Sleepy Philosophy Radio

Fall asleep to Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and The Rebel, a reading of absurdity, freedom, and revolt.Camus and Sartre began as friends and became public opponents over The Rebel. Their argument reaches deeper than the quarrel: Camus starts with the absurd and insists on revolt with limits; Sartre starts with radical freedom and asks what commitment to history requires. The reading follows their wartime friendship, the break, and the strongest version of each view. It asks how a person acts when no final authority can decide in their place. The chapters give each major claim enough space to become clear, then test where its evidence and limits lie. The narration follows the subject through the named texts and arguments, with its historical context where that changes the meaning. It keeps quotations and disputed interpretations in view, and leaves room for a listener to weigh the question rather than accepting a ready answer. Search terms include L’Homme révolté and La Nausée.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.Chapters:(00:00:00) Camus Reads Sartre's Nausea(00:02:19) Camus and Sartre Become Friends(00:14:00) Camus's Absurd and Sartre's Contingency(00:25:43) Sartre's Freedom Without Excuse(00:38:02) Camus at the Combat Newspaper(00:48:41) Sartre's Student and the Choice(01:00:47) Camus's Plague and Shared Happiness(01:13:39) Sartre's Literature of Freedom(01:26:41) Camus's Rebel and Its Limits(01:40:40) Sartre's Commitment to History(01:52:53) Camus and Sartre on Human Nature(02:04:57) Camus and Sartre's Break of 1952(02:14:28) Camus and Sartre's Nobel Choices(02:22:34) Camus and Sartre After the QuarrelIf 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:"Meditation Impromptu 01" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Trio for Piano, Cello, and Clarinet" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Promising Relationship" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Aftermath" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Magic Forest" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Cryptic Sorrow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Mesmerize" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Night Break" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Unnatural Situation" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Overheat" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Meditation Impromptu 03" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Meditation Impromptu 02" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Gymnopedie No. 1" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Lightless Dawn" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Crypto" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Blue Feather" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Immersed" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Oppressive Gloom" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Wounded" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Colorless Aura" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Lost Time" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Heartbreaking" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Cylinder Five", "Cylinder Two", "Cylinder Nine", "Cylinder Eight" by Chris ZabriskieFrom the album CylindersLicensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/chriszabriskie.com

Fall asleep to The Kybalion's seven Hermetic principles, usually attributed to William Walker Atkinson.The Kybalion places a living mind beneath the visible universe and presents seven principles for understanding existence. This carefully researched narration follows Mentalism, Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender, giving each its own argument and concrete examples. It distinguishes the book's American New Thought setting from its claims of ancient authority, and separates its speculative cosmology from established physics. The discussion also considers mental transmutation, deliberate attention, the relationship between a creator and a created individual, and the demand that knowledge enter action. Atkinson's Thought Vibration helps locate its publishing world, while the ancient Hermetica, including the Corpus Hermeticum, provides a contrast with the modern numbered system. The book's afterlife is considered through its portable maxims and the historical framing of The Kybalion: The Definitive Edition. The aim is to understand what the text actually proposes without turning mental practice into promises that wishes control physical events.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.Chapters:0:00:00 The Kybalion and Its Real Origins0:13:50 Mentalism and the Mental Universe0:33:30 Correspondence and the Unseen0:48:58 Vibration and the Language of Science1:04:25 Polarity and Degrees of Feeling1:20:18 Rhythm and the Return of Moods1:35:48 Cause and Effect and Human Freedom1:51:48 Gender and the Creative Mind2:07:25 Mental Transmutation and Attention2:21:00 The All in Every Individual2:37:30 The Kybalion and Its Afterlife2:51:34 Knowledge Intended for UseIf 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:"Mesmerize" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Evening Fall (Harp)" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Magic Forest" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Soaring" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Aftermath" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Clean Soul" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Sunset at Glengorm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Blue Feather" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Meditation Impromptu 02" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Trio for Piano, Cello, and Clarinet" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Cryptic Sorrow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Promising Relationship" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Gymnopedie No. 1" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Overheat" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Meditation Impromptu 01" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Meditation Impromptu 03" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Smoother Move" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Cylinder Seven", "Cylinder Eight", "Cylinder Four", "Cylinder Five" by Chris ZabriskieFrom the album CylindersLicensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/chriszabriskie.com

Fall asleep to the history of hell and Dante’s Inferno, a reading of Hades, Sheol, and Dante’s Inferno.The idea of hell did not enter history in one finished form. This reading follows Egyptian judgment, Hebrew Sheol, Greek Hades, the Zoroastrian bridge, Gehenna, and arguments in early Christianity about the reach and duration of judgment. Dante gives the tradition its most enduring imaginative architecture; Milton, Swedenborg, and modern philosophers change its terms again. The focus stays on ideas about justice and the human conscience, rather than scenes of torment. The chapters give each major claim enough space to become clear, then test where its evidence and limits lie. The narration follows the subject through the named texts and arguments, with its historical context where that changes the meaning. It keeps quotations and disputed interpretations in view, and leaves room for a listener to weigh the question rather than accepting a ready answer. Search terms include Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Inferno.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.Chapters:0:00:00 The History of Hell and Its Names0:04:53 Dante's Inferno and the Gate0:15:27 Dante's Nine Circles of Hell0:26:14 Egyptian Weighing of the Heart0:35:40 Sheol and the House of Dust0:44:16 Hades and Plato's Judges0:56:28 Zoroaster's Bridge of Judgment1:04:10 Gehenna and the Divided Dead1:13:19 Hell in the Gospels and Revelation1:22:28 Origen and the Hope of Restoration1:39:41 Augustine and Eternal Punishment1:56:57 Medieval Judgment in Stone2:07:11 Milton's Hell Within the Mind2:12:26 Swedenborg and the Chosen Hell2:25:36 Darwin and the Moral Objection2:33:08 Sartre's No Exit and Other PeopleIf 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:"Cryptic Sorrow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Deep Noise" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Oppressive Gloom" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"The Dread" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Lightless Dawn" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Echoes of Time" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Sunset at Glengorm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Aftermath" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Unnatural Situation" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Heartbreaking" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Mourning Song" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Magic Forest" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Wounded" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Virtutes Instrumenti" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Agnus Dei X" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Soaring" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Quinn's Song: A New Man" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Immersed" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Crypto" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Night Break" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)"Mesmerize" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Cylinder Four", "Cylinder One", "Cylinder Seven" by Chris ZabriskieFrom the album CylindersLicensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/chriszabriskie.com

Fall asleep to the life and mind of Samuel Beckett, who made an art of failure, waiting, and going on.Born on a Good Friday in a comfortable Dublin suburb, a brilliant, restless young Irishman drifts to Paris, falls into the orbit of the greatest writer of the age, and spends a lost decade unable to find his own voice. Then a war, a betrayal, and years in hiding change him, and afterward, in a single astonishing burst, he writes the works that remake modern literature. This is the story of the man behind Waiting for Godot and Endgame, of two tramps by a bare tree and a woman buried in the earth, of a trilogy of novels that descend into a voice that cannot stop. We follow his idea of habit and time, his comedy of the abyss, his strange doctrine of failure, and the deep kindness of the private man, all the way to a plain grey stone and the words that outlived him. A life, and a way of seeing, for the quiet hours.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.Chapters:0:00:00 Chapter 1: The Life0:11:49 Chapter 2: The Suffering of Being0:20:48 Chapter 3: The Years in Hiding0:27:35 Chapter 4: The Way of Subtraction0:36:51 Chapter 5: Waiting for Godot0:48:47 Chapter 6: The Comedy of the Abyss0:56:39 Chapter 7: Endgame1:08:11 Chapter 8: The Need of the Other1:13:49 Chapter 9: The Voice Goes On1:25:14 Chapter 10: Krapp's Last Tape1:31:43 Chapter 11: Voices and Shadows1:39:59 Chapter 12: Happy Days1:46:08 Chapter 13: Fail Better1:54:22 Chapter 14: The Body in the Dark2:00:41 Chapter 15: Grey Upon Grey2:09:02 Chapter 16: Still Going OnIf 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 and ideas of Alan Watts, the philosopher who taught the West how to let go.Across sixteen unhurried chapters, we follow the strange and luminous life of Alan Watts, the self-taught Englishman who became the most listened-to interpreter of Eastern wisdom the West has ever known. From a boyhood spent gazing at Chinese landscape paintings, through a brief and surprising career as a priest, to the houseboats and mountain cabins of California, we trace how a restless amateur turned Zen, Taoism, and the old Indian teachings into clear and living English. Along the way we sit with his best-loved books, on insecurity, on Zen, and on the taboo against knowing who you really are, and with the great question at the center of them all. And we look, without flinching, at the gap between the serene teacher and the troubled man, and at why his gentle voice, decades after his death, still finds people in the dark.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.Chapters:0:00:00 Chapter 1: The Painted Mountains0:11:56 Chapter 2: The borrowed light0:17:57 Chapter 3: The habit and the collar0:26:22 Chapter 4: The menu and the meal0:32:27 Chapter 5: To hold your breath0:43:01 Chapter 6: A finger pointing at the moon0:55:28 Chapter 7: Beat, square, and neither1:02:32 Chapter 8: The war with nature1:11:34 Chapter 9: Two ways of healing1:23:06 Chapter 10: The chemistry of consciousness1:30:13 Chapter 11: The game of hide and seek1:40:53 Chapter 12: The taboo against knowing1:52:45 Chapter 13: You cannot live in tomorrow1:59:27 Chapter 14: The watercourse way2:08:41 Chapter 15: The genuine fake2:19:58 Chapter 16: The voice that remainedIf 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 Sigmund Freud, from a room full of buried gods to a chosen death in exile.He set out to be the coldest of scientists and ended by telling the strangest story modern people had ever heard about themselves. This is the life and the mind of Sigmund Freud. We begin in his consulting rooms in Vienna, among the ancient statues he could not work without, and follow him from a provincial childhood to the discovery that made his name, the claim that most of the mind is hidden, and hidden on purpose. We move through his masterwork on dreams, his scandalous account of childhood, the drama he found buried in every family, and the movement that made him famous and cost him his dearest friends. We watch his vision darken, after a war, into a theory of the wish for death and the permanent discontent of civilization. And we follow him to the end, through illness, exile, and a death met on his own terms, into the strange afterlife of ideas that science keeps rejecting and no one can quite escape.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.Chapters:0:00:00 Chapter 1: The Life0:11:51 Chapter 2: A Cure by Talking0:20:10 Chapter 3: Not Master in the House0:26:21 Chapter 4: The Lamp Turned Inward0:34:05 Chapter 5: The Royal Road0:46:20 Chapter 6: What the Tongue Betrays0:51:26 Chapter 7: The Child's Secret Life0:58:38 Chapter 8: The Drama in the Nursery1:09:36 Chapter 9: The Difficult Patients1:15:48 Chapter 10: The Cause and Its Heretics1:24:25 Chapter 11: The Crime at the Origin1:30:27 Chapter 12: The Undertow1:38:57 Chapter 13: The House Divided1:44:52 Chapter 14: The Consoling Illusion1:52:30 Chapter 15: The Price of Civilization2:05:08 Chapter 16: The Fire and the Flight2:13:33 Chapter 17: A Climate of OpinionIf 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 Plotinus, the mystic who taught that all things flow from a single source and long to return.In the third century, in the crowded city of Rome, a gentle teacher who was ashamed of his own body and would not sit for a portrait built the last great philosophy of the ancient world. This episode follows Plotinus, the founder of what we now call Neoplatonism, from his youth in Roman Egypt and his years with a secret master in Alexandria to the circle of devoted students who gathered around him. We trace his single luminous vision of reality, a great outpouring from one nameless source down through mind and soul to the very edge of matter, and the long road home by which a person may climb back. Along the way we sit with his thoughts on beauty and on time, on evil and the goodness of the world, on the self that never fell, and on the rare and wordless union he was said to have reached four times. It is a slow, patient walk up the oldest ladder in philosophy.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.Chapters:0:00:00 Chapter 1: The Face He Would Not Leave0:11:56 Chapter 2: The Heir of Plato0:17:59 Chapter 3: From One, All Things0:26:27 Chapter 4: Beyond Being Itself0:37:55 Chapter 5: Where Thought Is Being0:48:00 Chapter 6: The Moving Image0:54:04 Chapter 7: The Soul of the World1:02:52 Chapter 8: The Shadow of Contemplation1:09:13 Chapter 9: Where the Light Fails1:18:36 Chapter 10: The Statue Within1:30:45 Chapter 11: The Self That Never Fell1:39:33 Chapter 12: Alone, to the Alone1:51:34 Chapter 13: Happy on the Rack1:59:51 Chapter 14: The Order of the Books2:05:41 Chapter 15: The Long AfterglowIf 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

Thank you for listening, whether this is your first episode or your fiftieth.Our regular episodes are free for everyone, and they always take hours of reading and writing. If you'd like to support the show directly, you can become a member on Spotify. Members get our book episodes: each one takes a single book and walks through it, in our own words. On Spotify, members also hear every episode without ad breaks.To join, press play on any of our episodes with a lock, or use this link: https://members.spotify.com/to/sleepyphiloMembership is separate from Spotify Premium. It is available in the US, Canada, the UK, most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.Music:"Trio for Piano, Cello, and Clarinet" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Fall asleep to the story of Mainländer, the philosopher who taught that God has died and death is our redemption.In a rented room by a German river, a mild and dutiful bank clerk finished the strangest book of his century, and then quietly ended his own life. This episode follows Philipp Mainländer, the poet and philosopher who took Schopenhauer's darkness further than anyone had dared. We trace his single great work, The Philosophy of Redemption, and the idea at its heart, that God, before the world began, chose not to exist, and shattered into the universe in order to die. We follow the strange drive he found beneath all life, the calm he took from a running-down cosmos, and the rescue he promised, which is simply rest, and nothing more. Along the way we meet his gentle serenity, his quarrel across time with Nietzsche, and the uncanny way modern science has come to echo his cooling universe. It is a patient walk to the far edge of pessimism, and gently back.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.Chapters:0:00:00 Chapter 1: The Man from the Main0:13:26 Chapter 2: The Case for Wanting Less0:22:19 Chapter 3: The Architecture of an Ending0:28:02 Chapter 4: The Suicide of God0:41:14 Chapter 5: The World Runs Down0:47:17 Chapter 6: A World Without a Beyond0:55:45 Chapter 7: The Will to Die1:07:44 Chapter 8: Redemption Into Nothing1:17:00 Chapter 9: A Foretaste of Peace1:22:48 Chapter 10: The Road of Renunciation1:30:59 Chapter 11: History's Long Sunset1:42:48 Chapter 12: A Strange Serenity1:48:42 Chapter 13: The One Who Said It First1:56:33 Chapter 14: The Quiet VindicationIf 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 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