Today we are moving on from the existence of God to look at the philosophical debate surrounding the traditional divine attributes - omnipotence, omniscience, omnitemporality, and omnibenevolence. We are exploring the puzzles that these attributes create as well as some possible solutions to those puzzles, from Aquinas’ ideas of analogical predication, to the work of Eleanor Stump.

Today we explore what obligations we hold with our personal beliefs. Hank explains epistemic responsibility and the issues it raises with everything from religious belief, to ship owning, to vaccinations.

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.

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.

Hank explores different ways of understanding identity – including the Indiscernibility of Identicals, and essential and accidental properties. In what ways does affect identity? In what ways does it not? What does it mean for a thing to persist over time?

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.

How can Daenerys Targaryen help us understand personal identity? Find out as Hank continues our exploration of personal identity, learning about Hume’s bundle theory and Parfit’s theory of survival through psychological connectedness.

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 continue our unit on identity by asking where the mind resides. Hank explains the mind-body problem and several approaches to the question of where our minds reside, including reductive physicalism, substance dualism, and mysterianism.

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.

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.

Content warning: today’s episode contains language that some viewers might find upsetting and that may not be viewable in all settings. We’ve talked about how language works and how powerful it can be. Sometimes, that power can be harmful. Today, Hank explains the use/mention distinction, the difference between dirty words and hate speech, as well as thick concepts and metaphorical identification.

Today we are talking about art and aesthetic appreciation. What makes something an artwork? Can art really be defined? Is aesthetic value objective or subjective? Can taste be developed? How?

How do art and morality intersect? Today we look at an ethically questionable work of art and discuss R. G. Collingwood’s view that art is best when it helps us live better lives. We’ll go over Aristotle’s concept of catharsis and how it can resolve the problem of tragedy. We are also exploring the paradox of fiction and the debate between autonomism and moralism.

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.

As we venture into the world of ethics, there are a lot of different answers to the grounding problem for us to explore. One of the oldest and most popular is the divine command theory. But with age comes a long history of questions, too, such as the dilemma presented by Plato known as the Euthyphro Problem.

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.

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.

Our next stop in our tour of the ethical lay of the land is utilitarianism. With a little help from Batman, Hank explains the principle of utility, and the difference between act and rule utilitarianism.

Today we explore the penultimate ethical theory in this unit: contractarianism. Hank explains Hobbes’ state of nature, implicit and explicit contracts, as well as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the benefits, and costs, of violating contracts.

This week we explore the final ethical theory in this unit: Aristotle’s virtue theory. Hank explains the Golden Mean, and how it exists as the midpoint between vices of excess and deficiency. We’ll also discuss moral exemplars, and introduce the concept of “eudaimonia.”

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.

In today’s episode, Hank asks you to consider all the ways people talk about justice and what we really mean when we use that word. We’ll explain various theories of justice, just distribution, and different approaches to punishment.

Is it OK to discriminate? Do you do it? Is it always wrong or are there cases where it can be acceptable? Today we’re talking through several tricky cases and different philosophical perspectives on this issue.

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.