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Diverse discussions with philosophers worth listening to. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ Philosophical discussions and live salons • Thinking skills and intellectual virtues • Anger, uncertainty, deference, charity • Cross-cultural philosophy (Asian/Confucian) • Freedom, harmony, hierarchy, equality • Ethics, politics, identity • Science, AI, consciousness, animals • Religion, evil, existentialism • Art, music, cycling interviewsThis podcast is a philosophy interview and discussion series hosted by Julian Baggini, bringing together professional philosophers and other creative or public figures for short-form conversations recorded in venues such as festivals, bookshops, and live salons. Across the episodes, the emphasis is on using philosophical tools to clarify ideas, test assumptions, and improve the quality of thinking, often by examining the habits and virtues associated with careful reasoning. Listeners can expect practical reflection on how people form beliefs, argue well, handle uncertainty, and recognise common pitfalls such as treating abstractions as concrete things, projecting human traits onto non-human phenomena, or becoming overconfident in one’s own concepts.
A recurring thread is moral and political philosophy applied to contemporary life. The show explores how to discuss contentious issues and why some debates become especially fraught, alongside broader questions about freedom, equality, hierarchy, and the relationship between individuals and the state. It also ranges widely across philosophical traditions, including substantial engagement with Asian and cross-cultural philosophy—especially Confucian, Buddhist, and comparative perspectives—using them to question familiar Western frameworks around the self, harmony, freedom, and ethical life.
The podcast frequently connects philosophy to other domains: psychotherapy and Stoicism, science and how (or whether) it can guide how we should live, artificial intelligence and what it reveals about humanity, animal minds and animal ethics, and emerging technologies that could alter human nature. There are also episodes that treat cultural subjects as philosophically revealing, using conversations with artists and musicians to consider how aesthetic practice intersects with questions about meaning, values, and how we conceptualise the world. Alongside serious inquiry, the feed includes occasional experimental or archival live material that plays with philosophical methods and their limits.