The Philosopher's Zone - Program podcast Folgen

In a world in which many humans do not have all their human rights fulfilled, who has what obligations to help bring a better world about? This is a question that, for many years, has exercised the mind of Thomas Pogge, Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale and Professorial Fellow at the Australian National University. This week, we talk to him about it by way of a chat about two influences on his thought: the great eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and one of his teachers, John Rawls, the distinguished American moral philosopher who died in 2002.

There’s been a change in the interpretation of Plato.  For centuries, he was admired for his inspiration and vision, rather than for his theories and argumentation. Then the pendulum swung hard in the other direction. 

Franz Kafka—author of The Trial, in which a man is unjustly accused and tried, and Metamorphosis, in which a man becomes a giant insect—is perhaps the modernist author most often discussed by philosophers. What has been so alluring about Kafka that philosophers have a compulsion to return to his writings?  This week we investigate with the help of Henry Sussman, Visiting Professor in German Language and Literature at Yale University and one of the world’s great Kafka scholars.