Philosophical Dictionary

The Writer Who Helped Start a Revolution | Voltaire for Sleep

Enlightenment, Candide, and the War on Fanaticism for Deep Sleep

He wrote twenty thousand letters and made half of Europe afraid of him. Francois Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, was 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. The full episode is on YouTube and Spotify. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

The Problem of Evil: Why Does God Allow Suffering? | Philosophy for Sleep

An innocent man, a burned fawn, and the hardest question ever asked of God. This episode follows the problem of evil from its oldest telling to its newest defenses. It begins with a man who loses everything in a single afternoon and refuses every easy explanation, then traces the great answers, evil as absence, the best of all possible worlds, and the earthquake and the novel that broke optimism's public standing. From there the argument sharpens into the twentieth century, a charge of outright contradiction, the celebrated defense that answered it, a theodicy of growing souls, and a dying fawn that changed the question from proof to evidence. The second half belongs to skeptical theism, the claim that human minds cannot survey the reasons a God might have, and to the objections that press it, moral paralysis, spreading doubt, horrendous evils, animal pain, and divine silence. The episode ends where the argument now stands, between a rock and a rope. The full episode is on YouTube and Spotify. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

He Wrote About Himself for 20 Years and Described Us All | Montaigne

He locked himself in a tower to study one ordinary man, and ended up describing everyone who would ever read him. In fifteen seventy-one a French nobleman withdrew from public life to a round library at the top of a stone tower, and there, to tame his own restless mind, he began the strangest and most intimate book of its age. This is the story of Michel de Montaigne and the work he modestly called his attempts, the essays that invented a whole way of writing. We begin with his unusual life, the strange education, the one friendship that shaped everything, and the loss that turned him inward. From there the great themes of the book: his bottomless doubt and its gentle motto, his study of the ever-changing self, his hatred of cruelty in a country torn apart by religious war, his acceptance of the body and its pains, and the serene wisdom of his final years. Along the way we meet a mind that set out to know one person and ended by knowing everyone. The full episode is on YouTube and Spotify. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

No One Is Free Alone | Hegel and the Need to Be Seen

He lived through revolution, war, and the collapse of everything that had looked permanent, and insisted that reason was moving through all of it. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born into a modest world and rose, against long odds, to become the most commanding philosopher of his age, the last great thinker who dared to explain nearly everything as a single unfolding whole. We follow his diagnosis of a broken modern world and his lifelong search to make it whole again. We watch his ladder of consciousness rise rung by rung, the meeting of master and servant that would echo for two centuries, his forbidding logic, his vision of history as the slow growth of freedom, and his readings of art, of religion, and of the state. And we end with the storm that broke over his grave, and with the strange, patient wisdom of an owl that takes flight only at dusk. The full episode is on YouTube and Spotify. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

Aldous Huxley | The Prophet Who Predicted Our Modern World

Aldous Huxley's Complete Philosophy

The real danger was never the boot on the face. The episode runs from the prophecy he delivered in Brave New World to 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 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 argument of The Doors of Perception, and his strange, ambitious last novel Island. We close with the question he leaves behind: in a world that offers infinite comfort and infinite distraction, what happens to the human capacity for meaning? The full episode is on YouTube and Spotify. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.

Rene Descartes's Discourse on the Method | 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. The full episode is on YouTube and Spotify. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.