Philosophy Bites

You might expect people who specialize in moral philosophy to behave better than other people. Eric Schwitzgebel has done some empirical investigation of whether this is the case, and it doesn't seem ...

28 Sep 201316min

Many people have noticed similarities between what David Hume wrote about the self and Buddhist teaching on this subject. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites archive Alison Gopnik discusses the po...

14 Sep 201315min

Is it ever morally acceptable to kill one person to save many? Most people agree that in some extreme circumstances this, though psychologically difficult, can be the right action to take. In this epi...

1 Sep 201317min

You think you know what's best but don't do it. We've all been there. For Plato and Aristotle this weakness of will presented a philosophical problem. Jessica Moss explains their contrasting approache...

17 Aug 201312min

David Hume's 'Of the Standard of Taste' focuses on judgements about beauty in writing. Can we say with any authority that one writer or work is better than another? Michael Martin gives a clear analys...

3 Aug 201317min

What do we really care about? In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast Samuel Scheffler suggests that most of us care a lot about what happens after our deaths, and that affects what we feel ab...

20 Jul 201317min

Must humour be moral? What about jokes that rely on immoral attitudes?  Can they be funny? Are humour and morality simply separate spheres. Noel Carroll explores the relationship between humour and mo...

6 Jul 201319min

Can computers think? John Searle famously used the Chinese Room thought experiment to suggest that they can't. Daniel Dennett is suspicious about the way the thought experiment is set up. In this conv...

23 Jun 201316min