One Philosopher At A Time

Explore Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian vision, from the felicific calculus to his push for legal and political reform based on real human consequences. The episode also looks at punishment, proportionality, and why Bentham remains a radical critic of cruelty, privilege, and legal fog.

This episode explores Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution, showing why he saw abstraction and radical rupture as threats to ordered freedom. It also explains his support for reform, his view of tradition as accumulated social wisdom, and why prudence matters in politics.

This episode explores Montesquieu as more than the thinker behind separation of powers, tracing how his experiences in absolutist France shaped his warnings about despotism and arbitrary rule. It also breaks down The Spirit of the Laws, his idea of political liberty, and why laws must fit the history, culture, and structure of the societies they govern.

This episode explores Voltaire as the Enlightenment’s most public agitator, from his exile in England and defense of pluralism to his sharp attacks on censorship, clerical power, and religious cruelty. It also revisits the Calas affair and explains how his ideas on tolerance were shaped by real-world injustice.

This episode explores how Wollstonecraft challenged Enlightenment thinkers to make their universal rights truly universal, especially by confronting the way women were denied education and political agency. It also examines her critique of Rousseau, her vision of virtue as rational moral maturity, and why marriage and dependence mattered so much to her philosophy.

This episode breaks down Kant’s critical philosophy, from Hume’s challenge and the Copernican revolution to the difference between phenomena and things in themselves. It also explains the categorical imperative with a clear example and shows how Kant tries to secure both knowledge and moral responsibility.

This episode reexamines Adam Smith as a moral philosopher of sympathy, conscience, and the impartial spectator, not just a champion of markets. It also explores the division of labor, the pin factory, and why Smith believed commerce depends on law, trust, justice, and moral restraint.

This episode explores Rousseau’s theory of freedom under modern social life, from amour de soi and amour-propre to the rise of property, inequality, and domination. It also places him in the Enlightenment and compares his ideas with Hobbes and Locke, showing why his political thought mattered so much to later revolutionaries.

This episode explores Hume’s empiricism, from impressions and ideas to his famous challenge to causation and induction. It also examines his view of the self as a bundle of perceptions and his broader critique of philosophical certainty.

Explore George Berkeley’s immaterialism, from to be is to be perceived to his attack on abstract ideas and mind-independent matter. The episode also examines how God, perception, and the stability of everyday objects fit together in Berkeley’s philosophy.