Philosophy Talk

Because of their innocent approach to things, do children make good philosophers?  Or do they lack the equipment for clear-thinking?  Is exposure to philosophy good for children?  Or will it undermine their sense of security?  John and Ken welcome Jana Mohr Lone, founder and director of the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children at the University of Washington. Together they’ll put some classic philosophical questions about Mind/Body, Personal Identity, Ethics, and Social Philosophy to a live — and questioning — audience of Seattle schoolchildren.

Human thought is an amazing thing. It has given us not only science, literature, and morality, but also superstition, slavery, and war.  Thought has the power to uncover the deepest mysteries of the universe.  Or to create new realities – social realities.  But what makes human thought so powerful?  John and Ken put this question and more to renowned cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, author of the best-selling The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

Sometimes people who seem to be your epistemic peers – that is, people as experienced, as well trained, as thoughtful, and as intelligent as you – disagree with you.  Should this shake your confidence in your own beliefs?  When, how much, and under what conditions?  Ken and John search for common ground with Jennifer Lackey from Northwestern University, author of Learning From Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge.

Reading is a lot of fun, especially narrative fiction – everyone loves a good story. But maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe everyone is, or at least tries to be, a good story themselves. Perhaps our very personal identities rest on narratives we form about ourselves, narratives that give our lives meaning, continuity, and coherence. Will the younger generation fashion lives based on the chaos and violence-based levels of computer games, rather than the carefully constructed lives of great fiction? Or is that just one of the old-fogey hosts grumbling? John and Ken swap stories with Joshua Landy, co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford University, for a program recorded in front of a live audience at Congregation Beth Shalom in San Francisco.

The occult is routinely dismissed in our times as the province of quacks, the irrational, and the superstitious.  But during the Renaissance, many of the best minds in Europe studied the philosophy and science of the occult.  The period witnessed an outpouring of systematic philosophical and scientific treatises on the occult.  References to the occult pervade the works of Shakespeare and other literary writers of the time.  Many scholars believe that The Occult Philosophy and the Occult Sciences, with their search for hidden causes, played a decisive role in the rise of modern science.  In this special Halloween week episode, John and Ken delve into the Occult Philosophy with Christopher Lehrich from Boston University, author of The Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice.

Compromise is the condition of peace and progress.  But there are times when we should not compromise – when compromise would undermine integrity and amount to cooperating with evil.  How do we distinguish between when are we ‘bargaining with the devil’ and when are we simply trying to be tolerant of alternative lifestyles and political positions?  Is it OK to ‘bargain with the devil’ in the name of peace?  When we refuse to compromise on moral grounds, are we imposing our values?  Ken and John negotiate the terms with UC Irvine Law Professor and professional mediator Carrie Menkel-Meadow.

Scholars from Berkeley and from Stanford have played a big role on Philosophy Talk.  Sure, John and Ken are from Stanford, but many of our most frequent and most brilliant guests are from Berkeley: Alison Gopnik, John Searle, Geoff Nunberg, George Lakoff, and many others. But who supports KALW more, Berkeley or Stanford?  We’ll rely on our Stanford- and Berkeley-connected guests to charge up the Cardinal and Bears in the audience, and see who can raise more money for our beloved radio station.

The American Revolution was saturated with meaning and ambiguity, from the words of the Declaration of Independence, to the beliefs of the founding fathers, to the vagueness, hedges, and contradictions of the Constitution on which the possibility of union between slave and free states rested.  Ken and John examine the personalities, philosophies, and documents of the American Revolution with Pulitzer Prize winning Stanford historian Jack Rakove, author of Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America.

Socrates was executed for corrupting the youth. In America, youth below college age are usually not exposed to philosophy in the classroom. Is philosophy all that dangerous? Should it be taught to teenagers? Or would this lead to a generation of self-absorbed and skeptical young people, shirking their duties in order to worry about the meaning of life? John and Ken are joined by Jack Bowen, author of The Dream Weaver and If You Can Read This: The Philosophy of Bumper Stickers, for a program recorded with a live audience of young philosophers at Palo Alto High School.

Self-deception sounds like a contradiction: intentionally convincing yourself of something you know to be untrue.  But it is a pervasive aspect of human nature.  What is the nature of self-deception, and what are its main patterns?  Does it serve any purpose?  Ken and John confront the truths of self-deception with Neil Van Leeuwen from the University of Johannesburg.