Philosopher's Zone

In a world in which many humans do not have all their human rights fulfilled, who has what obligations to help bring a better world about? This is a question that, for many years, has exercised the mind of Thomas Pogge, Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale and Professorial Fellow at the Australian National University. This week, we talk to him about it by way of a chat about two influences on his thought: the great eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and one of his teachers, John Rawls, the distinguished American moral philosopher who died in 2002.

There’s been a change in the interpretation of Plato.  For centuries, he was admired for his inspiration and vision, rather than for his theories and argumentation. Then the pendulum swung hard in the other direction.

Franz Kafka—author of The Trial, in which a man is unjustly accused and tried, and Metamorphosis, in which a man becomes a giant insect—is perhaps the modernist author most often discussed by philosophers. What has been so alluring about Kafka that philosophers have a compulsion to return to his writings?  This week we investigate with the help of Henry Sussman, Visiting Professor in German Language and Literature at Yale University and one of the world’s great Kafka scholars.

On this Philosopher’s Zone we’re looking at agents. Not secret agents but rather public agents: an agent is just somebody who does something for a purpose and an agent is distinguished from a patient. The agent is the person who does things and the patient is the person to whom things are done. But do we have to be talking about individual persons here or can groups of people be agents in the way that individuals can? This week, we investigate.

There are many areas of human endeavour with which philosophy can be connected: the law, religion, science, mathematics -- but martial arts?  This week we talk to Damon Young, Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, who is both a philosopher and a grappler, about what martial arts have to tell us of thinking and being.

Michael Dummett, one of the greatest English philosophers of the twentieth century, died late in December at the age of 86.

In a world of environmental crisis, what can philosophy tell us?  Who is qualified to pronounce on the subject and how do the institutions of science (peer-reviewed journals the like) help?  How do we model the situation in which we find ourselves and how do we decide which species to save, the most endangered or the easiest to save?

Hannah Arendt’s life describes a tragically typical twentieth century trajectory.  Born in Germany and, fleeing the Nazis, she ended up in the United States, where she died in 1975.  As a philosopher – a title she disclaimed – she insisted on the importance of thinking in the world and not trying to be above it and she thought that understanding the richness and variety of the world was more important than attaining a consistent view of it. This week, we look at a very worldly thinker.

This program was first broadcast on 6 August 2011.

This program was first broadcast on 18 June 2011.