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PODCAST

Philosopher"s Zone

The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher"s Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

0:29:56

Freud, Wittgenstein and the unconscious

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/07/03

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 device. There's certainly no science of the unconscious, no empirical evidence that might

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0:32:16

Buddhism and nationalism

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/06/26

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.

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0:28:25

Philosophy's problem with its history

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/06/19

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.

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0:28:40

Authority and medical diagnosis

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/06/11

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 emerging technologies have for the kind of authority traditionally seen as exclusive to

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0:33:12

Nationalism and immigration

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/06/05

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.

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0:34:39

Speech acts and AI

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/05/29

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-generated workplace commands really have?

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0:35:30

Belief, emotion and trust

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/05/22

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.

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0:31:00

In defence of workism

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/05/14

"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.

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0:34:15

How feminism changed primatology

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/05/07

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?

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0:28:25

History and the left

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/05/01

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.

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0:34:21

Henri Bergson, philosopher of past and future

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/04/23

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.

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0:31:09

Style wars pt 2: Scandals and hoaxes

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/04/16

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?

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0:33:03

Style wars pt 1: Postwar France and a new...

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/04/09

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 analytic philosophical style. It grabbed scholarly attention then, and is still controversial

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0:51:32

LIVE EVENT: What use is philosophy?

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/04/01

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.

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0:37:08

Queer theory and animal rights

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/03/27

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 includes themes of sexual assault and animal abuse that some listeners may find distressing.

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0:33:45

AI, reliability and trust

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/03/18

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.

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0:37:26

Innocence and "child rescue" in the colonial imagination

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/03/13

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 families - in many cases, abducted - and placed in institutions, to be trained and

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0:28:11

What is a conspiracy theory?

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/03/06

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, things get even muddier.

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0:38:00

Getting past post-truth

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/02/26

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.

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0:39:45

Expanding our moral circle

Philosopher"s Zone ·

2025/02/19

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 upcoming population of artificial intelligences. How can we possibly care for them all, and

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352 results

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