Egg Timer Philosophy

This episode of the egg timer explores Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay 'Civil Disobedience' .  Thoreau's approach to civil disobedience is put in the spotlight and we see how his view compares and contrasts with that of major 20th century advocates for civil disobedience such as Gandhi and King.

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Art Attribution: By Edward Sidney Dunshee (1823-1907) - Anna Ricketson (1902) Daniel Ricketson and his friends[1], Boston: Houghton Mifflin, OCLC 2952813, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24950780

This episode of the egg timer continues on the theme of knowledge from last week's episode.  But a shift in focus is made toward the work of the 11th century Islamic thinker, Al-Ghazali.  As we see, Al-Ghazali masterfully demonstrated the case for epistemic skepticism roughly 400 years before Descartes is often credited with accomplishing this feat.

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Arabic Calligraphy Attribution: By السيف ذو الوشاح - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50000224

What, if anything, can we know with absolute certainty?  This episode of the egg timer takes a critical look at the answer Rene Descartes gives to this question.  His answer has provided the foundation for the last 400 years of philosophical thought surrounding knowledge.

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Art Attribution: Frans Hals  - André Hatala [e.a.] (1997) De eeuw van Rembrandt, Bruxelles: Crédit communal de Belgique, ISBN 2-908388-32-4.

If you could plug into in a machine that would provide you with the experience of any desire and wish that you had while all the time your brain were hooked up to electrodes running to the machine would you flip the switch and plug into the machine?  This thought provoking question posed by Robert Nozick is the topic of this week's egg timer.  And yes Nozick wrote about this idea roughly 25 years before the first Matrix film was released on the big screen.

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Image Attribution: By made by Alexander Wivel [1]. - knol article, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8719730

A podcast where philosophical ideas are scrambled up in about five minutes. From ancient philosophy to contemporary approaches and everything in between, if you are looking for accessible, interesting, and relevant philosophy served up fast then you are in the right spot. New episode weekly.

If we dismantle a ship one plank at a time and replace the rotting wood with new planks of wood slowly over a few decades and then wake up to find that the ship no longer has any of the original parts left is it the same ship?  This is the puzzle of the Ship of Theseus. During this episode questions about identity over time will float past ships and be applied to persons as well.

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Art Attribution: Rémi Kaupp, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

This episode of the egg timer explores John Stuart Mill's 'harm principle'.  Mill offers this principle to suggest when the liberty of the person can be legitimately restricted.  The basic idea is that the liberty of people can be restricted when they harm or threaten to harm others.  What exactly this amounts to will be the crux of this episode.

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Art Attribution: By London Stereoscopic Company - Hulton Archive, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30913285

This inaugural episode of the Podcast starts things off by looking at the Ancient tradition of Stoicism.  The life approach where one is ever-cautious to avoid basking too much in glory or worrying about the problems that life might hold for us in the future.  The stoic faces life as it is and refuses to become shaped and molded by that which is outside of themselves.  

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Art Attribution: Paolo Monti, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons