Philosophiraga: The Video Games and Philosophy Podcast
Philosophiraga is an audio presentation in the Well-Red Mage family of content. Each episode, I look at a big idea from the history of philosophy and discuss how it relates to the world of video games. It's sort of like an introductory philosophy course mashed up with gaming culture, which (I like to think) makes it a bit more interesting. If you've already studied philosophy, you're unlikely to learn anything new from Philosophiraga... but I hope you might be able to enjoy listening anyway.
Episodes
If reality were just a dream, how could we tell? Are tables perfect? Why bother waking up a fish? Why did a dictionary maker kick a rock?
All these questions and more will be... maybe answered, or maybe just alluded to, in this episode on Bishop Berkeley's subjective idealism. We also talk about video games a bit, of course.
If you're a fan of the show, I'm given to understand that feeding the algor...
What's even real anyway, dude? Like, does the world even exist, yo?
These, albeit perhaps not phrased in quite the same way, are big questions in philosophy, and this episode is an introduction to ontology: the study of being and existence. Stay tuned for the rest of the module on ontology, in which we'll explore some theories about what there might be (or indeed not be) and what it might be like (or indeed not b...
Logic is weird and fuzzy. Fortunately, understanding logical fallacies can help us to cut through some of the fuzziness... as long as we're careful how we use them. This episode is an introduction to a few useful fallacies, illuminated with examples from the world of gaming.
If you're a fan of the show, I'm given to understand that feeding the algorithms by leaving ratings or reviews on Apple Podcasts o...
It's a special interview episode: my guest is none other than my other half, Hannah!
We discuss her gaming history, why she wants her games to be colourful and not boring, and how she feels about philosophy. Her views on philosophy might not be what you'd expect from someone who lives with me, but hey, different perspectives are what the world needs!
If you're a fan of the show, I'm given ...
It's another episode of Philosophiraga, the bite-sized deep-dive into video games and philosophy.
This time, we're looking at empiricism: the view that we know stuff through experience, and no other way. Phoenix Wright and co will help us to think about different kinds of knowledge, how experiencing something can help us to prove claims true or false, and what there even is to experience anyway.
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In this episode of Philosophiraga, the gaming and philosophy podcast, we take a look at rationalism. How can we know things without experiencing them? Rationalism has a few suggestions.
Speaking of things we know without having experienced them, the way Dark Souls presents its story is so unlike anything else I've ever come across that I think it's worth talking about.
We discuss intuition, innate knowle...
In this... slightly out-of-schedule episode of Philosophiraga, we take a look at something that happened in World of Warcraft many years ago, and discuss whether it's relevant to things happening in the real world today.
One correction: I said in the show that 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' translates to 'with this therefore because of this'. That would actually be 'cum hoc ergo propter hoc'...
Moses Norton, the Well-Red Mage himself, is my guest for this interview episode of Philosophiraga. We talk right and wrong, Batman, truffle oil, parenthood, the difference between academic philosophy and just sort of doing philosophy out in the world, how to have a good conversation with just about anyone, the secret bad ending of Tetris, the distinction between 'favourite' and 'best', and whether Rob Zombie cou...
Module two episode one!
What is knowledge? How do we know when we know something? How do we know whether we know that we know anything?
To answer all these questions and more (or just to wonder about them and form no conclusions whatsoever), Philosophiraga is here to explain what Justified True Belief means with the help of Pokémon.
If you're a fan of the show, I'm given to understand that feed...
What even is good, or bad, or whatever? When we say 'this is good', to what are we actually referring?
These are some questions which, if we're being honest, sound like they might be slightly meaningless. Fortunately, Philosophiraga takes weird philosophical questions and looks at them through the lens of video games: in this episode, we discuss how morality works in the Kingdom Hearts universe, and maybe ev...
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