The Living Philosophy

Self Reliance, Emerson’s classic essay is one of the gems of philosophical literature. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the leading light of the American Transcendentalism tradition and Self Reliance Emerson’s most famous spark.  I have been a fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s since my early days of philosophical exploration as a teenager and it’s interesting to read Emerson Self Reliance now in light of the pa...

In his 1981 book Simulation and Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard makes the claim that we are all living in a simulation. Baudrillard’s conception of simulation is extremely complex, going beyond The Matrix’s conception of the simulation (a movie that was inspired by Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra) as a virtual reality world in which we all live. Baudrillard says that with the emergence of the p...

What is Structuralism? In this episode, we are going to break down the Structuralist theory pioneered by Claude Lévi Strauss and explored by the likes of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jean Piaget. We will be looking at the meaning of Structuralism and what the main criticisms of it were from Jean Piaget and from the Poststructuralism angle of Jacques Derrida.  The simple answe...

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was one of the most controversial books of the 20th century as well as being one of the most referenced academic works in history.  In this episode we look at what Thomas Kuhn said about the Structure of Scientific Revolutions and how every science falls into three phases. The first stage of Kuhn’s theory is the Pre-Paradigm phase. This is wher...

Carl Jung's Collective Unconscious is his biggest and most commonly misunderstood concept. The Collective Unconscious Jung tells us goes deeper than the Personal Unconscious in which we find our own personal experiences. The Collective Unconscious is the common layer of the mind in which the instincts of humanity exist and at certain times in our life bubble up into consciousness. This is the...

In the wake of the Paris 1968 student protests, Le Monde published a petition from a group of French intellectuals including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and a number of future French ministers that argued for the rights of “12- and 13-year olds” “to have relations with whomever they choose”.  In this episode I want to explore why these Fren...

In the work of the great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Id Ego Superego form the tripartite structure of the mind. This three-part structure is illustrated by the metaphor of an iceberg by Freud in his 1915 work The Unconscious. This Id Ego Superego structure can be divided between the realms of the conscious and the unconscious. The Id is entirely unconscious, the Ego entirely conscious while the S...

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was one of the most controversial books of the 20th century as well as being one of the most referenced academic works in history. Paradigm was a specialised term before Kuhn but since The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been in circulation, Kuhn’s paradigm rears its head in every nook and cranny of our society. From Fortune 500 board m...

Thomas Aquinas was the shining light of medieval philosophy. He worked on his masterpiece the Summa Theologica from 1265 until the year of his death in 1274. This book — most famous today for its 5 arguments for the existence of God — was the reason for his canonisation as a saint and doctor of the Catholic church fifty years after his death. But the work was unfinished because a few months before...

21st-century humanity is threatened by numerous self-generated existential threats to its continued survival. These include socio-political disintegration, ecological collapse and the potential ramifications of AI. The nature of this challenge is comparable to the most prominent scientific hypothesis as to why moths fly into flames — an accidental hijacking of an evolutionary adaptation that leads...

The etymology of philosophy leads to the love of wisdom. The paths to wisdom can be divided into two: ekstasis and catharsis. Jamie Wheal is a thinker who utilises this distinction in his book Recapture the Rapture and on podcasts (where he includes a third aspect: Communitas — community/sangha). The distinction between ekstasis and catharsis is a powerful one. Ekstasis is the higher perspective;...

Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development has an important place in the system of Integral Philosopher Ken Wilber. Wilber’s theory of everything is based around the stages of human development that go from the four stages of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and ascend into the spiritual realms of nondualism that we find in the works of Plotinus and other great spiritual masters.  In th...

Jean Piaget was the second most referenced psychologist of the 20th century whose work was dedicated to mapping out the stages of human development that is now known as the Piaget Theory of Cognitive Development. Piaget differentiated four developmental stages that humans pass through: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational.  These stages of Piaget’s Theory of Co...

In his masterpiece Sex Ecology and Spirituality, Ken Wilber applies the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in Semiotics to the question of spiritual experiences’ validity. By looking at the Signifier and Signified of Saussure’s linguistic Sign as well as the referent in the context of spiritual experience Integral philosopher Ken Wilber arrives at an interesting hypothesis in Sex Ecology and Spirituali...

“The European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” — A.N. Whitehead. Plato is the greatest philosopher that ever lived and yet the life of Plato is shrouded in myth and mystery. The challenge with Plato’s biography is knowing where the legend ends and history begins. In this episode we explore the various accounts of Plato’s life and try to reassemble the arc of his...

Semiotics came into being with the publishing of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics in 1916. It contained distinctions such as langue vs parole as well as the signifier and signified that make up the Sign — Saussure’s fundamental unit of language.  The Semiotics school of thought would go on to be a major influence on the Existentialists such as Sartre, the Structuralists such a...

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein told his lover David Pinsent that Russell’s words of encouragement at the start of his dabbling with philosophy had been his salvation and put an end to nine years of loneliness and suffering in the constant shadow of suicide.  Russell described him as “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate,...

The Analytic Philosophy vs Continental Philosophy divide is a faultline running through modern philosophy. In this episode we explore the origins of this divide and why these two paths diverged when their founders were in close contact. Edmund Husserl and Gottlob Frege were the two men that gave rise to Continental Philosophy and Analytic Philosophy respectively and surprisingly they were in close...

When asking ourselves what is empiricism in philosophy we cannot help but speak of the  Empiricism vs. Rationalism debate that began with Descartes’s cogito ergo sum of and ended with Immanuel Kant. The Empiricism of John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume — known as the British Empiricists — developed in the 17th and 18th centuries and was a very influential movement. In contrast to the Ration...

Albert Camus called the philosopher Simone Weil “the only great spirit of our times.” T.S. Eliot said she was the greatest saint of the 20th century. Charles de Gaulle said she was insane. But who is she and what is the Simone Weil philosophy? Despite dying at the age of 34, Simone Weil lived a life that rivalled any philosopher. And it was the authentic life of a philosopher following her inner c...

The Phenomenology philosophy is a school of philosophy that originated in the 20th century. With Edmund Husserl Phenomenology was born but it was the phenomenology Heidegger innovated that reoriented the course of European philosophy.  The Phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger (whose respective philosophies are called Transcendental Phenomenology and Existential Phenomenology) does not seek after...

There are many legends and lies surrounding the question of why Nietzsche went mad. After the German philosopher had a mental breakdown in a Turin square January 1889, the initial diagnosis was paretic syphilis. But as later investigators point this definitely wasn’t the case. In this episode we are going to explore the “circus-like history of controversies over the syphilis diagnosis”.  Nietzsche...

What is the difference between Nihilism vs. Existentialism vs. Absurdism? The common ground they share is that they are all responses to philosophy’s timeless clichéd question “what is the meaning of life?” Nihilism came into full bloom in the 19th century as the full implications of modernism came to fruition. Existentialism and Absurdism are two ways of responding to the crisis of Nihilism.  So...

The friendship of Camus and Sartre went from bromance to bitter hatred. The two giants of 20th-century philosophy first became friends during WW2 but the friendship was doomed to fail. The conflict of Camus vs. Sartre boils down to their political philosophy. The philosophy of Albert Camus was one of peace and valued the individual human being; the philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre on the other hand...

Nietzsche and Emerson don’t seem like they should go together. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a spiritual nature-loving Transcendentalist and Friedrich Nietzsche was a self-proclaimed Antichrist. But the truth is that Nietzsche loved Ralph Waldo Emerson and while he was far from agreement with him on many points, he felt that Emerson was a “twin soul” and only wished that he could go back and give this g...