You've Got It All Wrong

Are zombies real? Could we all be zombies? On this special Halloween episode, we raise topics from the dead—specifically we’re reanimating our discussion of philosophical zombies from Episode 2. This time we take a closer look at qualia, a technical term for the experiences that are unique to us as individuals, such as “what it’s like for Mark to be scared by Gremlins.” Can qualia be explained in phy...

In this episode we sort through some listener mail and attempt to answer your most pressing questions. A number of fans wanted to know why we didn’t mention Sam Harris’s book, “The Moral Landscape,” in our episode about moral realism. In order to answer that question, we had to watch his TED talk and then wing it. We also revisit some questions about the ethics of robot torture, and take a closer loo...

In this episode we jump around in time. From a conversation last year at a bagel shop, to  Paco’s college years and all the way back to the middle ages. What do an everything bagel and the ontological argument for the existence of God have to do with each other? We discuss Saint Anselm’s extremely analytical argument for God and how his contemporary, Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, challenged it directly wit...

Are moral statements objectively true? When we say “stealing for fun is wrong,” are we making a factual claim about the world, or are we just voicing an opinion? Many philosophers, known as moral realists, have attempted to show that “stealing for fun is wrong” is true in exactly the same way that “two plus two equals four” is true. In this episode we examine two different types of moral realism, and...

Do we learn everything we know from the world around us, or are there some things we learn independently of our sensory experiences? Rationalists argue that some of our knowledge, like concepts in algebra and trigonometry, is innate or intuitive. We know that two plus two equals four independently of our specific observations of the world around us. Empiricists argue that all knowledge comes from exp...

This is our second show about how proper names work (check out episode 10 for part one). It’s an important topic because much of philosophy is built around the concept of assigning truth values to sentences such as “Socrates is mortal.” And we can’t know if that sentence is true or false unless we know what “Socrates” means. In this episode we look at how Bertrand Russell developed his Descriptivist ...

You might say it’s possible that Tom Selleck could have played Indiana Jones. But what does that actually mean? Can you prove that this statement is true or false in the some way? In today’s episode we look at how truth functional statements can be evaluated in the context of more than just our world. We look at the role of Possible Worlds and Modal Logic through the work of Saul Kripke, Ruth Barcan Marcus and David Lewis with a li...

Paradoxes have confounded philosophers and handsome people for ages, perhaps since the dawn of language. The oldest ones we have on record come from the ancient Greeks. These paradoxes are thousands of years old, yet many of them re...

One of the great debates in philosophy is whether or not moral rules are created by humans or exist independently...

If all of the cells in your body get replaced every ten years, will you still be the same person a decade from now? If all of your memories get erased today, will you still be the same person tomorrow? In this episode we ta...

Questions from our listeners have been stacking up, and in this episode we tackle a few of your your most pre...

What’s in a name? In his 1892 paper, “Sense and Reference,” the German philosopher Gottlob Frege gave an unco...

Inductive reasoning is the process whereby we take a lot of specific observations and use them to form more general conclusions. For example, because we’ve seen millions of black ravens, we conclude that all ravens are blac...

The Ship of Theseus is one of longest-standing paradoxes in philosophy. It asks us to consider how something can change over time, but still remain the same thing. If we take a ship, lik...

The problem of free will has long haunted philosophers who also want to believe that the laws of physics govern everything in the universe. According to determinism, once set in motion the universe is essentially a giant “clockwork” where all future events can be predicted. But if that’s true, then why do we feel like we can change the course of...