Philosopher's Zone

These days we’re constantly pushed to be more efficient – at work, of course, but also in our leisure pursuits and even while we sleep (“hacking your sleep cycle” to extract maximum benefit from the nocturnal hours is a staple of wellness magazine articles). How did we get here? And how can we get back to a state that’s less pressured, a state governed by principles other than accumulation and profit?

Consciousness is one of those phenomena that combine the everyday with the ineffable. We experience consciousness intimately, and yet in many ways it remains ungraspable. What is consciousness? Why do we have it? How can the physical stuff of the world give rise to something as mysterious as first-person experience? Philosophy, science and contemplative traditions have all struggled with these questions - and this week, we're talking about a new Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies that brings these disciplines together.

Our current climate crisis is, as much as anything else, a crisis of communication. Artists have a unique opportunity to step in and deliver environmental messages in a way that speaks to the emotions and the gut. And in doing this, they're reconfiguring the conceptual map of what art is supposed to be. Can a public sleepover in a town hall to raise awareness of disaster preparedness be called “art”? And what role do mystery and aesthetics play in this sort of work?

For more than three millennia, most buildings in China were configured around a central courtyard. This week’s guest believes that the courtyard helps us to understand Chinese society and culture, as well as Confucian philosophy. Today, with increasing numbers of people living in urban apartment buildings, the courtyard has become something of a period piece. What does this tell us about Chinese thought and identity in the modern world?

Many of us these days are buried beneath an avalanche of stuff – everyday objects that seem to proliferate in the cupboard while our back is turned. Our obsession with material technology infects our view of human history, as many anthropologists judge the progress of past civilisations on the basis of how much stuff they generated, or “failed” to generate. And the production of stuff threatens our future, with the looming catastrophe of climate change and the growing tide of microplastics.

The 19th century notion of race as something rooted in biology and genetics is a well-debunked idea whose time has passed. But the more recent liberal conception of race as a social construct fails to acknowledge the ways in which race is lived in and through the body (something the COVID pandemic has thrown into sharp relief). This week we’re talking about race as theory and experience, and how best to increase racial literacy.

The death of analytic philosophy has been confidently predicted for almost as long as analytic philosophy has been around. But today, with profound challenges posed by feminism, postcolonialism and critical race theory, could its long-heralded demise finally be on the horizon? And what exactly do we mean when we talk about analytic philosophy anyway – is it a science, a tradition or little more than a style?

Feeling a little distracted lately? Most of us are, and not just lately. We tend to view withering attention spans and the compulsion to seek change for its own sake as curses of the social media era, but restless dissatisfaction has been the subject of philosophical inquiry for centuries.

Who is responsible for structural injustice? The answer is “practically everybody” - but that can be just another way of saying “effectively nobody”. So what responsibility do individuals bear for structural injustice? And how can this responsibility be acted upon, without falling into practices of blaming and shaming?

In the late 1960s Michel Foucault, on being asked to grade an undergraduate dissertation written by Jacques Derrida, remarked “Well, it’s either an F or an A+” The philosophy community’s verdict on Derrida has changed little in the decades since. This week we’re talking with the author of a new biography of this enigmatic philosopher.