Much of our last episode dealt with what Aristotle meant by words like ’every’ and ‘some.’ As we discussed at some length in our previous post, in the Aristotelian setting, the meaning of ’every’ was slightly different from what we’re used to. Under today’s meaning of the word ’every,’ when I say ’every frog is green,’ you can check to see whether what I just said is true by checking to see whether the set of frogs is a subset of the set of green things. But in Aristotle’s philosophy, it takes more to make the sentence ’every frog is green’ true. It’s not enough for the set of green things just to contain the set of frogs. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Episode transcript here. Marko Malink is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. An episode on modal syllogistic is guaranteed to sound a bit challenging to someone who hasn’t ever studied logic. But the topic isn’t just fascinating–it’s easy to grasp once you’ve learned some of the relevant terminology_._ If you’ve never taken an introductory course in logic before, I recommend taking a look at my entry from earlier this year at the Partially Examined Life blog, which introduces some of the basic concepts in philosophical logic. ...

In our latest episode, Peter Kail addressed a popular misreading of David Hume’s views about induction—the process of inferring things about the future on the basis of facts about the past. According to this reading, Hume is a skeptic about induction. Let’s distinguish skeptical from non-skeptical views about induction like this: Skepticism about induction: we are never justified in believing things about the future on the basis of facts about the past. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Peter Kail is University Lecturer in the History of Modern Philosophy at St. Peter’s College, University of Oxford. For our belated celebration of David Hume’s 300th birthday, Prof. Kail joins us to discuss Hume’s life and philosophical legacy. You can listen to our interview with Prof. Kail by clicking here. ...

Thus far, three of our episodes (12, 25 and 28 have contained some discussion of possible worlds semantics. Most memorably, we learned in our last episode that John Searle is rather critical of the enterprise. But what is possible worlds semantics? Let’s take a look. This possible worlds business originally stems from the work of 17th-century philosopher and polymath, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz got the ball rolling on possible worlds by putting forth the idea that a statement is necessarily true just in case it is true in all possible worlds, and possibly true just in case it is true in some possible world. The idea also plays a role in his controversial view that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Leibniz was resolutely mocked for this idea in Voltaire’s Candide. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       We are pleased to present John Searle, Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, who joins us for a stimulating and wide ranging conversation (click here). First he gives his assessment of how the field of philosophy has changed since his time as a graduate student at Oxford in the 1950’s, charting the decline of ‘ordinary language’ philosophy and the reemergence of Metaphysics and substantive ethics. Professor Searle tells us why he lacks sympathy for contemporary philosophy’s emphasis on formal methods of analysis. These methods, he worries, lose sight of the problems that they were originally developed to solve. Consequently, it is not so much that their results are wrong as that they are unilluminating. In contrast, his interest is in giving an account of human reality (of ourselves as mindful, social, political, aesthetic, speech-act users) that is consistent with our understanding of the world as a chemical-physical system. ...

Thus far, a number of our interviews have alluded to what philosophers of language call indexical expressions. (In particular, episodes 12, 25, and 27.) Although the theory of what these words and phrases mean represents one of the major developments in philosophy over the past fifty or so years, it can seem counterintuitive at first. Since the questions these words raise are unusually subtle and difficult, we thought it might be worthwhile to go over some of the basics. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Emma Borg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, and was the White Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago Spring Quarter 2011. Click here to listen to our conversation with her. In linguistics and the philosophy of language, semantics is the study of literal meaning, and pragmatics is the study of implied meaning. For example, if I say ‘It’s cold in here,’ all I’m literally saying is that the temperature in the room is low. But one could imagine a situation in which I said that in order to request that someone turn on the heat. In that case, I wouldn’t literally be saying, ‘Please turn on the heat,’ but I would be implying something to that effect. Try taking a second look at most of the things you said over the past few days: you’ll be surprised to find that you rarely mean exactly what you say! ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Robert Richards is the Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor in the History of Science, and Professor in the Departments of Medicine, Philosophy, History, Psychology, and in the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science; and he is director of the Fishbein Center for History of Science. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. ...

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