Philosophy Playdate

To answer this week’s question, “Am I too perfect?” Steve and Christabel begin with a brief survey of a selection of religious conceptions of human perfection. This takes them from the contemplation of fitra in Sufi Islam, to the concepts of ātman and puruṣa in the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and Sāṅkhya traditions of Hinduism. They weigh in on the Pelagian-Augustinian debate on whether spontaneously conceived babies are on the hook for Adam’s crimes against apples – or St Augustine of Hippo’s crimes against pears – according to the Christian doctrine of original sin (noting that IVF babies might have found the perfect theological loophole).Discussion then turns to the question as to whether perfection is even a logically coherent concept. Divine perfection seems problematic, given that it seems to entail that God could create a rock so heavy that no being could lift it, and then immediately do so. Christabel explores the process theist’s rejection of the classical, monopolar view of God as existing within Boethian eternity. She begins to expound upon the idea that time is a wheel, and that according to this dogma, though good times pass away, so do the bad. It’s considered that mutability is our tragedy, but also our hope; that the worst of times - like the best - are always passing away. Steve simply replies: “I know”. Email us the impossible questions children ask you at philosophyplaydate@gmail.comFind Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.com/Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane

This week, Steve and Christabel try their best to avoid suffering the fate of John William Dunne, who was laughed out of metaphysics circles for proposing that time is an infinite layer cake. In fact, in answering this week’s question, “How long is a minute?”, both hosts are clear on one thing; that you cannot have your cake and eat (all of the temporal parts of) it too. In fact, Christabel argues that the project of destroying a whole cake is just as problematic as that of travelling back in time to kill your grandfather. But time travel isn’t found to be completely paradoxical, and the possibility of travelling back to your favourite minute of a Weird Al Yankovich concert is found to be broadly unobjectionable (at least as concerns logical consistency). Christabel introduces us to distinctions between ecstatic, historical, personal, external, absolute and proper times, and makes the case for perdurantism; the theory that all objects that persist through time are four-dimensional spacetime worms, and that only small slices of these worms exist at any given time. Steve is more convinced by this view than the presentist’s denial of the existence of the past and future, which he likens to the philosophical commitments shared by babies and Beach Boys. 
Read Christabel’s paper about time, as mentioned in the episode: 
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10217604/1/10.1515_krt-2025-0022%20%281%29.pdf
Email us the impossible questions children ask you at philosophyplaydate@gmail.comFind Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.com/Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane

This week Christabel is on a mission to convince us that navy blue is the objectively best colour. In her efforts to do this, she enlists the help of Immanuel Kant, and his distinction between things that are capital B Beautiful, and the merely agreeable. Kant relegates wine to the latter category, and Steve argues that the same is true of Queen (but makes a reasonable exception for Freddie Mercury). Christabel takes issue with both, drawing on Shen-Yi Liao’s characterisation of nostalgic food as art to argue that we have good reasons for widening our understanding of what counts as both Beautiful and high art. We are then introduced to Samantha Matherne’s Kant scholarship, to which Christabel appeals in order to make the claim that if we squint at the Critique of Judgement in the right light, Kant might give us what we need to make the argument that individual shades and tones, when appreciated in a sufficiently abstract way, might be taken to count as the kinds of things about which proper aesthetic judgements can be made. We are invited to conclude that there may be a universally correct answer to this week’s question “What’s the best favourite colour to have?” (and that the answer is navy blue).Email us the impossible questions children ask you at philosophyplaydate@gmail.comFind Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.com/Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane

For the very first episode of Philosophy Playdate, Steve and Christabel tackle a fresh new take on the trolley problem, provided by a 7-year-old nascent ethicist. Her question was: “If there was a switch that turned all dogs into human babies, and another switch that turned all human babies into dogs, and you had to push one, which would you push?” This ethical dilemma prompts a discussion of animal sentience and the problems we face when tasked with ranking different kinds of human and non-human consciousness, and whether such a ranking could ever justify the ‘speciesist’ conclusion that some lives are worth more than others. Christabel extolls the virtues of care ethics over the utilitarian aggregative calculus, and Steve extolls the virtues of vasectomies. Both oscillate between the two poles of pro- and antinatalism, considering the environmental, social and hedonistic factors that bear on the question as to when - if ever - it is morally permissible to bring life into the world.  As a rare treat for this inaugural episode, both hosts come to a definitive answer on this week’s question (though in a characteristically philosophical turn of events, they fail to meet an agreement).Email us the impossible questions children ask you at philosophyplaydate@gmail.comFind Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.com/Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane