Explore every episode of the podcast Philosopher's Zone

First episode in a five-part series. Liberal democratic theory has traditionally held that it's up to individual citizens to decide for themselves what constitutes the good life, and that the state should have nothing to say on the matter. But increasingly, a number of states around the world are taking it upon themselves to decide what the good life means, and to offer various combinations of carrot and stick in getting their citizens to fall into line. And while many liberals denounce this as authoritarianism, and accuse "good life state" leaders of being motivated by greed or power, this week we're asking if the picture is a little more complex.

This episode is a recording of the 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture, produced in collaboration with the Australasian Association of Philosophy.

Guest: Alexandre Lefebvre, Professor of Politics and Philosophy at The University of Sydney

Producer: David Rutledge

Liberalism as a Way of Life by Alexandre Lefebvre (Princeton University Press 2024)

One of the more utopian promises of technology has always been that it will free us from the necessity of work - but not having to work poses its own problems. What will we do instead? how will we make money? and what might a leisure-oriented society look like? Technophiles - from the early cybernetics enthusiasts to today's AI promoters - have looked to ancient Athens as an example of a society where citizens were free to engage in culture, reflection and political participation. But was ancient Athens really such a place? and how likely is it that today's tech lords will deliver 'the good life' to us all?

Guest: Michele Kennerly, Associate Professor Communication Arts and Sciences, and Classics and Mediterranean Studies, Pennsylvania State University

Producer: David Rutledge

Automated Athens: Ancient Greek Ideals in the Early Age of Automation by Michele Kennerly (University of Chicago Press 2026)

Australian feminist philosopher Kate Manne memorably coined the term "himpathy" to describe what happens when a man commits a crime against a woman and finds himself the object of disproportionate sympathy. But as useful as this description is, the psychological mechanism behind himpathy remains unexplored in Manne's account. To remedy this, we're turning this week to Catharine Macaulay, a fascinating late 18th century English philosopher whose work on sympathy provides some valuable psychological insights.

Guest: Elena Gordon, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin

Producer: David Rutledge

Catharine Macaulay on cultivating our sympathetic potential - Elena Gordon in Journal of Modern Philosophy Volume 7 (2025)

About Catharine Macaulay

*The 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture* - Alexandre Lefebvre on 'The return of the moral state: philosophy and the good life', Thursday September 24 at 6.30 pmRegister on the 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture event page, registrations close on September 17

If someone's behaving badly, it can be hard to know how much of their behaviour stems from a deep character flaw, and how much of it is incidental - the stuff we might charitably filter out as unreflective of their true self. And the same goes for achievement: how much credit for a Nobel prize should go to the person themselves, and how much to their fortunate circumstances, or to the people who helped them? This week we're asking if philosophy can help us discern the signal from the noise.

Guest: Mark Schroeder, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California

Producer: David Rutledge

When Things Get Personal: A Philosophical Guide to Conflict by Mark Schroeder (Princeton University Press 2026)

*The 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture* - Alexandre Lefebvre on 'The return of the moral state: philosophy and the good life', Thursday September 24 at 6.30 pmRegister on the 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture event page, registrations close on September 17

Western feminists often express support for women in Muslim majority countries, but sometimes that support is couched in the language of pity, as though Muslim women were held captive by their religion and culture, and in need of 'rescue'. This week, a conversation about how to offer cross-cultural support without paternalism, and how the insight of Simone de Beauvoir can illuminate the issue.

Guest: Sameema Zahra, psychotherapist and Lecturer in Philosophy, Australian Catholic University Brisbane

Producer: David Rutledge

Philosophers in the Therapy Room - podcast with Sameema Zahra and Hora Zabarjadi Sar

*The 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture* - Alexandre Lefebvre on 'The return of the moral state: philosophy and the good life', Thursday September 24 at 6.30 pmRegister on the 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture event page, registrations close on September 17

If I pick up a tree branch and smash your window with it, you're going to be angry, and your anger will rightly be directed at me. But if a tree branch smashes your windscreen during a cyclone whose intensity has been caused by global warming, you're still going to be angry — but who or what exactly should you be angry with? This week, a conversation about responsibility for systemic injustice.

Guest: Stephanie Collins, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Monash University Melbourne

Producer: David Rutledge

*The 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture* - Alexandre Lefebvre on 'The return of the moral state: philosophy and the good life', Thursday September 24 at 6.30 pmRegister on the 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture event page, registrations close on September 17

Cultural Marxism is many things to many people — at one end of the political spectrum, it's the hidden force behind political correctness, identity politics and 'wokeness', while at the other end it's a shopworn conspiracy theory that explains nothing much at all. So what is Cultural Marxism? Did a group of Marxist intellectuals in the mid-20th century really set out to reshape Western culture? And if they did, how convincingly does their story stack up as a tale of secret plots and calculated ideological subversion?

Guest: Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer in English and Writing, University of Sydney

Producer: David Rutledge

'Cultural Marxism' is a conspiracy theory for our time - Alexander Howard in The Conversation July 2026

The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West by A.J.A. Woods (Verso 2026)

Conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism and fun - The Philosopher's Zone, December 2022

*The 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture* - Alexandre Lefebvre on 'The return of the moral state: philosophy and the good life', Thursday September 24 at 6.30 pmRegister on the 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture event page, registrations close on September 17

The great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who died in March, wrote in his later works about what he called Unheimlichkeit — roughly translated as "the unease of the times" — to describe the global retreat of liberal democracy, the fraying of the rules-based international order, and the increasing polarisation and hostility of public discourse. And yet, to the end he defended Enlightenment reason and the utility of rational debate. In a world that seems to be losing its democratic bearings, has Habermas' day passed? Or is the problem more that we haven't read him carefully enough?

Guest: Peter J. Verovšek, Assistant Professor in the History of European Integration, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Producer: David Rutledge

Did Jürgen Habermas's death also mark the end of his vision of democratic life? - Peter Verovšek for ABC Religion & Ethics

*The 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture* - Alexandre Lefebvre on 'The return of the moral state: philosophy and the good life', Thursday September 24 at 6.30 pmRegister on the 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture event page, registrations close on September 17

When it comes to the ideal philosophical medium, most of us would identify the written word - or maybe the spoken word, if we're fans of Socratic dialogue - and this is because for centuries, philosophy has been a linguistic practice. But this week we're arguing that visual art can be philosophy, and looking at how visual art can represent concepts in ways that haven't traditionally been recognised by Western epistemic traditions.

Guest: Taylor-Jai McAlister, clinical psychologist and postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney

Producer: David Rutledge

Defining Aboriginality - Taylor-Jai McAlister on The Philosopher's Zone, November 2023

*The 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture* - Alexandre Lefebvre on 'The return of the moral state: philosophy and the good life', Thursday September 24 at 6.30 pmRegister on the 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture event page, registrations close on September 17

Ever since AI was founded in the 1950s, people have talked and written about 'intelligence' as though we all broadly agree on what that word means. But there's considerable debate on that score, and among the debaters are philosophers - like this week's guest - who question the degree to which machines can be said to be intelligent at all, and think that claims of intelligence can all too easily deflect attention from the real ethical issues around AI.

Guest: Tim Crane, Professor of Philosophy at the Central European University (CEU) in Vienna, Austria

Producer: David Rutledge

*The 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture* - Alexandre Lefebvre on 'The return of the moral state: philosophy and the good life', Thursday September 24 at 6.30 pmRegister on the 2026 Alan Saunders Lecture event page, registrations close on September 17

GWF Hegel (1770-1831) wanted to construct nothing less than a complete explanation of reality - nature, consciousness, art, history, politics, the lot - based on a single self-explanatory idea. Whether or not he succeeded is an interesting question (spoiler: he didn't), but more interesting is the question of why philosophy has become so much less ambitious since then, and what we can learn from Hegel today.

Philosophers have traditionally thought of grief as something that attaches to immediate loss - the death of a loved one, something terrible that's happened to us personally. But as the environmental crisis continues to wreak havoc on human and non-human lives, the philosophy of emotions needs a concept that captures a response to loss that perhaps hasn't happened yet, or loss that affects other people we may never meet: eco-grief.

There's something about space that's always captured the human imagination, but what happens when space begins to capture the imagination of billionaire tech entrepreneurs? In the past, we've visited space for scientific purposes, but now the grand vision is colonisation, permanent human settlement on the Moon, Mars and even further afield, with such ventures along the way as asteroid mining, which promises to deliver untold riches. The technical challenges are immense - as are the ethical ones.

Commercial surrogacy - the practice of paying someone to gestate your child and then hand it over when it's born - is banned in Australia, but it has its supporters. Defenders of commercial surrogacy argue that it should be legal for someone to receive payment for the labour of carrying a child, on the grounds that surrogacy constitutes a legitimate form of work. But are there some things that just shouldn't be for sale? This week we're testing the arguments.

The traditional philosophical view of belief is that it's a rational cognitive affair, evidence based and directed toward truth. According to this account, things like delusion and religious belief are "edge cases", exceptions that prove the rule. But this week we're considering not only that belief may be closely tied to emotion, but that it may actually be a form of emotion itself.

Collins Dictionary made "permacrisis" their word of the year in 2022 - a prescient choice because since then, the crises have just kept coming. Permacrisis is forcing us to take a close look at the way we communicate, because while free public discourse is one of the cornerstones of democracy, there's something about the nature of today's public discourse that fuels crisis, and keeps us frozen in a fight-or-flight posture.

Elite sport is traditionally a celebration of the human, but for how much longer? We watch in awe as athletes perform feats of skill, strength and endurance,  and experience the high drama of triumph and defeat -  but it's all on a human scale, or at least it has been until now. Sport and technology have always been intertwined, but with the advent of AI, this week we're wondering if the human element of sport - the physical dimension, but also the ethical - might be under threat.

Why are we so repelled yet fascinated by bodily waste? Today we're talking purity, pollution, colonial sanitation regimes, medicine and public health, and how they've been shaped by our deeply ambivalent attitudes to the stuff we all produce (ideally) every day, but rarely think about deeply.

There's a certain kind of question that raises suspicion as to the motives of the person asking it. 'Was the Holocaust really as bad as historians have made out?' 'Is there really a scientific consensus on climate change?' 'How do we now for sure that vaccines aren't harmful?' These kinds of questions can be read on the surface as innocent enquiry, but sometimes they can function as a kind of epistemic sabotage, casting doubt on settled issues and seeking to undermine confidence in established truth. How can we tell the difference between sincerity and bad faith? And how should we respond to the latter?

To call the effects of a fire, flood or cyclone these days a 'natural' disaster only tells part of the story, as climate change makes us realise that vulnerability to harm is often the result of factors that actually have little to do with weather events. Land theft, displacement, poverty and the legacies of colonial rule can all multiply climate harms, which means that climate justice is more than simply a matter of sustainable energy development or transitioning to a greener economy.

Behind the familiar Buddhist doctrine that "there is no self" lies a centuries-long tradition of dispute and disagreement. Reductionists believe that the self is no more than a bundle of sense impressions and mental states that add up to nothing of substance or permanence, while emergentists believe that the self is something more - something related to these impressions and mental states, but not reducible to them. We're not going to settle the argument this week, but we will be exploring the ethical ramifications and asking what's at stake.

There are certain things about the world that we think we know for sure, and yet philosophical reason tells us cannot be true. Can you fly? are you real? is the world a hallucination? The answers seem self-evident, but this week we're exploring philosophical thought experiments that pull the rug out from under common sense and intuitive certainty.

Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790) is often described as an arch capitalist, the "father of modern economics" - and at a glance it's easy to see why. His Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations provided the theoretical foundation for free market capitalism and the economic policies that prevailed throughout the Industrial Revolution. But to see Smith as an extreme free market ideologue is to get him badly wrong.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to revolutionise many aspects of human existence - but how does it rate on friendship? The question is less theoretical than it seems: media reports of people developing 'relationships' with chatbots are becoming more common, and while we may instinctively recoil from this prospect, it's not clear that AIs could never deliver at least some of the benefits of genuine friendship.

It's often claimed that the Enlightenment was a time when Europeans awoke from their superstitious slumber, discovered rationality, got started on science and threw religion in the bin. But a surprising number of Enlightenment philosophers had religious commitments — including Immanuel Kant, whose work at the time was understood as not just a religion, but a rival to Christianity.

Speech acts - utterances that have the power to make things happen in the world - are increasingly being created by AI, especially in certain workplaces where it's not uncommon to receive orders and instructions from an algorithm. The power of a speech act is often understood as emanating from the intention of its author - but if AI lacks the capacity for intention, how much authority do AI-generated workplace commands really have?

Caring for a terminally ill person can place huge pressure - financial, emotional, physical - on the caregivers, who are often family members. And it's not uncommon at the end of life for someone for feel as though they're a 'burden' to those around them. But how should perceptions of burdensomeness play into decisions around medically assisted dying?

The supposed evils of postmodern culture have been endlessly catalogued: moral relativism, the loss of shared values, ironic detachment, a pathological aversion to sincerity, and all rooted in a philosophical worldview that casts a sceptical eye on master narratives and the concept of transcendent truth. But have we finally moved on from postmodernism? This week we explore the concept of metamodernism, a cultural disposition that seeks to reintroduce interiority and feeling to postmodern playfulness.

Most of us have Male or Female registered on our birth certificates - but what does this certification mean, in terms of its effect on our lives? There are many other things about us that have at least as much significance as our gender - our sexuality, our ethnicity - but only gender has legal status. This week we're talking about the pros and cons of uncoupling gender from the law.

We secular moderns sometimes make the assumption that philosophy is what you do when you're interested in the Big Questions of human existence, but not interested in religious answers. But the sacred/secular divide is itself a modern invention, and would not have made sense to medieval thinkers. This week we're exploring medieval Jewish philosophy - its fascinating cross-fertilisation with the Islamic culture of its day, its primary philosophical concerns and the things it can teach us about navigating a precarious and challenging world today.

Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) is widely celebrated as the founder of International Women's Day, yet she saw herself first and foremost as a socialist revolutionary. Far from embracing the mainstream women's movement of her day, she had limited sympathy for what she viewed as its bourgeois priorities. This week we explore the tensions between class and gender politics in her work, and what her legacy means for how we understand International Women's Day today.

Nick Land is one of the more interesting contemporary philosophers, and one of the most disturbing. This week we're talking with the author of a new book that sets out Land's ideas, from cybernetic capitalism to the collapse of Enlightenment reason.

Most of us are a little anxious these days - and for good reason, as advances in technology and the rising intensity of climate change are set to cause massive upheavals on our planet. But this week we're hearing a 'post-humanist' perspective on global issues that's positive without being blindly optimistic, and critical without giving in to despair.

It's a well-rehearsed argument that systemic, structural racism has more significant bearing on the lives and opportunities of racialised minorities than the attitudes of individual racists. But systemic racism is harder to shift, being deeply entangled in the structures of capitalism and democratic liberalism - even the enlightened 'diversity' programs of such liberal institutions as universities and businesses can be put to the service of perpetuating racial regimes.

There has never been as much art around as there is today - digital tools are incredibly cheap, artistic production and distribution can bypass the traditional institutional gatekeepers of galleries, museums and curated spaces. And yet, there's a sense today in which art is devalued currency, and the potential for art to bring people together is being eroded. This week we're talking art, politics and what we lose when we stop loving culture.

The question of identity, and whether each of us is best understood as an individual or a member of a collective, has vexed philosophers for centuries. This week we're getting into it with a thinker who's also a leading light in the teaching of philosophy in schools.

Of course, education has a point - but establishing exactly what that point is, can be a surprisingly difficult task. Do we educate children in order to foster autonomy and independent thinking, or to teach respect for certain norms, values and hierarchies? Is education about creative thinking and developing curiosity about the world, or is it about getting ready for the job market? Plenty of tension to explore this week, in a panel discussion on the aims of education.

Living and writing through the years before, during and after the Second World War, French author and philosopher Albert Camus witnessed the rise of fascism and its terrible endgame in German National Socialism. Today, amid fears of a neo-fascist resurgence in the USA, his work well is worth revisiting.

For decades, primatologists believed that primate societies were structured around aggressive alpha males - until a remarkable push from feminist scientists in the 1960s and 70s changed the narrative. So why does the "dominant alpha male" story persist in human culture?

We tend to think of time as a universal experience, something that carries us all along in the same direction at the same pace. So it might seem strange to think of time in terms of 'temporalities', different concepts and experiences of time that reflect different cultural values. In Australia, Indigenous temporalities are deeply interwoven with notions of justice, sovereignty and care for country - but these temporalities exist in tension with settler-colonial notions of time.

Buddhism in the West is often thought of as an ethical or philosophical system first and foremost, based on principles of non-self and impermanence, and universalist in its outlook. So it can come as a surprise to find that in countries like Sri Lanka, there exists a strain of Buddhist nationalism that has fierce pride, religious chauvinism and even violence in its history.

The forced removal of First Nations children from their families was active government policy in Australia between the 1910s and the 1970s, and still continues today under the banner of child protection. Today we're hearing that the story of the Stolen Generation has a historical parallel in the 'child rescue' movement in 19th century Britain, when so-called 'ragged children' were taken from their families - in many cases, abducted - and placed in institutions, to be trained and moulded into productive citizens.

Conspiracy theorists are turning out to be a resilient bunch, and no amount of refutation or mockery will make them go away. It's a problem, because as well as being ethically problematic, conspiracy theories can sometimes be downright dangerous. So how do we deal with them? This week we're exploring the ways in which the familiar diagnosis of the conspiracy theorist - lacking in reason, perhaps mentally ill - doesn't really get it right.

Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679-1749) is best known as a contemporary and defender of John Locke - but she was also a fascinating philosopher in her own right. Writing at a time when secular philosophy was beginning to challenge the Christian religious monopoly on moral authority, Cockburn was a devout Anglican - and, for a time, a devout Catholic - who nevertheless believed that virtue could be attained via reason.

Reading seems like a simple, uncomplicated activity that most of us enjoy without thinking too much about it - but how simple is it really? Literary theorists have been arguing for decades over what it is to read, what it is to interpret a text, what it is for something to be a text. This week we're catching up on some of the recent debates.

It's been said that the work of the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer should come with a health warning, so stark and pessimistic was his outlook on life. And the man was no less confronting than the philosophy: he could be rude, intemperate and misanthropic. But a new biography of Schopenhauer shows him to have been a more complex and even endearing figure than his reputation might suggest.

The 2023 Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme exposed a system that unfairly (and illegally) subjected vulnerable people to stress and trauma - but was it deliberately punitive? And to what extent does our welfare system reflect negative public attitudes toward people living in poverty?

There's an app for everything these days, including parenting and childrearing - but at what cost? Women in the Global South are increasingly using parenting apps, whose Western developers say their advice is scientific and reliable. But that modern, scientific advice is edging out older, traditional childrearing wisdom and causing intergenerational tension.

Democracy is a powerful force for progress, but it's also vulnerable and beset by its own internal contradictions. Plato thought that democracy was a bad idea, as it gave unmerited power to the ignorant and the malevolent. Looking around the world today, can we confidently say he was wrong?

Conservation is the name of the game in most ecological thinking - but in the eyes of some environmental philosophers, conservation is a backward-looking concept. What if, instead of looking to conserve nature, we tried to recreate and improve it via biotechnology? This year's Alan Saunders Lecture explores such futuristic interventions as reviving extinct species, turning carnivores into herbivores and genetically engineering less resource-intensive humans.