SAN FRANCISCO — Isabella from Berkeley wanted to talk about how everyone -- even vegans -- is complicit in the evils of "factory farming, billions of animals living lives of misery."
Philip from San Francisco called in to chat about whether art is even possible without evil, musing aloud on the early-morning airwaves that "if you don't have evil, Satan with a big tail, you don't have irony."
And Charles e-mailed from his Western Addition apartment that "as someone trained in clinical psychology, I see evil as psychopathology. . . . Why couldn't this explain evil in a way we can more readily understand?"
It was just another Sunday morning for Ken Taylor and John Perry, who dissect life's big mysteries on "Philosophy Talk," believed to be America's only live weekly call-in radio show dedicated to the philosophical.
In this celebrity-soaked era, when Americans seem to spend more time pondering whether Britney Spears' underwear exists than whether God does, these two Stanford philosophy professors take on everything from the weighty to the winsome.
On this June morning in the little broadcast booth at KALW-FM (91.7), "Philosophy Talk" tackled the problem of evil -- or, as Perry put it, quoting Epicurus: "If God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?"
They've prodded political correctness, postmodernism and prostitution. They've wondered aloud: "Can science explain consciousness?" "If Truth is so valuable, why is there so much B.S.?" "What are numbers?" "What is a child?"
Rush Limbaugh may be radio royalty, but Taylor and Perry have carved out a small but growing niche and are helping burnish a discipline even adherents say could use a hand.
"Philosophy has, for 2,500 years, had a bit of an image problem," said David E. Schrader, executive director of the American Philosophical Assn. "Ken and John are clearly evangelists for our discipline."
Perry ambles into the studio at Phillip and Sala Burton High School shortly after 9 a.m., central casting's answer for a college professor, all rumpled tweed jacket and essence of pipe tobacco.
He's 65, on the cusp of retirement and deeply influenced by the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, whose central thesis the grandfather of 10 paraphrases as follows: "The world's a big accident, one damn thing after another. . . . When you have to go to lunch, stop thinking about it."
