Philosopher's Zone

We tend to think of time as a universal experience, something that carries us all along in the same direction at the same pace. So it might seem strange to think of time in terms of 'temporalities', different concepts and experiences of time that reflect different cultural values. In Australia, Indigenous temporalities are deeply interwoven with notions of justice, sovereignty and care for country...

Once upon a time, what we now call scientists were known as "natural philosophers". These were people who studied the physical universe through observation and logic, using philosophical methods and reasoning. Today, science and philosophy have gone their separate ways, with some scientists rejoicing in the split (the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking famously pronounced that "philosophy...

Is it possible to have judgement without blame? And what does it mean to say - as Socrates did - that it's better to suffer evil at the hands of others than to be an evildoer oneself? This week we're talking with one of Australia's pre-eminent moral philosophers on questions of judgement, evil, remorse... and why he became a philosopher in the first place.

We routinely refer to "the unconscious" in a way that suggests we all agree on what it means - but in fact, the unconscious is a highly contested domain. For some, it's a subterranean layer of emotions and desires that operate deep below the rational mind, and that drive our behaviour in unpredictable ways. For others, the unconscious barely exists at all, and only as a metaphor or linguistic devi...

Buddhism in the West is often thought of as an ethical or philosophical system first and foremost, based on principles of non-self and impermanence, and universalist in its outlook. So it can come as a surprise to find that in countries like Sri Lanka, there exists a strain of Buddhist nationalism that has fierce pride, religious chauvinism and even violence in its history.

Analytic philosophy has often understood itself as being in some sense "above" history - using reason and logic to explore problems that are timeless and apolitical. But this week we're talking with the author of a new book that places analytic philosophy firmly in its social/historical context.

Medical diagnosis these days is not as straightforward as it seems. Doctors still diagnose, but so do a great many people who previously didn't - wellness influencers, misinformation peddlers, users of the many kinds of medical tests available to the public - and then there's the advent of AI and machine learning diagnostics. So what exactly does diagnosis mean today? And what implications do emer...

Nationalism is often associated with rightwing politics and anti-immigration sentiment - but is that a necessary connection? This week we're looking at various forms of nationalism, and asking if there's something about the structure of the nation-state itself that fosters an exclusionary attitude to outsiders.

Speech acts - utterances that have the power to make things happen in the world - are increasingly being created by AI, especially in certain workplaces where it's not uncommon to receive orders and instructions from an algorithm. The power of a speech act is often understood as emanating from the intention of its author - but if AI lacks the capacity for intention, how much authority do AI-genera...

The traditional philosophical view of belief is that it's a rational cognitive affair, evidence based and directed toward truth. According to this account, things like delusion and religious belief are "edge cases", exceptions that prove the rule. But this week we're considering not only that belief may be closely tied to emotion, but that it may actually be a form of emotion itself.

"Workism" is defined as the tendency to put work at the centre of one's identity and life meaning - and according to many recent commentators, it's a bad thing. Workism is said to throw life out of balance, and to expose workists to the risk of deep existential trauma if they lose their job. But according to this week's guest, the arguments against workism don't stack up.

For decades, primatologists believed that primate societies were structured around aggressive alpha males - until a remarkable push from feminist scientists in the 1960s and 70s changed the narrative. So why does the "dominant alpha male" story persist in human culture?

The defeat of the Democrats in last November's Presidential election has prompted much soul-searching on the political left. But according to this week's guest, there's still an important point being missed: the fact that while the left pays close attention to historical injustices committed by the West, it's strangely blind to its own history of complicity with oppression.

100 years ago, Henri Bergson was the most famous philosopher on earth, drawing traffic-stopping crowds to his public lectures and scandalising the French intellectual elite with his popularity among women. His ideas resonated at a time when people were anxious about the rise of new and strange scientific discoveries and technologies - which makes him a thinker well worth exploring in 2025.

What should we think when an academic Humanities journal unsuspectingly publishes a paper that's been written as a hoax, full of fashionable jargon and deliberately specious arguments? Does this demonstrate that the Humanities set a higher value on shallow intellectual trends than on rigorous scholarship - or is there something more nuanced and complicated going on?

In the aftermath of the Second World War, France was in a state of creative ferment that affected politics, culture - and philosophy. A new mode of philosophical writing emerged in the form of the review, and it was being done in an idiom that we've since come to recognise as typical of modern French theory: dense, experimental, multivocal, open-ended, very much the opposite of traditional analyti...

Does philosophy answer questions, or just keep asking them over and over again? Some say that compared to the sciences, philosophy has few runs on the board when it comes to measurable results. And then there's the issue of sexism in the discipline, and Western philosophy's colonial past. In this live panel discussion recorded in Brisbane, we put philosophy's feet to the fire.

This week we're exploring links between queer liberation and animal subjugation, and discovering how the struggles for acceptable queer identity are often entwined with entrenching animal exploitation. Along the way we get into some fascinating history of sexual violence, colonial constructs of the human, and those ever-shifting categories of "natural" and "deviant" behaviour. This program include...

AI is making all kinds of important decisions for us these days, but how far can we trust it? Or rather, what kind of trust is appropriate to bring to AI? The inner workings of "black box" AI are inscrutable even to its creators, so if transparency and explainability are essential to the development of trust, then we could be in trouble. It all depends on how we think about trust.

The forced removal of First Nations children from their families was active government policy in Australia between the 1910s and the 1970s, and still continues today under the banner of child protection. Today we're hearing that the story of the Stolen Generation has a historical parallel in the "child rescue" movement in 19th century Britain, when so-called "ragged children" were taken from their...

We all feel we know what a conspiracy theory is: it's a belief held by other people about a conspiracy or conspiracies. Nobody likes being identified as a conspiracy theorist - including conspiracy theorists - and this makes life difficult for social scientists, psychologists and other researchers. When it comes to philosophy and the business of nailing down exactly what a conspiracy theory is, th...

Our current "post-truth" environment means it's getting harder to trust what we see, hear and read - and this is a problem for all of us, but especially for educators and anyone in the business of teaching younger people about the world. This week we hear from a scholar who's looking to a modern philosophical tradition to come up with critical thinking strategies for students.

Our "moral circle" encompasses fellow humans, other primates, dogs, cats and other animals to which we attribute feelings and interests. But as science teaches us more about the inner lives of insects, marine animals and even microbes, it becomes more and more apparent that we might need to include them in our moral circle as well. Furthermore, we may need to bestow moral significance on an upcomi...

Conventional wisdom has it that if you've never fallen in love, if you've never given birth to a child, if you've never tasted Vegemite... then you can't know what these experiences are like. But is the conventional wisdom correct? This week we're asking if there could in fact be various kinds of what-it-is-like knowledge, not all of which require direct first-hand experience.

It's often said that we're experiencing a crisis in the arts and Humanities, with declining student numbers in subjects that aren't deemed suitable for creating "job-ready graduates", and funding cuts slashing support for the arts. In a world of tight job markets and increasing importance given to STEM subjects, what can we do about it?