Philosophy Playdate

This episode sees Steve and Christabel explore a topic that has fascinated philosophers for centuries in their attempt to answer Steve’s daughter's question “Is your brain a separate thing that tells you to do things?”.

To gain insight into the nature of a person’s relationship with their brain, mind or thoughts, the two begin by consulting Plato, Akṣapāda Gautama and the Cārvākamaterialist school of thought.

Rather than answering our original question, this foray into the ancient world only serves to generate more, including “Does the mind have parts?”, “Are mental states physical?” and “Where does our agency originate from?” To answer the first question, Margret Cavendish’s argument for mental disunity is pitted against René Descartes insistence that the mind is indivisible. The winner of this particular bout is clear to anyone who’s stayed at the pub for one more round, knowing they have work early next morning.

In considering the second question, Steve and Christabel wonder what the Cartesians would have made of the unfortunate case of Phineas Gage, who had a rod pass through his brain whilst working on the railroad.

The third question is answered pretty definitively by way of David Hume’s slogan that ‘reason is the slave of the passions’. The two finish with a (fierce, but wholly unphilosophical) debate as to which of them would better endure Bernard Williams’ torture thought experiment (it’s Christabel).

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Content note: extensive discussion of death, mortality and loss.

This week’s episode is an existential crisis courtesy of Steve's daughter, who asks “When will I die?”. This triggers a brief discussion of the chic continental philosophers you might expect to find theorising about mortality (most likely while wearing berets and smoking Gitanes outside a Parisian café). Steve and Christabel take us from Pascal’s divertissement, to Heidegger’s emphasis on finitude, to Jean Paul Sartre’s nausea.

However, rather than succumbing to a dark night of the soul, Christabel turns to what she knows best, which is (as faithful listeners will know) a worm-based metaphysics of time. This is the kind of philosophy practiced by philosophers whose invites to hip gatherings on the continent always seem to get lost in the mail.

As a result, the duo turn from contemplation of the cool and angsty philosophers to the practical question of how your philosophy of time should affect your view of death. Steve is delighted to have presentism between his crosshairs again, as Christabel compares presentist, eternalist and growing block-theoretic conceptions of the end. Natalja Deng’s assessment of Robin Le Poidevin’s claim that eternalists shouldn’t feel existential dread is examined, as is Daniel Story’s reassurance that worm theorists shouldn’t ever worry that their time is growing short.

Steve chastises contemporary philosophers Harry S. Silverstein and Thomas Nagel for their critique of Epicurus, arguing that these modern thinkers should pick on someone who’s still around to defend themselves. Christabel replies that Epicurus is still kicking about somewhere in the spacetime manifold, it’s just that he can’t respond (and probably has more pleasurable things to be doing, anyway).

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In this episode, Steve and Christabel smash through Marxian false consciousness as they answer this week’s question: “Why do people make the same bad choice again and again?”. The duo embark on a heroes’ journey through a landscape of determinisms, exploring the lush valleys of nominative, environmental and physical determinism, and braving the arid wasteland of phrenology, eugenics, and other junk theory that coalesces around biological determinism. The villains of the piece are Cesare Lombroso, Laplace’s demon and gentle parenting. The heroes are bell hooks, Pierre Bourdieu and Susan Wolf. Steve asserts his free will but can’t decide whether he wants to be a berserker, a brigand or Friedrich Engels’ sugar baby. Christabel wonders if dedicating oneself to any of these vocations would exemplify Jean Paul Sartre’s bad faith. It is concluded that as in the case of butter, many philosophical positions are best enjoyed soft.

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To answer this week’s question, “Am I too perfect?” Steve and Christabel begin with a brief survey of a selection of religious conceptions of human perfection. This takes them from the contemplation of fitra in Sufi Islam, to the concepts of ātman and puruṣa in the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and Sāṅkhya traditions of Hinduism. They weigh in on the Pelagian-Augustinian debate on whether spontaneously conceived babies are on the hook for Adam’s crimes against apples – or St Augustine of Hippo’s crimes against pears – according to the Christian doctrine of original sin (noting that IVF babies might have found the perfect theological loophole).

Discussion then turns to the question as to whether perfection is even a logically coherent concept. Divine perfection seems problematic, given that it seems to entail that God could create a rock so heavy that no being could lift it, and then immediately do so. Christabel explores the process theist’s rejection of the classical, monopolar view of God as existing within Boethian eternity. She begins to expound upon the idea that time is a wheel, and that according to this dogma, though good times pass away, so do the bad. It’s considered that mutability is our tragedy, but also our hope; that the worst of times - like the best - are always passing away. Steve simply replies: “I know”.

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This week, Steve and Christabel try their best to avoid suffering the fate of John William Dunne, who was laughed out of metaphysics circles for proposing that time is an infinite layer cake. In fact, in answering this week’s question, “How long is a minute?”, both hosts are clear on one thing; that you cannot have your cake and eat (all of the temporal parts of) it too. In fact, Christabel argues that the project of destroying a whole cake is just as problematic as that of travelling back in time to kill your grandfather. But time travel isn’t found to be completely paradoxical, and the possibility of travelling back to your favourite minute of a Weird Al Yankovich concert is found to be broadly unobjectionable (at least as concerns logical consistency).

Christabel introduces us to distinctions between ecstatic, historical, personal, external, absolute and proper times, and makes the case for perdurantism; the theory that all objects that persist through time are four-dimensional spacetime worms, and that only small slices of these worms exist at any given time. Steve is more convinced by this view than the presentist’s denial of the existence of the past and future, which he likens to the philosophical commitments shared by babies and Beach Boys. 


Read Christabel’s paper about time, as mentioned in the episode: 
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10217604/1/10.1515_krt-2025-0022%20%281%29.pdf


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This week Christabel is on a mission to convince us that navy blue is the objectively best colour. In her efforts to do this, she enlists the help of Immanuel Kant, and his distinction between things that are capital B Beautiful, and the merely agreeable. Kant relegates wine to the latter category, and Steve argues that the same is true of Queen (but makes a reasonable exception for Freddie Mercury). Christabel takes issue with both, drawing on Shen-Yi Liao’s characterisation of nostalgic food as art to argue that we have good reasons for widening our understanding of what counts as both Beautiful and high art.

We are then introduced to Samantha Matherne’s Kant scholarship, to which Christabel appeals in order to make the claim that if we squint at the Critique of Judgement in the right light, Kant might give us what we need to make the argument that individual shades and tones, when appreciated in a sufficiently abstract way, might be taken to count as the kinds of things about which proper aesthetic judgements can be made. We are invited to conclude that there may be a universally correct answer to this week’s question “What’s the best favourite colour to have?” (and that the answer is navy blue).

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For the very first episode of Philosophy Playdate, Steve and Christabel tackle a fresh new take on the trolley problem, provided by a 7-year-old nascent ethicist. Her question was: “If there was a switch that turned all dogs into human babies, and another switch that turned all human babies into dogs, and you had to push one, which would you push?” This ethical dilemma prompts a discussion of animal sentience and the problems we face when tasked with ranking different kinds of human and non-human consciousness, and whether such a ranking could ever justify the ‘speciesist’ conclusion that some lives are worth more than others. Christabel extolls the virtues of care ethics over the utilitarian aggregative calculus, and Steve extolls the virtues of vasectomies. Both oscillate between the two poles of pro- and antinatalism, considering the environmental, social and hedonistic factors that bear on the question as to when - if ever - it is morally permissible to bring life into the world. 

As a rare treat for this inaugural episode, both hosts come to a definitive answer on this week’s question (though in a characteristically philosophical turn of events, they fail to meet an agreement).

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