Philosopher's Zone

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.

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Episodes

Style wars pt 2: Scandals and hoaxes

What should we think when an academic Humanities journal unsuspectingly publishes a paper that's been written as a hoax, full of fashionable jargon and deliberately specious arguments? Does this demonstrate that the Humanities set a higher value on shallow intellectual trends than on rigorous scholarship - or is there something more nuanced and complicated going on?

Apr 16, 2025•31 min

Style wars pt 1: Postwar France and a new philosophical mode

In the aftermath of the Second World War, France was in a state of creative ferment that affected politics, culture - and philosophy. A new mode of philosophical writing emerged in the form of the review, and it was being done in an idiom that we've since come to recognise as typical of modern French theory: dense, experimental, multivocal, open-ended, very much the opposite of traditional analytic philosophical style. It grabbed scholarly attention then, and is still controversial today....

Apr 09, 2025•33 min

LIVE EVENT: What use is philosophy?

Does philosophy answer questions, or just keep asking them over and over again? Some say that compared to the sciences, philosophy has few runs on the board when it comes to measurable results. And then there's the issue of sexism in the discipline, and Western philosophy's colonial past. In this live panel discussion recorded in Brisbane, we put philosophy's feet to the fire.

Apr 01, 2025•52 min