race to today'...

Robin Waterfield is a classicist, author, and one of the most prolific translators of ancient Greek philosophy and history into modern English, with more than thirty-five volumes of translations to his name. His work includes Plato’s Republic and Symposium, Herodotus, Marcus Aurelius, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Epictetus, Xenophon, Euripides, and other major Greek and Roman auth...

Angie Hobbs is Professor Emerita of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, where she held the world's first chair of that title. She works on ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Plato, and on how it bears on contemporary questions. Alongside her academic work she has taught the Socratic method in schools and to the UK civil service, and appears regularly on r...

Simon Critchley is a British philosopher, author, and the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. One of the most distinctive voices in contemporary philosophy and continental philosophy, his work spans ethics, political philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, religion, tragedy, death, football (soccer), and the role of philosophy in everyday life. He...

Peter Adamson is Professor of Philosophy at LMU Munich and the host of the widely respected podcast History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. He is one of the leading scholars working on the history of philosophy across the Islamic world, late antiquity, medieval philosophy, Greek philosophy, Arabic philosophy, and the broader global history of ideas. In this episode, we discuss Ibn Sina’s Flying Ma...

Michael Levin is a developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University whose work sits at the intersection of biology, bioelectricity, artificial life, regenerative medicine, synthetic biology, computer science, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. He is known for his research on how cells communicate, make decisions, build bodies, repair tissues, and form collective intelligence throu...

David Pinsof is an evolutionary psychologist, writer, and co-creator of Cards Against Humanity. He is the author of the substack "Everything Is Bullsh*t", where he examines self-deception, social status, morality, humor, and the hidden motives behind human behavior through the lens of evolutionary psychology. In this conversation, we discuss how self-deception stabilizes status games, why people p...

William B. Irvine is an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus at Wright State University, best known for his work on Stoicism and practical philosophy. His books include A Guide to the Good Life, which helped popularize modern Stoicism, and his most recent work, How to Think More and Better: Being Reasonable in an Unreasonable World (2024), where he explores evidence-based reasoning, cogniti...

Rebecca Goldstein is a philosopher/novelist who brings serious philosophical ideas to the world of popular discussion. A trained analytic philosopher, with an interest in philosophers such as Spinoza, Plato, and Aristotle; her writing takes up many of the most ancient of questions about human existence from a contemporary perspective. She recently developed the concept of "the mattering instinct"...

Dr. Niayesh Afshordi is a theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Waterloo, known for his work on cosmology, quantum gravity, and the fundamental nature of the universe. His research explores some of the deepest questions in physics, including the origin of the Big Bang, the nature of time, and the limits of our current theories. He is also the co-author of The Battle of the Big B...

Robert Pogue Harrison is a Professor of Italian and French Literature at Stanford University and a leading scholar in Philosophy, Literature, Intellectual History. He has written many important books on topics such as Death and Youth, which include: The Dominion of the Dead; Juvenescence. Additionally, he hosts the popular podcast "Entitled Opinions" in which he discusses big picture issues of Hum...

What do you believe to be true? Are you absolutely certain? Can you really know? Does reason exist for its own sake, or is every thought simply an illusion created by your brain? This week, I look at Descartes' revolutionary experiment of doubting everything - everything about the world, how we sense things, even our own reasoning - and attempting to build knowledge back up again. He bases his con...

I recently talked with Dr. Gordon Pennycook who is a cognitive psychologist and has researched, among other things, why people accept false information, why some statements sound profound but have no real meaning and if using Artificial Intelligence (AI) could help decrease conspiracy thinking. Dr. Pennycook is one of the top researchers studying misinformation, cognitive reflection and what he te...

Steven C. Hayes is a prominent American clinical psychologist and researcher known for his foundational work in behavioral science and psychotherapy with a focus on human language, cognition, and alleviating suffering. He developed Relational Frame Theory (RFT), which explains human higher cognition, and originated Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), an evidence-based psychotherapy. We explor...

The idea that love is a feeling rather than an appetite for something may be part of the marketing surrounding Valentine's Day; in other words, love is viewed as satisfaction, completion, or a secure sense of emotions. However, Plato has an entirely different view. In this episode, I take a look at Plato's "Symposium," which is arguably one of the most upsetting, and authentic de...

John Vervaeke is a cognitive scientist and philosopher best known for his work on the modern meaning crisis, wisdom, and the nature of human understanding. He is a professor at the University of Toronto and the creator of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, a widely influential lecture series exploring why modern life feels increasingly disconnected, fragmented, and nihilistic. In this episode, we...

John Cottingham is one of the world’s leading scholars of René Descartes and early modern philosophy. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading and the author of several influential books on Descartes, ethics, and philosophy of religion. Cottingham is also widely known for his work on the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Descartes, where he served as editor and translato...

Nothing can be trusted to be real, or at least, that’s the starting point. In this episode, I break down René Descartes’ method of radical doubt by walking through the First and Second Meditations, step by step. What happens if you treat everything that can be doubted as false? That includes; your senses, your body, the external world, and even mathematics. Source of Discussion: Meditations on Fir...

Dr. Avi Loeb is a prominent theoretical physicist specializing in astrophysics and cosmology. He serves as the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, where he previously chaired the Astronomy Department and founded the Black Hole Initiative. He has authored over 800 papers and popular books like Extraterrestrial on potential signs of alien technology. Follow the podcast for...

As we enter 2026, I wanted to take a step back and reflect on some of the books I read this year, and what they made me rethink about life, meaning, power, consciousness, and society. Check out the chapter names to see books discussed in this video. Let me know in the comments what you’re planning to read in 2026, and whether you have read any of these before.

Was education ever meant to make you employable or fix your career? In the final book of Politics, Aristotle argues that this assumption misunderstands education from the beginning. According to Aristotle, education primarily exists for the sake of leisure, here understood as freedom from necessity and the condition for contemplation. This understanding proposes that a life organized entirely arou...

Did Aristotle sketch the foundations of something like Universal Basic Income in ancient times? In Book VII of Politics , he argues that no citizen should live in a state of constant labor and necessity, because leisure is the precondition for virtue, philosophy, and judgment. In this episode, I walk through his surprising claims about basic sustenance, land distribution, civic roles, military pow...

Aristotle never treated philosophy as a luxury or something that you do when you are bored. In Book Seven of Politics, he forces a difficult question: can the philosophical life become a retreat from real action? And if so, what does that say about the lives we choose? What is worth pursuing at the end of the day? And what is ultimately meaning of life? In this episode, I break down Aristotle’s ar...

In this episode, I walk through Book 6 of Aristotle’s Politics, a section where he becomes unusually practical. Here he stops talking about ideal systems and starts asking a simpler question: what actually keeps a community functioning? Why do some forms of shared rule remain stable while others constantly shift? Aristotle looks at freedom, equality, participation, and the habits of everyday life....