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Philosophy for Lunch
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Ever wish someone would just explain philosophy in a way that actually connects to your real life? That's Philosophy for Lunch.
Hosted by Shawn and Claire Spainhour, Philosophy for Lunch is a weekly podcast that makes the great ideas of philosophy, psychology, and the history of thought genuinely accessible — without dumbing them down. Each episode runs 25 to 35 minutes: long enough to go deep, short enough for a lunch break, a commute, or the end of your day.
From Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius to Anna Freud's defense mechanisms, from Gödel's incompleteness theorems to the trolley problem — Shawn and Claire explore the ideas that matter most for understanding yourself, other people, and the world. No prior knowledge required. No lectures. Just two curious people thinking out loud together.
If you enjoy Philosophize This!, The Partially Examined Life, or Hidden Brain — and want something warmer, shorter, and built around genuine conversation — this show is for you.
New episodes every Sunday.
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Episode #011 - The Trolley Problem and the Architecture of Moral Thinking
1w ago00:30:28Tap to summarizeDESCRIPTIONYou have probably heard the trolley problem. A runaway trolley, five people on the tracks, a lever that will divert it — but kill one person instead. Most people say pull the lever. Then comes the bridge version: same trolley, same five people, but this time you have to push a man off a bridge to stop it. Same arithmetic. Almost everyone says no.That inconsistency is not a failure of reasoning. It is a window into the architecture of how moral thinking actually works.Shawn and Claire take the most famous thought experiment in moral philosophy seriously — not as a puzzle, but as a precise instrument for exposing the genuine conflict at the heart of moral judgment. Why does the same numerical outcome produce completely different verdicts depending on how the harm is caused? What does that reveal about the limits of utilitarian thinking? And what does it mean that brain imaging studies show different neural systems firing in each case — that the conflict is not just philosophical but physiological?The episode works through the two frameworks the trolley problem puts in direct conflict: utilitarianism, which says the right action is whatever produces the best outcomes; and deontological ethics, which says some actions are wrong regardless of consequences — that there are people you cannot use as means to an end, even a good one. Both capture something real. Neither wins cleanly.And why does any of this matter outside a seminar room? The conflict between maximizing outcomes and respecting individuals is not hypothetical. It is present in every serious question we face — in healthcare, in criminal justice, in how we think about future generations. The trolley problem strips the question down so you can see it clearly. The real-world versions are the same question with the complexity turned back up.Shawn and Claire together. No prior philosophy required.SHOW NOTESPrimary Philosophical TextsFoot, P. (1967). The problem of abortion and the doctrine of double effect. Oxford Review, 5, 5–15.Thomson, J. J. (1985). The trolley problem. Yale Law Journal, 94(6), 1395–1415.Kant, I. (1998). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (M. Gregor, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1785)Mill, J. S. (1998). Utilitarianism (R. Crisp, Ed.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1863)Works Referenced in This EpisodeGreene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293(5537), 2105–2108.Ross, W. D. (1930). The Right and the Good. Oxford University Press.Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press.Kamm, F. M. (2007). Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm. Oxford University Press.Accessible Starting PointsSandel, M. J. (2009). Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (The best popular entry point into utilitarian vs. deontological ethics — and the source of the most-watched philosophy lecture in history.)Singer, P. (1993). Practical Ethics (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.Greene, J. (2013). Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. Penguin Press.New episodes every Sunday. Philosophy for Lunch · Big ideas. Human conversations.
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Episode #010 - Simone de Beauvoir and the Construction of Self
2w ago00:18:35Tap to summarizeYou did not find yourself. You are making yourself. And the conditions under which that making is happening are not neutral.That is the core claim of Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy — and it reaches far beyond the question of gender it is most often associated with. It is a claim about what any self is, how it comes to be, and what it means to take responsibility for who you are becoming when the forces shaping you are largely invisible.In this solo episode, Claire takes the full measure of one of the twentieth century's most important and most underread thinkers. She covers what de Beauvoir's famous sentence — one is not born a woman, one becomes one — is actually arguing beneath the slogan; how de Beauvoir takes Sartre's existentialism and makes it philosophically stronger by insisting that freedom is always situated, always conditioned, never the unconstrained abstraction Sartre sometimes implied; and what the concept of bad faith looks like not as a theoretical failing but as a daily temptation — the comfort of letting your circumstances, your relationships, or your role define you so that you do not have to do the harder work of defining yourself.This episode also takes seriously something the popular reception of de Beauvoir often skips: the way her framework complicates moral judgment. If the self is always shaped by conditions the person did not fully choose, then understanding someone's choices requires attending to the conditions that constrained them — without dissolving personal responsibility entirely. Holding both at once is the philosophical work she is asking you to do. It is harder than either alternative, and more honest.The episode connects directly to last week's conversation on love — because if the self is always a project rather than a finished thing, then who you build a life with is not peripheral to the question of who you become. It is one of the most consequential philosophical decisions you will ever make.Claire solo. No prior philosophy required.SHOW NOTESPrimary Sourcesde Beauvoir, S. (2011). The Second Sex (C. Borde & S. Malovany-Chevallier, Trans.). Knopf. (Original work published 1949) (The complete translation — dense but essential. Even reading Part One and the Introduction will change how you think.)de Beauvoir, S. (1948). The Ethics of Ambiguity (B. Frechtman, Trans.). Philosophical Library. (Shorter and more accessible than The Second Sex — the clearest statement of her own philosophical position.)Sartre, J.-P. (2007). Existentialism Is a Humanism (C. Macomber, Trans.). Yale University Press. (Original work published 1946) (The best short entry point into the existentialist framework de Beauvoir is building on and revising.)Biographical & ContextualBair, D. (1990). Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. Summit Books.Rowley, H. (2005). Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. HarperCollins.Works Referenced in This EpisodeButler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge.Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Harvard University Press.Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit (A. V. Miller, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1807)New episodes every Sunday. Philosophy for Lunch · Big ideas. Human conversations.
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Episode #009 - The Philosophy of Love: What Are You Actually Looking For?
3w ago00:30:32Tap to summarizeMost people approach love with a list. Values they want shared, a lifestyle that fits, a feeling that arrives and confirms they have found the right person. Philosophy has a different question: what if the list is the wrong tool entirely?In this episode, Shawn and Claire take one of the most personal and least examined questions in everyday life and bring the full weight of philosophical tradition to bear on it — not to make love abstract, but to make it clearer. What is it that you are actually tracking when you feel drawn to someone? Is love something that happens to you, or something you develop? And what does it mean that the person you choose is not just a companion for the self you already have — but partly constitutive of the self you will become?They move through the major philosophical accounts: Plato's Symposium and the idea that love is a recognition of something real, not just a projection; Hume's correction that what you are tracking is partly a response in you, not just a property in them; and Erich Fromm's underread argument that contemporary culture has love almost entirely backwards — treating it as something to find rather than a capacity to develop, a skill that requires discipline, knowledge, and practice.The episode lands on a concept the pop-psychology conversation around relationships almost never reaches: philosophical compatibility. Not values alignment — something deeper. How does this person think? How do they handle not knowing? Who do they become under pressure? Those are the questions that predict whether a relationship can sustain a life, and they take longer to answer than any profile or first conversation allows.This episode also sets up next week's deep dive into Simone de Beauvoir — because if the self is always a project rather than a fixed thing, then choosing who you build a life with is not peripheral to the question of who you become. It is one of the most consequential philosophical decisions you will ever make.Shawn and Claire together. No prior philosophy required.SHOW NOTESPrimary SourcesPlato. (1989). Symposium (A. Nehamas & P. Woodruff, Trans.). Hackett Publishing. (Original work written c. 385–370 BCE)Hume, D. (1985). Of the standard of taste. In Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (E. F. Miller, Ed.). Liberty Fund. (Original work published 1757)Kant, I. (2000). Critique of the Power of Judgment (P. Guyer & E. Matthews, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1790)Works Referenced in This EpisodeNozick, R. (1989). Love's bond. In The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (pp. 68–86). Simon & Schuster.Fromm, E. (1956). The Art of Loving. Harper & Row. (Short, quietly radical, and still one of the best things written on this subject.)Accessible Starting PointsSinger, I. (1984). The Nature of Love, Vol. 1: Plato to Luther. University of Chicago Press.Scruton, R. (1986). Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic. Free Press.New episodes every Sunday. Philosophy for Lunch · Big ideas. Human conversations.
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Episode #008 - Cognitive Bias: The Philosophy Behind the Shortcuts
4w ago00:32:07Tap to summarizeYou think you know why you believe what you believe. You probably do not.Not because you are careless or unintelligent—but because the part of your mind doing most of the work is fast, automatic, and largely invisible to you. It forms judgments before you are aware of them, fills in gaps with whatever is most available, and produces confident outputs without flagging what it missed. And here is the uncomfortable part: learning about this does not reliably fix it.In this episode, Shawn and Claire open Block Two — How We Think — with the most practically disruptive idea in modern psychology. Drawing on Daniel Kahneman's and Amos Tversky's decades of research, they walk through the architecture of System 1 and System 2 thinking—not as a memorizable list of named errors, but as a philosophical framework for understanding why the mind works the way it does and what that means for how we should live.This episode goes further than the popular Kahneman summary. It asks the questions that the pop-psychology version leaves out: If our moral judgments about other people are shaped by biases we cannot see — by race, by attractiveness, by how a question is framed — what does that mean for ethics? If knowing about a bias does not protect you from it, what actually helps? And is there something right about the shortcuts, or are they simply errors in a system that should know better?They also cover the philosophical tension at the heart of nudge theory—the insight that you can improve decisions not by educating people but by changing the architecture of their choices and why that approach is both effective and deeply uncomfortable from the standpoint of human autonomy.The examined life is still the goal. But this episode shows just how much there is left to examine.Shawn and Claire together. No prior knowledge required.SHOW NOTESPrimary WorksKahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131.Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291.Works Referenced in This EpisodeGigerenzer, G. (2007). Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious. Viking.Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2017). The Enigma of Reason. Harvard University Press.Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press.Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1464–1480.Wason, P. C. (1968). Reasoning about a rule. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20(3), 273–281.Accessible Starting PointsLewis, M. (2017). The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. Norton. (The story of Kahneman and Tversky's collaboration — reads like a thriller.)Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. HarperCollins.New episodes every Sunday. Philosophy for Lunch · Big ideas. Human conversations.
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Episode #007 - Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem: The Proof That Broke Mathematics
May 2400:33:16Tap to summarizeMost of us were raised on an implicit promise: that if you think carefully enough, gather enough evidence, and reason rigorously enough, you can in principle get to the bottom of any question. Science will eventually explain everything. Logic will eventually resolve every contradiction. Reason, given enough time, is sufficient.Kurt Gödel proved that promise was false. Not in a vague, philosophical hand-waving way — but with a formal mathematical proof that no one has ever refuted, and no one ever will.In this episode, Shawn and Claire take one of the most profound and least understood results in intellectual history and make it genuinely accessible — not as a mathematical curiosity, but as a philosophical reckoning. Because what Gödel discovered is not just about arithmetic. It is about the nature of knowledge itself: that every system of thought, no matter how rigorous, contains truths it cannot reach from the inside. That reason has a ceiling. And that the ceiling is not a failure — it is a feature of what it means to think at all.They also go back further, to Georg Cantor's discovery that infinity is not one thing but many — that some infinities are measurably larger than others — and why that discovery, which his contemporaries denounced as dangerous, turned out to be one of the most beautiful results in the history of human thought.This episode asks the questions that connect the mathematics to lived experience: What does it mean to accept that some truths are permanently beyond proof? How should that change the confidence with which we hold our own frameworks? And what does it say about the human mind that we can somehow perceive truths that no formal system can verify?This is the episode for anyone who has ever suspected that reality is stranger — and richer — than the explanations on offer. It is.Shawn and Claire together. No prior mathematics required.SHOW NOTESPrimary Mathematical TextsCantor, G. (1915). Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers (P. E. B. Jourdain, Trans.). Open Court. (Original work published 1895–1897)Gödel, K. (1992). On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems (B. Meltzer, Trans.). Dover. (Original work published 1931)Biographical & ContextualDauben, J. W. (1979). Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite. Harvard University Press.Goldstein, R. (2005). Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. Norton. (The best accessible biography and intellectual history of Gödel — highly recommended as a follow-up.)Philosophy of MathematicsBenacerraf, P., & Putnam, H. (Eds.). (1983). Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.Penrose, R. (1989). The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. Oxford University Press.Wigner, E. P. (1960). The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, 13(1), 1–14.New episodes every Sunday. Philosophy for Lunch · Big ideas. Human conversations.
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Episode #006 - Aristotle's Happiness: Why Feeling Good Is Not the Same as Living Well
May 1700:36:55Tap to summarizeThere is a question most people do not ask out loud but almost everyone thinks about. Not "am I happy right now" — that one changes by the hour. The harder question is: is this a good life? Is the life I am building one that, at the end, I will look back on and think — yes, that was it?Aristotle thought that was the right question. And he thought most of the answers people give to it are wrong.In this episode, Shawn and Claire unpack Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia — usually translated as happiness, almost never meaning what that word implies. Eudaimonia is not a feeling. It is not a state you achieve and then maintain. It is something you do, and keep doing, over the course of an entire life. It is closer to flourishing — the full, excellent exercise of what you are genuinely capable of.They cover why Aristotle draws such a sharp line between pleasure and the good life (and why he is not saying pleasure is unimportant), the function argument and what it means that human beings have a characteristic excellence to develop, why virtue for Aristotle means something closer to skill than piety, how the research on psychological flow maps almost exactly onto what Aristotle described 2,400 years ago, and why Aristotle insists — in a way that many modern self-help frameworks quietly evade — that you cannot flourish alone. Deep friendship and a functioning community are not optional extras. They are structural requirements.This episode also looks honestly at where Aristotle's framework is demanding, where it runs into trouble, and what it means that every choice you make is quietly building — or failing to build — the character that makes a good life possible.Shawn and Claire together. No prior philosophy required.SHOW NOTESPrimary SourcesAristotle. (1999). Nicomachean Ethics (T. Irwin, Trans., 2nd ed.). Hackett Publishing. (Original work written c. 350 BCE) (The essential text — Irwin's translation is rigorous and readable.)Aristotle. (1998). Politics (C. D. C. Reeve, Trans.). Hackett Publishing. (Original work written c. 350 BCE)Works Referenced in This EpisodeCsikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row. (The empirical research that maps most closely onto Aristotle's account of eudaimonia.)Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being. Free Press. (The PERMA model as a contemporary translation of Aristotelian flourishing.)Nussbaum, M. C. (1986). The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.Hursthouse, R. (1999). On Virtue Ethics. Oxford University Press.Bellah, R. N., et al. (1985). Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. University of California Press.Accessible Starting PointsMacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. University of Notre Dame Press. (The best modern case for why Aristotelian ethics still matters.)Sandel, M. J. (2009). Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? Farrar, Straus and Giroux.New episodes every Sunday. Philosophy for Lunch · Big ideas. Human conversations.
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Episode #005 - The Philosophy of Grief: What the Best Thinkers Actually Said About Loss
May 1000:24:52Tap to summarizeGrief is not a stage you pass through. It is not a staircase with acceptance waiting at the top. And the five-stage model you probably learned—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—was never actually based on bereaved people at all.In this solo episode, Shawn comes to the philosophy of grief the way most people come to it: because he needed it. He lost his brother not long ago. And what he found in philosophy was not a fix or a framework but something rarer—honesty. Thinkers who sat with exactly what loss feels like, without flinching, and wrote about it with precision.This episode covers what grief actually is—not sadness, but a reorganization of the self around an absence—and why the Kübler-Ross stage model fails the people it is supposed to help. It draws on C.S. Lewis writing in raw grief after losing his wife, Joan Didion, on the way grief distorts cognition; Boethius writing The Consolation of Philosophy while awaiting his own execution; and Camus on how to live honestly in a world that does not offer the comfort we want.Shawn also addresses the thing our culture gets most wrong about grief: the expectation that it should fade, resolve, and eventually end. What changes over time is not the love and not exactly the loss—but your relationship to both. You carry it differently. It does not go away, and the pressure to be over it after some culturally specified period is one of the crueler things we do to each other around death.This episode is for anyone in the middle of it. And for anyone who wants to be better company to someone who is.Shawn solo. No prior philosophy required.SHOW NOTESPrimary SourcesBoethius. (2008). The Consolation of Philosophy (N. Watts, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work written c. 524 CE)Camus, A. (1991). The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (J. O'Brien, Trans.). Vintage. (Original work published 1942)Camus, A. (1989). The Stranger (M. Ward, Trans.). Vintage. (Original work published 1942)Lewis, C. S. (1961). A Grief Observed. Faber & Faber.Contemporary Philosophy of GriefCholbi, M. (2021). Grief: A Philosophical Guide. Princeton University Press.Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. Macmillan.Freud, S. (1957). Mourning and melancholia. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 243–258). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1917)Accessible Starting PointsDidion, J. (2005). The Year of Magical Thinking. Knopf.Wolterstorff, N. (1987). Lament for a Son. Eerdmans. (Quiet, profound, and unlike anything else written about grief.)If you are currently in crisis or need support, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text: dial or text 988.New episodes every Sunday. Philosophy for Lunch · Big ideas. Human conversations.
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Episode #004 - Do You Actually Have Free Will? The Philosophy That Changes How You See Yourself
May 300:29:35Tap to summarizeYou made a decision this morning. Maybe several. But here is the question philosophers have been wrestling with for centuries: did you actually choose, or did something choose for you? Your genetics, your upbringing, your brain chemistry, a chain of causes that stretches back before you were born?In this solo episode, Claire takes one of the oldest and most personally confronting questions in philosophy and walks it all the way through—not to unsettle you, but to hand you something genuinely useful on the other side.She covers the three main positions: hard determinism (the universe is a closed causal system, and nothing could have been otherwise), libertarian free will (you are a genuine first cause, an agent who stands outside the chain), and compatibilism (freedom is real, but it is not what you think it is). She unpacks the famous Libet neuroscience experiments that seemed to show your brain decides before you do, what Spinoza believed understanding your own causes can actually do for you, and why the question of moral luck—how much of who you are was simply given to you—may be the most important practical implication of this entire debate.Claire lands somewhere honest. And wherever you land, this episode will change the emotional register of how you relate to your own history — and how quickly you judge someone else's.Claire solo. No prior philosophy required.SHOW NOTESPrimary Sources & Key Philosophical TextsSpinoza, B. (1994). Ethics (E. Curley, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1677)Hume, D. (1975). Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (3rd ed., L. A. Selby-Bigge & P. H. Nidditch, Eds.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1748)Frankfurt, H. G. (1971). Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. Journal of Philosophy, 68(1), 5–20.Contemporary Works ReferencedKane, R. (1998). The Significance of Free Will. Oxford University Press.Pereboom, D. (2001). Living Without Free Will. Cambridge University Press.Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W., & Pearl, D. K. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity. Brain, 106(3), 623–642.Baumeister, R. F., Masicampo, E. J., & DeWall, C. N. (2009). Prosocial benefits of feeling free: Disbelief in free will increases aggression and reduces helpfulness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35(2), 260–268.Accessible Starting PointsHarris, S. (2012). Free Will. Free Press.Dennett, D. C. (2003). Freedom Evolves. Viking.Strawson, G. (2010). Freedom and Belief (rev. ed.). Oxford University Press.New episodes every Sunday. Philosophy for Lunch · Big ideas. Human conversations.
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Episode #003 - Carl Jung and the Shadow: The Parts of You That You Don't Claim
Apr 2600:29:19Tap to summarizeThink about the person who irritates you most — not someone who has wronged you, but the one whose very presence gets under your skin in a way you can't quite explain. Carl Jung had a theory about that feeling. And it points directly back at you.In this episode, Shawn and Claire Spainhour unpack one of Jung's most durable and personally confronting ideas: the shadow. Not the pop-psychology version — the real one. The shadow is the unconscious part of the personality that the ego refuses to claim: the anger you were told was unacceptable, the ambition you learned to hide, the spontaneity you traded away to become reliable. It doesn't disappear when you disown it. It accumulates. And eventually, it shows up in your relationships, your reactions, and the patterns you can't seem to break no matter how hard you try.This episode covers how the shadow forms in childhood; why the qualities that irritate us most in others are often a map of our own interior; what Jung actually meant by "shadow integration" (it's not what social media says it is), and why the shadow contains not just darkness but unlived potential—the capacities and gifts you set aside to become who you are.Jung said the shadow is ninety percent pure gold. This episode is about how to find it.25 minutes. No prior knowledge of Jung required.SHOW NOTESPrimary SourcesJung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Collected Works Vol. 9ii)Jung, C. G. (1968). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Collected Works Vol. 9i)Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections (A. Jaffé, Ed.; R. & C. Winston, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (The most accessible entry point into Jung's own voice — part memoir, part psychology.)Biographical & ContextualBair, D. (2003). Jung: A Biography. Little, Brown.Hayman, R. (1999). A Life of Jung. Norton.Works Referenced in This EpisodeJohnson, R. A. (1991). Owning Your Own Shadow. HarperOne. (Short, practical, highly recommended as a follow-up to this episode.)Zweig, C., & Abrams, J. (Eds.). (1991). Meeting the Shadow. Tarcher.Von Franz, M.-L. (1995). Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales (rev. ed.). Shambhala.Accessible Starting PointsStorr, A. (1983). The Essential Jung. Princeton University Press.Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books.New episodes every Sunday. Philosophy for Lunch · Big ideas. Human conversations.
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Episode #002 - The Stoic's Morning Routine: Marcus Aurelius in Practice
Apr 1900:27:11Tap to summarizeThere's a book that has been in print for nearly two thousand years — and it was never meant to be published. Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome, wrote the Meditations entirely for himself: no audience, no posterity, no performance. Just a man on a military campaign, before dawn, talking himself into facing the day.In this episode, Shawn and Claire dig into what the Meditations actually says — and it's not what most people expect. This is not a serene philosopher-king who had it figured out. This is an anxious, grieving, endlessly self-correcting human being who happened to run the most powerful empire on earth. His morning practice wasn't about achieving peace. It was about trying to become the person he wanted to be, one day at a time.We cover the Stoic dichotomy of control (what's up to you vs. what isn't), why memento mori is a tool for gratitude and not despair, the "view from above" technique for stopping a mental spiral, and why Marcus's daily practice looks a lot like what modern cognitive behavioral therapy discovered two thousand years later.If you've ever woken up with your mind already running ahead of you — already anxious, already rehearsing grievances — this episode is for you.No prior philosophy required.SHOW NOTESPrimary SourcesAurelius, M. (2002). Meditations (G. Hays, Trans.). Modern Library. (The best modern translation — readable, precise, and beautifully introduced.)Epictetus. (2008). Discourses and Selected Writings (R. Dobbin, Trans.). Penguin Classics.Epictetus. (1983). Handbook (Enchiridion) (N. P. White, Trans.). Hackett Publishing.Biographical & ContextualMcLynn, F. (2009). Marcus Aurelius: A Life. Da Capo Press.Birley, A. R. (1987). Marcus Aurelius: A Biography (rev. ed.). Yale University Press.Works Referenced in This EpisodeRobertson, D. (2019). How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. St. Martin's Press. (Excellent bridge between Stoicism and modern CBT.)Holiday, R., & Hanselman, S. (2016). The Daily Stoic. Portfolio/Penguin.Oettingen, G. (2014). Rethinking Positive Thinking. Current. (The research behind implementation intention and mental contrasting.)Accessible Starting PointsPigliucci, M. (2017). How to Be a Stoic. Basic Books.Irvine, W. B. (2009). A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. Oxford University Press.New episodes every Sunday. Philosophy for Lunch · Big ideas. Human conversations.
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