Those of you who would like to follow up on our previous episode could hardly do any better than to check out Mariam Thalos’ incredible book on the topic! A Social Theory of Freedom, Mariam Thalos Matt Teichman...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, I sit down with Mariam Thalos (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) to discuss freedom. What is it, why do we want it, and how do we attain it? Click here to listen to our conversation. We all categorize ourselves. You might think of yourself as a student, or as a painter, or as being good with numbers, or as being civic-minded....

Professor Alcoff recommends the following books to those of you who are interested in working through her views in detail: Rape and Resistance (2018) The Future of Whiteness (2016) Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (2006)...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       In this episode, Emily Dupree and I had the pleasure of talking to Linda Martín Alcoff (Hunter College & CUNY Graduate Center) about identity. Click here to listen to our conversation. Let’s start with some terminology. ‘Identity’ means different things in different contexts, but in this episode we use it to mean something like: ‘the social demographic a person belongs to....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Full transcript here. This month, it is our privilege to have R. A. Briggs (Stanford University) back on a second time to discuss the nature of gender. Click here to listen to our conversation. What exactly is gender? Simone de Beauvoir drew a distinction between gender and biological sex, and encouraged us to think of the former as the social significance of the latter....

For those of you who would like to read up on formal epistemology as it relates to decision theory, our esteemed guest recommends: Epistemic Utility Arguments for Probabilism, Richard Pettigrew Happy reading! Matt Teichman...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we are joined by R.A. Briggs (Stanford University), who is here to discuss an interdisciplinary area of study called epistemic decision theory. Click here to listen to our conversation. Epistemic decision theory is an area of study that brings together two sub-disciplines. The first is decision theory, which tries to mathematically study the best principles for deciding what to do: what are the costs and benefits of each option you’re considering, and how can you optimize the decision process so as to at least the worst options?...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we learn that there’s more to a person’s beliefs than just one big blob of information! Seth Yalcin (University of California, Berkeley) sits down with us to talk about how a person’s beliefs are sorted into answers to various questions. Click here to listen to our conversation. According to an influential picture of what a person’s belief state is–one that comes from philosophers like Jaakko Hintikka, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker--everything you believe can be encoded as a set of possible situations....

For those of you who would like to follow up on our conversation with Brian Leiter, his paper ‘Why Marxism Does Not Need Normative Theory’ goes through some of the questions we discussed in more detail. Matt Teichman...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Full transcript here. This month, Brian Leiter (University of Chicago) makes his third (!) appearance on the program to talk about how Karl Marx can help us understand our current political moment. Click here to listen to our conversation. Karl Marx thought that industrial capitalism had an in-built self-destructive tendency. Capitalism would lead to great technological progress, which would in turn lead to more menial and repetitive careers being replaced by automation processes....