Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month we’re joined by Agustín Rayo, Associate Professor of philosophy at MIT. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Many things are theoretically possible. In fact, just about anything you can imagine is possible in the broadest sense of the term. I might win the lottery, or win a tennis match, or travel to Mars. It isn’t _ likely _ that I’ll do any of these things, but it’s possible. A fiction author could come up with a story in which a series of extraordinary coincidences end up in my visiting the moon. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       In this episode, we talk some metaethics with David Enoch, Professor of Philosophy and Jacob I. Berman Professor of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Are moral judgments, for example “stealing is wrong,” ever true? Are they even the kinds of things that can be true or false, or are moral judgments just fancy ways of expressing our feelings about stuff, so that “stealing is wrong” is just a fancy way of saying “Boo stealing!”? If there are some true moral judgments, what makes them true? Does the world include special, irreducible moral features, or are “moral facts” reducible to facts about the natural world? ...

Those of you who are interested in following up on this month’s episode with van Benthem should check out his recent book on the topic, Logical Dynamics of Information and Interaction (2011). It’s a thrilling read! There is also his earlier book on the topic, Exploring Logical Dynamics (1996). Matt Teichman ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       In this episode, we talk to Johan van Benthem, University Professor of pure and applied logic at the University of Amsterdam and Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of philosophy at Stanford University. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Logic is traditionally assumed to have deductive reasoning as its subject matter. A valid deductive argument is one in which it’s impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. For instance, if it’s true that I’m a German composer, then it absolutely must be the case that I am a composer. I couldn’t not be one! The conclusion of the argument is just inevitable. Over the past century, philosophical and mathematical logicians have developed a wide array of formal techniques to study arguments of this sort. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month we’re joined by Nicholas Asher, research director at the CNRS and the IRIT in Toulouse, and former longtime Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Remember Spanish class? You had to learn all those rules about where to put the verb, where to put the subject, which nouns have which genders, which prepositions to use when, etc. What a pain. Now try to imagine what it would be like to try to explain all of the rules of English to someone from a different country. It’s actually pretty difficult. If you did try to do this, you’d find that you were following all kinds of subtle grammatical conventions without even realizing it. You’d be pronouncing everything a certain way without realizing it. Although the rules we follow when we speak English are incredibly complicated, we native speakers do it effortlessly, as if by reflex. And that’s part of the difficulty: our knowledge of how to speak English is tacit. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month we talk to Christopher Frey, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Click here to listen to our conversation. Aristotle thought that after you chop off a person’s hand, it ceases to be a hand in the original sense of the term. Sure, we _ call _ it a hand. But it just isn’t a hand in the same sense. It can’t pick up a glass of orange juice, twist doorknobs, or make obscene gestures. It can’t do any of the things that real hands do; and if you can’t do any of the things that real hands do, you don’t get to count as a hand. This is because being a hand–according to Aristotle–isn’t just a matter of having a certain shape, weighing a certain amount, or being located near an arm. Being a hand is really about serving a certain purpose in a person’s life: namely, that of allowing her to grasp objects, use tools, build things, and so on. ...

If you’re curious to learn more about what Catarina Dutilh Novaes called conjunctive pluralism (as opposed to disjunctive pluralism), take a look at some of her blog posts from NewAPPS: Methodological Pluralism in Philosophy Intuition-based Philosophical Methodology and Belief Empirically-informed Philosophy of Logic Feynman on Precise Definitions and Philosophical Methodology On the Origins of Analytic Philosophy Instrumentalist and Intrinsic Value Defenses of History of Philosophy History of Philosophy as Antidote to Philosophical Intuitions ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       In this episode, Matt continues his European adventure by sitting down with Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Assistant Professor and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the University of Groningen. Click here to listen to their conversation. Philosophers want to answer big, sexy questions like how one should live or what knowledge is. How should one go about answering questions like that? Random guessing is definitely out. That’s because philosophical insight is supposed to be the result of some kind of rigorous investigation. But what is that kind of investigation supposed to look like? This is a question about philosophical methodology, and an extremely important one. After all, if we don’t know what methods we can use to gain philosophical insight, it’s hard to know whether we’re on the right track when we try to answer those big, sexy questions. ...

If you’re interested in learning about how the ancient Stoic philosopher Chrysippus tried to deal with the sorites paradox, give episode 61 of the amazing History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast a listen. Matt Teichman ...

For an excellent introduction to the issues we discussed in Episode 36, you can read: Robert van Rooij, ‘Vagueness and Linguistics’ If you’re curious to see the details of van Rooij’s solution to the sorites paradox, including the distinction between strict truth and tolerant truth, take a look at the following: Robert van Rooij, ‘Tolerant, Classical, Strict’ Matt Teichman ...