and ... from the Original Web Page ...
Elucidations - https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/57b498490b5f3f772a76004a
I created the following YouTube Playlists ...
ENGLISH - Elucidations - free downloaded from the University of Chicago from 001 to 051
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGZepaES7LY&list=PLH99V1T9pDs4587XhgsVgwAXMo4TggRP0
and ...
ENGLISH - Elucidations - free downloaded from the University of Chicago from 056 to 150
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ9aPeAXNts&list=PLH99V1T9pDs7nNffFDIljyr2XZwnSkXnz
and ...
ENGLISH - Elucidations - free downloaded from the University of Chicago 2
In the 2nd Elucidations Playlist I will include ALL lectures done in the past by the Philosophers of the 1st Elucications Playlist I will find searching the Youtube ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btmk-jvksOw&list=PLH99V1T9pDs4wrM-qUa3hzdNKVDJjzBvi
==========
Tue, 20 Aug 2024
In this episode, Matt sits down with Shruti Rajagopalan (Mercatus Center) to talk about what the future holds for India.
We often have a tendency to think of the current economic and geopolitical situation as simply the way things are. Especially for people who grew up in the United States over the past 50 years, the fact that it is an economic and military superpower sorta feels set in stone. But in this episode, Shruti Rajagopalan encourages us to take the long view, regarding the current state of the US as just one phase in a decades or possibly centuries-long economic development life cycle. First, the country logs a certain number of decades as a manufacturing hub, under conditions of minimal top-down interference from regulatory bodies. This enables it to build wealth, which eventually pushes it away from being a manufacturing economy, but it’s a race against the clock. With economic growth comes a rise in average life expectancy, plus a lower birth rate, which together can lead to large aging population. Once the aging population increases, the country’s economy needs to be strong in order to accommodate all the caregiving that an aging population makes necessary.
Interestingly, it’s starting to look like some other countries—particularly India—are currently poised to undergo a similar trajectory of economic development that the US did. What makes India stand out is that among the countries in the world with a large young population, they have an unusually high GDP per capita. They also have a pretty sizeable early-career, STEM-savvy middle class that is ready to move anywhere in the world, build a life wherever they end up, and culturally assimilate.
Our esteemed guest argues a) that the relaxation of economic restrictions which took place in India in 1991 made this siutation possible, and that b) a few conditions still need to be met for the future to unfold in the optimal way. One is that India needs to build up its manufacturing sector that the country can get richer before the population gets too old. Another is that other countries need to take advantage of the fact that India’s young workforce is ready to emigrate. She even suggests that wealthier countries with a rising elderly population, low birthrate, or declining heritage language could perhaps address those issues by welcoming an incoming population of young workers from India.
Join us as our guest outlines the (hopefully) upcoming rise of India on the world stage!
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Episode 149: Lainie Ross and Christos Lazaridis talk about defining death
Sun, 14 Apr 2024
In this episode, we are joined by Lainie Ross (University of Rochester Medical Center) and (once again!) Christos Lazaridis (UChicago Medicine), this time to talk about the different ways of defining death.
In our previous episode with Christos, we talked about death and the vexed history of attempts to define it. Prior to the advent of modern life support technology in the 1950s, it was usually enough to check whether a person had a heartbeat and could breathe to determine whether they were dead. But once machines were invented that could breathe and circulate blood in patients whose lungs or hearts were failing, a new moral conundrum was born: how do you decide whether a medical patient is dead when it is now possible to keep their lungs breathing and their heart beating indefinitely?
In this episode, our distinguished guests talk about the actual criteria that physicians use to determine whether a patient is dead, as well as some possible criteria that no one has tried applying but which some doctors think would be more appropriate. Furthermore, Lainie Ross argues that every person has the right to choose which criteria will be used to determine whether they are dead. These two topics interact in interesting ways.
For example, I might have a strong preference for my doctor to pronounce me dead only if I have permanently lost all consciousness, even if I can still spontaneously breathe. Although we currently have no good method of objectively measuring whether a patient has permanently lost consciousness, Dr. Ross argues that I have the moral right to sign an agreement stating my preferences. Specifically: the agreement could state that if, in the future, the technology for determining whether someone has permanently lost consciousness gets invented, and, at that time, I have permanently lost consciousness, then I should be declared dead. On the flipside, some patients prefer a stricter criterion, often for religious reasons. Perhaps it is my religious belief that if I am breathing, then I should be considered to be alive. Lainie Ross argues that in that case, I have the moral right to sign an agreement stating that that is the criterion that doctors will use on me, in the event that I lose consciousness but am still able to spontaneously breathe.
As of right now, people only have the legal right to sign these types of agrreements in a handful of states in the US. Join us for this episode as Christos Lazaridis and Lainie Ross argue for making this legal right more widespread!
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Fri, 20 Oct 2023
In this episode, Matt sits down with Christos Lazaridis (University of Chicago Medicine) to chat about what brain death is and whether brain death should count as, like, death death.
Modern life support technology really hits its stride in the 1960s, allowing doctors to buy themselves more time to save their patients by connecting them to machines that can assist with breathing, blood oxygenation and/or heart pumping. But the flipside to that incredible technological breakthrough was that the medical community now needed to get more precise about the moment at which a person goes from being alive to being dead. After all, what had previously been a quick window between the two was now, due to life support technology, happening in extreme slow motion. In addition, organ transplanation was becoming more and more commonplace, meaning that it was no longer as simple as saying e.g. ‘I count someone as dead just in case their heart has stopped.’
By the early 80s, the United States had settled on a standard definition for when someone counts as dead, which states that a person is dead if they have either permanently lost consciousness or permanently lost the ability to breathe and pump blood with their heart. That criterion makes certain life-saving practices possible; for example, it legally feasible for organ transplantation to begin once a patient has fallen into an irreversible coma, provided they agreed to donate their organs in advance.
But should a person really count as dead just because they fell into an irreversible coma? We call that condition ‘brain death’, or sometimes the wordier ‘death by neurological criteria’, and we legally count it as a full death. Critics of the notion of brain death say that it should not count as death, because a person in this condition is still biologically alive. Their argument is that saying a person in this condition is dead is just a story we’re telling ourselves.
In this episode, Christos Lazaridis—who is a practicing neurointensivist—argues that even if that is a story we’re telling ourselves, that’s fine, because this is a corner case in which it makes sense for the social/legal status of being dead to come apart from the biological status of being dead.
Tune in to hear why he thinks this is the case!
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Episode 147: Gabriella Gonzalez discusses the intersection of algebra and programming
Sat, 15 Jul 2023
In this episode, Matt talks to Gabriella Gonzalez about how basic concepts from the branch of math known as abstract algebra can help us simplify our
computer programs and organize our thoughts.
Algebra. That thing they make us do in school. What was that again? Oh yeah, that’s right; it’s where you get to manipulate equations containing variables. Like, if I have an equation that looks like this:
2⋅x = 16
Then I can divide both sides by two and get a new version where x stands alone, i.e. solve for x:
(2⋅x) / 2 = 16 / 2
x = 8
If you took algebra in school, you might remember learning a bunch of tricks for pushing parts of equations around to get one of the variables to appear only on one side and thus solve for it. Being able to solve for variables in equations proves useful for lots of things: like, if you can translate a word problem into one of those equations, finding the answer is often as simple as tinkering with the equation in some obvious way.
Abstract algebra is somewhat similar in that it also involves manipulating equations containing variables, except the twist is that now you aren’t necessarily manipulating numbers anymore. The variables can stand for something else, and there are more general versions of plus-like, times-like, etc. operations that you can do on these other things. You might be wondering: what on earth could a variable in an equation stand for other than a number? Well, in this episode, Gabriella Gonzalez gives a bunch of examples. You can have equations for cooking recipes, for computer programs, for transactions performed on databases, and for regular expressions. (A regular expression is a special type of computer program for identifying strings that fit a particular pattern and pulling information out of them.)
Gonzalez then goes on to argue that the point of all this is to avoid re-inventing the wheel. Often, when you write a computer program to add some numbers, though this isn’t necessariy obvious at the time of writing, you aren’t actually drawing meaningfully on the fact that they’re numbers. If that’s the case, then what you can often do is make your code that adds things abstract so you only have to write your program once, but then you can re-use it on all these different other kinds of entities other than numbers.
The overall payoff of all that, according to this month’s distinguished guest, is that by following algebra-driven design, you can keep your code simple and easy to understand, while still having it do fancy things. This is particularly important today, when our software just seems to keep getting fancier and fancier, but the usual ways of accomplishing that goal make it unreliable and well nigh impossible to keep up to date.
Join us as Gabriella Gonzalez gives us the tour through various algebraic systems that occur all over the place in computer science, philosophy, and linguistics!
Matt Teichman
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episode 146: Gaurav Venkataraman discusses memory in DNA and RNA
Thu, 30 Mar 2023
In this episode, Matt sits down with Gaurav Vankataraman (Trisk Bio) to talk about how human memory is physically realized.
Where do your memories live? In the brain, right? They’re, like, imprinted there somehow? We often think of memories as analogous with recordings, like when you do an audio recording and the air vibrations get translated into an electrical signal which reorients the magnetic particles on some tape. But is that really how it works? Is the brain some tape waiting to get recorded to, or a hard drive waiting to get data written to it? We don’t exactly have definitive answers to those questions, but in this episode, our distinguished guest discusses a line of research into whether memories could be stored outside the brain, in RNA. He then notes that there is also a lot of RNA in the human brain itself, which means that a similar mechanism for storing memories could exist there as well.
This research, as it turns out, originated in some rather astonishing scientific work from the 1950s involving planarian flatworms. Planarian flatworms have the extraordinary ability to regenerate: if you cut one in half, each of the two halves can actually grow back into a new worm. At that time, there was some preliminary evidence to suggest that if a planarian flatworm learned something, and you cut it in half, when the half that didn’t have a brain grew back, it still retained what the original worm had learned. What the what? It could remember something even though it had a brand new brain? Those initial studies went through a period of being discredited, but in recent years a number of researchers have been exploring new, more rigorous evidence that something of this nature could be going on. Perhaps the flatworms could actually be storing some of their memories in their RNA or DNA, and perhaps RNA has the ability to preserve some of that information both in and outside of the brain.
In this episode, Gaurav Venkataraman argues that the RNA in the brain not responsible for making proteins (called non-coding RNA) has a specific type of mathematical structure that is particularly well-suited for transmitting information both fast and accurately. Not only that, but entities with that kind of structure transmit information more accurately the faster they transmit it. So the fact that RNA in the brain is structurally arranged in the way it is actually makes it a viable candidate for being sort of like the brain’s “software” for storing and manipulating memories.
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Episode 145: Andrew Sepielli discusses quietism and metaethics
Sat, 21 Jan 2023
This episode, Matt and Joseph sit down with Andrew Sepielli (University of Toronto) to talk about metaethical quietism. His new book on the topic, Pragmatist Quietism, is out now from Oxford University Press. Click here to listen to episode 145 of Elucidations.
Metaethical quietism is the view that ethical statements—or anyway, a large portion of the ethical statements we’re usually interested in—can’t be justified or disproved by statements from outside of ethics. There’s something autonomous about the topic of ethics (or rather, about a lot of ethics). Consider the question: in the scenario where a trolley is barreling down the track, on its way to clobber five people, and you have the ability to divert it to the other track where it will only clobber one, should you do so? According to quietists such as our guest, you can’t answer this question by asking metaphysicians or logicians for help. It won’t do to investigate whether moral facts are part of the furniture of the universe, or to study the grammar of words like ought. The only way you can answer a question like that is, well, whatever we usually do to answer ethical questions.
Why are philosophers often tempted to think we can turn to metaphysics, logic, or the philosophy of language to help answer ethical questions? Andrew Sepielli thinks it’s because we conflate two different kinds of ethical statements: the statements he calls deep and the statements he calls superficial. A deep statement is one such that, if you believe it, that belief can impact your mental picture of how things are laid out in the world and guide your action. The fancy word for this mental picture of how the world is laid out is non-conceptual representation. A superficial statement is one belief in which does not influence your non-conpceptual representation of the world. The questions that moral philosophers often write about—such as whether one should divert the trolley, or whether utilitarianism is true—are superficial, which is part of why you can only answer them from within ethics. But there are also deep moral questions, such as: will the party we’re thinking of going to be attended by a bunch of jackasses? When you ask that question, you’re deploying moral language—jackass, specifically, so it is definitely a moral question—but you’re also trying to find out which individuals are going to be at the party. And which individuals happen to be at the party is part of the information in your non-conceptual mental map.
In this episode, Sepielli argues that keeping track of when we’re having a superficial debate vs. when we’re having a deep debate can make it seem less mysterious how ethics could be its own autonomous area of inquiry. Tune in to see why he thinks this is the case!
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Sun, 20 Nov 2022
This episode, Matt talks to Christopher Beem (Penn State University) about how we can cultivate those skills that conduce to having a functioning democracy. His book on the topic, The Seven Democratic Virtues, is out now from Penn State University Press.
The storming of the US Capitol Building in 2021 was an eyebrow-raising event, to say the least. It prompted historians, political scientists, and political philosophers to ask whether deep down, everything was going okay with our democratic system. Was this event some kind of sign that the voting process was under unusual strain? Was it time to start thinking about measures we can take to try to support and maintain it?
Our guest says yes: that time is upon us. In light of evidence from evolutionary psychology that natural selection imbued us all with an instinct for tribalism, he argues that there are pretty strong causal forces working to congeal us into increasingly disjoint political camps. If we don’t do anything about it, members of these communities may one day no longer be willing to vote in the same elections. But what are we supposed to do about it? Although no one simple trick is likely to work, Beem argues that there are personal moral virtues that we can all work on developing. Democracy doesn’t just function by default; we have to actively work on ourselves in order to make it function. It’s not like we wave a magic wand, follow a couple simple steps and then we’re “done”. Rather, it’s always going to be an ongoing process to keep this crazy thing afloat.
Tune in to hear Christopher Beem’s thoughts about what these virtues are and how exemplifying them can get our democracy back into whack!
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Episode 143: Mark Linsenmayer discusses alternative models of education
Wed, 05 Oct 2022
This episode, Matt Teichman talks to Mark Linsenmayer about alternative models of education. Mark is creator and host of the Partially Examined Life, Nakedly Examined Music, Pretty Much Pop, and Philosophy vs. Improv podcasts. He is also the author of the recent book, Philosophy For Teens.
There’s going to college and there’s listening to podcasts. Both can give you a way to learn new things, so in that general sense, both can count as forms of education. Going to college has advantages over listening to podcasts when it comes to learning—a college class can kick off a feedback loop where you’re given work to do, then you’re given one-on-one feedback on that work, then you do more work, and so on. In the best college classes, there’s a dynamic interplay between the state of your understanding and what happens next in the lesson. That means that at least for people who end up connecting with the college experience—not necessarily everyone, but some significant number of people—being in college has a certain intensity to it. It feels like you’re gaining understanding at a more concentrated dose.
That said, though, in addition to these upsides, there is a downside to college, which is that it ends! The learning is nice and concentrated, but it’s also relatively short compared to listening to podcasts, which you can do for way more than just four years—theoretically, it’ll be possible for as long as the technology exists. (And it’s showing no signs of ever going away.) Sure, people can’t just go to college forever. If literally every single person went to college for their entire lives and no one ever did any of the work that makes society function, it wouldn’t be clear how we’d keep the lights on, run hospitals, create enough food for everyone to eat, build houses for everyone to live in, etc. At the same time, a lot of college students have the joyous experience of having their intellectual horizon expanded for four years, only to get suddenly thrust into a demanding work environment upon graduation that may not afford time for all that. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to embark upon your career while not giving up on exploratory learning? At least not entirely?
This is where podcasts come in, according to our guest. They let you continue to explore new topics with a more free-form, lower-stakes structure. Maybe you don’t know whether you want to know more about something yet, but you suspect you might, and that’s enough. The fact that listening to a podcast doesn’t have to end means you can do it at your own pace, and more fundamentally, that you won’t suddenly go from having it to not having it anymore—the way it always seems to happen with formal education.
Tune in to hear Mark Linsenmayer explain the kind of experience he seeks to foster in his listeners by way of four (!!) different podcasts!
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Episode 142: Emily Dupree discusses the rationality of revenge
Tue, 02 Aug 2022
In this episode of Elucidations, Matt sits down with Emily Dupree to learn about whether it’s rational or irrational to try to seek revenge.
As a culture, we kind can’t decide what we think about revenge. Out of one side of our mouths, we talk a big game about letting bygones be bygones, about how revenge and retaliation lead to cycles of violence, and about how nothing good can really come of getting back at people. But acts of revenge, where clearly warranted, also have a visceral moral appeal that it would be absurd to deny. If we didn’t think there were at least some situations in which a person ought to get their comeuppance, then there wouldn’t be so many heroic adventure movies centered around the protagonist’s quest for revenge. When the hero gets back at the villain, it just feels right, like the movie needs to end here and we can all go home; and no amount of pedantic, post-hoc reasoning can ever make that feeling go away.
Solving that dilemma is hard, but as a way of working up to it, our distinguished guest decides to tackle a slightly different question. Not: can seeking revenge ever be the right thing to do—but: can seeking revenge ever be a rational thing to do. Traditionally, most philosophers have answered that question in the negative. Calling it irrational means that it’s senseless and unintelligible, like anyone who does it is undergoing a (possibly temporary) lapse in their basic mental faculties. The reason most philosophers think that it’s irrational to take revenge is that there’s no way to undo the wrong that was done to you in the past. If Person A did something truly horrible to Person B, that thing doesn’t get undone when Person B does a new horrible thing to Person A. And if that’s the case, why do it? Doing it is all cost and no benefit.
In this episode, Emily Dupree argues that in fact, it can be rational to take revenge. How come? It isn’t all cost and no benefit, because in some cases, successfully taking revenge can lead to a unique benefit: namely, the restoration of the vengeance seeker’s moral personhood. For the unique benefit to come, certain background conditions have to hold: the original harm has to have been genuinely morally wrong, it has to have been as egregious as it can be (so it can’t be minor/inconsequential), it has to have taken place under conditions of the political state failing, and it has to have undermined the vengeance seeker’s moral personhood. In that case, it is possible for an act of vengeance to be intelligible as an attempt on the part of the vengeance seeker to get their moral personhood back. Note that our guest isn’t saying the vengeance seeker is right to seek vengeance in these circumstances. The view is just that seeking vengeance under these circumstances can be comprehensible, rather than just bonkers.
Tune in to hear our guest discuss some historical examples of revenge that we can comprehend!
Matt Teichman
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Mon, 13 Jun 2022
This time around, Matt sits down with Rob Goodman to talk about political eloquence. Goodman is the author of a new book on this topic called Words on Fire, which you can pick up a copy of wherever you like to get books.
Can you think of the last time you saw someone give a rousing speech? They step up to the podium with throngs of onlookers staring at them. Somehow, rather than nervously scampering offstage or melting into a puddle, they speak off the cuff in a way that transfixes everyone listening. Their words feel fresh, sincere, and yet somehow also perfect, like a movie star nailing their big scene on the first take. You’d think that someone speaking from the heart would falter or stumble the way the rest of us do, but against all odds, this feels both maximally authentic and maximally polished.
What is it that makes a speaker compelling to listen to? Rob Goodman thinks that in order to understand what eloquence is, we need to look not just at the person up on stage and how they’re talking, but how the people in the audience are responding, and how the speaker is responding to their responses, and how they’re responding to the responses to their responses, and so on, ad infinitum. What makes eloquence happen isn’t really individual speakers talking in vacuum, so much as it is groups of people conversing together. Or at least that’s his idea. Eloquence isn’t just one person speaking skillfully; it’s several people conversing skillfully.
In this episode, our distinguished guest also argues that when a public speech goes well, it goes well because both the person speaking and the people listening are taking some risks. The person speaking is sort of on the spot, risking embarrassment, and the people listening might have to rethink their prior beliefs, which takes a lot of work, at least assuming they make an effort to live by their beliefs. When a speech does what it’s supposed to, these risks are shared between all parties, rather than farmed off onto just one. But when the speaker tries to give the appearance of taking risks without actually doing so, you end up with the audience shouldering 100% of the burden, and the exchange ends up somewhat dysfunctional. This, argues our guest, is what happens when politicians go to great lengths to control or sanitize the environment in which they speak, so that no matter what, they don’t embarrass themselves. Sort of like riding a roller coaster with a safety bar.
Tune in to hear more about what makes for a great speech!
Matt Teichman
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episode 140: Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko discuss the good life
Sun, 10 Apr 2022
Intro philosophy classes often get stuck in a rut. Some philosophy classes go through a list of old dead people and try to understand excerpts from some of their most influential writings, over the course of a semester. Could be something like: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche. Other types of intro classes go through a list of topics that contemporary philosophers feel are canonical and have students read papers on those topics. Could be something like: the problem of evil, the mind-body problem, arguments for the existence (or non-existence) of God, the is/ought distinction, and external world skepticism. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that type of class per se—I’d bet a lot of listeners tune into Elucidations precisely because of a kickass class they took on those lines. But sometimes, an instructor will quickly throw a syllabus like that together just out of a general feeling that that’s what you’re supposed to do. Not because the syllabus consists of material that they personally feel excited about. When that happens, what we often end up with is a room full of people who kinda don’t know what they’re doing there, including both the teacher and the students.
This month’s Elucidations guests have a different approach. Their first-year students come from all different backgrounds and majors, and when they walk in, Sullivan and Blaschko immediately ask them: what are you planning to do with your life? Why? What do you hope to get out of it? What is it that makes this plan superior to others? This format still gives the usual suspects like Aristotle, Mill, etc. a seat at the table, but now they’re brought in specifically to help students figure out what they’re going to do when they graduate. Part of what makes this work is that Sullivan and Blaschko are completely open about sharing their own life stories, including big decisions from their past and the reasoning that went into them.
With these background conditions in place, the class turns into a vibrant debate about how to make a future for yourself, thus bringing philosophy back into contact with its original mission from 2500 years ago in ancient Athens. Namely: to give everyone the skills they need to live a good life, to understand what makes the life they’re living good, and to define what a good life is going to look like for them personally, as opposed to for other people.
Their course at The University of Notre Dame, God and the Good Life, has taken the higher education world by storm, and in order to bring some of what they’re up to to a bigger audience, they have adapted it into a new book from Penguin Press, called The Good Life Method. Tune into this month’s episode to learn all about how to live your best life!
Further Reading
If you’re interested in getting a glimpse of the book, you can look at excerpts from it here:
The Good Life Method, Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blashcko
You can also take a look at the authors' personal website, which contain links to many of their writings on this and other topics:
Meghan Sullivan
Paul Blaschko
Happy reading!
Matt Teichman
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episode 139: Jessica Tizzard discusses the philosophy of pregnancy
Sun, 13 Feb 2022
This month, Jessica Tizzard (University of Tuebingen) makes her second appearance on Elucidations to talk to Matt about pregnancy.
Human pregnancy is weird. Try talking to a reproductive endochrinologist about it, and you’ll soon find that there’s a lot we don’t really understand about it even at the scientific level. But even when it comes to thinking about pregnancy at the commonsense reasoning level, puzzles begin popping up the second you start trying to think about it systematically. Like, consider the commonsense idea that a fetus is ‘inside’ the person who is pregant with it. They clearly are, in the sense that they aren’t out and about in the world the way a marsupial fetus is. But if you think about how containment and interiority are defined mathematically, there’s also a sense in which the fetus can’t literally be inside the womb, because in order for one thing to be inside another they have to be physically disconnected.
In this episode, Jessica Tizzard argues that our commonsense thinking about pregnancy is dominated by ‘container’ metaphors: i.e. we think about a fetus inside a womb the way we think about a cookie inside a jar. However, she thinks that ‘parthood’ analogies are often an equally good fit for how a fetus relates to the person pregnant with it. That is, there are also biological analogies you could draw between a fetus and a body part: a body part is seamlessly physically connected to the body it’s a part of, and a body part is subject the same organism-level system of homeostatic regulation that the rest of the body is.
The next step is to start thinking about how these observations ramify morally. Can acknowledging that the ‘parthood’ way of thinking is at least as biologically accurate as the ‘container’ way of thinking help shed light on what kinds of duties a pregnant person has to their as-yet unborn fetus? Join Matt and Jessica as they dive right into these thorny but important questions!
Further Reading
Our distinguished guest recommends the following literature on pregnancy, which she draws on heavily in her own work:
‘Lady Parts’, Elselijn Kingma
‘Were You a Part of Your Mother?’, Elselijn Kingma
‘9 Months’, Elselijn Kingma
‘Neonatal Incubator or Artifical Womb?’, Elselijn Kingma and Suki Finn
‘Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate’, Margaret Olivia Little
Happy reading!
Matt Teichman
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sun, 23 Jan 2022
This month, Toby Buckle, host of the Political Philosophy Podcast, returns to talk about John Stuart Mill’s liberty principle!
(Also sometimes called the ‘harm principle’.)
The occasion for the episode is the recent release of Toby’s cool new book, What is Freedom?, which is out now from Oxford University Press. Get it while it’s hot!
John Stuart Mill is probably one of the most influential intellectuals of the 19th century, having penned treatises on markets, logic, feminism, utilitarianism, and freedom of speech that people continue to pick up and read today. In this episode, we talk about how he had one foot in the free market-oriented tradition of liberalism and another in the more social justice-oriented type of liberalism, how he was raised under the world’s most ambitious parenting/education regime, and how he had a lifelong collaboration with Harriet Taylor. We also introduce what gets called his ‘liberty princple’.
The idea behind the liberty principle is that we want as much freedom for each person as possible: they should have the ability to set their own agenda and carry it out. But we also need to limit it somewhat, because if everyone was completely unconstrained in how they set their agenda and carried it out, they’d interfere with each other. We’d have one person’s freedom detracting from other people’s freedom. So in order to achieve the perfect equilibrium we want, the thing to do is aim for sort of a greatest lower bound: every person should be allowed to do whatever they want for whatever reason they want, only stopping shy once they reach the point where doing whatever they want would harm another person. It might seem like an obvious principle to us now, but arguably that’s because we’re all living in the shadow of Mill!
Part of the background context for this principle is a worry about paternalism. There’s a natural tendency for Person A to prevent Person B from doing what they want because Person A thinks it’s obvious that what Person B wants to do right now is harmful to them. The liberty principle tells us that that’s not a good reason to have laws prohibiting some course of action. We should only have a law prohibiting some course of action if allowing that course of action would interfere with other people’s freedom. That way, Mill argued, we keep the decision about whether to pass a law prohibiting something grounded in empirical facts about what would actually happen if it were passed. He also wanted to emphasize that each person has the right to be their own arbiter of what kinds of risk they will assume.
I hope you enjoy our discussion! It was a fun one.
Further Reading
If you’d like to hear more along the lines of what Toby and I discuss in this episode, you can do no better than to take a look at Mill’s exquisite On Liberty, which you can get for free here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34901
And if you missed the link up at the top, definitely check out Toby’s edited volume, which gathers together a number of the interviews from his own podcast. The overarching theme is what freedom is and what it can be.
What is Freedom?: Conversations with Historians, Philosophers, and Activists, Toby Buckle
Happy reading!
Matt Teichman
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sun, 02 Jan 2022
This month, I talk to Bryan Caplan (George Mason University) about what a world without immigration restrictions could look like.
The work discussed in this episode comes out of Bryan’s incredible non-fiction graphic novel, Open Borders, which I highly recommend checking out. Don’t let the comic-book-iness of it fool you; it is 100% accessible and entertaining, but it is also written at the level of detail you’d normally expect to see in a peer-reviewed research paper.
One basic fact about the world today is that it’s kind of a pain to move from country to country. You can maybe pull it off if you’ve already landed a fancy job where you want to move and if you’re coming from a first-world country, but even then, there are more complications than you might think: work visas, sponsorships, visa renewal, permanent residency, possible eventual citizenship. Basically just a ton of red tape. And if you’re coming from a third-world country, forget it: you typically either have to be a political refugee or enter a lottery that leaves you with a vanishingly small chance of getting in. So although it is technically possible to immigrate, assuming that planets are aligned, the fact remains that in most situations, there are strong legal pressures locking us into whatever country we live in right now. Bryan Caplan thinks that we should essentially just eliminate the bureaucratic machine that makes it so difficult to live wherever you please. Sure, there can still be customs, and nation states, and basic security checks—but other than that, make it as easy as possible for everyone to move around.
Let’s take the US as an example. One obvious benefit of opening up our borders is humanitarian: anyone living in poverty would be able to come here and with no difficulty whatsoever be able to start earning ten times as much money as they could back home. But far beyond that, there is a growing body of research within economics which suggests that having a large influx of formerly poor, newly productive people will lead to a boost in our economy. So everybody wins. And it isn’t just any old boost; it’s a massive boost. If these models are correct, everybody wins big time.
Tune in to hear our guest run through some of the empirical evidence for this prediction and find out why, according to him, the supposed dangers of an open boders policy are greatly exaggerated!
Further Reading
If you’re curious to learn more about the arguments discussed in this episode, you can do no better than to turn to the book:
Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith
You might also enjoy Bryan’s blog post at Econlib running through the many topics the book covers.
Finally, our distinguished guest recommends the following paper by Michael Clemens, which was part of the inspiration for his work on open borders:
‘Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?', Michael A. Clemens
Happy reading!
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Episode 136: Christian Miller discusses virtue and character
Mon, 25 Oct 2021
This month, Yuezhen Li and I sit down with Christian Miller (Wake Forest University) to talk about how to be virtuous. Also known as how to be good.
‘Virtue’ is sort of an old-timey word. But the concept is still alive and well today, even though we tend to use different words for it. The idea behind a virtue is: there’s such a thing as being a good person and doing good things, and that there are different ways of being a good person and doing good things. For example, you can be good in the sense that you’re honest, or you can be good in the sense that you’re brave, and you can definitely be one of those things without being the other. In philosophy, the name we give to character traits like being honest or brave is ‘virtues’.
We talk a big game about being great people. Maybe I love to tell my friends about how I donated money to a charitable cause, or how I forgive people who did bad things when they apologize, or how I like to help people when they’re in trouble, or whatever. Blah blah blah. Christian Miller wants to cut through the all the talk and find out how virtuous we actually are, as a whole. What does the empirical evidence from psychology suggest? In his book, The Character Gap, Christian Miller finds that we are, on the whole, a mixed bag. On average, we aren’t particularly good people, which is maybe a bit of a bummer. But on the plus side, we also aren’t particularly bad people. We’re all sorta meh, in the middle. And there is a full range of variation in the population, with small numbers of extraordinarily good people and small numbers extraordinarily bad people at each of the tails.
What should we do about all this? I guess all you ever can do is follow your bliss. But the fact is that most of us want to think of ourselves as good, regardless of how good we actually are, so why not try to be our best selves? Join us for this episode, as Christian Miller discusses some strategies we can employ to nudge ourselves in the direction of being a bit more honest, or a bit more brave, or a bit more whatever we want to be.
Matt Teichman
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thu, 15 Jul 2021
This month, Charlie Wiland and I sit down with Sara Protasi to talk about envy. Which she just came out with a whole book about! Awesome. Click here to download episode 135 of Elucidations.
You might think that it’s pretty clear what envy is. Isn’t envy just when someone else has something you want, you don’t have it, and that makes you feel annoyed? Well, kind of—but there’s a little more to it. For example, you have to view yourself as similar to the other person in the relevant respect; as in contention for the same resources. If I have no ambition to get promoted into upper-level management, I’m not in a position to get envious when that happens to someone else. Another subtlety is that if you look at how we use the word ‘envy’, we often use it interchangeably with other words like ‘jealousy’ or ‘resentment’. And although the everyday meanings of these terms are probably at least a little bit fluid, there are sharp distinctions between different related emotional reactions that it is useful to draw.
In the context of the academic literature in psychology and philosophy, envy is an amoral emotion, which means that it isn’t connected up with feelings of who truly deserves what. It’s just a feeling that you want the envied thing no matter what, and you aren’t really thinking about who deserves it. One test that Sara Protasi proposes for differentiating between envy and resentment is the following. Say you have sort of an angry feeling about your lack of something that another person has, and you want to figure out whether it’s envy or resentment. What you should do is ask yourself: if the roles were reversed, and I had the desired thing while someone who really deserved it didn’t, would I be indignant on that other person’s behalf? Or would I just think: no problem, I’ve got everything I need? If you would be indignant in that scenario, then what you’re feeling is resentment. If you wouldn’t, then what you’re feeling is envy.
Sara Protasi also advances the adventurous claim that some forms of envy can actually be good. If I find that a friend has some quality I wish I had, and that realization spurs me to self-improve in some way so that I can bring myself up to their level, then I’m feeling what Protasi calls emulative envy.
Join us as we get to the bottom of what kinds of envy are, when they’re good, when they’re bad, and why!
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Sat, 29 May 2021
This month, Josh Kaufman and I talk to Claire Kirwin about whether things are objectively good or bad, or whether it’s all in the eye of the beholder.
Professor Kirwin is a fan of peanut butter cup ice cream, and Josh and I are fans of mint chocolate chip. Is there an objective fact of the matter about whether either is good, or whether one is better than the other? Or are we all just expressing our preferences, i.e. doing nothing more than providing information about ourselves? Can goodness be ‘in’ ice cream, or is it just ‘in’ the person eating it? If we think peanut butter cup ice cream can be objectively good, is that somehow disrespectful to people who prefer something else? Does everyone have a moral right to have their ice cream preferences respected by others? The example may be somewhat frivolous, but it ties into lots of similar questions that many of us think of as more weighty, like whether classical music can be objectively great/terrible, or whether a given behavior can be morally objectively great/terrible.
Value realism is a catch-all expression for the belief that all of these things are objectively in the objects themselves. Peanut butter cup ice cream deliciousness is in the ice cream itself, not in the person experiencing it, and classical music greatness is in the music itself, not in the audience member listening to it at Carnegie Hall. Claire Kirwin espouses value realism across all of these cases, but we focus on ice cream in this episode because, uh, hopefully it’s a little less of a hot button thing than some other topics. We’d like to be able to talk about it without raising an undue amount of ire.
Kirwin’s two main ideas are as follows. First, you might wonder how the heck there could even be some sort of objective deliciousness in ice cream itself. Doesn’t everyone disagree about that? Her general line of response is that there can be experts in the flavor of ice cream, and if there can be experts in the flavor of ice cream, then there must be something about ice cream that they’re especially good at picking up. Maybe you’re a master chef, or maybe you’re a food critic, or maybe you’ve just eaten more ice cream than most people. Whatever. There are lots of different ways of being an expert. The point is that if you understand a lot about ice cream it can sensitize you to little details in its flavor that other people haven’t been trained to notice.
Her follow-up idea is quite interesting. She argues that when one person prefers mint chocolate chip ice cream and another prefers peanut butter cup ice cream, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the two people disagree. It could very well be that peanut butter cup ice cream is objectively good, and mint chocolate chip ice cream is also objectively good. It’s just that one person only has the expertise required to discern the tastiness of the one flavor, and the other person only has the expertise required to discern the tastiness of the other flavor. So saying that some flavor you have expertise in is objectively good is actually potentially remaining neutral about other flavors—at least the ones you feel like you don’t have a good grip on.
Join the three of us as we entertain a peaceful solution to the ice cream wars!
Matt Teichman
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sun, 04 Apr 2021
This month, Agnes Callard and I talk to Aristotle about his philosophy, including his work on physics, biology, and ethics. Featuring an introduction by our awesome intern, Noadia Steinmetz-Silber! Click here to download Episode 133 of Elucidations.
Not everyone is familiar with Aristotle’s work today, but the case could be made that science, political theory, logic, ethics, and philosophy exist in their current form largely due to the precedent he set. That said, in this episode, Aristotle opens by telling us a little about how the foundational assumptions made by a number of today’s scientists and philosophers differ from his. One distinctive feature of his work—both as compared to today’s intellectuals and as compared to his peers in 4th century B.C. Athens—was how his philosophy was meant to accommodate the possibility of different types of phenomena requiring totally different types of theoretical explanation.
Today, this is reflected in the fact that we have different departments for different sciences in universities. Like, we don’t have a ‘science’ department. We have a physics department that aims to explain the behavior of physical matter and energy, a biology department that aims to explain the behavior of living organisms, a chemistry department that aims to explain the behavior of chemical compounds, a psychology department that aims to explain the behavior of minds, an economics department that aims to explain the behavior of markets, and so on. Could all of these things be reduced to one fundamental science? Maybe, maybe not. It’s possible that there’s a way of, for example, reducing all of biology to physics, but if there is, we haven’t figured it out yet. Aristotle’s main thought here is that that’s fine. If we have to have separate scientific fields for physical matter and biological organisms, that isn’t necessarily a failure on the part of the hard sciences—it could just be that different types of entities in the world need different types of explanations.
Aristotle then observes that if you’re okay with the idea that there could be different types of phenomena that need to be explained in different ways, that goes along with believing that things can be created and destroyed. How come? Well, at the level of common sense, you and I would say that when a dog is born, the universe now has a new thing in it: this dog. But if you’re one of these ‘nothing exists other than fundamental physical particles’ people, you think that nothing is ever created or destroyed. It’s just that the atoms—or maybe the quarks and leptons—are just rearranging themselves, and the nickname we give that at the macroscopic level is that ‘a dog came into existence’. One of the main tasks that Aristotle set for himself was explaining how it makes sense to take talk of things being created and destroyed literally, at face value.
Join us as we discuss the ancient Greek perspective on causality, matter, biology, physics, and whether or not people have a purpose!
Matt Teichman
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, 02 Mar 2021
This month, we sit down with Rebecca Valentine (co-founder of Queerious Labs) to talk about anarchism, feminism, tech culture, and creative hacking.
Hack this, hack that. What is a hacker, anyway? In pop culture, it’s common to use the term ‘hacker’ as a synonym for ‘cybercriminal’—that is, a person who engages in illegal activity over a computer network, usually involving gaining access to something they shouldn’t. But if you’ve ever spent any time in the tech community, you’ll know that there, the term is used in a very different way. It’s complicated to define precisely, but generally, ‘hacking’ involves taking apart a ready-made product in an exploratory way, whether to understand how it works, or to put it back together in a different, more customized way.
We live in a world of mass-produced artifacts, each of which is manufactured in bulk to serve a specific purpose. But despite that fact, we are all individual people, many of whom want different things out of their artifacts. For example, maybe I have a car and want to give it my own paint job that it wouldn’t have gotten in the factory. Or maybe I have a handbag and would like to embroider a cool pattern on it. Those are simple examples, but our guest stresses that hacking often involves going further and subverting the original intentions behind the thing being hacked. For instance, there are people who have managed to get Alexa and Siri to talk to one another, each device responding in speech the way it would respond to a person. Neither was designed to talk to another device in English—rather, each was designed to provide a voice interface to a single human owner. The result can be pretty bizarre and interesting to listen to!
In this episode, Valentine discusses why she founded Queerious Labs, a public nonprofit whose purpose is to encourage these sorts of tinker-y explorations. Most other spaces of this kind tend to be dominated by men, especially straight cisgender men, and often that can have the effect of alienating people who aren’t men, or who aren’t straight, or who aren’t cisgender. In addition, Queerious Labs is intended to be a friendly environment for people with socialist, anarchist, and feminist backgrounds. In the course of laying out how all those things hang together, we have the chance to dig in a wide range of topics, including political power, bottom-up vs. top-down organizational structures, mass culture, the patriarchy, natural language, theory vs. anti-theory, and how gender roles are in flux across time and history.
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Sun, 03 Jan 2021
This month, Greg Salmieri (University of Texas at Austin) returns for his third appearance on Elucidations, this time to talk about doing right by yourself.
What was the last thing you did? The last thing I did was pull a shot of espresso. I wouldn’t say I made coffee as an end in itself, even though I love the taste of the roast I just used. If I had to tell you the main reason I made a coffee, it was in order to speed along my transformation from groggy podcast host to awake podcast host. But why do that? Hmm. I guess I wanted to wake up so that I could start writing this blog post, pay a couple bills, and put together a cool new IKEA lamp? But why pay a couple bills or put together a new IKEA lamp? So that I can continue to live in my apartment, be able to see things in it, and so on, maybe? Plato and Aristotle were interested in these ‘but what are you doing XYZ in order to accomplish?’ type questions, and they had the idea that if you keep re-asking the question every time you come up with answer, eventually you’ll get to something that is the ultimate reason you’re doing everything for. Once you get there, there won’t be any further justification for anything you do.
‘Ethical egoism’ is a nickname that philosophers give to the idea that being a good person means that everything you do, ultimately, at the end of the day, you do in order to benefit yourself.
Note that there’s already a lot of subtlety in this idea as we’ve defined it. For example, if you’re deceived about what’s good for you, and the thing you think is good for you is actually bad for you, then if you do everything you do in order to bring that about, you don’t count as a good person. Maybe I think that fame will be great for me, because of all the money, power, and attention that comes with it. But in a few years, once I actually become world famous, I realize it’s actually pretty miserable to be hounded by paparazzi, speculated about in the tabloids, and subjected to intense scrutiny every time I make a comment about anything. Once that happens, I might decide the whole get famous plan was misbegotten, longing for the days before I was a celebrity. So one point of subtlety is that what’s good or bad for a person can be complicated to determine—there are lots of cases where you can make a mistake about what’s really good for you.
A second point of subtlety is that how your everyday behavior corresponds to what you’re ultimately doing everything for can be complex. Maybe you’ve adopted a monkish lifestyle, sacrificing the day to day comforts we take for granted so that you can help as many other people as possible, volunteering, donating to charities, and so forth. An ethical egoist would say that if you’re ultimately doing all those things because of the deep, persistent, long-term satisfaction it brings you—because of how it enriches your life to the fullest possible extent, then that counts as being a good person. So it’s not like commonly-held stereotypes about what selfishness is necessarily line up with what ethical egoists recommend.
Due to those two factors, there’s a lot of wiggle room in what concrete behaviors can count as acting in your self-interest, and different behaviors are going to count as self-interested for different people, because different people often have fundamentally different needs and abilities. And I would say that’s what makes it especially interesting to think about whether ethical egoists have it right.
Join us this month as our esteemed guest defends the viability of ethical egoism!
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Sun, 22 Nov 2020
This month, Long Dang and I sit down to talk to Jessica Tizzard (University of Connecticut, Storrs) about weakness of the will.
You’re at a party hosted by a close friend. It’s been three hours since you got there, and the evening thus far has been chock full of scintillating conversation, a fun round of Charades followed by Assassins, first rate cocktails, and a dessert to die for. You’ve just now been invited to play one of your favorite games, which usually takes about 90 minutes to complete—when out of nowhere, the onset of a yawn yanks you back into reality. Suddenly, you remember you’d promised yourself that you weren’t going to stay out late, because you’ve got to get up early tomorrow for an important meeting. You realize that now is the time to go home and get a good night’s sleep. And yet, the allure of the game pulls you in. Against your better judgment, you play the game deep into the night, future consequences be damned.
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, some of the sharpest thinkers in philosophy have tried to figure out what is happening in that scenario. Obviously, we frequently decide that X is the best course of action, and yet our willpower falters and we decide to do Y, even though we know full well that doing Y is counterproductive or self-destructive. But why? In what world does that make any logical sense? Surely, if you decided that X was the thing to do, the natural next move is to do X. Not do the thing you convinced yourself was going to be bad for you. Right?
The trouble is that every obvious answer to this puzzle feels unsatisfactory. You could be like: well if I did Y, then I must have really decided Y was best. But if that’s the case, why do you feel so terrible when you do it? Why do you feel guilty staying at the party until deep into the night, if you’ve supposedly decided that staying at the party is for the best? Taking that stance is effectively saying: no one ever has a crisis of willpower. Whenever you do anything, that is definitive proof that you believed it was the best possible thing to do. But insisting that everyone always has the willpower to do everything they think they should just seems to fly in the face of what we know about the human experience.
Another option might be to say: well, ok, I did decide that X was the best thing to do, but when the moment to suck it up and actually do X came, I was overcome with desire. The feeling of pleasure at the prospect of partying hard swept over me and signal jammed my rational faculty, blocking me from doing what I knew I should. So I stayed, and had to suffer the consequences the next morning. But then that feels unsatisfactory as well, because if I really was overcome by the pleasure instinct, blocked from doing what I thought I should do, then what I did was really involuntary. Like a muscle spasm. Or a brain tumor that made me do it. That just seems wrong: clearly, in these types of situations, I actively chose to e.g. stay at the party and suffer the consequences. Staying at the party didn’t just happen to me, like a headache.
Jessica Tizzard thinks that the 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant offered an interesting and novel way to understand what’s going on in these moments when you’re weak-willed. Step one in his approach is to take cases like the one described above and assimilate them all to what is often thought of as a different situation: the moral dilemma. A moral dilemma, as standardly construed, is a situation where you really can’t decide which of several options is the best to take. The idea here is that what look like situations where you knew you should do X but instead did Y are often, upon closer examination, really situations where you genuinely couldn’t tell which of those two things you should do. Sometimes, perhaps, when I thought I was having a crisis of willpower, I was in fact just torn and couldn’t decide.
Number two in Immanuel Kant’s bag of tricks is to accept a version of the ‘I wanted to go home, but the desire to stay swept over me and made me stay at the party’ explanation, with one key difference: namely, he has a different take on what a desire is. Maybe a desire isn’t some physical pleasure sensation seizing control of your body like a puppet and forcing you to do something other than what you really want to do. Maybe a desire is really more like another set of factors to consider in your reasoning—it may come with a feeling, and present itself to you with a certain urgency, but really what it is is a set of reasons that you’re weighing up like any other. Understanding desire on those lines puts Kant in a nice position to say that lacking the willpower to do what you think is right is actually just a case of being racked by indecision.
Tune in to hear Jessica Tizzard lay out the Kantian story about what happens when we act against our better judgment!
Matt Teichman
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sun, 27 Sep 2020
This month, Ben Andrew and I are joined by Nethanel Lipshitz (Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University) to talk about discrimination.
If someone treats me unequally--that is, if they give other people a relative advantage but not me--am I the victim of discrimination? Our guest says yes. That is enough for me to count as having been discriminated against, and that is enough for it to be morally wrong.
All fine and dandy. But then what's the big deal? The big deal is that the standard view in political philosophy tells us that discrimination requires more. If a shopkeeper kicks me out of their store merely because they don't like my hat, then according to the definition, I haven't been discriminated against. Why? Because in order for this behavior to count as discrimination, I have to be treated unequally based on my membership in a salient social group. It's maybe a bit tricky to define exactly what a 'salient social group' is, but some familiar examples might include e.g. LGBTQ people, people with a disability, or black people. 'People with a funny looking hat' aren't a salient social group--that's just a random category that popped up in this moment. So although I may have been treated badly, I haven't been discriminated against.
Nethanel Lipshitz doesn't see a good reason for including 'you have to be a member of a salient social group' in the definition of discrimination. Note that this is compatible with saying that being discriminated against qua member of a particular social group is worse than being discriminated against as an individual, maybe as part of a one-off. The idea is just that it still counts as discrimination, and that it's still bad, even if it isn't as bad. Lipshitz' main reason for thinking this is that the 'I got discriminated against because of my hat' situation and the 'I got discriminated against because I'm gay' have a key factor in common: in both situations, the victim is being singled out as someone not worthy of the same moral respect/consideration as everyone else.
It's a fascinating discussion, and I hope you enjoy it. I think Nethanel Lipshitz provides lots of good reasons to rethink some of our contemporary assumptions about what discrimination is and why it's bad.
Matt Teichman
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Sun, 16 Aug 2020
One of the foundational ideas behind philosophical logic is that when you say something, that has further implications beyond the single thing you said. Like, if I think ‘every single frog is green’ and ‘Fran is a frog’, then I am committed to thinking that Fran is green. I don't have to have actually thought to myself or said out loud that Fran is green—I'm just required to believe that Fran is green, given that I thought the first two things, and if I fail to believe that, I've made some kind of mistake. Like I haven't thought through all the consequences of my beliefs.
Modal logic studies how we reason about obligation and permission. For example, f I think that Bob is obligated to visit his parents for the holidays, it follows from that that he isn't permitted not to visit his parents for the holidays. (The term for this in philosophical logic is that obligation and permission are duals.) There are lots of inference patterns that pop up, some of them familiar and some of them surprising, the moment you start thinking about how the notions of ‘obligated to’ or ‘permitted to’ interact with notions like ‘if/then’ or ‘and’.
Free choice permission is a funny case where it feels like out in the wild, you would have to draw a certain conclusion from something you said, but our best formal, mathematical theory of obligation and permission tells us that you aren't allowed to draw that conclusion. So although the theory gets most other things impressively right, it seems to get this one thing wrong.
Here's the example. Imagine you're a customer at a cafe and a waiter says to you, ‘Since you ordered our prix fixe lunch menu option, you may have coffee or tea’. Translated into the terminology of obligation and permission, we could think of what the waiter said as ‘it is permissible for you to have either coffee or tea’. And there seems to be no way the waiter could think that and not thereby also be committed to thinking it is permissible for you to have coffee. If you're allowed to have either coffee or tea, then surely you're thereby allowed to have coffee. Right?
The problem is that the best available formal mathematization of how reasoning about obligation and permission works (believe it or not, this is given the humorous-sounding name normal modal logic) predicts that you are not allowed to draw that conclusion. So since it seems obvious that any rational person would draw that conclusion, but our theory predicts that you aren't allowed to draw it, that means the theory has a problem. The trouble is that revising the theory so as to correctly make that prediction is quite technically difficult, because most of the obvious things you might do to have it make that prediction have the side effect of breaking other aspects of it that work well.
In this episode, Melissa Fusco sketches out a highly original and ambitious approach to the puzzle, using a more sophisticated framework called two-dimensional modal logic. Two-dimensional modal logic is based on a subtle but interesting distinction between a statement that's automatically true the moment you start thinking about it, and a statement that is necessarily true, no matter what. It may sound a bit counterintuitive, but just wait till you hear the examples that Fusco gives! Trust me—her idea about how you can use that distinction to explain what's happening in the waiter example is super cool.
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Wed, 15 Jul 2020
In this episode, Nic Koziolek (Washington University in St. Louis) returns to talk to me and Nora Bradford about self-consciousness.
Self-consciousness, as philosophers use the term, is a word for when you know something about one of your own mental states. Like when I really enjoy some pizza and note that I'm enjoying it. Someone else might ask me: ‘Hey Matt, do you like that pizza?’ And I'm typically the best person to ask about that, which is a sign that I typically know whether I like the pizza. Or when I have an itch, and I notice the itch before going to scratch it. If I noticed it, then I know that I have an itch. Self-consciousness, in the philosophical setting, is a name for me being able to tell what's happening in my own mind, when it happens.
Now, you might wonder how I know about my own mind, when something new happens with it. Our guest argues that there has to be an answer to that question, because whenever you know something, there's an answer to the question how you know it. And so, he argues that the way you know you're in a mental state is by being in that mental state. So to apply the idea to the two examples we started with, you know you having an itch by having an itch. And you know you like the pizza by liking the pizza. Being in the state is what allows you to know that you're in it.
If you think that idea sounds wacky, you're not alone. But our guest provides some pretty interesting arguments in favor of it. And he also makes the case that understanding what's going on when you fail to know something about your own mind can lead us to a clearer understanding of what's going on when you fail to know that you know something—which is an age-old puzzle in philosophy.
It's a fun discussion. I hope you enjoy it.
Matt Teichman
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Episode 126 - Listener Q&A with Agnes Callard and Ben Callard
Thu, 11 Jun 2020
Three philosophers. Eight head-scratchers. 50 minutes. In this episode, Agnes Callard, Ben Callard and I respond to the world's most awesome listener-recorded questions.
A lot of people have the impression that philosophy is, first and foremost, an enterprise in which college professor types read books that no one can understand, then issue a response in the form of more books that no one can understand. It's not. Don't get me wrong—I love books. I'm constantly trying to talk friends and acquaintances who don't like reading books into giving them another shot, if only for the simple reason that reading is basically guaranteed to improve your life. It's just that the existence of philosophy books doesn't make philosophy the art of book writing any more than the existence of bodybuilding books makes bodybuilding the art of book writing.
Philosophy is about fearlessly posing questions. Our everyday lives are interwoven with foundational mysteries, some of which turn out to be trivial, others of which prove challenging to resolve. While we can't confront all of them, simultaneously, 100% of the time, philosophy is what happens when you formally give yourself permission to confront some of them head on, at least some of the time. Which is a superior alternative to sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending they aren't there. Or so I would allege.
The point of departure for this episode is what the show's listeners are wondering about. Not journal citations. Not name-dropping over miniature bagels at a conference. Not some incomprehensible jargon that cleverly avoids ever getting defined over hundreds of pages. The real stuff. Why is blahbityblah the case? That's quite surprising, because of such and such. What the heck is going on? Etc. There's nothing I enjoy more than working through conceptual difficulties in the form of a conversation.
In this episode, we end up talking about property rights, the best gateway drugs for getting into philosophy, how to prove ‘ought’ statements, whether the past is real, looseness in how we interpret speed limit regulations, who counts as a philosopher, whether those of us in the first world are shirking our moral responsibilities towards everyone else, and why we never seem to listen to extraordinary claims, even when they are backed by extraordinary evidence. Join us as you, listeners, supply us with things to be surprised about, and Agnes Callard, Ben Callard, and I set out in search of strategies for coping with those surprises.
Matt Teichman
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Episode 125: James Koppel discusses counterfactual inference and automated explanation
Fri, 17 Apr 2020
Episode link here.
In this episode, James Koppel (MIT, James Koppel Coaching) joins me and Dominick Reo to talk about how we can write software to help identify the causes of disasters.
These days, there's often a tendency to think of software primarily as a venue for frivolous pleasures. Maybe there's a new app that's really good at hooking me up with videos of alpacas on skateboards, or making my mom look like a hot dog when she's video chatting with me, or helping me decide what flavor of cupcake I want delivered to my home—because gosh, I just am just way too stressed right now to be able to figure that out. Have you seen how few Retweets I'm getting? If we followed the lead of a lot of the popular rhetoric about the software industry, we might very well come away with the impression that tech exists solely to facilitate precious, self-involved time wasting. And if that's right, then if it doesn't work from time to time, who really cares?
But in fact, software correctness is frequently a life or death matter. Computer software controls our medical life support systems, it manages our health care records, it navigates our airplanes, and it keeps track of our bank account balances. If the author of the software used in any of those systems messed something up, it can and often will lead to planes crashing into mountains, or life support systems malfunctioning for no particular reason, or some other tragedy.
James Koppel is here to tell us that software can do better. It can be designed ‘preventatively’ to avoid large classes of bugs in advance, and there are diagnostic techniques that can help pinpoint those bugs that cannot be ruled out in advance. In this episode, Koppel discusses some work he started in 2015 as a follow-up to Stanford's Cooperative Bug Isolation project, which provided a way to gather detailed diagnostics about the conditions under which programs fail or crash. But the problem he kept running into was that the diagnostic information was too much correlation and not enough causation. If the analysis you did tells you that your app crashes whenever it tries to load a large image, that's ok, but it doesn't tell you what about the large image causes the crash, or what other kinds of large images would also cause a crash, or whether the crash even is a result of largeness or something more specific. Correlation information is a great start, but ultimately, it's of limited use when it comes to directly fixing the problem.
To deal with this, in his more recent work, Koppel and his colleagues have turned to the analysis of counterfactuals and causation, which is an interesting point of collaboration between philosophers and computer scientists. Using a recent paradigm called probabilistic programming, they have identified a way to have a computer program run the clock back and simulate what would have happened, had some condition been different, to determine whether that condition is the cause of a bug. The project is still in its initial stages, but if it works, it promises to deliver major dividends in making the technology we rely on more reliable.
Tune in to hear more about this exciting new area of research!
Matt Teichman
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Elucidations Episode 124: Graham Priest discusses Buddhist political philosophy
Sat, 21 Mar 2020
Episode link here:
https://elucidations.now.sh/posts/episode-124/
In this episode, Graham Priest returns to discuss Buddhist political philosophy with me and Henry Curtis. (Last month, we talked with him about Buddhist metaphysics.)
Last month, we discussed the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: that suffering happens, that this suffering is (partially) caused by emotional attachment, that you can deal with it by changing your headspace, and that you can change your headspace by understanding the world, understanding your mind and body, and treating other people well. In this episode, our guest adds something to that list, which he calls the '0-th noble truth'. This is the idea that suffering is bad. That idea appears as a foundational premise across many different Buddhist philosophical traditions, and he suspects that it can be used as the basis for political philosophy.
You might remember last month's episode when we talked about 'anatman', which is the Sanskrit word for the Buddhist principle that there is no self. Priest makes the interesting proposal that the 0-th Noble Truth plus 'anatman' gives us the view that we should care about suffering equally no matter who is suffering. We should just try to reduce the global amount of suffering anywhere in the world.
Graham Priest then argues that industrial capitalism is the cause of a lot of the suffering in today's world. Countless numbers of people are compelled by circumstance to work in exploitative jobs that overwork and underpay them, while others reap the profit from their work. If that further claim is correct, then it would seem to lead to the conclusion that a political philosophy based on Buddhist ethics would have to propose some alternative to industrial capitalism.
Would a political system based Buddhist principles then have to look like socialism, or communism, or anarchism? Maybe, but the question turns out to be a bit complicated. Tune in to find out!
Would a political system based Buddhist principles then have to look like socialism, or communism, or anarchism? Maybe, but it's a bit complicated. Tune in to find out!
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Sat, 15 Feb 2020
In this episode, Matt Teichman and Henry Curtis talk to Graham Priest (CUNY Graduate Center) about the philosophical foundations of Buddhism.
Buddhism isn't just a religion--it's an entire family of philosophical traditions that took root all over the Asian continent for thousands of years. The historical Buddha articulated views in what we consider to be many different areas of philosophy, including metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy. For this episode, we're focusing on the metaphysics.
Metaphysics means different things to different people, but our guest thinks of it as a broad inquiry into the structure of reality at a fundamental level, space and time, what substance is, cause and effect, what makes any given thing the thing it is. And one of many things he finds interesting about Buddhism is that over the years, Buddhists have floated metaphysical views that don't arise in the Western traditions.
One cool example he gives is a view associated with Madhyamaka Buddhism that nothing has a nature that makes it independent of its relation to anything else in the world. So take me, Matt. I am what I am not just because of properties that I have in and of myself, but because of the relation I stand in to certain other things. (Though not all other things, as he hastens to point out.) Like for example, I have a special relation to New Jersey: I was born and grew up there. So facts about what Matt is and what he's like is are tangled up with facts about what New Jersey is and what it's like.
Graham Priest further observes that this general view leads to skepticism about whether anything is maximally explanatorily basic, which is a view that hasn't been explored by many contemporary philosophers. Like, most contemporary philosophers who work on metaphysics would say that a flagpole is more basic than the shadow it casts, because you could have the flagpole without the shadow, but not the other way around. There wouldn't be anything for the shadow to be a shadow of! Priest thinks that the Madhyamaka view that everything is dependent on something else leads to the further view that no one thing or set of things can be most basic.
Join us as our guest walks us through the core metaphysical tenets of Buddhism!
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Episode 122: Frithjof Bergmann and David Helmbold discuss new work, new culture
Fri, 17 Jan 2020
In this episode, Frithjof Bergmann and David Helmbold make the case for a different approach to working in the modern world. A lot of us experience our day to day work as a 'mild disease'--not terrible, not excruciating, but also not our #1 choice about how to spend weekdays. Instead, they argue, a person's work should be the best part of their life. But making that a possibility for everyone requires not just our social structures to transform--it requires a kind of personal psychological transformation.
Check out our blog for more info!
https://elucidations.now.sh/posts/episode-122/
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Thu, 05 Dec 2019
In this episode, Matt Teichman and Julia Liu talk to Aaron Ben Ze'ev (University of Haifa) about lifelong romantic love. What is love? Is it just a private feeling that each individual person experiences, or is it something that crucially involves multiple people? Our guest argues that although it is primarily a feeling, it is also something that emerges out of the interaction between two people.
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Episode 120: Robin Dembroff on going beyond the gender binary
Sun, 10 Nov 2019
Ever wonder what 'gender non-binary' means? Don't worry--Robin Dembroff (Yale University) is here to walk us through the relevant terminology, along with the everyday moral issues that are tied up with the gender concepts we use.
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Tue, 15 Oct 2019
In this episode, our guest argues that in addition to ordinary individual cases of misgendering, in which one person gets another person's gender wrong when they address them, there's a broader sense of the term. In the broader sense, a philosophical account of what gender is can also misgender people. How? The idea is that in signing yourself up for an incorrect philosophical account of gender, you could be committing yourself to the view that certain people are not the gender they (correctly) claim to be.
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Thu, 12 Sep 2019
In this episode, Tyler Cowen lays out an interesting normative ethical theory according to which we should be utilitarians, but with a twist: we should be utilitarians who care just as much about the humans of the future as we care about people now. Re-emphasizing our commitment to future people, he argues, has the effect of allowing us to embrace utilitarianism wholeheartedly without having to feel like we aren't doing enough. Why? The best way to make life better for future generations is to help bring about economic growth, and we have good reason to think that a lot of what we're already doing is pretty good for economic growth.
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Fri, 30 Aug 2019
In this episode, Brian L. Frye (University of Kentucky) argues that we should think more carefully about our moral reaction to instances of plagiarism.
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Mon, 05 Aug 2019
In this episode, Tommy Curry argues that if we really want to understand gender-based oppression, we have to look at how black men have been targeted for it.
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Mon, 01 Jul 2019
In this episode, Katherine Ritchie (CUNY Graduate Center, City College) lays out what it means to belong to a social group, and what kind of thing a social group is.
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Tue, 14 May 2019
What is the nature of a person's political outlook?
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Mon, 08 Apr 2019
In this episode, Tom Pashby explains how quantum physics is different from theories that came before, and runs through some of the ways that philosophers and physicists have tried to make intuitive sense of this challenging framework.
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Episode 112: Myisha Cherry discusses the skill of conversation
Thu, 07 Mar 2019
In this episode, Myisha Cherry argues that having a productive conversation with someone often involves explicitly laying out each person's background experiences and expectations.
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Sun, 27 Jan 2019
In this episode, Greg Kobele discusses how abstract mathematics can be useful for arriving at a unified theory of what patterns a person has mastery over when they can speak a language.
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Episode 110: Chike Jeffers discusses the social and political philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois
Sat, 15 Dec 2018
What is the best way forward for a group of people fairly recently freed from slavery? Booker T. Washington emphasized economic enfranchisement, whereas W.E.B. Du Bois thought it was necessary to achieve political enfranchisement alongside economic enfranchisement. Join us as our guest discusses how threads from this 100-year-old debate persist in today's discussions about racial justice in America.
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Episode 109: Bonus Episode with Matt Teichman and Toby Buckle
Sat, 13 Oct 2018
Bonus episode! In this joint edition of Elucidations and the Political Philosophy Podcast, Matt Teichman and Toby Buckle sit down and have a freeform conversation about why we do podcasts, the nature of moral disagreement, and the existence of political divides.
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Sat, 15 Sep 2018
What do you think of yourself as? A musician? A mother? A political organizer? In this episode, our guest argues that your ability to act and reason freely is premised on your ability to shape and sometimes even invent the labels you apply to yourself.
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Episode 107: Linda Martín Alcoff discusses identity and history
Fri, 03 Aug 2018
In this episode, Linda Martín Alcoff discusses the subtle ways that things like your race, gender, sexual orientation, and class can influence your life. She argues that the best way to understand that kind of influence is by looking to the history of the relevant social group.
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Fri, 22 Jun 2018
In this episode, R. A. Briggs discusses some complexities underlying our use of the terms 'man' and 'woman.'
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Episode 105: R. A. Briggs discusses epistemic decision theory
Fri, 20 Apr 2018
How do we tell what the best strategies for changing our beliefs on the basis of new evidence might be?
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Episode 104: Seth Yalcin discusses the question-sensitivity of belief
Sun, 04 Mar 2018
In this episode, Seth Yalcin argues that every belief we have is implicitly framed as the answer to a question, and that at different times we're considering different questions.
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Episode 103: Brian Leiter explains why we should think about Marx
Tue, 09 Jan 2018
In this episode, we talk to Brian Leiter about why the writings of Karl Marx are helpful for understanding the current situation of the working and middle class in America, the 2016 Presidential election, and related topics!
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Fri, 01 Dec 2017
In this episode, Josh Knobe discusses a series of experiments that try to tease out what we implicitly assume about who a person really is, deep down.
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Episode 101: Miranda Fricker discusses blame and forgiveness
Sat, 21 Oct 2017
In this episode, Miranda Fricker argues that the purpose of blaming someone is to communicate to them your sense of why what they did was wrong.
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Fri, 22 Sep 2017
In this episode, Agnes Callard explains why she thinks aspiration is the process of moving from one set of values to a new set of values in the way you live your life.
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Sun, 13 Aug 2017
In this episode, Steven Nadler discusses Benedict de Spinoza's unique reason-centric conception of what it is to live a good life and be free.
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Mon, 17 Jul 2017
In this episode, Jennifer Lackey discusses both how you can get things factually wrong and do something morally wrong by trusting people more than they deserve to be trusted.
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Sun, 11 Jun 2017
In this episode, Meghan Sullivan argues that if it's irrational to sacrifice long-term benefits for short-term gain, then it's also irrational to prefer for bad experiences to have already happened.
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Episode 96: Nic Koziolek discusses the role of belief in reasoning
Mon, 08 May 2017
In this episode, Nic Koziolek offers an account of what thought, belief, and reasoning are in terms of what knowledge is.
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Mon, 10 Apr 2017
In this episode, Zed Adams argues that philosophers are in an irresolvable debate about whether colors are real because they inherited multiple conflicting conceptions of what color is from previous generations.
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Thu, 23 Mar 2017
In this episode, Zsofia Zvolenszky argues that names like 'Harry Potter' or 'Princess Leia' stand for non-concrete human-made artifacts.
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Mon, 30 Jan 2017
In this episode, Barry Lam examines our common assumption that we should prioritize honoring the wishes of dead people.
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Sat, 14 Jan 2017
In this episode, Kristie Dotson discusses how imbalances in the way we share information with each other reflect broader power imbalances between social groups.
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Fri, 23 Dec 2016
In this episode, Paolo Santorio argues that to explain what statements like 'If A were, then B would be' mean, we need to understand them as statements about causal networks.
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Sun, 20 Nov 2016
In this episode, our guest argues that we confer social statuses on each other by treating each other has having different obligations and entitlements.
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Fri, 28 Oct 2016
In this episode, John Collins discusses the philosophical significance of Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar, along with some of the scientific evidence for it.
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Episode 88: Kent Bach discusses jumping to conclusions and knowing when to think twice
Wed, 12 Oct 2016
In this episode, Kent Bach discusses the importance of subconscious processes that underlie ordinary, everyday reasoning.
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Episode 87: Susanna Schellenberg discusses perceptual particularity
Sun, 11 Sep 2016
In this episode, Susanna Schellenberg argues that hallucination involves the very same ability as ordinary visual experience--it's just that the ability goes wrong.
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Episode 86: Daniel Smyth discusses photographs and their vicissitudes
Thu, 18 Aug 2016
In this episode, Daniel Smyth discusses the vast amount of background knowledge that goes into interpreting a photograph.
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Episode 85: Bryce Huebner discusses race and cognitive science
Mon, 01 Aug 2016
In this episode, Bryce Huebner argues that our implicit racial biases are shaped by the physical environments we inhabit.
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Episode 84: Amanda Greene discusses the legitimacy of democracy
Fri, 10 Jun 2016
In this episode, Amanda Greene argues that democracy is the form of government that most reliably leads to long-term stability and acceptance.
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Thu, 12 May 2016
In this episode, Bob Simpson discusses how a person should respond to the realization that they only believe something because of how they were brought up.
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Episode 82: Robert May discusses Frege and the problem of identity
Wed, 13 Apr 2016
In this episode, Robert May discusses the problems that arise when we try to explain what simple statements of arithmetic are saying.
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Episode 81: Cathy Legg discusses what Peirce's categories can do for you
Tue, 15 Mar 2016
In this episode, Cathy Legg talks about why Charles Sanders Peirce thought that existing was only one of three ways of being.
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Wed, 10 Feb 2016
In this episode, Mark Hopwood discusses the moral relation that results when one person values another as a particular individual.
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Wed, 06 Jan 2016
In this episode, Anthony S. Gillies shows us how difficult it is to figure out what if/then statements mean!
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Episode 78: Stephen Engstrom discusses the categorical imperative
Wed, 09 Dec 2015
In this episode, Stephen Engstrom discusses the principle that Immanuel Kant thought to underlie all of ethics.
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Episode 77: Mark Schroeder discusses reasons for action and belief
Fri, 13 Nov 2015
In this episode, Mark Schroeder discusses an example of how something other than evidence against a claim can give you a reason not to believe that it's true.
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Tue, 13 Oct 2015
In this episode, Barbara Herman describes the intricacies of the relationship between two people that is created when one does a favor for the other.
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Tue, 08 Sep 2015
In this episode, Malte Willer discusses attempts to give a formal theory of commonsense reasoning, and how it differs from the kind of reasoning that has traditionally been studied.
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Episode 74: Christina van Dyke discusses gender and medieval mysticism
Fri, 07 Aug 2015
In this episode, Christina van Dyke discusses the medieval mystics, a loose collection of authors who thought through philosophical issues by writing about their religious experiences.
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Episode 73: Greg Salmieri discusses Ayn Rand's moral philosophy
Wed, 15 Jul 2015
In this episode, Greg Salmieri explains why Ayn Rand thought a good life is oriented, first and foremost, toward the goal of benefitting oneself.
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Thu, 25 Jun 2015
In this episode, Robert May explains what racial, ethnic, and homophobic slurs literally mean.
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Fri, 05 Jun 2015
In this episode, Kent Schmor introduces us to Rudolf Carnap's classic work, _The Logical Construction of the World_.
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Episode 70: Susan James discusses Spinoza on the good embodied life
Wed, 06 May 2015
In this episode, Susan James explains Spinoza's view that the mind and the body are really just different aspects of the same thing, and how that view led him to think of moral reasoning as having an emotional component.
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Episode 69: Christel Fricke discusses Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments
Wed, 25 Mar 2015
In this episode, Christel Fricke discusses a view in ethics according to which you determine the right thing to do by imitating the perspective of an ideal, impartial spectator.
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Wed, 18 Feb 2015
In this episode, Mark Lance defends the view that instead of answering to a central authority, our society should self-govern, only scaling up what it has to.
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Episode 67: John Protevi discusses Darwin, disaster, and prosociality
Mon, 12 Jan 2015
In this episode, John Protevi discusses research across several different disciplines which supports the hypothesis that human beings evolved to cooperate with each other.
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Wed, 17 Dec 2014
In this episode, Haim Gaifman argues that there are mathematical facts about real, objective, mathematical entities.
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Mon, 17 Nov 2014
In this episode, Julian Savulescu argues that professional sports should change their regulations so as to allow for a certain amount of doping.
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Episode 64: James Conant and Jay Elliott discuss the analytic tradition
Sat, 18 Oct 2014
In this episode, James Conant and Jay Elliott go into the history of the movement known as analytic philosophy.
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Fri, 19 Sep 2014
In this episode, Michael Devitt explains why we need a theory of what it means for a proper name to stand for a person or place.
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Episode 62: Sally Sedgwick discusses Hegel’s critique of Kant
Thu, 21 Aug 2014
In this episode, Sally Sedgwick runs through Immanuel Kant’s idea that doing the right thing means doing whatever respects the dignity of all rational creatures, along with G. W. F. Hegel’s worry that Kant neglected how his moral theory was the product of a particular historical moment.
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Episode 61: Jeff Buechner discusses Kripke and functionalism
Wed, 16 Jul 2014
In this episode, Jeff Buechner gives us an overview of the work of Saul Kripke, and explains his (not yet published) argument against the idea that the human mind is a kind of computer.
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Episode 60: Fabrizio Cariani shares some thoughts about oughts
Mon, 23 Jun 2014
In this episode, Fabrizio Cariani explains some of the challenges that arise when we try to precisely define the words 'ought' and 'should.'
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Wed, 14 May 2014
In this episode, Quill Kukla questions the assumptions behind the idea that keeping unborn fetuses safe is simply a matter of individual mothers managing risk responsibly.
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Thu, 17 Apr 2014
In this episode, we return to the topic of vagueness from a new perspective.
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Wed, 19 Mar 2014
In this episode, Julia Annas introduces us to the ancient Greek conception of ethics.
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Episode 56: Philip Pettit discusses corporate rights and responsibilities
Mon, 10 Feb 2014
In this episode, Philip Pettit considers whether a corporation can have any special privileges or rights.
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Episode 55: Branden Fitelson discusses paradoxes of consistency
Wed, 08 Jan 2014
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Fri, 06 Dec 2013
In this episode, Patricia Blanchette explains why Gottlob Frege and other early 20th century philosophers wanted to understand all of mathematics as really being about logic.
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Episode 53: Martin Stokhof discusses formal semantics and Wittgenstein
Thu, 14 Nov 2013
In this episode, Martin Stokhof argues that understanding what formal theories of linguistic meaning are actually doing is less straightforward than it might seem.
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Episode 52: Rafeeq Hasan discusses Rousseau on freedom and happiness
Mon, 14 Oct 2013
In this episode, Rafeeq Hasan argues that according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, there isn't any conflict between being a free individual and living in a cooperative society.
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Episode 51: Jeroen Groenendijk and Floris Roelofsen discuss inquisitive semantics
Mon, 23 Sep 2013
In this episode, Jeroen Groenendijk and Floris Roelofsen discuss a new theory of linguistic meaning that brings out a deep commonality between statements and questions.
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Episode 50: Greg Salmieri discusses the Aristotelian good life and productive work
Wed, 21 Aug 2013
In this episode, Greg Salmieri looks at the attitudes ancient philosophers used to take towards craftsmanship.
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Episode 49: Hans Kamp discusses discourse representation theory
Wed, 17 Jul 2013
In this episode, Hans Kamp discusses his influential dynamic theory of linguistic meaning.
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Episode 48: Jennifer Frey discusses the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas
Mon, 10 Jun 2013
In this episode, Jennifer Frey discusses the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas' idea that what's ethically right or wrong is determined by our nature as human beings.
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Episode 47: Alexandru Baltag discusses the logic of knowledge
Tue, 14 May 2013
In this episode, Alexandru Baltag gives us a tour through a number of formal definitions of knowledge that have been proposed in recent years.
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Fri, 19 Apr 2013
In this episode, Frank Veltman discusses the central role that the idea of normality (along with abnormality) plays in our everyday reasoning.
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Episode 45: Anubav Vasudevan discusses probability and determinism
Fri, 22 Mar 2013
In this episode, Anubav Vasudevan argues that there is no conflict between the belief that the future is completely determined by the past and the belief that some things truly happen by chance.
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Fri, 15 Feb 2013
In this episode, Joelle Proust discusses whether you need to have the concept of memory in order to evaluate your ability to remember things.
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Episode 43: Peter Adamson discusses the philosophy of Al-Kindi
Tue, 01 Jan 2013
In this episode, Peter Adamson gives us a tour through the impressively wide-ranging work of Al-Kindi, including his arguments for the unity of God and against the eternity of the universe.
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Episode 42: Agustin Rayo discusses the construction of logical space
Wed, 12 Dec 2012
In this episode, Agustin Rayo considers whether the number of dinosaurs being zero is the same thing as there being no dinosaurs, whether some wood blocks being nailed together into the shape of a table is the same thing as there being a table, and similar matters.
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Fri, 09 Nov 2012
In this episode, David Enoch argues that there are real facts of the matter about whether something is right or wrong, and that our ability to deliberate about what to do depends on this.
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Mon, 08 Oct 2012
In this episode, Johan van Benthem argues that the subject matter of logic should be broadened to encompass not only processes of inference performed by individuals, but also the sharing of information among groups of people.
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Episode 39: Nicholas Asher discusses the philosophy of language
Tue, 04 Sep 2012
In this episode, Nicholas Asher discusses some of the challenges faced by philosophers, linguists, and computer scientists when it comes to developing a formal theory of meaning that (for example) a computer could understand.
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Episode 38: Christopher Frey discusses Aristotle on living organisms and their parts
Wed, 08 Aug 2012
In this episode, Christopher Frey explains why Aristotle thought that after you sever a person's hand, it isn't really a hand anymore.
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Episode 37: Catarina Dutilh Novaes discusses methods in philosophy
Tue, 10 Jul 2012
In this episode, Catarina Dutilh Novaes talks about whether there is any one method that's specific to philosophy, the way there is (for example) something we call the scientific method.
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Fri, 15 Jun 2012
In this episode, Robert van Rooij talks about a paradox that arises when you try to decide exactly how many millimeters high someone has to be in order to count as tall.
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Episode 35: Martha Nussbaum discusses the capabilities approach
Mon, 07 May 2012
In this episode, Martha Nussbaum proposes a new set of criteria for determining the overall health and prosperity of a country.
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Mon, 09 Apr 2012
In this episode, Kieran Setiya discusses the difference between disagreeing with someone about how you should live your life and disagreeing with someone about what you just saw (like, for example, who was the winner of a very close race).
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Episode 33: Daniel Sutherland discusses the philosophy of mathematics
Wed, 14 Mar 2012
In this episode, Daniel Sutherland explains some of the difficulties involved in trying to say what numbers are.
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Thu, 09 Feb 2012
In this episode, Jennifer Lockhart tells us what happens when a person is unable to go ahead and do something they know how to do in theory.
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Wed, 11 Jan 2012
In this episode, Branden Fitelson discusses some mistakes we often make when reasoning about probabilities, and explains why we may even have evolved to make these mistakes.
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Mon, 12 Dec 2011
In this episode, Marko Malink discusses what Aristotle meant by words like 'every' and 'some,' and how his use of these words differs subtly from ours.
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Tue, 08 Nov 2011
In this episode, Peter Kail discusses the importance of David Hume's contributions to philosophy, including his thoughts on the scientific method, human psychology, and religious belief.
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Episode 28: John Searle discusses human reality and basic reality
Tue, 18 Oct 2011
In this episode, John Searle explores some of the problems that come up when we try to reconcile what's obvious and self-evident about human experience with what we know about how the world works.
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Mon, 26 Sep 2011
In this episode, Emma Borg explains why it's important to have a sharp distinction between what a person literally means when they say something and what they merely imply.
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Thu, 08 Sep 2011
In this episode, Robert Richards argues that we have evolved an instinct to act for the benefit of other people.
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Episode 25: Robert Stalnaker discusses conversational context
Mon, 18 Jul 2011
In this episode, Robert Stalnaker draws a distinction between two different meanings of the word 'context,' then explores some of its philosophical ramifications.
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Episode 24: Christopher Peacocke discusses the perception of music
Mon, 13 Jun 2011
In this episode, Christopher Peacocke discusses what it is to hear emotion in music.
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Episode 23: Quassim Cassam discusses transcendental arguments
Tue, 17 May 2011
In this episode, Quassim Cassam discusses an influential strategy for arguing against the idea that (for example) we're all in the Matrix.
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Wed, 06 Apr 2011
In this episode, Ben Laurence discusses the difference between what an individual person does and what a group of people does.
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Mon, 07 Mar 2011
In this episode, Raymond Geuss critiques the idea that we should always look to what the general consensus is when deciding which political policies to adopt.
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Tue, 08 Feb 2011
In this episode, Simon Critchley considers whether religious faith can serve as a model for faith in ethical principles.
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Wed, 12 Jan 2011
In this episode, Dan Sperber discusses the psychological habits we develop in order to figure out whether the information we hear from other people is trustworthy.
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Mon, 06 Dec 2010
In this episode, Mark Lance discusses how the conventions by which we address one another verbally define the roles we play in society.
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Mon, 08 Nov 2010
In this episode, Brandon Fogel discusses how attitudes toward the idea of action at a distance have changed over the course of history.
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Wed, 06 Oct 2010
In this episode, Amartya Sen critiques the idea that in order to make our society more just, we have to model it on an ideal.
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Wed, 08 Sep 2010
In this episode, Brian Leiter considers whether claims of religious conscience--as opposed to claims of other matters of conscience--should be given special status under the law.
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Mon, 02 Aug 2010
In this episode, Edward Witherspoon considers whether a disembodied brain could, in principle, have the ability to think.
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Fri, 09 Jul 2010
In this episode, Fabrizio Cariani discusses how the beliefs held by a single person in a group relate to the beliefs held by that group as a whole.
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Thu, 03 Jun 2010
In this episode, Jason Bridges discusses how a single sentence can mean completely different things in different contexts, and why this is of particular interest to philosophers.
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Episode 11: Martin Gustafsson discusses philosophical pictures
Fri, 07 May 2010
In this episode, Martin Gustafsson discusses Ludwig Wittgenstein's thoughts on the commonsense belief that the meaning of a word is the thing for which the word stands.
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Mon, 05 Apr 2010
In this episode, Richard Kraut discusses the contrast between being good for someone and simply being good.
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Thu, 04 Mar 2010
In this episode, Ted Cohen argues that metaphorical language is a tool we use to identify with other people.
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Fri, 12 Feb 2010
In this episode, Chris Haufe discusses the problems involved in trying to give an evolutionary account of our psychological traits.
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Mon, 04 Jan 2010
In this episode, Daniel Groll discusses how one might invoke the idea of nature when making an argument about what is right or wrong.
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Tue, 01 Dec 2009
In this episode, Jesse Prinz discusses a new movement in philosophy which makes use of findings in psychology and the social sciences to address traditional philosophical problems.
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Episode 5: Jocelyn Benoist discusses the philosophy of perception
Mon, 02 Nov 2009
In this episode, Jocelyn Benoist reflects on whether our sense perception is reliable. Should we worry about whether we can be certain that there is a real, tangible, external world, or is that worry misplaced?
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Thu, 01 Oct 2009
In this episode, Martha Nussbaum discusses how and whether sexual conduct should be legally regulated.
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Tue, 01 Sep 2009
In this episode, Brian Leiter discusses Nietzsche's critique of morality and his naturalist approach to human psychology.
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Episode 2: Gabriel Richardson Lear discusses Plato's philosophy of poetry
Mon, 03 Aug 2009
In this episode, Gabriel Richardson Lear tells us why Plato thought that the stylistic choices made by a poet could have ethical ramifications.
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Mon, 06 Jul 2009
In this episode, Agnes Callard offers a new account of what it is to want something, and what it means to get the thing you want.
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