Published by ABC
The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.
Listen on Apple Podcasts32 min
Ever since AI was founded in the 1950s, people have talked and written about 'intelligence' as though we all broadly agree on what that word means. But there's considerable debate on that score, and among the debaters are philosophers - like this week's guest - who question the degree to which machines can be said to be intelligent at all, and think that claims of intelligence can all too easily deflect attention from the real ethical issues around AI. Guest: Tim Crane , Professor of Philosophy at the Central European University (CEU) in Vienna, Austria Producer: David Rutledge
36 min
GWF Hegel (1770-1831) wanted to construct nothing less than a complete explanation of reality - nature, consciousness, art, history, politics, the lot - based on a single self-explanatory idea. Whether or not he succeeded is an interesting question (spoiler: he didn't), but more interesting is the question of why philosophy has become so much less ambitious since then, and what we can learn from Hegel today.
28 min
Philosophers have traditionally thought of grief as something that attaches to immediate loss - the death of a loved one, something terrible that's happened to us personally. But as the environmental crisis continues to wreak havoc on human and non-human lives, the philosophy of emotions needs a concept that captures a response to loss that perhaps hasn't happened yet, or loss that affects other people we may never meet: eco-grief.
32 min
There's something about space that's always captured the human imagination, but what happens when space begins to capture the imagination of billionaire tech entrepreneurs? In the past, we've visited space for scientific purposes, but now the grand vision is colonisation, permanent human settlement on the Moon, Mars and even further afield, with such ventures along the way as asteroid mining, which promises to deliver untold riches. The technical challenges are immense - as are the ethical ones.
32 min
Commercial surrogacy - the practice of paying someone to gestate your child and then hand it over when it's born - is banned in Australia, but it has its supporters. Defenders of commercial surrogacy argue that it should be legal for someone to receive payment for the labour of carrying a child, on the grounds that surrogacy constitutes a legitimate form of work. But are there some things that just shouldn't be for sale? This week we're testing the arguments.
35 min
The traditional philosophical view of belief is that it's a rational cognitive affair, evidence based and directed toward truth. According to this account, things like delusion and religious belief are "edge cases", exceptions that prove the rule. But this week we're considering not only that belief may be closely tied to emotion, but that it may actually be a form of emotion itself.
34 min
Collins Dictionary made "permacrisis" their word of the year in 2022 - a prescient choice because since then, the crises have just kept coming. Permacrisis is forcing us to take a close look at the way we communicate, because while free public discourse is one of the cornerstones of democracy, there's something about the nature of today's public discourse that fuels crisis, and keeps us frozen in a fight-or-flight posture.
37 min
Elite sport is traditionally a celebration of the human, but for how much longer? We watch in awe as athletes perform feats of skill, strength and endurance, and experience the high drama of triumph and defeat - but it's all on a human scale, or at least it has been until now. Sport and technology have always been intertwined, but with the advent of AI, this week we're wondering if the human element of sport - the physical dimension, but also the ethical - might be under threat.
36 min
Why are we so repelled yet fascinated by bodily waste? Today we're talking purity, pollution, colonial sanitation regimes, medicine and public health, and how they've been shaped by our deeply ambivalent attitudes to the stuff we all produce (ideally) every day, but rarely think about deeply.
28 min
There's a certain kind of question that raises suspicion as to the motives of the person asking it. 'Was the Holocaust really as bad as historians have made out?' 'Is there really a scientific consensus on climate change?' 'How do we now for sure that vaccines aren't harmful?' These kinds of questions can be read on the surface as innocent enquiry, but sometimes they can function as a kind of epistemic sabotage, casting doubt on settled issues and seeking to undermine confidence in established truth. How can we tell the difference between sincerity and bad faith? And how should we respond to the latter?
31 min
To call the effects of a fire, flood or cyclone these days a 'natural' disaster only tells part of the story, as climate change makes us realise that vulnerability to harm is often the result of factors that actually have little to do with weather events. Land theft, displacement, poverty and the legacies of colonial rule can all multiply climate harms, which means that climate justice is more than simply a matter of sustainable energy development or transitioning to a greener economy.
39 min
Behind the familiar Buddhist doctrine that "there is no self" lies a centuries-long tradition of dispute and disagreement. Reductionists believe that the self is no more than a bundle of sense impressions and mental states that add up to nothing of substance or permanence, while emergentists believe that the self is something more - something related to these impressions and mental states, but not reducible to them. We're not going to settle the argument this week, but we will be exploring the ethical ramifications and asking what's at stake.
35 min
There are certain things about the world that we think we know for sure, and yet philosophical reason tells us cannot be true. Can you fly? are you real? is the world a hallucination? The answers seem self-evident, but this week we're exploring philosophical thought experiments that pull the rug out from under common sense and intuitive certainty.
32 min
Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790) is often described as an arch capitalist, the "father of modern economics" - and at a glance it's easy to see why. His Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations provided the theoretical foundation for free market capitalism and the economic policies that prevailed throughout the Industrial Revolution. But to see Smith as an extreme free market ideologue is to get him badly wrong.
36 min
Artificial intelligence is beginning to revolutionise many aspects of human existence - but how does it rate on friendship? The question is less theoretical than it seems: media reports of people developing 'relationships' with chatbots are becoming more common, and while we may instinctively recoil from this prospect, it's not clear that AIs could never deliver at least some of the benefits of genuine friendship.
35 min
It's often claimed that the Enlightenment was a time when Europeans awoke from their superstitious slumber, discovered rationality, got started on science and threw religion in the bin. But a surprising number of Enlightenment philosophers had religious commitments — including Immanuel Kant, whose work at the time was understood as not just a religion, but a rival to Christianity.
34 min
Speech acts - utterances that have the power to make things happen in the world - are increasingly being created by AI, especially in certain workplaces where it's not uncommon to receive orders and instructions from an algorithm. The power of a speech act is often understood as emanating from the intention of its author - but if AI lacks the capacity for intention, how much authority do AI-generated workplace commands really have?
29 min
Caring for a terminally ill person can place huge pressure - financial, emotional, physical - on the caregivers, who are often family members. And it's not uncommon at the end of life for someone for feel as though they're a 'burden' to those around them. But how should perceptions of burdensomeness play into decisions around medically assisted dying?
38 min
The supposed evils of postmodern culture have been endlessly catalogued: moral relativism, the loss of shared values, ironic detachment, a pathological aversion to sincerity, and all rooted in a philosophical worldview that casts a sceptical eye on master narratives and the concept of transcendent truth. But have we finally moved on from postmodernism? This week we explore the concept of metamodernism, a cultural disposition that seeks to reintroduce interiority and feeling to postmodern playfulness.
35 min
Most of us have Male or Female registered on our birth certificates - but what does this certification mean, in terms of its effect on our lives? There are many other things about us that have at least as much significance as our gender - our sexuality, our ethnicity - but only gender has legal status. This week we're talking about the pros and cons of uncoupling gender from the law.
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Observed July 30, 2026.
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