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The Wisdom Of — 392 episodes
Review of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey
Isaac Asimov's A Boy's Best Friend
Philosophers on sleepwalking through life!
Camus' Caligula and the Destructive Pursuit of Absolute Power
Aristotle on the Importance of Parents as Role-Models
Rebirth without the afterlife!
Beyond the Man Cave: Philosophers on Rethinking Masculine Space
The Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey - How to stay on course in your life despite the temptations!
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Why wisdom is more important than ever today!
Joyce vs. Beckett - Everything or Nothing?
Pythagoras on diet - The beauty of vegetarianism!
Nietzsche on diet and self-overcoming!
How philosophy can save your life!
Hegel - Is history really moving towards freedom?
Business culture and the corruption of moral language
Socrates versus Heidegger - Can trees teach us anything?
On Memory and the Dead - A Defence against Oblivion
Nietzsche - Have you understood me? Dionysus versus Christ.
Karl Jaspers - What does it mean to be a hero in the modern age?
Byung-Chul Han - The disappearance of thinking!
Freedom, Happiness, and Control: Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor and Huxley's Mustapha Mond!
Stop deferring - Choose yourself into existence!
Nietzsche and van Gogh - The significance of the year 1888!
Dostoevsky on the limitations of innocence!
Boccaccio's DeCameron - Escaping the chaos and living rightly again!
Hegel and Plato - The Problem of Democracy
Simone Weil - Gravity, Grace and Love!
The Great Gatsby, CARELESSNESS and AI
The Rise of the Emoticons
Kaufman's The Faith of a Heretic - The dissent that keeps knowledge alive!
The Personal Journals of Camus and Kierkegaard!
The Samurai Sword and AI
Max Weber - The age of the disenchantment of the world!
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death
Heidegger - The Disappearance of the World!
Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet - Writing as an existential necessity!
Epicurus on Gratitude
William James - Pluralism and Free Will!
Let's bring back the language of the SOUL!
Rousseau and Han - Today's Loneliness Epidemic!
The Spirit of Ancient Greek Tragedy - Why we need it so badly today!
La Mettrie's Man the Machine - From Cartesian Dualism to Joyful Materialism!
Edmund Burke - Inherited Wisdom and the Perils of Starting Anew!
Rollo May - How Art Overcomes Nihilism!
A reminder from Mircea Eliade on the significance of the New Year!
The Poverty of Wealth: Nietzsche on Money and Mediocrity!
In the spirit of Christmas - Why the path of self-interest will always fail you
Walter Benjamin - Against the Copy: Holding On to the Real in an Age of Reproduction!
Barthes, Kierkegaard, Han - What happened to the erotic?
Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund - Pick a path, pay the price, live the life!
Bertrand Russell and Byung-Chul Han: Self-absorption is the source of unhappiness!
Great philosophers on how to stay young as we get older!
Why Samuel Beckett is so funny!
Voltaire's "Crush the infamous thing" and our age of tragic regression
Dostoevsky, Ricoeur, Kierkegaard - The future needs the past!
Orwell's 1984 - Fake News and the destruction of language
Feuerbach and Marx - We created God in our own image!
Aristotle - Why Competency is essential for Happiness!
Consciousness and the Universe - From Matter to Meaning!
Byung-Chul Han and Fromm - Clean shiny machines and our Necrophilia!
Kant vs. Aristotle - Duty vs. Character!
The rise and the danger of binary thinking
Montaigne's self-fashioning vs. the curated facade of today's self!
Optimize this! - The cost of constant improvement
Three famous philosophers who were practically unknown in their own time!
The death of expertise is the demise of civilization!
David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous - Living in attunement with the earth!
When Religion becomes Shallow
Julian Jaynes - The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and AI!
A human history of intelligence without kindness - A cautionary analogy for the advent of AI
Cicero and Simone de Beauvoir on Old Age - The Self, the Other and growing old authentically!
Eden, Adam and Eve: Thank God for the Fall! - Why paradise is deeply problematic!
Byung-Chul Han - The Transparency Society
To our Children
Samuel Beckett - "I can't go on. I'll go on."
Reclaiming the power of Melancholy!
Alexander Nehamas - Platonic Irony!
The Pathetic Nature of the Sycophant!
The Absurd and the Sand: A Camusian Reading of Woman in the Dunes
Aristotle and Nietzsche - A return to TOUCH in a disembodied age!
The Philosopher and his Poodles: Schopenhauer's Ethics of Compassion!
The Fissure of Being, or Why You’re Never Whole: Sartre’s Existential Bombshell!
Carl Jung, Heidegger, and the California Gold Rush!
Star Wars vs. Star Trek - Why Star Trek is better!
Byung-Chul Han - Why so many of us feel so empty today!
ASMR - A sensory rebellion against our disembodied age!
Susan Wolf and Dostoevsky - The Problem with being a Moral Saint!
Wisdom as Content, Grifters, and why Socrates wouldn’t have used Patreon!
The Cynics - Ya gotta be TOUGH to be happy!
Learning to Love: Nietzsche, Beauty and the Beast, and Don Quixote!
Astrology - The Zodiac delusion!
Jesus and Rousseau on Hypocrisy (or Wolves in Virtue's clothing!)
Will Durant - The top ten greatest thinkers of all time!
Henri Bergson - Overcoming the tyranny of mechanical time!
Greek tragedy, Pollution and AI! + announcement!
If I could time travel....Cafe, Paris, 1940's!
Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night - Don't surrender the flame!
Kafka's A Hunger Artist - The Death of Uncompromising Art!
Naomi Klein - The Apocalypse, Mars, and the Bunker Nation!
Why We Can't Avoid Making JUDGMENTS—And Why That's a Great Thing!
Adorno on Animals - "The degradation of a creature to the status of a mere thing"
Humour as Social Critique - Let's keep LAUGHING at POWER!
Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky - Some major DIFFERENCES!
Miles Davis - Why LESS IS MORE!
Heidegger - The death of the LOVE LETTER in the time of the digital message!
Buddhism and NON-ATTACHMENT - Some Objections!
Byung-Chul Han and Plato on the POWER of BEAUTY!
What does it mean to be a GOOD FATHER?
Foucault and Kierkegaard - Where the heck has YOUTHFUL REBELLION gone?
Simone De Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt - A Happiness of ENGAGEMENT!
Socrates - Power and Stupidity: A Destructive Combination!
Pascal and Kierkegaard on the SUPERFICIAL LIFE - Owning up to one's SELF!
Why Plato wrote dialogues - Let's bring back the power of real conversation!
The Myth of Icarus and Daedalus - Melting the wings of our children!
Nietzsche - DECADENT Culture!
Erich Fromm - Submission to Authoritarianism!
Carl Jung - UFOs and their PSYCHIC SIGNIFICANCE!
Camus's The Rebel - Helping us to find MEASURE in a time of EXTREMES!
The Cult of Personality and CEO worship!
Kierkegaard - We've forgotten how to exist! Passion in the age of apathy!
Dostoevsky - Kiss the earth! Why the soil matters!
Byung-Chul Han and Aristotle - Why real friends shouldn't be afraid of conflict!
What time is it? - Chronos vs. Kairos!
The Beat Writers - If it ain't got that swing, it don't mean a thing!
Why the death of Socrates matters!
Selflessness as the antidote to death!
Kant's "What is Enlightenment?" - Emancipate your thinking!
The Delphic Injunction - KNOW THYSELF!
Bertrand Russell - Why I am not a Christian
Dostoevsky and Heidegger - How to escape the algorithm!
Cormac McCarthy's The Road - Each the other's world entire!
Byung-Chul Han and Gabriel Marcel on Hope!
Selfies and Existentialism!
What the heck happened to integrity and character?!
Marinetti and Futurism - Welcome to the machine!
The lost art of reading! And why reading makes us truly happy!
The problem with lying and liars!
Why the existentialists hate the bourgeois!
Aristotle, Leisure and AI - Outsourcing our humanity!
Freud, the Uncanny and AI!
Can you be good WITHOUT god?
Horace and Carpe Diem - What this famous phrase REALLY means!
The Presocratic philosophers - From myth to matter!
The THREE most important things I learned from graduate school!
Kierkegaard's The Present Age - Why Kierkegaard would have HATED the internet!
Socrates - The Hemlock Controversy!
Karl Jaspers - Boundary situations and Transcendence!
Callicles versus Socrates - On sound and leaky barrels!
Byung-Chul Han's The Crisis of Narration - Why information is not enough!
Love's Resurgence - Part 3 - Love as an Activity!
Love's Resurgence - Part 2 - Love as Expansion!
Love's Resurgence - Part 1 - The Fall of Eros!
Orwell's 1984 - The abuse of language and history!
Nietzsche on why art is crucially important for us!
Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea - Beyond the customary fishing grounds!
Socrates - The Man of Mystery!
The Ethics of Lawns!
Bertrand Russell - Fear of Public Opinion!
William Barrett - The disappearance of mystery in a world of technique!
The benefits of living a more simple life!
Final Regular Podcast Episode - The six thinkers and artists that have inspired me the most!
Jung and The Stages of Life - Mid-life crisis and old age!
The degeneration of gift-giving! A Christmas special!
Nietzsche on Buddhism!
Kafka's Letter to his Father!
Sartre vs. Camus: Revolutionary vs. Rebel - The Big Dispute!
Can you be GRATEFUL for life if you're an ATHEIST?
Existentialism and Cezanne's Doubt!
Lucretius - A spoonful of sugar!
Heraclitus - The times they are a-changin!
Thanatos - The fear of, and the desire for, death!
Some thoughts on the notion of the SUFFERING ARTIST!
John Stuart Mill - The marketplace of ideas, and the question of Truth!
Flaubert, le mot juste, and Schopenhauer's philosophy of language!
Euripides' Medea - Revenge turned into something inhuman!
Vico and The New Science - The Barbarism of Reflection!
St. Paul and Nietzsche - Make work a VOCATION not a job!
Saving the sublime and bringing back the awe in awesome!
Some differences between Eastern and Western philosophy
Karl Marx - Religion is a product of social disorder!
Can the immoralist be happy?
Do you really want to live forever?
Are you a Platonist or an Aristotelian?
The Pros and Cons of Nostalgia!
Eros and Agape - Two great but very different kinds of love!
Lou Salome - Was Nietzsche actually religious?
What I like about Robinson Crusoe!
Paul Tillich and Plato on Courage!
Descartes' I think, therefore I am!
Marcuse and Nietzsche - Rebellion against the Masses!
Fromm's To Have or To Be?
Does money bring happiness?!
Negative and Positive Freedom! (Isaiah Berlin, Plato and Fromm)
The power and sound of silence!
My problem with Tolstoy's Confession!
Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life
Plato's Allegory of the Cave: A warning to us!
Negative Visualization: the art of coping with tragedy!
Why we should care about classical antiquity!
Gabriel Marcel's Man Against Mass Society
A Philosophy Short: Privilege the present over the past! (Sartre and Nietzsche)
Badiou's In Praise of Love
Nussbaum and Nietzsche on Revenge and Punishment
A Philosophy Short: Only humans can die! (Rousseau and Heidegger)
Heidegger, ChatGPT, Buber and our bot relationships!
Niceness is Overrated!
Why our death isn't always about ourselves!
Aldous Huxley, Psychedelics and God!
Indigenous thought
Thoreau and the Companionship of Solitude
Marcus Aurelius - Even emperors have no power over death!
William Barrett on Modern Art and Existentialism
Ideology!
D.H. Lawrence and Schopenhauer on Sex and Love
Ayn Rand
Boethius's Consolations and the Talking Cure
Camus' The Fall
Shatner's tears and Earth's little onion skin
The love letters of Heloise and Abelard
Courage, Tillich, and that coward Silenus!
Happiness is Overrated!
Evil
Byung-Chul Han on Fingers, Phones and the Strangeness of Socrates!
Existentialism - The Philosophy of Affirmation!
Santa and Ethics!
Nehamas's Only a Promise of Happiness - The Place of Beauty in a World of Art
Atheism! (Part 2/2)
Atheism! (Part 1/2)
Pascal's Pensées
The Allure of Mystery Novels
Homer's Iliad
Climate Change, Solidarity and Love
Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane
Rollo May on Anxiety, Freedom and Creativity!
Why Socrates is Still Important Today!
Fromm's The Art of Loving
Nietzsche on Happiness, Meaning and Overcoming Resistance
Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Moral Purity and Dirty Hands
Carl Jung and Becoming All That You Are!
The Copernican Revolution
Plato on Education and Beauty
Voltaire's Candide - It's not all for the best!
Camus and Nietzsche on Hope
Rationalism versus Irrationalism
Tolstoy's How Much Land Does a Man Need?
The Top Philosophy Quotes of All Time! - Epictetus and Camus
Turgenev's Fathers and Sons
Nietzsche's Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit
Hesse's Siddhartha
Wall-E and the Soul of Dirt
Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity
Mill's Higher and Lower Pleasures
The Immorality of Tipping
Heidegger and the Typewriter
The Top Philosophy Quotes of All Time! - Sartre and Nietzsche
Dante and Vice
Byung-Chul Han's Non-Things
Orwell's Animal Farm
What is Philosophy?
The Top Philosophy Quotes of All Time! - Kierkegaard and Locke
Arendt's The Human Condition
What is a Work of Art?
Thomas Nagel and Absurdity
Nietzsche and the Love of Life
Kierkegaard's Diary of the Seducer
Suffering and Happiness
The Top Philosophy Quotes of All Time! - Protagoras and Marx
Fromm's Escape From Freedom
Intro For New Listeners
Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning
Iris Murdoch
Sartre's Nausea: How to Live Your Life Like a Song!
The Burdens and Benefits of Boredom
The Top Philosophy Quotes of All Time! - Berkeley and Leibniz
Seneca's The Shortness of Life
Would Socrates use Twitter?
Heidegger's Being and Time
A Eulogy on Love
Elon Musk and Mars
Anton Chekhov
Love and Possession
The Sun
Peter Singer on Animals
The Benefit of Being a Crab
Simone Weil
Freedom and Responsibility
Ecclesiastes
Socrates and Care of the Soul
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Gratitude
Buddhism and Stoicism on Anger
Beckett's Molloy
Anthropocentrism
Zorba the Greek
Narcissism
Plato's Republic
Buber and The Tyranny of the IT
Ibsen's A Doll's House
Sartre and the Creation of Value
Hesse's Journey to the East
Nietzsche and the Tightrope Walker
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Free Speech
Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Pain
The Fragility of Goodness
Thinking in a Digital Age
Dostoevsky and The Problem of Evil
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Cynic Diogenes and his Wine Barrel
Gods - Yahweh
Aristotle and Character Development
Gods - Thor
The Stoics on Fate
Gods - Buddha
Gods - Jesus
Gods - Gaia
Grace
Beauty - Camus' Lyrical Essays
Beauty - The Song of Songs
The Ancient Greek countryside
Beauty - Sports
Beauty - Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil
The Passionate Life! Something to Inspire Your Mornings With!
Beauty - Nabokov's Lolita
Science & Tech - The Dispossessed
Science & Tech - Brave New World
Science & Tech - Star Trek
Science & Tech - Nietzsche
Science & Tech - Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground
Listener Requests - Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
Listener Requests - Lord of the Flies
Listener Requests - Shakespeare's Hamlet
Listener Requests - Dostoevsky's The Possessed
Ancient Happiness
Listener Requests - Emily Dickinson
A Thanks to the Listeners!
Tragedy - Moby Dick
Tragedy - Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents
Tragedy - Euripides' Bacchae
Tragedy - Waiting For Godot
Films - Rashomon
Films - The Tree of Life
Q&A in the Deep Dark Forest!
Greek Hospitality
Schweitzer's Reverence For Life
Films - Fight Club
Films - Fellini's 8 1/2
Films - Star Wars
Empedocles' Cosmic Powers
Paintings - Van Gogh's Starry Night
Paintings - Frida Kahlo
Paintings - Munch's The Scream
Seneca on the WIDE life!
Paintings - Picasso's The Young Ladies of Avignon
Masks
Paintings - The Lascaux Cave Paintings
Authenticity - Camus' The Stranger
Carl Jung and Rollo May on the power of words and symbols!
Authenticity - Alice Munro
Aristotle on Friendship
Authenticity - Salinger's Catcher in the Rye
An ode to Dogs!
Authenticity - Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
Authenticity - Bob Dylan
Authenticity - Kafka's Metamorphosis
Morality - Rousseau's Emile
Morality - Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Morality - Gide's The Immoralist
Morality - Sophocles' Oedipus Rex
Morality - The Story of Abraham and Isaac
Morality - Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
Happiness - John Keats
Happiness - F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
Happiness - Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus
Happiness - Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
Happiness - Epicurus' Letter to Menoeceus
Happiness - Herodotus
Love - Thomas Mann's Death in Venice
Love - Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov
Love - Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Love - Homer's Odyssey
Love - Sappho
Love - Plato's Symposium
Meaning - Cervantes' Don Quixote
Meaning - Hemingway's A Clean Well Lighted Place
Meaning - Camus' The Plague
Meaning - Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Meaning - The Book of Job
Meaning - The Epic Of Gilgamesh