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PODCAST

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners

From Heraclitus’ fragments on change to Hannah Arendt’s reflections on responsibility, this series traces the story of Western moral thought. Each episode introduces the life, context, and ideas of the philosophers who shaped how we think about right and wrong, freedom and duty, justice and power. Designed for newcomers yet rich enough for curious thinkers, it offers a guided journey through the great debates that still shape our world today.

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All Episodes

18:45

Michel Foucault

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/10/29

Michel Foucault is the philosopher who taught us to question how knowledge itself can be a form of power. He was a French thinker who didn’t look like a typical academic sage studying timeless truths from an armchair. Instead, he prowled through archives of asylums, prisons, and clinics to uncover how modern society quietly defines what is normal and what is deviant. Born Paul-Michel Foucault in nineteen twenty-six in the provincial city of Poitiers, France, he came of age in a country rebuilding

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18:49

Hannah Arendt

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/10/27

Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany, to a secular Jewish family. She grew up in Königsberg (Immanuel Kant’s city), raised largely by her mother after her father died when she was seven. Brilliant and strong-willed, Arendt studied philosophy at university under some of Germany’s greatest thinkers – including Martin Heidegger at Marburg (with whom she had a youthful love affair) and Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg. She completed a dissertation on St. Augustine’s concept of love. But Arendt’s

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11:56

Martin Heidegger

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/10/24

Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in Messkirch, a rural Catholic town in southwestern Germany. His upbringing was humble; his father was a sexton. Young Heidegger was initially headed for the priesthood – he even started seminary – but he developed an intense interest in philosophy (spurred by reading Brentano) and switched to studying that at the University of Freiburg. He earned his doctorate and then worked under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology.By the 1920s, Heidegger’s own

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13:42

Søren Kierkegaard

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/10/21

Søren Kierkegaard was born in 1813 in Copenhagen, Denmark, the youngest of seven children of a wealthy wool merchant. His father was stern, deeply pious, and prone to guilt and melancholy – traits he passed to Søren. Kierkegaard grew up in a house haunted by a sense of sin and religious intensity (his father believed he’d cursed their family by an impious act as a boy, and indeed many of Søren’s siblings died young, fueling that tragic belief).Kierkegaard studied theology and philosophy at the

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35:16

Friedrich Nietzsche

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/10/11

Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken, a village in Saxony (now Germany). His father was a Lutheran pastor who died young; Nietzsche was raised in a pious household of women (mother, sister, grandmother). A precocious student, he excelled in classical philology (the study of Greek and Roman texts). At 24, he became a professor at Basel, Switzerland – extraordinarily young. But academic life didn’t suit his fiery spirit for long. He was deeply influenced by composer Richard Wagner (they were

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13:31

Immanuel Kant

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/10/11

Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, a provincial capital on the Baltic Sea (today Kaliningrad). He was raised in a modest artisanal family and educated in a pietistic Lutheran tradition that stressed duty and virtue. Young Kant was intellectually precocious. He studied at the University of Königsberg (never venturing more than a hundred miles from his birthplace his entire life). After some years as a private tutor, he became a professor at Königsberg and taught there for four

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31:52

David Hume

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/10/10

A stout, rosy-cheeked old man lies propped up in bed, greeting his visitor with a gentle smile. It is the summer of 1776 in Edinburgh, and David Hume knows he is dying. Yet there is no fear in his clear grey eyes—only mild amusement at the anxious expression on young James Boswell’s face. Boswell has come to see whether the great skeptic is frightened to meet his Maker at last. But Hume, ever composed, chuckles softly. He spins an imaginary tale for Boswell: perhaps, he says, he might bargain with

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14:02

Simone de Beauvoir

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/10/10

Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 into a bourgeois Parisian family. Her father was a traditionalist who once ruefully said, “Simone thinks like a man!” – noticing her fierce intellect. Beauvoir was indeed precocious and very independent-minded. After World War I, her family lost much of its wealth, but they still prioritized a good education for Simone. Deeply religious as a child, Beauvoir experienced a loss of faith in adolescence and thereafter declared herself an atheist – but one with a

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16:07

Jean-Paul Sartre

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/10/10

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1905 in Paris. His father, a naval officer, died when Sartre was an infant, so he was raised by his mother in his maternal grandfather’s home. As a child, he was small, sickly, and partially blind in one eye (which gave him his signature walleyed look). But he was precocious and developed an early love of literature. Sartre studied philosophy at the elite École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he met Simone de Beauvoir, a fellow philosophy student who would become his

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14:47

Albert Camus

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/10/10

Albert Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi, French Algeria. His background was humble: his father was an agricultural worker who died in World War I when Camus was a baby, and his illiterate mother of Spanish origin raised him in a poor neighborhood of Algiers. Despite hardship (they lived in a two-room apartment; Camus later said he never forgot the silent suffering of his mother, which informed his outlook on human resilience), Camus excelled in school. He was a bright, athletic young man –

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18:40

René Descartes

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/10/10

Today we enter the seventeenth century, a moment when philosophy took a decisive turn into what we now call modernity. Our guide is René Descartes, born in 1596 in La Haye in France, a man whose restless mind and relentless pursuit of certainty reshaped the intellectual map of Europe. He is remembered for his famous declaration, cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am – a phrase that became the rallying cry of rationalism and the cornerstone of modern philosophy. But Descartes was not only a

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16:10

Thomas Hobbes

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/10/10

Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada. Later he would say that fear and he were born twins, because his mother went into labor prematurely after hearing rumors of invasion. Whether or not this anecdote is literally true, it captures something about Hobbes’s temperament: a man haunted by the fragility of peace, attentive to the ways fear shapes politics. Hobbes’s father was a clergyman of modest means, prone to quarrels. After a fight outside his church, the elder Hobbes fled

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13:38

John Locke

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/09/17

In this episode of Philosophy for Beginners, we turn to John Locke (1632–1704), the philosopher of liberty and natural rights. In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke argued that all people are born with rights to life, liberty, and property, and that governments exist only to protect those rights. If rulers become tyrants, the people have the right to resist. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding advanced the idea that the mind is a “blank slate,” shaped by experience and education. Locke’s

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10:06

Dante: Divine Comedy & Beyond

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/09/17

Dante: Divine Comedy & BeyondWhat can poetry teach us about philosophy? In this episode of Philosophy for Beginners, we turn to Dante Alighieri, the Florentine poet whose Divine Comedy is both a masterpiece of literature and a map of the human soul.Guided by reason and faith, Dante journeys through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, weaving together classical philosophy and Christian theology into a vision of justice, morality, and love. His work reveals how poetry can become philosophy in action —

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14:13

Heraclitus - Panta Rei

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/09/17

eraclitus on Change and the Search for BalanceWhat if the very thing that unsettles you—change—is also the key to inner steadiness? In our debut episode on Philosophy Now! we trek back to Ephesus (circa 500 BCE) to meet Heraclitus, the loner philosopher who claimed that “all things flow” and that “character is fate.” His surviving fragments—fewer than a hundred cryptic lines hit harder than ever in an era of 24-hour news cycles and zero-sum reasoning.Produced by Selenius Media - the team behind

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10:15

Aquinas: Faith and Reason

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/09/17

Aquinas: Faith and ReasonCan faith and reason truly work together? In this episode of Philosophy for Beginners, we explore the thought of Thomas Aquinas, the medieval scholar who sought harmony between Aristotle’s philosophy and Christian theology.Aquinas argued that reason could uncover truths about the natural world, while faith revealed mysteries beyond reason’s reach. His Summa Theologica became a cornerstone of Western philosophy and theology, shaping debates on ethics, law, and the nature of

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12:18

Michel de Montaigne

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/09/17

In this episode of Philosophy for Beginners, we turn to Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), the French nobleman who withdrew from public life to a tower filled with books and invented a new form of philosophy: the essay. Montaigne believed that wisdom comes not from building grand systems but from examining ordinary experience with honesty and doubt. He wrote about friendship, death, custom, and the body with candor that still feels startlingly modern. By asking “What do I know?” Montaigne taught that

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13:21

Title: Niccolò Machiavelli – The Morality of Power

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/09/17

Title: Niccolò Machiavelli – The Morality of PowerIn this episode of Philosophy for Beginners, we leave the humanist gentleness of Erasmus and step into the sharp world of Florentine politics with Niccolò Machiavelli. Civil servant, diplomat, dramatist, and author of The Prince and Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli has been remembered as ruthless and cunning — but his deepest concern was the survival of the state. What does it really take to hold power, to govern effectively, to preserve liberty

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9:57

Boethius

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/09/17

What does it mean to find hope when fortune turns against you? In this episode of Philosophy for Beginners, we explore the life and thought of Boethius, a Roman statesman whose fall from power gave rise to one of the most influential works of medieval philosophy, The Consolation of Philosophy.Guided by the figure of Lady Philosophy, Boethius wrestled with questions of fate, free will, and the nature of true happiness. His reflections shaped centuries of Christian and philosophical thought — from

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7:58

Erasmus: Humanism & Reform

Western Moral Philosophy For Beginners ·

2025/09/17

Erasmus: Humanism & ReformWhat role can scholarship play in renewing society? In this episode of Philosophy for Beginners, we explore the life and thought of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the Renaissance humanist who sought to unite learning, faith, and reform.Erasmus believed that truth should be sought in the original sources of wisdom — in scripture, in classical texts, in the honest work of reason. His critical edition of the New Testament reshaped theology, while his writings urged

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