Sleepy Philosophy Radio

Life Is Worth Living | William James and the Sick Soul

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

Is Change Real? | Heraclitus vs Parmenides | Philosophy for Sleep

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 answer

No One Is Free Alone | Hegel and the Need to Be Seen

Fall asleep to Hegel, who watched an old world end and swore reason was moving through the ruin. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born into a modest world and rose, aga

Those Who Know Do Not Speak | The Hidden Teachings of Lao Tzu

Fall asleep to the ancient Chinese way of yielding, water, and the wisdom of doing without forcing. More than two thousand years ago, in a China torn apart by endless wa

The Most Reluctant Convert | C.S. Lewis for Deep Sleep

Fall asleep to the life and mind of C.S. Lewis, the atheist who became Christianity's most beloved modern voice. Over more than two hours, this longform episode traces t

The Sword Was Never the Point | Miyamoto Musashi for Deep Sleep

Fall asleep to the story of Miyamoto Musashi, the undefeated swordsman who laid down his blade to write. Born into the last years of Japan's long civil wars, a rough, mo

Why We Fear Death | Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death for Sleep

Fall asleep to the story of Ernest Becker, who traced all human striving back to the fear of death. In a hospital bed on the Canadian coast, a dying man agreed to be rec

Man Is Not a Piano Key | Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground for Sleep

Fall asleep to the story of literature's first anti-hero, the sick and spiteful man who spoke the modern mind's secret. In the winter of a year that would take almost ev

Is Life Worth Living? | Nietzsche vs Schopenhauer | Philosophy for Sleep

Fall asleep to the story of the young Nietzsche, who worshipped Schopenhauer and spent his life trying to prove him wrong. As a lonely student, Friedrich Nietzsche found

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind | Joseph Murphy for Sleep

An Irish boy left the priesthood, crossed an ocean, and built a new faith out of the human mind. This is the story of Joseph Murphy, the Irish-born minister whose single

The Odyssey Explained: The Full Story and What It Really Means | For Sleep

Fall asleep to Homer's Odyssey, a voyage through mortality, memory, identity, and the difficult meaning of home. Beginning with a man who refuses immortality, then enter

If You Gaze Long Into an Abyss | A Complete Philosophy of the Existential Crisis

Why do people who have everything still wake at three in the morning certain that none of it means anything? This is a long, unhurried history of the moment the floor of

Why Humans Are Drawn to the Forbidden | Georges Bataille for Sleep

Vote on what comes next: ⁠https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote⁠ Becoming a member keeps these episodes coming and unlocks the members only library of exclusive boo

Best of All Is Never to Be Born | Antinatalism, a Complete Philosophy for Sleep

The oldest, strangest verdict in philosophy, that it might be better never to have been born. Long before the word existed, the wisest voices of the ancient world kept a

Heidegger Betrayed Him. Arendt Never Left. | Karl Jaspers Complete Philosophy for Sleep

A boy told he would die by thirty built a philosophy of openness that outlived two death sentences. Karl Jaspers trained as a doctor under the shadow of an early death,

Why Pythagoras Believed Everything Was a Number | Philosophy for Sleep

Around 600 BCE, on the island of Samos, a man declared something that sounded almost absurd: that everything in the universe, every object, every force, every living crea

"Led by an Invisible Hand" | Adam Smith Complete Philosophy For Sleep

He wrote the book that built the modern world, then spent his last days making sure most of the rest was burned. Adam Smith was the gentle, absent-minded son of a Scotti

Emily Dickinson on Death, Immortality and the Inner World | For Sleep

She died unknown, leaving eighteen hundred poems in a locked box. This is the mind that hid them. In May of 1886, a woman almost nobody knew died in a brick house in Amh

The Problem of Evil: Why God Allows Suffering

An innocent man, a burned fawn, and the hardest question ever asked of God. This episode follows the problem of evil from its oldest telling to its newest defenses. It b

Anna Akhmatova on Poetry, Suffering and Survival | For Sleep

She answered terror with a poem too dangerous to write down, and the poem outlived the state that banned it. This episode follows Anna Akhmatova from a childhood in Push