Philosophy Talk

Worship is the feeling or expression of reverence and adoration for something.  The attitude of worship towards God or gods or ancestors is a universal of human culture.  But why do we worship?  Do objects of worship need to fulfill certain criteria?  Does worship play a positive or negative role in human culture?  Is it clear that a perfect, omnipotent and omniscient God truly wants to be worship...

Our brains evolved on the African savannah, but are now expected to deal with complex statistical information and other intricate concepts every day.  The result: beliefs gone wild.  Ken and John reveal the traps that the mismatch between our brains and the world we live in pose for ordinary mortals with their guest, The Undercover Philosopher, Michael Philips.  This program was recorded live at t...

There are two ways to have your desires fulfilled: you can either get what you want (if you’re lucky enough) or change your desires. If we can fit our desires to what we have, we’re likely to be a lot happier. So why do we desire things that are out of reach? Why do we have desires that make us unhappy? And what can we do about it? John and Ken explore the relationship between desire and happiness...

“We’re just never going to catch up,” writes David Weinberger in Everything Is Miscellaneous.  That is, we’re never going to catch up with the flood of information that is thrown at us by modern technology, especially the internet.  We can never get all of our email filed, our digital pictures labeled, our calendars updated, our computers organized.  Is the problem too much information, or out-of-...

Money makes the world go around.  But what sort of thing is money?  Bits of paper and metal?  An elaborate set of IOUs to be redeemed with more IOUs?  An abstract accounting tool?  If money is real, how can billions disappear on the stock market?  And where does it go?  Ken and John follow the money – its nature, its utility, and whether it is the root of all evil – with Stanford Economist Alex Go...

Today there is an entire generation of people who have never paid for music.  From Napster to YouTube, some of our most innovative and inventive young people have been the targets of lawsuits by entertainment industry lawyers for violating copyright laws.  What are the ideas behind copyright protection?  What is the philosophical and practical basis of copyright?  Can rethinking the issues suggest...

We seem to be able to decide our behavior for ourselves – what we do is up to us.  But if everything that we do can be explained by physics, does this leave room for freedom?  Are all of our actions pre-determined?  Are we slaves to fate?  Is freedom compatible with determinism, or does science teach us that we’re nothing but complex machines, following out a complicated program that a good enough...

Many people identify strongly with the ethnic or racial group to which they belong – as Jews, or African-Americans, or Latinos.  But to which groups does a person truly belong?  President Obama has a white mother from Kansas and an African father from Kenya.  Why is he seen as our first African-American President, rather than our forty-fourth white president?  How does racial identity work?  Is su...

Why do we do what we do? To please others? To live up to what culture expects? Or for our own reasons –- as “autonomous agents”? Americans tend to admire (at least in theory) the autonomous individual, the person who knows what he wants, and sets out to get it, no matter what the world might think. Is this true of all cultures? John and Ken are joined by Stanford Psychologist Hazel Markus to explo...

Movies play a large role in modern life.  We enjoy watching them; we idolize the actors and actresses who appear in them; we analyze the directors. What is special about cinema as an art form, a mode of learning, a technique of propaganda?  Do movies pose special problems for aesthetics?  With the Oscars coming, Ken and John discuss the most philosophically-oriented films of this and past years, a...

What makes an idea or work of art creative?  Can creativity be measured?  Can a computer be creative?  What is the relationship between creativity and consciousness? John and Ken explore their creative sides with Margaret Boden from the University of Sussex, author of The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms.

Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King all engaged in civil disobedience, and are widely admired for doing so.  But how can democratic society function if each person’s conscience has to be satisfied for a law to be obeyed?  When is civil disobedience justified?  When is it required?  How does the concept fit with the great ethical and political philosophies?  John and Ken discuss the ethics of p...

Is history just a series of events, or an interpretation of those events?  Is there progress in history?  Can history be objective, or is it, as Napoleon said, just the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon?  Ken and John delve into the past and its meaning with Daniel Little, Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn and author of History’s Pathways and Varieties o...

Is a university a research institute with students, or and educational institution with research around the edges – or something in between?  To whom does the university answer – the trustees?  The administration?  The faculty?  The students?  Or something more abstract, like knowledge and wisdom?  John and Ken examine the very idea of a university with Stanford Provost John Etchemendy, in a progr...

John Rawls was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. In his book A Theory of Justice he articulated a concept of justice as fairness, which won many fans among liberals, and provoked important responses from thoughtful libertarians such as Robert Nozick. Ken and John discuss the life and ideas of John Rawls with Joshua Cohen, Professor of Political Science, P...

I can sell my house, the things I make, and the services I provide.  So why can’t I sell one of my kidneys?  What is the philosophical basis for the taboo against selling parts of our bodies?  There is an (illegal) market in body parts; shouldn’t we trust the wisdom of the market and make it legitimate?  Or would doing so undermine the very dignity of persons and human life?  Ken and John dissect...

Are there levels of reality, with each level emerging from the other in a way that provides a truly new aspect of reality?  The concept of emergence has been seen as an alternative to mere reducibility in discussion of the relation of the physical world to the biological world, consciousness, the social world, and God.  Ken and John probe the nature of reality with Tim O’Connor, Professor of Philo...

Gandhi is famous as the leader of the movement for Indian independence, which he based on his philosophy of non-violence, an important influence on Martin Luther King Jr. Gandhi’s ideas and the effects of his leadership continue to influence the world and its leaders.  What was the philosophical basis of these ideas?  Is non-violence a strategy for a certain purpose, or the basis for a way of life...

William James is one of the great American philosophers, historically important as a philosopher (pragmatism and radical empiricism), a student of religion (author of the monumental Varieties of Religious Experience), and psychology.  Ken and John examine the life and ideas of this towering figure with Russell Goodman, a leading scholar of Pragmatism and editor of Pragmatism: A Contemporary Reader...

When we make decisions we think we’re in control, making rational choices. But are we? This is the central question posed by Dan Ariely, Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University, in his book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. John and Ken discuss irrationality, its dangers, and perhaps also its benefits, with this philosophical and fascinating economist...

Second Life and dozens of other online adventures involve creating digital selves, and millions of users are taking advantage of the opportunity to develop new personas. Cyberpunk literature, like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, describes worlds in which the line between digital selves and real selves is hard to draw.  What makes your digital self you?  What does your choice of digital selves show a...

To many death is terrifying. But why? As David Hume pointed out, all the years we didn’t exist before we were born seemed painless enough. Why worry about future non-existence? Is the real worry that we will continue to exist? Ken and John confront mortality with psychiatrist and novelist Irv Yalom, author of Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death. This program was recorded before a li...

Veganism, freeganism, organic, sustainability, simplicity, biofuel, animal rights, worker’s rights, nutrition, preventing hunger, reducing waste and protecting the environment.  What obligations do we have when it comes to buying, eating and producing food?  How should we balance moral and practical concerns?  John and Ken chew on these questions with Michael Pollan from the UC Berkeley School of...

Can morality be quantified?  Can the good be calculated?  Utilitarianism says the right action is the one which leads to the most overall happiness -– a deceptively simple theory, but not without its detractors.  Is utilitarianism compatible with the idea that people have inalienable rights?  Should we be so focused on the consequences of our actions?  John and Ken welcome Wayne Sumner from the Un...

What constitutes a just society?  What are the obligations of liberal democracies to ensure the rights and well-being of the citizens of other countries?  What kinds of interventions and institutions are most suitable to the task of preventing war, disease, and poverty in the world today?  John and Ken discuss the requirements of justice with Helen Stacy from Stanford Law School.