Before we dive into the big questions of philosophy, you need to know how to argue properly. We’ll start with an overview of philosophical reasoning and breakdown of how deductive arguments work (and sometimes don’t work).

Today we conclude our unit on Philosophy of Religion and Hank gets a little help from Indiana Jones to explain religious pragmatism and Pascal’s Wager, fideism, and Kierkegaard’s leap to faith.

Last week we introduced Thomas Aquinas’s four cosmological arguments for the existence of god; today we introduce his fifth argument: the teleological argument, and the ensuing dialogue it initiated.

Our next stop on our tour of ethics is Kant’s ethics. Today Hank explains hypothetical and categorical imperatives, the universalizability principle, autonomy, and what it means to treat people as ends-in-themselves, rather than as mere means.

The early 1900s was an amazing time for Western science, as Albert Einstein was developing his theories of relativity and psychology was born, as Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis took over the scientific mainstream. Karl Popper observed these developments firsthand and came to draw a distinction between what he referred to as science and pseudoscience, which might best be summarized as science disconfirms, while pseudoscience confirms. While the way we describe these disciplines has changed in the intervening years, Popper’s ideas speak to the heart of how we arrive at knowledge.
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Today we start our unit on language with a discussion of meaning and how we assign and understand meaning. We’ll cover sense and reference, beetles in boxes, and language games.

We’re also getting into the meaning-making game ourselves: bananas are now chom-choms. Pass it on.

Today Hank gains insight from that most philosophical of figures...Leonardo DiCaprio. In this episode, we’re talking about the process of philosophical discovery and questioning the relationship between appearance and reality by taking a look at Plato’s famous Myth of the Cave. All with a little help from our good pal Leo.

This week we answer skeptics like Descartes with empiricism. Hank explains John Locke’s primary and secondary qualities and why George Berkeley doesn’t think that distinction works -- leaving us with literally nothing but our minds, ideas, and perceptions.

On today’s episode...CATS. Also: Hank talks about some philosophy stuff, like a few of the key concepts philosophers use when discussing belief and knowledge, such as what defines an assertion and a proposition, and that belief is a kind of propositional attitude. Hank also discusses forms of justification and the traditional definition of knowledge, which Edmund Gettier just totally messed with, using his Gettier cases.

Many thanks to Index the cat for his patience in the filming of this episode.
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We begin our unit on ethics with a look at metaethics. Hank explains three forms of moral realism – moral absolutism, and cultural relativism, including the difference between descriptive and normative cultural relativism – and moral subjectivism, which is a form of moral antirealism. Finally, we’ll introduce the concept of an ethical theory.

Can two people who make the same bad decision bear different levels of moral responsibility? Today, we try to address this question with the concept of moral luck. Hank explains the difference between moral and causal responsibility and the reasons we assign praise and blame.

Our exploration of ethical theories continues with another theistic answer to the grounding problem: natural law theory. Thomas Aquinas’s version of this theory says that we all seek out what’s known as the basic goods and argued that instinct and reason come together to point us to the natural law. There are, of course, objections to this theory – in particular, the is-ought problem advanced by David Hume.

Last week we talked about language and meaning. Today, Hank explores some of the things that complicate meaning and how we get around that. We’ll explain conversational implicature, the cooperative principle, and the four main maxims of successful communication, as laid out by Paul Grice, as well as performative utterances.

Today we are taking all the things we have learned this year about doing philosophy and applying that to moral considerations regarding non-human animals. We’ll explore what philosophers like Peter Singer and Carl Cohen have to say about their use, including the concept of equal consideration of interests.

Today we transition between units on language and aesthetics with a discussion of nonexistent and imaginary objects. Is it possible to make true assertions about things that aren’t real? We’ll explore Meinong’s Jungle and the concept of a universe of discourse.

Today Hank is building on last week’s exploration of identity to focus on personal identity. Does it in reside in your body? Is it in the collective memories of your consciousness? There are, of course, strengths and weaknesses to both of these ideas, and that’s what we’re talking about today.

Now that we’ve started talking about identity, today Hank tackles the question of personhood. Philosophers have tried to assess what constitutes personhood with a variety of different criteria, including genetic, cognitive, social, sentience, and the gradient theory. As with many of philosophy’s great questions, this has much broader implications than simple conjecture. The way we answer this question informs all sorts of things about the way we move about the world, including our views on some of our greatest social debates.

Today we are talking about death, looking at philosophical approaches from Socrates, Epicurus, and Zhuangzi. We will consider whether it’s logical to fear your own death, or the deaths of your loved ones. Hank also discusses Thomas Nagel, death, and Fear of Missing Out.

We’re picking up where we left off last time, exploring the “ethics of care” and how it applies to extreme poverty. Are we responding to global poverty in a moral way? Philosophers like Peter Singer argue that we have an obligation to prevent harm caused by poverty, whereas Garrett Hardin offers a “lifeboat analogy” to explain our obligations to focus on caring for our own.
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After weeks of exploring the existence of nature of god, today Hank explores one of the biggest problems in theism, and possibly the biggest philosophical question humanity faces: why is there evil?