PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: Over a century ago, the American philosopher and psychologist William James argued in his book Pragmatism that what he called “the present dilemma in philosophy” is that philosophers may not be as objective as they […]
Oct 5, 2021
10 min
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: Half a century ago, Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich published a little book called Deschooling Society. Illich’s principal aim in that book was to critique existing educational institutions from the elementary school to the […]
Oct 4, 2021
13 min
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: We make a very large mistake when we imagine that western-style democracy is destined to remain ascendant forever. Authoritarianism is the proverbial wolf at the door in every democratic society, and its constant […]
Oct 4, 2021
9 min
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: The second chapter of Leo Tolstoy’s short story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” begins with the following sentence: “Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” I […]
Jul 10, 2021
10 min
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: In the city where I live, a statue of John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, has been removed from its pedestal in a public park and placed in an undisclosed location for […]
Jun 27, 2021
12 min
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: It’s customary for people in my profession to answer this question in the following way: you become a philosopher by earning usually three degrees in philosophy from the best universities you can get into and for which you can […]
Jun 22, 2021
9 min
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: I can only hope that cancel culture is a trend that, like many similar phenomena, is here today and will be gone tomorrow, although I’m not about to offer a prediction about this. When a pendulum […]
Jun 15, 2021
11 min
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: We all value innovation, or at least we say we do. A question I seldom see answered or even asked, however, is what makes innovation possible? The question, what makes something possible, is […]
May 28, 2021
11 min
PODCAST: TRANSCRIPT: One of the questions that first attracted me to philosophy when I was a teenager is the perennial problem of the meaning of life. The search for meaning drove me to read widely […]
Apr 28, 2021
10 min