Ep. 80 - Can I Trust Philosophers?

Are philosophers good people?

Do they actually live the kinds of lives they tell the rest of us to aspire to?

Or are they all talk and no action?

In this weeks episode, we take a hard look at the lives of some of our favorite philosophers and the ways they sometimes seemed to completely contradict their own teachings. With thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Albert Camus on the chopping block, we ask whether we can still trust their ideas after discovering the flaws, contradictions, and troubling choices in the lives they lived.

With the gentle but clear guidance of American thinker and writer bell hooks, we confront a difficult question: what do we do when someone whose ideas have changed us turns out to be deeply flawed in ways that challenge everything we thought we knew about them?

Perhaps the person who gives us a powerful idea does not have to be the person we want to become.