TrueSciPhi

Podcast Profile: The Philosopher's Arms

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23 episodes
2012 to 2017
Median: 27 minutes
Collection: Philosophy

Description (podcaster-provided):

Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):

This podcast brings philosophy into an informal pub setting, with host Matthew Sweet leading live, audience-involved discussions of classic and contemporary puzzles. Across the episodes, the show uses everyday examples and famous thought experiments to probe questions in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, often testing where common sense judgments hold up and where they break down.

A recurring focus is moral decision-making and responsibility: how to weigh harms and benefits in difficult choices, what it means to deserve blame, and how concepts like hypocrisy, exploitation, free-riding, and justice shape social life. The podcast also examines the moral status of actions and speech, including when words can cause harm, how hate speech should be understood, and whether there is an important difference between lying and merely misleading. Social and political topics appear through discussions of equality and discrimination, the ethics of influencing behaviour (including biomedical or psychological “enhancement”), and the relationship between morality and law.

Alongside these applied issues, the show explores foundational philosophical problems: whether we have free will, how we can justify predicting the future from the past (the problem of induction), and puzzles about identity and categories—what makes something the same thing over time, what counts as a genuine or a fake, and where vague boundaries fall (such as heaps or everyday classification disputes). Occasional forays into technology and personhood consider how we should treat human-like artificial beings and what happiness and reality amount to in scenarios involving simulated experience.