Sleepy Philosophy Radio

Fall asleep to the medieval mystic who taught ordinary people to pray to be rid of God.At the summit of the medieval Church, a Dominican master who governed dozens of religious houses did something no one of his rank had dared. He carried the deepest theology out of the Latin schools and preached it, in plain German, to nuns and weavers and widows. We follow him from an uncertain village in Germany to the heights of the University of Paris, and into the heart of what he taught, a God beyond all names, an uncreated spark at the bottom of the soul, a birth of the divine within us, and a path that runs not by adding but by letting everything go. We trace his tender words to the grieving, his surprising defense of the working life, and the trial that broke over him at the very end. Then we follow the long silence after his death, and the strange, luminous return that made him a voice for our own restless age.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.Chapters:0:00:00 Chapter 1: A German Life0:11:39 Chapter 2: The Common Tongue0:20:05 Chapter 3: Being Before Doing0:25:45 Chapter 4: Being Is God0:34:21 Chapter 5: A Pure Nothing0:39:58 Chapter 6: The God Beyond God0:51:08 Chapter 7: The Spark in the Soul0:59:36 Chapter 8: The Eternal Birth1:10:41 Chapter 9: The Art of Letting Go1:20:07 Chapter 10: Without a Why1:25:57 Chapter 11: The Breakthrough1:37:23 Chapter 12: The Swiftest Horse1:44:54 Chapter 13: Martha in the Kitchen1:50:42 Chapter 14: In the Field of the Lord2:01:53 Chapter 15: The Long SilenceIf this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going.Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded

Fall asleep to Montaigne, who locked himself in a tower to study one man and quietly described us all.In fifteen seventy-one a French nobleman withdrew from public life to a round library at the top of a stone tower, and there, to tame his own restless mind, he began the strangest and most intimate book of its age. This is the story of Michel de Montaigne and the work he modestly called his attempts, the essays that invented a whole way of writing. We begin with his unusual life, the strange education, the one friendship that shaped everything, and the loss that turned him inward. From there we follow the great themes of the book, his bottomless doubt and its gentle motto, his study of the ever-changing self, his hatred of cruelty in a country torn apart by religious war, his acceptance of the body and its pains, and the serene wisdom of his final years. Along the way we meet a mind that set out to know one person and ended by knowing everyone.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.Chapters:0:00:00 Chapter 1: The Man in the Tower0:11:33 Chapter 2: Because It Was He0:19:29 Chapter 3: The Matter of My Book0:31:06 Chapter 4: Nothing Holds Still0:36:42 Chapter 5: Planting the Cabbages0:45:20 Chapter 6: What Do I Know0:57:58 Chapter 7: A Head Well Made1:03:53 Chapter 8: The Cannibals at Rouen1:12:01 Chapter 9: Between Two Fires1:23:03 Chapter 10: The Mayor and Myself1:30:17 Chapter 11: The Road to Rome1:35:53 Chapter 12: Kings and Philosophers1:43:33 Chapter 13: On Our Own Legs1:55:05 Chapter 14: The Last Additions2:00:28 Chapter 15: The Book That Became a FriendIf this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going.Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded

Fall asleep to the story of Boethius, the Roman philosopher who faced execution and answered it with reason alone.In a prison cell in the north of Italy, fifteen centuries ago, one of the most powerful men in the kingdom sat condemned to death and did something no one expected. He wrote a long conversation with Philosophy herself. Tonight we follow the whole of that life and that book. We trace Boethius from the heights of Roman honor to his fall on a false charge, through the vast project by which he tried to carry the thought of Greece into a darkening West, and into the cell where, facing the end, he reached not for rescue but for the light of reason. We sit with Lady Philosophy as she confronts the wheel of fortune, the goods that never satisfy, the one good that all things seek, the puzzle of why the wicked prosper, and at last the great question of how a person can be free under a God who sees all of time at once. It is a quiet, patient argument about how a mind can hold steady when everything else is taken away.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.Chapters:0:00:00 Chapter 1: A Roman Life0:11:16 Chapter 2: A Bridge Over the Ruins0:16:54 Chapter 3: The Only Aristotle0:25:10 Chapter 4: The Reality of Kinds0:30:34 Chapter 5: The Four Roads to Wisdom0:38:58 Chapter 6: Faith Put to Reason0:45:49 Chapter 7: A Book Made in Chains0:56:59 Chapter 8: The Woman Who Is Wisdom1:04:23 Chapter 9: The Turning of the Wheel1:15:38 Chapter 10: The Gifts That Fail1:24:23 Chapter 11: The Good All Things Seek1:35:51 Chapter 12: The Powerlessness of Evil1:42:44 Chapter 13: The Pattern Behind the World1:51:06 Chapter 14: The Eternal Present2:03:03 Chapter 15: A Thousand Years of ReadersIf this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going.Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded

Fall asleep to the life of William James, the invalid who became America's great philosopher of hope and belief.As a young man William James was so ill in body and mind that he could barely leave his room, and one spring evening he made a private decision that would shape everything after it. This episode follows the whole arc of his life and thought, from a wandering childhood in the most gifted family in America, through the collapse that nearly ended him, to the years when he founded a new science of the mind and taught the world to picture consciousness as a flowing stream. We move with him from psychology into philosophy, through his defense of the right to believe, his tender study of the religious experience of ordinary people, and the practical theory of truth that made him famous and infamous at once. And we follow him to the end, a public conscience in a warring age, insisting to his last breath that the universe is unfinished and that our own efforts help to complete it.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.Chapters:0:00:00 Chapter 1: The Life and the Turn0:11:44 Chapter 2: A Natural History of the Mind0:21:34 Chapter 3: The Stream That Never Stops0:29:58 Chapter 4: The Great Flywheel0:35:48 Chapter 5: Because We Tremble0:47:29 Chapter 6: The Right to Believe0:56:28 Chapter 7: The Sick Soul1:08:32 Chapter 8: By Their Fruits1:17:25 Chapter 9: One White Crow1:23:32 Chapter 10: What Difference It Makes1:34:57 Chapter 11: Truth Happens to an Idea1:44:09 Chapter 12: A World of Pure Experience1:50:30 Chapter 13: A Universe Still Unfinished2:00:51 Chapter 14: What Makes a Life Significant2:12:22 Chapter 15: The Temper That RemainsIf this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going.Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded

Fall asleep to the oldest quarrel in philosophy, whether all things flow or nothing ever moves at all.Twenty-five centuries ago, two Greek thinkers gave opposite answers to the same question, and nearly every philosopher since has stood somewhere between them. This episode follows the quarrel from its beginning. We meet Heraclitus, the lonely riddler of Ephesus who hid his one book in a temple and taught that everything flows, that the world is a river and a living fire held in tune by a hidden measure. We cross the sea to meet Parmenides, the calm lawgiver of the Greek west who used pure reason to argue that change is impossible, and that whatever truly is must stand motionless and one. We follow their collision through the famous paradoxes of Zeno, through Plato's daring attempt to give each thinker a world of his own, through Aristotle's quieter answer, and into our own age, where the same argument lives on in physics and in the felt passing of time. It is a slow, patient walk through the two deepest things we feel, that everything changes, and that nothing is ever truly lost.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.Chapters:0:00:00 Chapter 1: The Riddler0:12:58 Chapter 2: The Man from the West0:21:03 Chapter 3: Into the Same River0:26:40 Chapter 4: The Bow and the Lyre0:35:38 Chapter 5: The Hidden Account0:47:03 Chapter 6: The Gates of Night and Day0:53:18 Chapter 7: What Cannot Not Be1:05:20 Chapter 8: The Well-Rounded Sphere1:14:14 Chapter 9: The World of Seeming1:19:55 Chapter 10: Achilles and the Tortoise1:28:20 Chapter 11: Becoming Against Being1:34:51 Chapter 12: The Two Worlds1:47:52 Chapter 13: How Change Was Saved1:55:01 Chapter 14: The World Flows Again2:04:43 Chapter 15: The Stubborn IllusionIf this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going.Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded