The Philosopher's Zone - Program podcast Folgen

These days, you can go to war without shouldering a pack and carrying a rifle: you can take out the enemy’s installations (and, indeed, take out the enemy) just sitting in an office not far from home.  But what are the ethics of a war fought for us by machines, where the only deaths we see are on TV monitors?  This week, we ask how we can bring a moral imagination to bear on a world of robot wars.

This week on The Philosopher's Zone we meet one of the foremost thinkers of our time. Daniel Dennett is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Described as the great de-mystifier of consciousness, Dennett has been quoted as saying he developed a deep distrust of the methods he saw other philosophers employing and decided that before he could trust his intuitions about the mind, he had to figure out how the brain could possibly accomplish the mind's work.

In the last decades of the Hapsburg empire, from 1895 to 194, the city of Vienna was opulent, elegant and daring. A group of radical young artists, architects, writers, musicians, designers and thinkers were busy overturning all the rules. This week, we meet two of the brightest stars to have arisen in this febrile world, the enigmatic artist Gustav Klimt and the elusive philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and we look at Klimt through the changing gaze of Wittgenstein.