Lista de episodios

Michel Foucault was a philosophical historian who questioned many of our assumptions about how much better the world is today compared with the past. When he looked at the treatment of the mad, at the medical profession and at sexuality, he didn't see the progress that's routinely assumed.

There's a particular pleasure to be felt in the mighty things of nature: thunderstorms, the stars, vast deserts, oceans, the icecaps. One philosopher who analyzed our pleasure was Edmund Burke, who pinned a word to this sensation and theorized about why it was so nice: he gave us the concept of The Sublime.

Jacques Lacan was France's most famous psychoanalyst, who came up with the intriguing concept of the 'mirror phase'.

We're used to thinking hugely well of democracy. But interestingly, one of the wisest people who ever lived, Socrates, had deep suspicions of it.

Most of us grow up in a single family as our only example of what a family is. Any family dysfunctions we accept as normal which impacts our relationships with other people later in life. It is healthy for us to look back at our childhood influences and understand them.