Philosophers’ Corner

  • Why Does Anything Exist?

    Why is there something rather than nothing? That’s the big question we’re asking in this week’s show. It’s an odd question that could be thought of as either supremely profound, or supremely silly. It’s hard to know what an answer might even look like.

  • Oneness is a Mystery

    Concepts such as infinity and oneness are problematic in terms of our capability to describe…

  • Extreme Altruism

      Altruists are people willing to do good things for others at a cost to…

  • People with Guns

    What do August 8, July 23, July 16, and June 17 have in common? Answer:…

  • Gun Control

      We usually think of the Bill of Rights as recognizing and guaranteeing to Americans…

  • The Science of Happiness

      Psychology used to be mostly concerned with unhappiness, treating the wounded, the traumatized, or the…

  • The Ancient Cosmos

    Cosmology—the study of the universe, how it was formed, and what laws govern its evolution—has exploded in the last few decades. But it’s not a new area of human inquiry. In fact, theories about the origin, nature, and structure of the cosmos go back thousands of years.

  • Simone de Beauvoir

    Simone de Beauvoir was probably best known as a novelist, and a feminist thinker and writer, but she was also an existentialist philosopher in her own right and, like her lover Sartre, thought a lot about the human struggle to be free.

  • The Debt Crisis

      International Debt, the debts that nations, often quite poor, owe to other nations and…

  • Finding Meaning in a Material World

    Modern science tells us there are no souls and nothing transcendent. There’s only dumb matter and energy, swirling aimlessly through the void. We humans are nothing but temporary arrangements of such matter – gone and forgotten in the blink of the cosmic eye! But what, then, is the point of it all? What, then, is the meaning of human life? That’s the question we’re grappling with today.

  • Is White Privilege a Distraction?

    Everybody knows that the US has a long and sorry history when it comes to racial injustice. It also has a long history of privileging the needs, concerns and narratives of white people over those of people of color. But how exactly are white privilege and racial injustice related? That’s our question for this week.