You've Got It All Wrong
by Thought Experiment Media
A weekly show about philosophy, science and the history of ideas from the Allen Brothers and Mark Sanders (best known to listeners as "America's Sweetheart"). If you can imagine what would happen if Plato and Carl Sagan were guests on The Daily Show, then you have a pretty good idea of what's going on here. Each week the trio provides an overview of a philosophical topic, a history of the problem and insights into contemporary thinking. They also take a behind-the-scenes look at the philosophers who came up with these ideas: usually they are kind of nuts (the guy who pioneered Utilitarian ethics had his body mummified and put on display at his college). If you wish your Philosophy 101 course had been more informative, less boring and taught by a professor who drank during class, then this podcast is for you.
Episodes
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Ep 22: Paradoxes Part II - Buford, Beethoven and Brothers
All handsome people enjoy a good paradox, so we decided to open up our paradox box again and pick out a few new ones for this episode. A lot of paradoxes have to do with the way language works, and how it fails us when we try to describe certain aspects of our experience. Often a series of...
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Ep 21: Halloween Spooktacular—From Aardvark to Zombies!
Are zombies real? Could we all be zombies? On this special Halloween episode, we raise topics from the dead—specifically we’re reanimating our discussion of philosophical zombies from Episode 2. This time we take a closer look at qualia, a technical term for the experiences that are unique to us…
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Ep 20: Listener Mail - Sam Harris and the Ethics of Jabba's Droid Dungeon
In this episode we sort through some listener mail and attempt to answer your most pressing questions. A number of fans wanted to know why we didn’t mention Sam Harris’s book, “The Moral Landscape,” in our episode about moral realism. In order to answer that question, we had to watch his TED talk...
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Ep 19: Ontological Argument for the Existence of God - The Everything Bagel
In this episode we jump around in time. From a conversation last year at a bagel shop, to Paco’s college years and all the way back to the middle ages. What do an everything bagel and the ontological argument for the existence of God have to do with each other? We discuss Saint Anselm’s extremely...
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Ep 18: Moral Realism - Vampire Socrates
Are moral statements objectively true? When we say “stealing for fun is wrong,” are we making a factual claim about the world, or are we just voicing an opinion? Many philosophers, known as moral realists, have attempted to show that “stealing for fun is wrong” is true in exactly the same way…
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Ep 17: Rationalism vs. Empiricism - Kevin Spacey Eyes
Do we learn everything we know from the world around us, or are there some things we learn independently of our sensory experiences? Rationalists argue that some of our knowledge, like concepts in algebra and trigonometry, is innate or intuitive. We know that two plus two equals four…
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Ep 16: Descriptivist Theory of Names - The Howie Mandel Effect
This is our second show about how proper names work (check out episode 10 for part one). It’s an important topic because much of philosophy is built around the concept of assigning truth values to sentences such as “Socrates is mortal.” And we can’t know if that sentence is true or false unless…
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Ep 15: Possible Worlds - Better call Saul Kripke
You might say it’s possible that Tom Selleck could have played Indiana Jones. But what does that actually mean? Can you prove that this statement is true or false in the some way? In today’s episode we look at how truth functional statements can be evaluated in the context of more than just our...
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Ep 14: Paradoxes - Infinite Oranges, Paradise Trunk
Paradoxes have confounded philosophers and handsome people for ages, perhaps since the dawn of language. The oldest ones we have on record come from the ancient Greeks. These paradoxes are thousands of years old, yet many of them remain unresolved. In this show we examine famous paradoxes from…
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Ep 13: Categorical Imperative - From Prussia With Love
One of the great debates in philosophy is whether or not moral rules are created by humans or exist independently from us as absolute truths. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that we could discover objective moral principles, and his theory of the Categorical Imperative was meant to...
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Ep 12: Personal Identity - What happens on Risa stays on Risa
If all of the cells in your body get replaced every ten years, will you still be the same person a decade from now? If all of your memories get erased today, will you still be the same person tomorrow? In this episode we take a look at tough questions about personal identity and the nature of the...
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Ep 11: Listener Mail - Gary Busey Syndrome
Questions from our listeners have been stacking up, and in this episode we tackle a few of your your most pressing concerns. Is there such a thing as an evil person, and if so, does Gary Busey have anything to do with it? What’s up with Thomas Aquinas's DDE (doctrine of double effect), and does…
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Ep 10: Sense and Reference - The Superman Paradox
What’s in a name? In his 1892 paper, “Sense and Reference,” the German philosopher Gottlob Frege gave an unconventional answer to this question. Up until that point, most philosophers thought of names as simple labels or pointers that referred to physical objects. If you wanted to know the…
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Ep 9: The New Riddle of Induction - Eaten by a Grue
Inductive reasoning is the process whereby we take a lot of specific observations and use them to form more general conclusions. For example, because we’ve seen millions of black ravens, we conclude that all ravens are black. In this episode we review some of the problems with inductive…
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Ep 8: Ship of Theseus - One Ship, Two Ship, Old Ship, New Ship
The Ship of Theseus is one of longest-standing paradoxes in philosophy. It asks us to consider how something can change over time, but still remain the same thing. If we take a ship, like the Ship of Theseus, and gradually replace all of the planks and sails and other parts, is there a point at...
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Ep 7: Compatibilism - To-do list: Cake, Ketamine, Gym, Podcast
The problem of free will has long haunted philosophers who also want to believe that the laws of physics govern everything in the universe. According to determinism, once set in motion the universe is essentially a giant “clockwork” where all future events can be predicted. But if that’s true…
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Ep. 6: Thomas Kuhn – Losing my Saganity
In his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that the history of science is not the history of a steady march towards the truth that we usually imagine. Rather, science moves in fits and starts, which Kuhn famously described as “paradigm shifts.” Often the new...
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Ep. 5: Time Theory – A Time, B Time, C All-Of-The-Above Time
Time is a fundamental part of how we experience the world. But when we try to describe what time actually is, things get murky pretty fast. The philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart laid out a framework that underpins much of the contemporary debate about the nature of time. In “A-series” time, the…
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Ep. 4: Supererogation - The Spiritual Bank Account
In traditional moral philosophy there are three kinds of actions: Good actions you’re required to do, bad actions you’re not allowed to do, and permittable actions that are neither good nor bad. The philosopher J.O. Urmson introduced a fourth category: Good actions that you’re not required to do....
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Ep. 3: Gettier Problems - A Squishy Dodge
The traditional definition of “knowledge,” first put forward by Plato, is a “justified, true belief.” That definition stuck for a few thousand years until Edmund Gettier wrote a famous paper in 1963. The eponymous “Gettier problems” outlined in the paper threw a wrench in the works for the field…
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Ep. 2: The Mind-Body Problem - My Sad is Different From Your Sad
Are humans just a mere collection of atoms, arranged just so, or is the “self” something that transcends the physical world? This question goes all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, but Rene Descartes kicked off the modern debate in his famous “Meditations on First Philosophy.” In this episode...
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Ep. 1: Utilitarianism - I've Got a Serial Killer's Liver
Is doing the most good for the most people always the right thing to do? The moral theory known as “consequentialism” holds that our decisions should be guided by their outcomes. Utilitarianism is one type of consequentialism, which says that our moral choices should be focused on maximizing...
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About this show
A weekly show about philosophy, science and the history of ideas from the Allen Brothers and Mark Sanders (best known to listeners as "America's Sweetheart"). If you can imagine what would happen if Plato and Carl Sagan were guests on The Daily Show, then you have a pretty good idea of what's going on here. Each week the trio provides an overview of a philosophical topic, a history of the problem and insights into contemporary thinking. They also take a behind-the-scenes look at the philosophers who came up with these ideas: usually they are kind of nuts (the guy who pioneered Utilitarian ethics had his body mummified and put on display at his college). If you wish your Philosophy 101 course had been more informative, less boring and taught by a professor who drank during class, then this podcast is for you.
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