Philosophy often starts with questions that sound simple until you try to answer them. What makes an action right? Can you control your happiness? Are people naturally good? What does it mean to live a good life? From beginner-friendly explanations to deep discussions of major thinkers, the philosophy podcasts below offer different ways to explore those questions.
1. Philosophize This!
Stephen West was doing two eight-hour shifts a day in a warehouse when he typed a question into Google, asking “Who was the wisest person in the history of the world?”. The search results pointed him to Plato, so he read the dialogue ‘Gorgias’. After that, he spent his shifts listening to philosophy, because the job left his ears free. In June 2013, he started recording his own explanations, and Philosophize This! has since passed 240+ episodes. The early series moves in order from the pre-Socratics onward, and by episode seven he goes to Asian philosophy with Daoism and Lao Tzu.
This is a great podcast for anyone who wants philosophy for beginners and feels intimidated by the field. I really liked West’s explanations on the Cold War era thinkers Camus and Sartre (episode 86). He started with simple examples, like the cookie analogy, to break down complex topics like existentialism. In other episodes, he also covers recent thinkers such as Byung-Chul Han and the late Mark Fisher. Fun fact: Dan Carlin of Hardcore History was West's podcasting hero, but he deliberately avoided imitating him, because he wanted the show to sound like nobody else.
2. The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
Peter Adamson teaches at LMU Munich and at King's College London, and he is a heavy listener of chronological history podcasts himself. It occurred to him that nobody had done the same job for his own subject, where the usual course leaps from Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas and then to Descartes. So in December 2010 he began with Thales and undertook this project, promising zero gaps. Episodes run about twenty minutes and go up twice a month.
If you are a perfectionist, this is the series to commit to, because it is the closest thing anyone has made to a history of Western philosophy in the order it happened. Adamson brings in guest specialists whenever a subject falls outside his own training, which is why Neoplatonist metaphysics and seventeenth-century French moralism are both handled seriously in the same feed. A second feed carries classical Indian philosophy with Jonardon Ganeri, Africana philosophy with Chike Jeffers and classical Chinese philosophy with Karyn Lai. Fun fact: His example animal in hypotheticals is nearly always a giraffe, and one listener was so amused by this that he sent him a copy of a book titled ‘Giraffes? Giraffes!’.
3. The Partially Examined Life
Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan and Seth Paskin were doctoral candidates in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1990s, and none of them finished the programme. In 2009, the three of them reconnected over Skype to revisit texts they had loved and loathed as students, and the first episode went out that May. Dylan Casey, who holds a doctorate in physics, joined afterwards as the fourth regular. Each episode takes one short text and runs for ninety minutes or more, and the hosts describe the result as a graduate seminar combined with a pub conversation.
Their episode on the Dao De Jing (episode 311) is a good free sample. They work through the wildly different translations of the text, what the Dao might actually be, and whether the opening chapter is making a practical or a metaphysical claim, with a guest who studied Chinese philosophy. The works of Immanuel Kant and Hegel have also been discussed flawlessly, and you do not need any prior knowledge to follow along. Fun fact: The actress Lucy Lawless, best known as Xena, told them their show had her thinking about going back to university to study philosophy.
4. Philosophy Bites
David Edmonds was making documentaries for the BBC World Service, and Nigel Warburton was a senior lecturer at the Open University, when the two of them began recording interviews with philosophers in 2007 and posting them online. Warburton eventually resigned his university post, to concentrate on public philosophy through radio, podcasts and writing.
The short length of this podcast makes it the obvious choice for a commute, and the archive is large enough to work as a sampler if you have no idea yet which part of the subject interests you. Peter Singer uses his episode to set out when he thinks ending a human life is permissible, and Monima Chadha of Oxford explains how Buddhist philosophy denies that any lasting self exists. Martha Nussbaum, Kwame Anthony Appiah and David Chalmers have all recorded episodes on this show too. Fun fact: Edmonds co-wrote a bestseller with John Eidinow titled ‘Wittgenstein's Poker’, which talks about the legendary 10-minute confrontation between two philosophical giants at Cambridge in October 1946.
5. Philosophy Talk
John Perry was listening to Car Talk, the radio programme where two brothers took calls about broken engines, and reasoned that if those two could make automobile repair entertaining, then philosophy ought to be easier. He and his Stanford colleague Ken Taylor recorded two demonstration episodes and took them to KQED in San Francisco, which turned them down. KALW agreed to try it instead, so the live pilot went out in August 2003. The programme has since passed six hundred episodes. Each one pairs the hosts with an academic guest and takes questions from listeners who phone in, with a reported segment from a roving philosophical reporter. Taylor died in 2019, and the show is now hosted by Josh Landy and Ray Briggs. The full archive was opened to the public free of charge in early 2026.
The callers are the reason I like this show, because they ask great questions and the hosts give thoughtful answers. One episode asks what Sartre meant by saying we are condemned to be free, and how existentialism became the ground Simone de Beauvoir built feminist theory on. Another covers Im Yunjidang, the eighteenth-century Korean philosopher who was the first Confucian to argue outright that women can become sages, on the grounds that everybody starts with the same moral nature. Fun fact: Stanford undergraduates have long done the background research for episodes as part of what the university calls the show's 'crack research team'.
6. The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast
Jack Symes started this podcast in 2016, when new UK-wide specifications for teaching religious studies came in and he saw a gap in the market for something that would serve students and teachers. He went on to teach philosophy and religious studies at a secondary school, and the podcast matches the way he taught the subject in class. A topic is split across two episodes released a fortnight apart. The first works through the thinker and the argument itself; the second, always titled 'Further Analysis and Discussion', is where the hosts turn on the idea and press the objections.
Choose this show if you would like a proper course instead of a casual playlist, because the multi-part structure lets an idea be introduced, developed and understood thoroughly. Plato's Euthyphro has been discussed well by setting out the old dilemma: whether an act is good because the gods command it, in which case goodness is arbitrary, or whether they command it because it is already good, in which case goodness exists outside of the gods. Peter Singer, Daniel Dennett, Galen Strawson and Rowan Williams have all appeared as guests on this show. Fun fact: Episode 150 is devoted entirely to deciding who deserves the title of the world's worst philosopher, with Žižek, Nietzsche and Bentham all in contention.
7. The Daily Stoic
Stoicism began with a shipwreck. Zeno of Citium was a merchant who lost his cargo at sea, ended up in Athens, and by about 300 BC was teaching in the marketplace beneath a painted colonnade. His school held that virtue is the only thing good in itself, and that your health, your money, your reputation and the conduct of everybody else lie outside your control, so resting your peace of mind on any of them is a mistake you will pay for. The modern habit of using the word stoic to mean unfeeling would have puzzled them, given how much they wrote about grief, anger and friendship.
Ryan Holiday reads a passage of two or three minutes aloud every weekday, which is the audio version of the Daily Stoic email; and posts longer interviews two or three times a week. The short format suits the material, because the Stoics taught their philosophy as a daily exercise and not as a subject you finish in one go. What you get from this show is practical advice about anger, money and work, rather than pure ancient philosophy. Fun fact: Holiday's bookshop in Bastrop, Texas is called The Painted Porch, which is the English translation of ‘Stoa Poikile’, the colonnade where Zeno taught and from which the Stoics took their name.
8. The Nietzsche Podcast
Keegan Kjeldsen spent much of the 2010s touring the US and Europe as the guitarist of doom metal band Destroyer of Light. In June 2021, he started The Nietzsche Podcast, a show devoted entirely to the ideas, influences, and legacy of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The podcast now spans six seasons, mixing thematic discussions with detailed readthroughs of Nietzsche’s books. In his series on The Gay Science, for example, Kjeldsen worked through the text section by section, explaining the ideas and arguments alongside the passages themselves. There is an interview strand alongside the main series called Untimely Reflections, and there are episodes on Schopenhauer, Carl Jung and Georges Bataille, who either fed Nietzsche or borrowed from him.
Reach for this podcast if you have tried opening books like ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ and got nowhere by yourself. Episodes often pass ninety minutes, which gives him room to explain complicated concepts like the eternal recurrence, which is a test of whether you could accept your life exactly as it has been and repeat it forever. Fun fact: Untimely Reflections, the name Kjeldsen publishes under, is one of the English titles used for Nietzsche's early essay collection Untimely Meditations.
9. Very Bad Wizards
Tamler Sommers teaches philosophy at the University of Houston, and David Pizarro is a psychologist at Cornell who studies disgust and moral judgement. They met at a conference on ethics, spent the following years arguing about morality over drinks, and eventually concluded that other people might enjoy listening in, so they began recording in 2012. A typical episode opens with an article that irritated one of them, moves on to a paper in moral psychology, and now and then abandons both for a novel or a film.
Sommers can tell you what philosophers think justifies a moral judgement while Pizarro can tell you what the experiments suggest people are doing when they make one. Peter Singer, Sam Harris and Laurie Santos have all been guests. I should warn you that the jokes are crude and the explicit tag is there for a reason, which makes this the least office-friendly of the philosophy podcasts here. Fun fact: The warning about bad language at the start of every episode is read by Sommers' daughter.
10. Hi-Phi Nation
Barry Lam had run a college radio station before he became a philosophy professor, so he knew how audio is put together. The idea for the show came to him at a 2017 conference at West Point, where he spent a day among soldiers who had served in wars and wanted to become philosophers, and decided the public ought to hear them. That conversation became 'Soldier Philosophers' in season one. Slate picked the show up from the third season onwards. He writes, edits and produces the whole thing himself. Every episode opens with a reported story and brings the philosophers in afterwards.
This is the one for people who like to listen to real, reported audio and find academic theories too far off the ground. One episode follows delivery workers for the grocery app Shipt, who realised in 2020 that the pay algorithm had changed and they could no longer tell whether a job would earn or cost them money. Then the episode is handed over to a political philosopher on the difference between wage labour and freelance labour. The sound design and scoring put the show nearer to a documentary series. Fun fact: Lam has taught a course at Princeton on podcast production and public philosophy.
11. The Public Philosopher
Michael Sandel teaches at Harvard, where his course Justice became the first there to be made freely available online and on television. BBC Radio 4 built this series on the same method. He takes a case from the news into a room full of people, invites somebody to defend a position on it, and then leans on the principle underneath until that person can see where it leads. The first three programmes were recorded with an audience at the London School of Economics. Later editions have come from inside the Palace of Westminster with MPs and peers, from St Paul's Cathedral, and from India, where he recorded a programme on violence against women after the Delhi rape case.
Pick this one if you hold strong opinions about fairness or markets and want them discussed by somebody who does political philosophy for a living. The subject he returns to is where a market stops allocating goods efficiently and starts altering what they mean. Firms on Capitol Hill pay people to hold overnight places in the queue for free congressional hearing seats, then sell the place to a lobbyist. Nobody is forced into it and both parties gain something, which is precisely what makes the case difficult to settle. Fun fact: Fourteen thousand people once filled an outdoor stadium in Seoul to hear Sandel speak, and China Newsweek named him the most influential foreign figure of the year.
The hardest part of getting into philosophy is often deciding where to begin. With centuries of thinkers, competing ideas, and unfamiliar terminology, the subject can feel overwhelming before you even start. Fortunately, these philosophy podcasts give you different entry points, so you can begin with the approach that suits you best. Good luck on your learning journey!