Lesson 3: Mind and Body

02/04/23 • 24 min

Continuing from Plato's views on the mind and body from last episode, this week, we discuss dualism... and a bit of everything else. We expand on Plato a bit with his charioteer analogy and on Descartes' cogito ergo sum, sharing some of our own views on the eternity of the soul too. We also talk about Frank Jackson's thought experiment, Mary's Room, and its counter arguments, before we go off on how much we love (Estelle) or hate (Lea) thought experiments. Lea shares a thought experiment about a lobster, but NOTE: the actual thought experiment is Locke's prince and cobbler (NOT lobster), we're sorry for that confusion but we hope you enjoy our more entertaining version!

Resources mentioned:

Phaedrus by Plato

Meditations on First Philosophy by Descartes

Persons and Personal Identity by Amy Kind

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Resources mentioned:

Phaedrus by Plato

Meditations on First Philosophy by Descartes

Persons and Personal Identity by Amy Kind

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Lesson 2: The Socratic Philosophers

We are back! Having set ourselves the challenge to summarise the three famous Socratic philosophers in twenty minutes, we talk about the key ideas of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. We begin with 'The School of Athens' painting, explaining the origins of the name of our show. We touch on Socrates' love for questioning and how that impacted the abrupt end of his life, Plato's world of forms and his ideal state, as well as Aristotle's influence on Aquinas (e.g. the Prime Mover). We breezed past each topic so we will go into detail with some in the future!

The philosophy resources recommendations we mentioned:

'Think' by Simon Blackburn

Oxford: Very Short Introductions

BBC: 'In Our Time' podcast

'Philosophy Bites' podcast

Philosophy Now articles

Regarding Socrates' execution: https://philosophynow.org/issues/19/Socrates_Revisited_The_Jurors_Speak

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Next Episode

Lesson 4: Determinism and Free Will

This week, we question the extent of our free will, looking at the views of hard determinists, libertarians, and compatibilists. We have some interesting examples and scenarios to illustrate these views, including My Little Pony... my little pony... aaahhh... Stay tuned to the end to hear about our own takes on whether we are just the sum of our causes - how we were brought up and our genes.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.