Philosophy & Society episodes
18 episodes so far
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17 min
Rules for War: How Humanity Tried to Limit Its Worst Impulse
What a Swiss businessman saw on a battlefield in 1859, and how it led to the rules that now govern every war
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22 min
From Feud to Code: How Humanity Invented the Rule of Law
How the idea that even kings must obey the law grew out of blood feuds, clay tablets and a meadow in England
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Free
22 min
Who Judges the Judges? The Long Search for a Fair Verdict
From trial by ordeal to algorithmic sentencing, how humans have tried to take bias out of judgment
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22 min
Right Too Soon: The Ideas That Lost Before They Won
Why the best ideas don't always win, and what that reveals about how humans actually think
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14 min
Bound by Oath: How Loyalty Became the Most Powerful Force in Human Organization
From tribal bonds to corporate culture, why the compulsion to belong shapes every institution humans have ever built
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16 min
Choosing History: How Societies Decide What to Remember and What to Erase
The hidden politics of collective memory, and why the past is always being rewritten
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13 min
The Effects of Devotion: How Ritual Transformed the Human Animal
From cave paintings to crowded stadiums, why humans are compelled to repeat the sacred and the symbolic
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20 min
The Theater of Power: Ritual, Ceremony and the Making of Authority
A pharaoh who had to prove he could still run, a Balinese court where the ceremony was the state, and a thirty-five-word oath surrounded by a parade
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15 min
The Sovereign Crowd: The Invention of the Nation-State, and Why It's Cracking
The surprisingly recent story of how humans carved the world into countries, and what happens when that idea starts to fail
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16 min
Doubt Is Our Product: The Industry Playbook for Manufacturing Uncertainty
A hotel meeting of tobacco executives in 1953, a memo that said the quiet part out loud, and the scientists hired to insist the science was not settled
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13 min
The Cult of the Persona: Masks, Roles and the Self Behind Them
Greek theater masks, Roman legal persons, Goffman's front stage and the curated feed: the long human habit of living behind a chosen face
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17 min
The Moral Machine: Can We Teach Artificial Intelligence Right from Wrong?
When machines must choose who lives and who dies, whose values do they follow?
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14 min
The Ethics of Extinction: Should We Bring Back the Dead?
De-extinction science is closer than ever — but does the power to resurrect species mean we should?
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14 min
Trusting Strangers: How Societies Learned to Cooperate at Scale
The instincts, networks and institutions that let us rely on people we will never meet
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12 min
The Philosophy of Privacy: How Much Should We Hide?
From naked Roman bathhouses to surveillance capitalism, why the right to be left alone had to be invented, and what we trade it for
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13 min
The Fermi Paradox: Where Is Everybody?
# The Fermi Paradox: Where Is Everybody?
**[SOUND: Cafeteria ambiance, footsteps on concrete]**
**NARRATOR:** Los A...
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18 min
The Quiet Power of Collective Intelligence
Picture this: It's 2009, and Netflix has a problem
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15 min
The Puzzle of Happiness: What Makes Life Worthwhile?
Picture this: It's 1968, and Robert Kennedy stands before a crowd at the University of Kansas, delivering what would ...
Hear any of them in full
Every episode is in the Compound app; Compound+ opens the whole library.