Sleepy Philosophy Radio

03:41:15

The Problem of Evil: Why God Allows Suffering

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/06/19

An innocent man, a burned fawn, and the hardest question ever asked of God.This episode follows the problem of evil from its oldest telling to its newest defenses. It begins with a man who loses everything in a single afternoon and refuses every easy explanation, then traces the great answers, evil as absence, the best of all possible worlds, and the earthquake and the novel that broke optimism's public standing.From there the argument sharpens into the twentieth century, a charge of outright

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03:25:51

Akhmatova: The Poet Who Outlived the State

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/06/14

She answered terror with a poem too dangerous to write down, and the poem outlived the state that banned it.This episode follows Anna Akhmatova from a childhood in Pushkin's town outside Petersburg, through the cellar cabarets where a new Russian poetry was made, to the love lyrics that made her the most famous woman in Russian literature before she was thirty.Then the century turns. A husband is executed, a son is taken, and an unofficial ban erases her name from print for fifteen years. We

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03:31:04

Wittgenstein, the Man Who Ended Philosophy Twice

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/06/11

The richest heir in Vienna gave everything away and kept only the hardest questions ever asked about language.Ludwig Wittgenstein was born into one of the wealthiest families in Europe and died telling his friends he had lived wonderfully, though almost nothing in between looks like happiness.This episode follows the whole arc: the palace in Vienna and the family tragedies, the flight from engineering into logic, the masterpiece written in the trenches of the First World War, and the lost decade he

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02:26:40

Aldous Huxley | The Prophet Who Predicted Our Modern...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/06/05

Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/voteThe real danger was never the boot on the face.In this episode, we trace the full arc of Huxley's life and thought, beginning with the prophecy he delivered in Brave New World and ending with the afternoon of his death in Los Angeles on the day John F. Kennedy was shot. We follow him from Godalming to Eton, from the eye infection that nearly blinded him at sixteen to the satirical novels of the 1920s that made him the cleverest young

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02:51:07

Blaise Pascal | The Mathematician Who Found God

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/05/31

Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/voteThe man who proved that nature does not abhor a vacuum, and then wrote the most honest account ever given of why the universe terrifies us. Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Blaise Pascal.Blaise Pascal lived only thirty-nine years, and in those years he changed mathematics, physics, probability theory, and the history of Western prose. But at the center of his life was a night in November of 1654 that he could never describe,

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02:24:02

We Should Never Have Been Born | Cioran's Darkest...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/05/28

Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/voteFall asleep to the complete philosophy of Emil Cioran. Some nights the thought you cannot chase away is the one you most need a voice to name.Emil Cioran wrote for sixty years about the pointlessness of existence, and lived for eighty four years. The gap between what he argued and how he lived is the honest center of his work. This long quiet episode follows him from a Carpathian village where a priest's son ran barefoot among

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01:07:00

The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels | Book...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/05/24

In the winter of eighteen forty-seven, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were commissioned by a small revolutionary organization to write a statement of communist principles. What they produced in a matter of weeks was something different and more ambitious: a compressed analysis of how capitalism works, why it produces the inequalities it does, and where the logic of its own development was leading.This episode moves through the Manifesto in full. We begin with Marx and Engels themselves, the world

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02:36:36

Niccolo Machiavelli | The Most Misunderstood...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/05/23

Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/voteThe world does not reward good intentions. Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Niccolo Machiavelli.In this episode, we trace the full arc of Machiavelli's life and ideas, beginning with a young diplomat watching power operate in the courts and camps of Renaissance Italy and ending with a philosophical vision that five centuries of enemies have not been able to destroy. We explore his years as a servant of the Florentine

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02:54:13

There Is A Book That Contains Your Death | Borges's...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/05/16

Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/voteSomewhere in an infinite library, there is a book that contains the date of your death. Tonight, fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Jorge Luis Borges.Tonight we step inside the mind of the blind Argentine librarian who thought in fictions and dreamed in paradoxes. Jorge Luis Borges was not a philosopher who wrote systematic treatises. He was a storyteller who turned philosophical problems into fables so precise and beautiful

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02:46:16

"The Banality of Evil" | Hannah Arendt's Complete...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/05/11

Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/voteWhat if the worst evil in history was committed not by monsters, but by ordinary people who simply stopped thinking? Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Hannah Arendt.In this episode, we trace the full arc of Arendt's life and ideas. We begin with a young Jewish philosopher in Königsberg, studying under Heidegger and Jaspers, and follow her flight from Nazi Germany, her internment in a French camp, and her arrival in New York

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02:55:17

Avicenna | The Most Prolific Polymath of the Islamic...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/05/07

Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/voteHow did a physician writing by lamplight in a mountain fortress come to shape five centuries of world philosophy?The philosopher who called himself Avicenna was born in nine hundred and eighty near Bukhara, memorized the Quran at ten, read Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times, and then built a philosophical system so comprehensive that it became, in two separate civilizations, the foundation on which later thought was constructed

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03:52:11

Thomas Ligotti | The Puppet's Curse: Why...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/05/01

Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/voteThomas Ligotti wrote horror fiction as philosophical argument, producing the most uncompromising pessimist literature of the last century.Tonight we trace the life and work of Thomas Ligotti, from a Catholic childhood in Detroit to the crisis at seventeen that broke his inherited sense of the world, through the decades he spent as a reference editor by day and a weird-fiction writer by night. We follow him into the small-press debut

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02:36:36

On Buddha and the End of Suffering | The Complete...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/04/24

Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/voteThere is a story that begins with a man who had everything, and who walked away from all of it on a single night. Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of the Buddha.Twenty-five centuries ago, a prince in the foothills of the Himalayas left three palaces, a wife, and a newborn son because he had seen three things on a road that made the comfort of his life intolerable. Six years later, sitting under a fig tree in what is now

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02:26:10

Twenty Thousand Letters and a Revolution | Voltaire's...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/04/20

Vote on what comes next: https://www.slphilosophyradio.com/voteHe wrote twenty thousand letters and made half of Europe afraid of him. Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Voltaire.Tonight we spend nearly two and a half hours with Francois Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, the most famous writer in eighteenth century Europe and the most devastating enemy of fanaticism, superstition, and cruelty that the French language has ever produced. We follow him from his birth in Paris in 1694, through two

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02:41:56

Everyone Has Epicurus Wrong | The Real Philosophy of...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/04/17

Vote on what comes next: https://www.slphilosophyradio.com/voteAlmost everyone has Epicurus wrong. The word “epicurean” has come to mean indulgence, luxury, and fine dining, but the real philosophy of Epicurus is almost the opposite: a quiet life, simple food, trusted friends, and freedom from fear. Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Epicurus.In this episode, we trace the full arc of Epicurus’s life and ideas, beginning with a displaced young man on the island of Samos and ending with a

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02:34:42

On Kant and the Wall Between You and Reality |...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/04/10

Vote on what comes next: https://www.slphilosophyradio.com/voteThere is a wall between you and reality. You did not build it. You cannot remove it. It is the structure of your own mind. Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Immanuel Kant.In this three-hour episode, we trace the full arc of Kant's life and ideas, from his daily walk through the streets of Konigsberg, where neighbors set their clocks by his passing, to a philosophical vision that reshaped every discipline it touched. We

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02:41:02

H.P. Lovecraft | The Complete Philosophy of Cosmic...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/04/04

Vote on what comes next: https://www.slphilosophyradio.com/voteThe universe is not hostile. It is indifferent. Which is worse. Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft.In this episode, we trace the full arc of Lovecraft’s life and ideas, beginning with a boy and a telescope on a hill in Providence, Rhode Island, and ending with a philosophical vision that science keeps confirming. We explore his materialism and his intellectual formation, from the ancient atomists through

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02:38:25

Society Made You Miserable | Rousseau's Complete...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/03/30

What happens when a man looks at civilization and sees not progress, but a catastrophe? Not liberation, but the slow corruption of everything natural and good in us?Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that human beings were born free, compassionate, and whole, and that society had made them vain, competitive, and miserable. Born in Geneva in 1712, abandoned by his father, self-educated and restless, he wandered through Europe before arriving in Paris and producing some of the most dangerous ideas the

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02:44:19

You Cannot Prove That Anyone Else Is Conscious |...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/03/28

Vote on what comes next: https://www.slphilosophyradio.com/voteSomething is happening right now that no science can fully explain. Fall asleep to a complete exploration of the hardest unsolved question in philosophy and science.There is a felt quality to seeing color, hearing sound, and simply existing. This is the problem of consciousness, and it remains one of the deepest unsolved questions in all of human thought.This episode traces the mystery from Descartes and Leibniz through Thomas Nagel and

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02:35:56

Nothing Lasts, and That Is the Point | Marcus...

Sleepy Philosophy Radio ·

2026/03/26

Vote on what comes next: https://www.slphilosophyradio.com/voteFall asleep to the complete Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius.Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the Roman world, and he spent his nights writing private notes to himself about how little any of it mattered. The Meditations, composed in Greek during military campaigns on the Danube frontier, was never intended for publication. It is a philosophical journal, a record of one man’s attempt to hold himself to the demands of Stoic

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