Ancient Philosophy
Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life
by Emily A. Austin(2023)
A warm, accessible introduction to Epicurean ethics for modern readers: friendship, freedom from anxiety, and a pleasure that has nothing to do with consumerism.
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Episodes featuring this book
Everyone Has Epicurus Wrong
Almost everyone has Epicurus wrong. The word "epicurean" has come to mean indulgence, luxury, and fine dining, but the real philosophy of Epicurus is almost the opposite: a quiet life, simple food, trusted friends, and freedom from fear. Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Epicurus. In this episode, we trace the full arc of Epicurus's life and ideas, beginning with a displaced young man on the island of Samos and ending with a philosophical vision that twenty-three centuries of persecution could not destroy. We explore his radical atomism, his argument that the gods do not care about human affairs, his claim that death is nothing to us, the most misunderstood concept in the history of philosophy (Epicurean pleasure as tranquility, ataraxia), the tetrapharmakos, the Garden as a community that admitted women and slaves as philosophical equals, and the miraculous survival of his ideas through Lucretius. We ask the question Epicurus leaves behind: what would it actually look like to live without fear? Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.
Life Is Suffering | Buddha's Complete Philosophy
There is a story that begins with a man who had everything, and who walked away from all of it on a single night. Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of the Buddha. Twenty-five centuries ago, a prince in the foothills of the Himalayas left three palaces, a wife, and a newborn son because he had seen three things on a road that made the comfort of his life intolerable. Six years later, sitting under a fig tree in what is now northern India, he claimed to have understood something that no accumulation of pleasure could reach, and he spent the next forty-five years explaining it to anyone who would listen. Over the next two and a half hours, we walk through ten chapters of his life and his thought, from the diagnosis that life is suffering, through the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, into the radical doctrines of no-self and impermanence, through the twelve links of dependent origination, and out into a comparison with Heraclitus, Hume, and Schopenhauer. This is not a devotional video. It is a careful, philosophical reading of the Buddha as one of the great systematic thinkers of any civilization, a physician of the mind whose prescription can still be tested today. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.
On Plato and the Cave You Never Left
What if everything you've ever seen, touched, or believed was just a shadow on a wall? Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Plato, the thinker who shaped Western civilization for over 2,500 years. This three-hour episode traces Plato's thought from its origins in the death of Socrates through the Theory of Forms, the Allegory of the Cave, the vision of the philosopher king in The Republic, the epistemology of recollection, Diotima's ladder of love in the Symposium, and the arguments for the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo. It also examines the political philosophy of The Republic, its controversial vision of a just society governed by those who have seen the Good, and the late dialogues where Plato turned a critical eye on his own theory of Forms.
From Logic to Ethics
Aristotle spent twenty years studying under Plato, then walked away and built a rival system that would dominate Western thought for two millennia. This episode traces his life from the court physician's son in Stagira, through the Academy, his years tutoring Alexander the Great, and the founding of the Lyceum in Athens. It examines his major contributions across logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and poetics: the categories of being, hylomorphism, the four causes, the unmoved mover, the function argument, eudaimonia as the highest good, the doctrine of the mean, practical wisdom, and the vision of the good life laid out in the Nicomachean Ethics. Dante called him the Master of Those Who Know, and for centuries no one in the Western or Islamic world could think seriously about the world without first thinking through Aristotle.
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.