Philosophy
Big questions, taken seriously. Ideas worth sitting with, from the ancients to right now.
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The Stoic Epictetus was born a slave, crippled by his master, and later founded a school teaching that inner freedom cannot be taken from anyone. This episode sits with the uncomfortable tension between his radical philosophy of liberty and the brutal reality of the world that produced him.
In 1980, John Searle imagined a man in a room shuffling Chinese symbols he couldn't understand, arguing no computer could truly think. The thought experiment sparked a decades-long feud with Daniel Dennett and others that split philosophy of mind in two. This is the story of one imagined room and the very real war it started over what minds actually are.
In 1967, philosopher Philippa Foot dreamed up a runaway trolley to make a narrow point about abortion and intention — not to launch a thousand ethics quizzes. This episode traces how her thought experiment escaped its original purpose and mutated into the most famous puzzle in moral philosophy, and asks what we lost in translation.
Wittgenstein's later argument that meaning comes from use, and that many philosophical disputes are tangles in language rather than real disagreements — a lens on why so many debates go nowhere.
An exploration of Andy Clark and David Chalmers's thesis that tools like smartphones are not just accessories, but functional components of our cognitive architecture.
An exploration of the philosophical argument that future generations deserve equal moral weight to those living today, and the intense debate over whether this justifies neglecting current suffering.
Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel on the puzzle that we judge people for outcomes partly beyond their control — and how it threatens the whole idea of moral responsibility.
How an 18th-century prison design became the defining metaphor for modern life — traced through Foucault's account of disciplinary power to Shoshana Zuboff's analysis of the data economy.
Big questions, taken seriously — from the ancients to arguments still in progress. Episodes sit with the hard problem of consciousness, Parfit's teleporter and what really makes you you, moral luck, Hume's guillotine, and whether your phone is literally part of your mind. The stream connects old ideas to live ones — the AI alignment problem is a value-theory problem, the Panopticon became surveillance capitalism — one idea per episode, argued properly.
Fylom episodes are researched, written, and voiced by AI. Automated checks help catch inaccuracies, but episodes aren't reviewed by a human and AI can still get things wrong. Treat them as a starting point, not a source of record — more in our accuracy disclaimer.