Philosophy has always been drawn to the question of what’s possible, what could be, what might have been, and what we might yet become. In a political moment when the distance between the world as it is and the world as we want it to be feels especially stark, the tools philosophers use to navigate that gap — thought experiments, counterfactuals, ideal theory, and fiction — have never felt more urgent or more contested. Whether we’re arguing about moral responsibility, political justice, or the meaning of a science fiction novel, we’re constantly invoking worlds that don’t (yet, or never did) exist. But how well do those imaginary worlds actually serve us?

When is a simplified, stripped-down scenario a useful device for isolating what we really believe, and when does it smuggle in the assumptions we already had? If we ask what the world would look like had one historical event gone differently, are we doing philosophy or just indulging in fantasy causality? When we imagine an ideal world from scratch, does it illuminate what justice requires, or does the very act of abstraction guarantee that we’ll leave out what matters most?

In this episode, Leigh, Jen, and Bob take up possible worlds as a question about philosophical methodology itself. What are philosophers actually doing when they reach for thought experiments, counterfactuals, ideal theory, and fictional worlds? And are those tools fit for the work we ask of them?

Grab a drink and join us as we test the limits of philosophical imagination — and ask whether the worlds we invent help us see this one more clearly, or let us off the hook too easily.

This week’s jukebox picks:

• From Leigh: “Strawberry Fields” by The Beatles
• From Jen: “Imagine” by John Lennon
• From Bob: “Possible Worlds” by The Shamen

In this episode, we reference the following thinkers, texts, ideas, etc.:

• Possible worlds 
• Thought experiments in philosophy
• Moral intuitions 
• Philippa Foot and the trolley problem
• Judith Jarvis Thomson and self-defense thought experiments
• Immanuel Kant on the motive of duty
• Trolleyology (the broader research program of trolley-problem variants)
• John Rawls and the original position
• Counterfactuals in philosophy and their use in reasoning about causality and responsibility
• Metaphysical thought experiments and questions of necessity and possibility
• David Chalmers and the philosophical zombie
• Jacques Derrida on the instability of the possible/impossible distinction
• Ideal theory in political philosophy
• Charles Mills and the critique of ideal theory (race, colonialism, and the “suspiciously clean” ideal)
• Amartya Sen and the critique of ideal theory 
• bell hooks on justice forged inside domination
• Martin Luther King Jr. and the emancipatory vision as an orientation rather than a blueprint
• Thomas More, Utopia
• Plato, Republic — the ideal city, the philosopher king, and the role of eros
• Phenomenology and its relationship to fiction
• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings — as a fictional world reflecting a critique of industrialization
• Albert Camus on fiction as “a lie that tells the truth”
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on the best of all possible worlds 
• Voltaire, Candide