In 1998, the American philosopher Richard Rorty predicted dark days for democracy and the rise of a Trump-like figure in the USA. This week, with the publication of a new collection of Rorty's essays, we're considering the ongoing relevance of his work.

If you don't know much about women philosophers in the ancient Graeco-Roman world, you have a good excuse. They're known to have existed, but hardly any of their works have survived, and historical accounts of their lives tend to come from biographies written by men. This week we try to unravel the mystery.

During the lockdowns at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, people started to experience a strange sense of temporal distortion - time slowing down, time speeding up, time getting bent out of shape. This week we hear from a philosopher, a historian and a sociologist about how that might have happened, and what it might mean.

Mary Graham is one of Australia's most distinguished Aboriginal academics and authors. In this conversation, she articulates a political philosophy of relationality, conflict management and much more.

Libertarians are hard to pin down – they have a number of seemingly contradictory commitments that we normally associate with people on either the left or the right of politics. Libertarians like small government, low taxes and free markets – but they also favour things like same-sex marriage and drug legalisation. So what exactly is libertarianism, and where did it come from?

Cynicism is a philosophical tradition that existed for centuries in the ancient Graeco-Roman world. Its influence can be found in the Christian gospels, throughout the Western philosophical tradition, and arguably up to the present day in the work of such protest groups as Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion - not bad for a philosophical school whose most famous early practitioner lived in a wine jar and masturbated in public. But what exactly did the Cynics believe? and what can we learn from them today?

Biology is a scientific discipline, notionally given to the pursuit of hard facts and empirical evidence - so what can philosophy bring to the table?

Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" thesis has been hugely influential in moral philosophy, but how well does it hold up today? This week we're asking if Arendt's characterisation of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as a mindless functionary, devoid of ideology, was accurate - and whether or not it's still important to understand evil as something that doesn't always appear as dramatic of colourful.

The legal definition of Aboriginality is a complex issue, raising questions that have to do with identity, epistemology and politics. And while "race" as a biological category has been scientifically discredited, it still persists in Australian society, culture and law. So how should Aboriginality be defined?

The idea that race is a "natural" category, grounded in biology, has long been discredited - and yet it persists in a surprising number of places. This week we're looking at how medical practice has been shaped by outmoded assumptions about race, and how these assumptions directly affect the health of racialised people.