Why the World Called Her Mad | Emily Dickinson Philosophy for Sleep

"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 Scottish customs official, and he became the most misread thinker in the history of economics. This episode follows the whole arc: the quiet port town of Kirkcaldy and the mother he never left, the miserable years at Oxford, the Glasgow lecture rooms where he was happiest, and the long silent decade by the sea in which he wrote the Wealth of Nations. Before the economics comes the moral philosophy the world forgot, the theory of sympathy and the mirror of society, the impartial spectator and the man within the breast, the little finger and the earthquake, the parable of the poor man's son who chases wealth and finds it empty. Then the great book itself, read slowly and in context, the pin factory, the butcher and the brewer, the invisible hand in all three places Smith actually used it, the merchants conspiring against the public, the critique of empire and slavery, and the duties he assigned to the state. Along the way come Hutcheson and Hume, the French economists in their Paris salons, the bank that collapsed while he wrote, the public letter on Hume's death that cost him more abuse than his attack on the whole commercial system, and the man of system who moves human beings like pieces on a board. Serious philosophy, told slowly and clearly, for listeners who want real ideas as they drift off. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts. SUPPORT THE SHOW 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 book summary episodes, a growing shelf of great books read closely and explained in plain language. Subscribe: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/sleepyphilo/subscribe (0:00:00) The Man Who Burned His Papers (0:13:08) Wonder and the Imagination (0:19:26) A Nation of Improvers (0:28:18) The Mirror of Society (0:39:50) The Faculty of Speech (0:45:29) The Man Within the Breast (0:58:50) The Little Finger and the Earthquake (1:04:32) The Corruption of Our Moral Sentiments (1:14:38) The Poor Man's Son (1:20:51) Justice, the Main Pillar (1:29:42) Among the Economists (1:41:38) The Year the Banks Fell (1:48:02) The Pin Factory (2:01:55) The Butcher's Self-Love (2:12:03) The Invisible Hand (2:24:11) A Conspiracy Against the Public (2:29:46) The Golden Dream (2:40:07) The Linen Shirt (2:46:14) The Duties of the Sovereign (2:59:54) The Death of David Hume (3:08:03) The Man of System (3:13:44) The Uses of Adam Smith Sleepy Philosophy Radio makes longform, carefully researched philosophy written as a serious essay and paced for rest. All research and writing is done personally. Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License.

Why the World Called Her Mad | Emily Dickinson Philosophy 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 Amherst, Massachusetts, and her sister found a locked box holding the largest secret in American literature. This episode begins inside that discovery and follows the whole life that produced it, the girl who would not stand for Christ at Mount Holyoke, the white-dressed woman who chose a locked door as a vocation, the letters that built a world she refused to enter, and the astonishing war years when she wrote nearly a poem a day while her eyesight failed. We read the great poems slowly and completely, the carriage ride with Death, the fly at the deathbed, the loaded gun, the wild nights and the great renunciation, the slant of winter light, and we end with the editors, lovers, and rivals who fought for decades over her manuscripts, and with the question of why every age remakes her and none has finished with her. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts. SUPPORT THE SHOW Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote [https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote] Becoming a member keeps these episodes coming and unlocks the members only library of exclusive book summary episodes, a growing shelf of great books read closely and explained in plain language. Subscribe: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/sleepyphilo/subscribe [https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/sleepyphilo/subscribe] (0:00:00) The Locked Box (0:12:50) The Soul Selects Her Own Society (0:19:21) A Letter Always Feels Like Immortality (0:28:49) Dear Mr. Higginson (0:40:20) Some Keep the Sabbath (0:48:33) The War Years (0:57:46) Publication Is the Auction (1:04:56) The Books She Sewed by Hand (1:13:55) Hymn Meter and the Dash (1:21:49) The Carriage Ride (1:33:45) The Fly in the Room (1:42:07) After Great Pain (1:52:36) Across the Hedge (2:01:49) The Master Letters (2:09:21) Wild Nights (2:15:50) I Cannot Live With You (2:25:50) A Loaded Gun (2:38:18) My Business Is Circumference (2:48:39) A Bird Came Down the Walk (2:57:22) A Certain Slant of Light (3:04:16) The Last Decade (3:13:00) The Editors' War (3:22:47) Why She Lasts Sleepy Philosophy Radio makes longform, carefully researched philosophy written as a serious essay and paced for rest. All research and writing is done personally. Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License.

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 begins with a man who loses everything in a single afternoon and refuses every easy explanation, then traces the great answers, evil as absence, the best of all possible worlds, and the earthquake and the novel that broke optimism's public standing. From there the argument sharpens into the twentieth century, a charge of outright contradiction, the celebrated defense that answered it, a theodicy of growing souls, and a dying fawn that changed the question from proof to evidence. The second half belongs to skeptical theism, the claim that human minds cannot survey the reasons a God might have, and to the objections that press it, moral paralysis, spreading doubt, horrendous evils, animal pain, and divine silence. The episode ends where the argument now stands, between a rock and a rope. Serious philosophy, told slowly and clearly, for listeners who want real ideas as they drift off. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts. SUPPORT THE SHOW Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote [https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote] Becoming a member keeps these episodes coming and unlocks the members only library of exclusive book summary episodes, a growing shelf of great books read closely and explained in plain language. Subscribe: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/sleepyphilo/subscribe [https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/sleepyphilo/subscribe] (0:00:00) The Man on the Ash Heap (0:13:21) The Riddle (0:19:35) Evil as Absence (0:29:38) The Best of All Possible Worlds (0:41:30) The Morning Lisbon Fell (0:47:30) The Posthumous Bombshell (0:59:38) Returning the Ticket (1:09:32) After Auschwitz (1:15:50) Three Propositions (1:24:38) The Free Will Defense (1:38:34) The Vale of Soul-Making (1:48:13) The Fawn in the Forest (2:00:13) The Hypothesis of Indifference (2:06:36) The Parent and the Child (2:19:14) The Limits of Sight (2:28:21) The Moral Cost (2:39:46) The Skeptical Spiral (2:46:17) Horrendous Evils (2:57:45) Wandering in Darkness (3:06:50) Against Theodicy (3:13:13) Nature Red in Tooth and Claw (3:22:02) The Hidden God (3:28:57) The Rock and the Rope Sleepy Philosophy Radio makes longform, carefully researched philosophy written as a serious essay and paced for rest. All research and writing is done personally. Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. Q7WnROfxZKmRe4Uk2xv7

Akhmatova: The Poet Who Outlived the State

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 Pushkin's town outside Petersburg, through the cellar cabarets where a new Russian poetry was made, to the love lyrics that made her the most famous woman in Russian literature before she was thirty. Then the century turns. A husband is executed, a son is taken, and an unofficial ban erases her name from print for fifteen years. We trace how a banned poet composed her greatest work without ever writing it down, how a cycle of short poems became the memorial for a generation of the disappeared, and what it means to treat memory itself as a form of resistance. The episode ends among honors that arrived forty years late, a difficult masterpiece three decades in the making, and a bronze figure standing by a river, looking at a prison. Serious philosophy and serious history, told slowly and clearly, for listeners who want real ideas as they drift off. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts. SUPPORT THE SHOW Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote [https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote] Becoming a member keeps these episodes coming and unlocks the members only library of exclusive book summary episodes, a growing shelf of great books read closely and explained in plain language. Subscribe: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/sleepyphilo/subscribe [https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/sleepyphilo/subscribe] (0:00:00) The Woman in the Queue (0:12:50) Pushkin's Town (0:18:51) The Unknown Italian (0:26:52) The Cellar of the Stray Dog (0:37:59) The Glove on the Wrong Hand (0:46:52) Anna of All the Russias (0:52:48) White Flock (0:59:58) The Voice She Refused (1:06:19) August Nineteen Twenty-One (1:16:59) The Unwritten Decade (1:24:58) Fountain House (1:31:14) The Mandelstams (1:40:45) Three Hundredth in Line (1:51:16) Hands, Matches, an Ashtray (1:59:57) Requiem (2:13:12) The Word as Witness (2:19:48) Courage (2:30:38) The Guest from the Future (2:38:41) Half Nun, Half Harlot (2:50:10) The Masquerade (2:59:27) The Box with the Triple Bottom (3:06:07) The Booth at Komarovo (3:15:10) The Monument by the Prison Sleepy Philosophy Radio makes longform, carefully researched philosophy written as a serious essay and paced for rest. All research and writing is done personally. Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License.

Wittgenstein, the Man Who Ended Philosophy Twice

The richest heir in Vienna gave everything away and kept only the hardest questions ever asked about language. Ludwig Wittgenstein was born into one of the wealthiest families in Europe and died telling his friends he had lived wonderfully, though almost nothing in between looks like happiness. This episode follows the whole arc: the palace in Vienna and the family tragedies, the flight from engineering into logic, the masterpiece written in the trenches of the First World War, and the lost decade he spent teaching village children after declaring philosophy finished. Then the return, the quiet unraveling of his own system, the language games and the forms of life, the beetle in the box, the duck and the rabbit, and the riverbed of certainty he was still mapping two days before the end. Along the way come Russell and Frege, the Vienna Circle's great misreading, Turing arguing about falling bridges, a disputed fireplace poker, and the deathbed sentence that frames it all. Serious philosophy, told slowly and clearly, for listeners who want real ideas as they drift off. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts. SUPPORT THE SHOW Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote [https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote] Becoming a member keeps these episodes coming and unlocks the members only library of exclusive book summary episodes, a growing shelf of great books read closely and explained in plain language. Subscribe: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/sleepyphilo/subscribe [https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/sleepyphilo/subscribe] (0:00:00) A Wonderful Life (0:16:00) The Paradox That Broke Logic (0:23:00) The Book in the Rucksack (0:33:00) A Picture of the World (0:46:00) What Cannot Be Said (0:57:00) The End of Philosophy (1:03:00) The Lost Decade (1:12:00) The Great Misreading (1:19:00) The Return (1:32:00) Philosophy as Therapy (1:41:00) Language Games (1:55:00) Following the Rule (2:05:00) The Beetle in the Box (2:18:00) The Duck and the Rabbit (2:25:00) The Inner and the Outer (2:35:00) The Ceremonial Animal (2:42:00) Inventing Mathematics (2:52:00) The Riverbed (3:05:00) The Walls of the Cage (3:14:00) The Poker and the Confession (3:22:00) The Album (3:30:00) Light in the Darkness Sleepy Philosophy Radio makes longform, carefully researched philosophy written as a serious essay and paced for rest. All research and writing is done personally. Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License.