Site • RSS • Apple PodcastsDescription (podcaster-provided):
Join us each month as we engage in philosophical discussions about the most common-place topics with host Jack Russell Weinstein, professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Dakota. He is the director of The Institute for Philosophy in Public Life.Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ everyday-life philosophy • ethics, responsibility, denial, evil • mental health: addiction, madness, Freud • privacy/oblivion, tech and virtual reality • identity, fashion, emotions • social mobility, education, capitalism/Marx • nature, agriculture, sustainability • peace, nonviolenceThis podcast brings academic philosophy into conversation with everyday experience through monthly interviews and reflections led by philosopher Jack Russell Weinstein. Across the episodes, guests from philosophy and adjacent fields use familiar concerns—health, work, relationships, technology, and culture—as entry points for examining questions about meaning, responsibility, and how to live well.
A recurring focus is moral and psychological life. Discussions consider addiction and recovery, the nature of “madness,” and the ways negative emotions such as shame, guilt, and anger can shape character and ethical judgment. Several conversations explore self-deception and denial, asking why people reject apparent facts and how identity, fear, and social pressures affect belief.
The show also returns to social and political philosophy. Episodes address inequality and social mobility, peace and nonviolence, ordinary people’s participation in large-scale wrongdoing, and how philosophical inquiry functions amid contentious politics, censorship debates, and changing educational contexts. Major intellectual figures and traditions appear as touchstones, including Freud and Marx, alongside examinations of Indigenous philosophy as a distinctive framework for thinking about community, nature, and relational responsibility.
Another theme is how value is created and preserved over time: what it means to save objects for posterity, how memory and forgetting relate to privacy, and how we decide what is “good enough” in life. The podcast also connects philosophy to wider domains—agriculture’s purposes, fashion and identity, human connection to nature, and emerging technologies like virtual reality—probing how perception, presence, and reality itself may be changing.
