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Philosophy for Modern Life

Philosophy for Modern Life

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Philosophy has never been safe. In the age of the Enlightenment, an essay could cost you your freedom, a book could be burned by the public executioner, and an idea could redraw the map of Europe. This show tells the true stories of philosophy on fire.

Each episode reconstructs one battle of ideas in full, cinematic detail: the thinker at their desk, the censors and kings closing in, the manuscript smuggled across borders, and the argument that outlived everyone who tried to silence it. No host chatting between clips, no panel debating abstractions. Just one complete story, narrated start to finish, built from letters, banned books, and the trial records of dangerous ideas.

You will follow philosophy through exiles who wrote under false names, salons where revolution was rehearsed over dinner, and philosophers who watched their ideas turn into constitutions, or into guillotines. Some episodes follow one thinker through the years that defined them; others trace a single idea from whispered heresy to the foundation of the modern world. All of them treat philosophy as what it was in the Enlightenment: the most dangerous cargo in Europe.

If you are drawn to the history of philosophy told like a thriller, this is built for you. New episodes drop regularly, each one a self-contained battle of ideas. Subscribe now so the next chapter of philosophy on fire lands the moment it goes live.Copyright OBOMEDIA ENTERTAINMENT Scienza Scienze biologiche
Episodi
  • The Pharaon that the Crowd Dragged Turned a Life into Liberty's Warning

    The Pharaon that the Crowd Dragged Turned a Life into Liberty's Warning
    Sep 7 2026
    The Pharaon that the Crowd Dragged Turned a Life into Liberty's Warning

    In the winter of 1917, a seven-year-old boy on a Petrograd street watched roughly twenty people drag a single man through the snow. The man had been firing from rooftops in defense of the Tsar, and the word used for men like him — Pharaon — never once appeared in the history books the boy later read. What does a child do with a memory the record itself refuses to keep?

    In this episode, we trace Isaiah Berlin's path from a merchant family in Riga to a British diplomatic post in wartime Washington and a candlelit room in Leningrad with Anna Akhmatova, asking what happens when a philosophy convinced of its own liberating mission decides that individual lives are an acceptable price.

    Person: Isaiah Berlin
    Location: Petrograd, later Oxford
    Date: winter 1917
    Case: a loyalist sniper, a "pharaon," dragged through the street by a crowd of about twenty people
    Status: the incident became the seed of Berlin's 1958 essay "Two Concepts of Liberty," still debated in philosophy today

    - Isaiah Berlin was born on June 6, 1909, in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire
    - The Berlin family left Petrograd for Riga on October 5, 1920, and settled in Britain by early 1921
    - At Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Berlin won the John Locke Prize in 1928, outscoring A.J. Ayer
    - At twenty-three he became the first unconverted Jew elected to a fellowship at All Souls College
    - His November 1945–January 1946 meetings with poet Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad preceded her expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers and the arrest of her son, Lev Gumilyov
    - Berlin died in Oxford on November 5, 1997, and is buried at Wolvercote Cemetery

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    21 min
  • The Tehran Armenian childhood that taught her which voices get believed

    The Tehran Armenian childhood that taught her which voices get believed
    Sep 7 2026
    The Tehran Armenian childhood that taught her which voices get believed

    In 1954, inside Tehran's Armenian minority community, a child was born who would spend the next four decades studying a single question: whose knowledge gets believed, and why. Decades later, the European Commission would put a number on how urgent that question had become — three million euros, handed to a philosopher rather than a laboratory. What in her path from Tehran to Belfast to Dublin made her the one they trusted to answer it?

    In this episode, we trace Maria Baghramian's path from a minority childhood in Tehran through the sectarian streets of 1970s Belfast to the European Commission's largest philosophy grant, asking when — and why — ordinary people should trust the experts who shape the policies governing their lives.

    Person: Maria Baghramian
    Location: Dublin, Ireland
    Date: July 2019
    Case: the european commission's three-million-euro grant to study public trust in expertise
    Status: project completed in 2023, its framework still being carried forward at the University of Oslo

    - Born March 21, 1954, into Tehran's Armenian community; left Iran for Ireland in 1979
    - Earned a Double First in Philosophy and Social Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast in 1983, then a PhD in the Philosophy of Logic at Trinity College Dublin under Timothy Williamson, completed in 1990
    - Published Relativism with Routledge in 2004, in the Problems of Philosophy series
    - Co-led the "When Experts Disagree" project with astrophysicist Luke Drury, funded by the Irish Research Council from 2015 to 2017, producing a 2018 paper in Environmental Communication
    - Led PEriTiA (Policy, Expertise and Trust in Action), a three-million-euro European Commission grant awarded in July 2019, running 2020–2023 with partners in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Italy, and Armenia

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    19 min
  • The smoked salmon that made a materialist write about the afterlife

    The smoked salmon that made a materialist write about the afterlife
    Sep 7 2026
    The smoked salmon that made a materialist write about the afterlife

    A plate of smoked salmon sits untouched on a table while, on the floor nearby, a seventy-seven-year-old philosopher's heart has stopped for four minutes. He had spent fifty years insisting that talk of the soul was, in the strictest technical sense, meaningless — and yet he came back from those four minutes and sat down to write about what happened. What did he actually claim to have found, and what did he refuse to claim?

    In this episode, we trace the life that makes that collision matter: Alfred Jules Ayer's upbringing between European finance and continental intellectual culture, his rise to fame at twenty-six with a book that declared most of philosophy nonsense, and the wartime service, civic campaigns, and public interventions that sat uneasily beside a doctrine built to strip moral language of meaning. We follow his 1988 cardiac arrest and the article and correction that followed, asking whether four silent minutes moved a lifelong verificationist even slightly off his own foundations.

    Person: Alfred Jules Ayer
    Location: London / Oxford / Vienna / New York
    Date: 1988 (near-death event); 27 June 1989 (death)
    Case: a four-minute cardiac arrest and the article "What I Saw When I Was Dead"
    Status: revised his claim to a slight weakening of "inflexible attitude," not belief itself

    - Born 29 October 1910 in St John's Wood; mother from the Dutch-Jewish family behind Citroën, father a Swiss Calvinist financier who worked for the Rothschild family.
    - Published Language, Truth, and Logic in 1936 at age twenty-six, built on the verification principle developed after his winter 1932-1933 stay with Moritz Schlick's Vienna Circle.
    - Served in the Welsh Guards from September 1940 and worked in intelligence with the Special Operations Executive and MI6 during World War II.
    - Physician Dr. John Gorman reported that Ayer said "I saw a divine being" after resuscitation in 1988; Ayer said he had no memory of saying it.
    - In 1987, at a party at Fernando Sanchez's New York apartment, Ayer physically intervened between Mike Tyson and Naomi Campbell, reportedly telling Tyson, "We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men."

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    24 min
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