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.
Conventional wisdom has it that if you've never fallen in love, if you've never given birth to a child, if you've never tasted Vegemite... then you can't know what these experiences are like. But is the conventional wisdom correct? This week we're asking if there could in fact be various kinds of what-it-is-like knowledge, not all of which require direct first-hand experience.
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31:19
How important is aesthetic education?
It's often said that we're experiencing a crisis in the arts and Humanities, with declining student numbers in subjects that aren't deemed suitable for creating "job-ready graduates", and funding cuts slashing support for the arts. In a world of tight job markets and increasing importance given to STEM subjects, what can we do about it?
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Rediscovering Wilfrid Sellars
The American thinker Wilfrid Sellars died in 1989, and has been remembered as a primarily analytic philosopher. But today, Sellars is being rediscovered by a new generation of Continental philosophers - and, perhaps surprisingly, Marxists. What do these thinkers find in Sellars, and how are his thoughts on science and knowledge being applied to questions of politics and society?
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Auschwitz: experiencing what can't be experienced
This week marks 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz at the end of the Second World War. Representation in literature and cinema of the horrors that took place at Auschwitz is fraught with ethical ambiguities, as is the experience of actually visiting Auschwitz, which many people do today. The place stands as a famous memorial, known to all - and yet, this week's guest fears that the lessons of Auschwitz are being forgotten.
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Summer season: History and narrative
Historians are commonly thought of as being a little like archaeologists or scientists - they're in the business of uncovering facts, and then presenting those facts to the public as accurately as possible. But this week we're considering history as a species of narrative, and the historian as someone who doesn't "discover" the meaning of the past but constructs it.
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.