Category
Philosophy
Big questions, taken seriously. Ideas worth sitting with, from the ancients to right now.
In this category
Wittgenstein's language games and why we talk past each other
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.
12 min
The Extended Mind: Is Your Phone Literally Part of Your Mind?
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.
12 min
Longtermism and the ethics of people who don't exist yet
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.
12 min
Moral luck: why we blame the unlucky drunk driver more
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.
12 min
From Bentham's Panopticon to surveillance capitalism
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.
12 min
Byung-Chul Han and the Burnout Society
An exploration of Byung-Chul Han's philosophy regarding the transition from a disciplinary society to an achievement society, where self-exploitation masquerades as freedom.
12 min
The AI alignment problem as a question in moral philosophy
Specifying human values precisely enough for a machine to follow runs straight into centuries-old problems in value theory — why 'just tell it what we want' is philosophically harder than it sounds.
12 min
Derek Parfit on personal identity, and why he said identity is not what matters
Parfit's teleporter and fission thought experiments dismantle our intuitions about what makes you the same person over time — with direct bearing on mind-uploading and the continuity of the self.
12 min
About Philosophy
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 and written 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.