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What is mental health? Can we make sense of psychosis? What’s the connection between mental health and concepts including race & evolution?Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ Philosophy lectures on mental health/psychiatry, ethics and emotions, memory/trauma/forgiveness, identity and selfhood, race/decolonisation, public commemoration, technology’s impact on remembering, global/Asian philosophy, law and healthcare researchThis podcast presents recordings of public philosophy lectures that use conceptual analysis and cross-disciplinary perspectives to address both longstanding philosophical problems and urgent contemporary issues. Across the series, speakers examine how we understand minds and persons, how moral life is shaped by relationships and emotions, and how social institutions and cultural frameworks influence what counts as knowledge, health, and justice.
A significant strand focuses on mental health and “madness,” probing what it means to call someone mentally ill and whether psychiatric models should treat distress as dysfunction, strategy, or something best understood through developmental, social, cultural, and existential lenses. Several talks connect these questions to ethics and policy, including the roles of diagnosis, communication and agency in clinical encounters (especially for young people), ethnic inequalities and structural racism in mental health outcomes, and the relationship between mental disorder and legal responsibility. Related discussions address suicide and assisted dying, and the difficulties of hearing and doing justice to traumatic experience.
Another major theme is remembering and forgetting. Lectures explore memory’s role in personal identity and intimate relationships, the effects of emotion and trauma on how the past is recalled, and whether remembering can itself be morally and socially unjust when shaped by stereotypes. The series also considers public commemoration—who is remembered, for how long, and according to what standards of justice—as well as practices like conservation and forgiveness, and the moral value of forgetting for goods such as privacy. Several contributions examine how digital platforms, social media, and AI reshape personal archives and public memory, altering what is preserved, shared, or erased.
The podcast also ranges widely across philosophical traditions and methods, engaging with figures and ideas from Avicenna and Descartes to Confucian, Buddhist, and other global philosophies. Topics include doubt and skepticism, the nature of the first-person perspective, hospitality and cross-cultural understanding, decolonising philosophy, global aesthetics, and the role of philosophical storytelling and contemplative practices. Throughout, the lectures connect abstract questions to practical concerns such as public discourse, moralism in politics, pregnancy and ethics, and even the philosophical assumptions behind green finance and climate responses.
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The You Turn, Naomi Eilan 2025-Nov-28 91 minutes |
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Empathy and Ethics: A Complicated Relation?, Rowan Williams 2025-Nov-21 90 minutes |
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Avicennan and Cartesian Doubt, Peter Adamson 2025-Nov-07 93 minutes |
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The Most Permanent Interests of the Human Spirit, John Haldane 2025-Oct-31 95 minutes |
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Why philosophers need to think about pregnancy, Fiona Woollard 2025-Oct-24 88 minutes |
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What became of the public philosopher?, Regina Rini 2025-Oct-17 91 minutes |
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The Problematic and the Unproblematic, Nikhil Krishnan 2025-Oct-10 89 minutes |
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Choosing how we Represent the Past; Derek Matravers 2025-Jun-05 87 minutes |
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Proust’s Theory of Memory and Knowledge; Tom Stern 2025-May-29 89 minutes |
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Who should we remember, and for how long? A theory of justice for public commemoration; James Wilson 2025-May-22 84 minutes |
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Can memories be unjust?; Katherine Puddifoot 2025-May-15 77 minutes |
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Remembering the dead; Kathleen Higgins 2025-May-08 87 minutes |
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Trauma, emotion, and memory; Michael Brady 2025-May-01 88 minutes |
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On Being Emotionally Haunted by One’s Past, Matthew Ratcliffe 2025-Apr-24 87 minutes |
Insta-Worthy Memories and Filtered Truth: The Effects of Technology on Our Personal Histories and Records of the Past2025-Apr-17 89 minutes |
Conservation as a Method of Remembering (and forgetting) - Erich Hatala Matthes2025-Mar-20 87 minutes |
Forgiveness: Do we need it? - Lucy Allais2025-Mar-12 88 minutes |
How We Remember and Forget Online; Alessandra Tanesini2025-Feb-24 88 minutes |
Remember Who You Are: Personal Identity and Memory; Presented by Marya Schechtman2025-Jan-15 88 minutes |
Trauma, Emotion, and Memory; Presented by James Dawes2024-Dec-06 85 minutes |
The Importance of Forgetting; Presented by Rima Basu2024-Nov-25 81 minutes |
Rethinking Disenchantment and the Immanent Frame; Presented by Camilia Kong2024-Jul-03 92 minutes |
Beyond Psychiatry: Rethinking Madness Outside Medicine; Presented by Justin Garson2024-Jul-03 86 minutes |
Mad Knowledge and Relations; Presented by Jasna Russo and Erick Fabris2024-Jul-03 87 minutes |
Ethnic Inequalities in Experience of Mental Distress; Presented by Kam Bhui2024-Jul-03 91 minutes |
The Person in Psychiatry; Presented by Sanneke de Haan2024-Jul-03 86 minutes |
How Can we Make Progress in Mental Healthcare Research?; Presented by Neil Armstrong and Nicola Byrom2024-Jul-03 87 minutes |
Communicating to Increase Agency in Youth Mental Health; Presented by Rose McCabe, Lisa Bortolotti, and Michele Lim2024-Jul-03 68 minutes |
Mental Disorder and the Criminal Law; Presented by Claire Hogg2024-Jul-03 87 minutes |
Health and Disease: Experimental Philosophy of Medicine; Presented by Somogy Varga and Andrew J. Latham2024-Jul-03 85 minutes |
Who Gets to Call Whom Mad?; Presented by Richard Gipps2024-Jul-03 85 minutes |
Understanding Suicide and Assisted Dying; Presented by Mona Gupta2024-Jul-03 86 minutes |
Beyond Psychiatric Diagnosis: Presented by Lucy Johnstone and Mary Boyle2024-Jul-03 79 minutes |
A Flaw in the Great Diamond of the World; Presented by Louis Sass2024-Jul-03 74 minutes |
Against Speaking Up; Presented by Havi Carel and Dan Degerman2024-Jun-28 76 minutes |
Rendering Trauma Audible with María del Rosario Acosta López2022-Jul-01 83 minutes |
Fernando Pessoa: The Poet as Philosopher with Jonardon Ganeri2022-Jun-24 69 minutes |
A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking with Roger Ames2022-Jun-17 74 minutes |
Decolonising Philosophy with Lewis Gordon2022-Jun-10 86 minutes |
Culture and Value in Du Bois’ The Gift of Black Folk with Chike Jeffers2022-Jun-03 88 minutes |
Getting Good at Bad Emotions with Amy Olberding2022-May-27 77 minutes |
Mutual Guardianship and Hospitality with Tamara Albertini2022-May-20 79 minutes |
The Ethics of Anger and Shame with Owen Flanagan2022-May-13 70 minutes |
The Possibility of Global Aesthetics with Eileen John2022-May-06 70 minutes |
The First Person in Buddhism with Nilanjan Das2022-Apr-29 78 minutes |
Japanese Philosophers on Plato’s Ideas with Noburu Notomi2022-Apr-22 64 minutes |
How to Change Your Mind with Leah Kalmanson2022-Apr-15 70 minutes |
Philosophical Storytelling with Helen de Cruz2022-Apr-15 71 minutes |
The Philosophy of Green Finance with Joanna Burch-Brown2022-Apr-15 55 minutes |