Episode #020 - Was Mathematics Invented or Discovered?
Here is a question that sounds like it should have an obvious answer. Was mathematics invented or discovered? Did humans create the number two the way we created the word for it? Or did the number two...
24 Aug 40min
Episode #019 - Epicurus Was Not an Epicurean
If someone described a philosophy whose central teachings were: live simply, eat bread and water, cultivate close friendships, manage your desires so they never exceed what is easily available, and sp...
17 Aug 18min
Episode #018 - Probability and Judgment: Why We Get Risk Wrong
Here is a medical test scenario. A disease affects one in a thousand people. There is a test that is ninety-nine percent accurate. You take the test. It comes back positive. What is the probability th...
10 Aug 31min
Episode #017 - The Paradox of Tolerance: Can a Free Society Tolerate Intolerance?
Karl Popper wrote one of the most widely shared philosophical texts on the internet. It is also one of the most consistently misread.The argument is simple on its surface: a society that tolerates int...
3 Aug 31min
Episode #016 - Nietzsche: God Is Dead — Now What?
Nietzsche is probably the most misread philosopher in the Western tradition. He has been claimed by Nazis, nihilists, self-help gurus, and people who have read a sentence or two and decided they under...
27 Jul 31min
Episode #015 - William James and the Will to Believe
Imagine you are standing at the edge of a chasm. You need to get to the other side. The leap is possible — just barely — but you cannot know in advance whether you will make it. Does believing you can...
20 Jul 29min
Episode #014 - Viktor Frankl and the Meaning Made from Suffering
There is a question that arrives most forcefully when circumstances are at their worst. Not why is this happening in the causal sense, but the question underneath that one: what does this mean? Is the...
13 Jul 30min
Episode #013 - What Does It Mean to Live Philosophically?
Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. That sentence is probably the most quoted in the history of philosophy. But the popular interpretation — that you should think more and be more s...
6 Jul 30min
