Modern Philosophy
The Life of David Hume
by Ernest Campbell Mossner
The definitive biography of Hume, tracing his life from Edinburgh to Paris with meticulous scholarship.
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Episodes featuring this book
On Hume and the Limits of Reason
Reason is not the master. It never was. This three-hour episode traces the life and philosophy of David Hume, the thinker who followed the evidence of the senses wherever it led, even when it overturned the deepest assumptions of Western thought. What he found shook the foundations of philosophy so thoroughly that Kant said Hume woke him from his dogmatic slumber. We explore his empiricist theory of knowledge, his denial of the self, his revolutionary analysis of causation, the is-ought problem, his moral philosophy of sentiment and sympathy, his critique of miracles and natural religion, and the problem of induction that still haunts philosophy and science today. Hume emerges not as a destroyer of knowledge but as one of the most honest and courageous thinkers in the Western tradition.
Aldous Huxley | The Prophet Who Predicted Our Modern World
The real danger was never the boot on the face. Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Aldous Huxley. In this episode, we trace the full arc of Huxley's life and thought, beginning with the prophecy he delivered in Brave New World and ending with the afternoon of his death in Los Angeles on the day John F. Kennedy was shot. We follow him from Godalming to Eton, from the eye infection that nearly blinded him at sixteen to the satirical novels of the 1920s that made him the cleverest young writer in England. We enter Brave New World not as a plot to be summarized but as a philosophical argument about what humanity would sacrifice for comfort. We address, honestly, the famous comparison with Orwell, and we ask which of the two prophets has turned out to be more accurate for the liberal democracies of the twenty-first century. We follow Huxley through his turn toward pacifism in the 1930s, his move to California, his long engagement with the mystical traditions of East and West in The Perennial Philosophy, his mescaline experience of 1953 and the philosophical argument of The Doors of Perception, and his strange, ambitious last novel Island, in which he tried to imagine what a good civilization might actually look like. We close with his death, and with the question he leaves behind: in a world that offers infinite comfort and infinite distraction, what happens to the human capacity for meaning? Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.
Discourse on the Method by Rene Descartes | Book Summary
A French philosopher in the Dutch Republic once wrote, in his own language, how he rebuilt knowledge from doubt. This episode walks listeners through the six parts of René Descartes's Discourse on the Method, published in sixteen thirty-seven. It opens with the Dutch years in which the book was composed and the decision to withhold the larger physics Descartes had prepared. It then follows him through his disappointment with the learning of the schools, into the winter room where he framed his four rules of method, past the provisional morality that let him keep living while he doubted, into the short philosophical chapter that contains I think therefore I am, and out into the treatment of the body as a machine. The episode closes with his appeal to readers and his quiet hope for the long collaborative work of science. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.
Twenty Thousand Letters and a Revolution | Voltaire's Complete philosophy
He wrote twenty thousand letters and made half of Europe afraid of him. Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Voltaire. Tonight we spend nearly two and a half hours with Francois Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, the most famous writer in eighteenth century Europe and the most devastating enemy of fanaticism, superstition, and cruelty that the French language has ever produced. We follow him from his birth in Paris in 1694, through two imprisonments in the Bastille, through his three year exile in England and his discovery of Newton and Locke, through the Lisbon earthquake that destroyed his patience with Leibnizian optimism, through the writing of Candide, through the Calas affair, through the founding of the town of Ferney, through the Philosophical Dictionary, and finally through his triumphant return to Paris in 1778, where he died surrounded by the city that had once exiled him. Settle in, lower the lights, and let the story carry you. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.
On Kant and the Wall Between You and Reality
There is a wall between you and reality. You did not build it. You cannot remove it. It is the structure of your own mind. Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In this three-hour episode, we trace the full arc of Kant's life and ideas, from his daily walk through the streets of Konigsberg, where neighbors set their clocks by his passing, to a philosophical vision that reshaped every discipline it touched. We explore the crisis that shattered his faith in rationalist metaphysics and the decade of silence that followed. We unpack his Copernican revolution in thought: the claim that the mind does not passively receive the world but actively constructs it. We follow him through the Critique of Pure Reason and the architecture of transcendental idealism, through the thing in itself and the boundaries of human knowledge, through the categorical imperative and his account of morality as rational self-legislation, through the demolition of every classical proof of God's existence and the construction of a moral faith to take their place. We examine his philosophy of beauty and the sublime. And we end where Kant ended: with the starry heavens above and the moral law within. Whether Kant's name is new to you or a familiar landmark in your reading, this episode offers a calm and thorough passage through one of the most transformative philosophies in human history. Let it carry you through a quiet evening of rest or reflection.