How do we know life is not a dream?
3/6/202632 min
Some questions are so big they’re existential, meaning that they get right to the heart of human existence. These are also sometimes called philosophical questions, so for this episode we called up a professor of philosophy, Scott Hershovitz, who teaches at the University of Michigan. He’s also written a book about how adults and kids can have philosophical discussions together. It’s called Nasty, Brutish and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids.
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Jane Lindholm· Host0:26
[upbeat music] This is But Why?, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions from curious kids just like you, and we find answers. Every now and then, actually more frequently than you might think, we get questions that are really, really big and very hard to answer. These are the questions from kids who are wrestling with what we call existential questions, things like why do humans exist, why is life sometimes unfair, questions about punishment and kindness, how we define art, or what if we're all living in a dream and we just don't know it? Another way to describe these kinds of questions is to say they're philosophical