Philosophy Talk

How do words shape our minds?  Do the French suffer because they have no word for berry or cozy?  Do we suffer because we have no word for schadenfreude?  Why do we adopt new words, or give old words new meaning?  Can we eliminate a concept by renaming it, or eliminating the word for it?  Ken and John welcome back Geoff Nunberg, author of The Years of Talking Dangerously, for a program recorded in...

It’s a Philosophy Talk highlight reel for the membership drive. In this special episode, John and Ken relive some favorite moments from the Philosophy Talk archives. Listen to cognitive scientist Margaret Boden on creativity, computers, and the emotions, Stanford University’s Kara Dansky on the nature of crime and punishment, Georgetown Provost James O’Donnell on the contemporary relevance of Sain...

What is a family, and what distinguishes it from other kinds of associations?  Is the traditional role of the family merely grounded in custom and habit, or is there a deeper philosophical justification for it?  How has the structure of families changed over the ages, and how does it differ across cultures?  John and Ken examine the structure and function of the family in relation to morality, val...

Is pornography an art form, or simply anything that depicts genitals in action?  Where does mere eroticism end and pornography begin?  In the internet age, pornography appears to have become not only more accessible but also more acceptable in American society – is this a welcome loosening up of a conservative tradition, or is it the path to moral degradation?  John and Ken probe the philosophical...

Does our system of credit and money make upward social mobility possible for anyone willing to work hard?  Or is it just a big Ponzi scheme?  Are corporations the essential structures necessary to harness the capital, energy, intelligence, and leadership on a scale large enough to make and market the inventions that define modern life?  Or are they just devices for evading responsibility and rewar...

As of June 30, 2007, the prisons and jails in the land of the free held 2,299,116 inmates; one in every 31 American adults is in prison, on parole, or on probation.  The state of California has more people in jail than China does, and this year expects to spend more on prisons than on higher education.  Is something wrong with this picture?  John and Ken explore the nature of incarceration and reh...

From online bulletin boards at the dawn of the internet to the modern mammoths of Facebook and MySpace, people have used communications technology to associate in innovative ways.  How do our old-fashioned values fit in to our new digital playgrounds?  John and Ken network with Malcolm Parks from the University of Washington, author of Personal Relationships and Personal Networks, for a program re...

Even if you’re not going to Biarritz for the summer as usual, you can relax in the sun and read.  There are a lot of readable, beach-friendly classics and non-classics to add philosophical depth to your Summer Reading.  Join Ken and John to share some of the philosophically-minded reading on your list for this summer.

What kinds of contact can the mind have with the world?  Can we know how the world is in itself, or can we only know shadows of the world in our own minds?  Are we trapped behind a veil of our own mental states?  Is there a world outside my mind – or our minds – at all?  John and Ken tackle the big questions of perception, the external world, and the nature of reality, with Howard Robinson from th...

More than any other President, Abraham Lincoln is known for his words, from the Lincoln-Douglass debates to the second inaugural address, as well as his deeds.  What was Lincoln’s basic philosophy, and did it change over the course of his Presidency?  Ken and John welcome back Chicago Public Radio’s Resident Philosopher, Al Gini, to celebrate the bicentennial of Lincoln, the man and his ideas.

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...