The Phlexible Philosophy Podcast, Hosted by Hamza King

On the 27th of September 2018, Christine Blasey Ford, a Professor at Palo Alto University, appeared in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee to testify against Brett Kavanaugh, who was at the time a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, for sexually assaulting her at a high school party they both attended thirty-six years earlier. Visibly shaken, she went on to describe how Kavanaugh pinned h...

The Rwandan Genocide was one of the most horrific events of the twentieth century. After decades of unrest between Rwanda’s two biggest tribes, the Tutsi’s and the Hutu’s, civil war finally broke out on the 7th of April 1994, and over the next thirty days, 800,000 people were killed in cold blood, while the world stood back and watched. UN forces were in Rwanda at the time, but they were ordered n...

Karl Popper was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Widely considered to be the father of modern science, Popper introduced the principle of falsificationism which states that for a theory to be considered scientific, it must have a hypothesis which is falsifiable, or capable of being disproven. A theory with a hypothesis which cannot be disproven, like the belief th...

Sheffield was once the steel-making capital of the world. During the First Industrial Revolution, almost half of the steel used in Europe was produced in Sheffield; and during both World Wars, the city became a bombing target because of the central role it played in arming the British military. This rich steel-making tradition began to decline under Margaret Thatcher. In the 1980s, market forces c...

The phrase ‘glass ceiling’ was coined by the American writer and management consultant, Marilyn Loden, to describe the barriers preventing women from progressing to senior positions in their careers. The sociologists Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison have introduced the phrase ‘class ceiling’ to describe the barriers preventing those from working-class backgrounds from progressing in their careers....

A protection gap exists under international law for those displacement by the impacts of climate change. The 1951 Refugee Convention and 1988 Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement offer no protection to those facing famine in Ethiopia, flooding in Pakistan, or the threat of ‘state extinction’ in Tuvalu. The idea of a climate refugee treaty has been suggested as a way of filling this protecti...

The laws which govern war do not reflect our moral intuitions about what types of behaviour are permissible when fighting wars. In some cases, morality is more relaxed than the law: the killing of noncombatants is almost never justified under international law, while many just war theorists believe it can be justified if these noncombatants pose a credible threat. In other cases, the law is more r...

We are living in a new age of work, where many of the tasks which once required a human touch, can now be done by AI systems. Imagine we one day reach a point where all human activities can be carried out by AI, and we are no longer the best problem-solvers on the planet. Would this be a utopian world, or a dystopian world? Hamza King sits down with John Danaher to imagine what a world world witho...

We live in an age of space travel. Billionaires and governments are already fighting for resources on the Moon and Mars, and academics are racing to develop ethical frameworks that can guide space policy and practice. Neil Armstrong believed space travel to be a symbol of human progress. Gil Scott-Heron believed space travel to be a symbol of global inequality. Who is right (or are they both right...