Philosopher's Zone

Familiar ideas about value, ownership and market economics can obscure the fact that there are different ways to think about housing. This week, we're looking at housing through the lens of Aboriginal property development and land rights.

Rent is one of those simple market economy mechanisms that seem very natural, as though it's an organic outgrowth of human society. But in fact, rent has a philosophical history, and one that's been traced in a new book by this week's guest.

Your guide throThese days we're increasingly led to think of a house as a commodity. But what does it mean to think of a house as a site of care, rather than an asset in a system of market exchange? This week we're re-centring people in the housing value debate.ugh the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.

The recipe for living well is simple: develop a morally sound set of values, formulate goals rooted in those values, and achieve those goals. But beneath this basic formula there lurks a number of tricky questions.

If we cease to exist after we die, then is our fear of death a fear of... nothing?

Death holds a special fascination for all of us - but none more than philosophers, who have been pondering the puzzle of death for centuries. In this two-part series, we take a look at some recent approaches to an ancient mystery.

So you’re feeling sick, and you go to the doctor. The doctor sends you off for a range of diagnostic tests, which come back inconclusive. What happens next?

This week we're exploring the idea that art can say things, and do things, and mean different things according to shifting historical circumstances - and that those sayings, doings and meanings aren't always benign or harmless. How should we respond to morally problematic art - particularly the kind of art that can function as hate speech?

Simone de Beauvoir wrote that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. It’s a much-quoted phrase that appears to speak presciently to modern concerns around sex and gender. But how well is Beauvoir understood by contemporary feminists?

Ubuntu is an African tradition of thought whose ethical orientation is captured in the well-known aphorism “I am, because we are”. But what gets lost when Ubuntu is framed as a philosophical discourse in the Western intellectual tradition? And where do we see its successes and failures in the reconstruction of post-colonial Africa?