Subscribe to Elucidations: Note: this episode was recorded in March of 2025. In the latest episode of Elucidations, Sam Enright (Progress Ireland, The Fitzwilliam) instructs us in the delicate art of learning forever. Click here to download Episode 153 of Elucidations. If you’re one of those people who responds well to formal education, chances are you’ve spent 10-20 years of your life as a student....
Subscribe to Elucidations: Note: this episode was recorded in March of 2024. This time around, Matt talks to Luca Gattoni-Celli about why it’s so expensive to buy a house. Click here to download episode 152 of Elucidations. In the 80s, people from all sorts of socioeconomic backgrounds were able to afford apartments and houses in places like New York City, San Francisco, or London....
Hello, party people. This is a blog post explaining how to connect to the University of Chicago VPN using Network Manager and openconnect from an Arch Linux machine with no desktop environment installed. Prerequisites This post assumes an “I run Linux on my computer” level of tech-savviness. If you don’t know what any of those words mean, or if this post employs concepts that you don’t understand but would like to, please feel free to get in touch with me and I’ll be happy to write a follow-up post explaining whatever you’d like to know about....
Subscribe to Elucidations: Episode post here. Transcription by Prexie Miranda Abainza Magallanes. Matt Teichman: Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman, and with me today is Shruti Rajagopalan, Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center, Fellow at the Classical Liberal Institute at New York University School of Law, host of the Ideas of India podcast, which I recommend you check out, and author of the Get Down and Shruti substack, which I also highly recommend you check out....
Subscribe to Elucidations: Note: this episode was recorded in August of 2022. In the latest Elucidation, Matt talks to Witold Więcek about the difficulties that come up for researchers who would like to draw upon statistics. Click here to download episode 151 of Elucidations. Lots of academic fields need to draw heavily on statistics, whether it’s economics, psychology, sociologym, linguistics, computer science, or data science....
Subscribe to Elucidations: Note: this episode was recorded in April of 2023. Full transcript here. In this episode, Matt sits down with Shruti Rajagopalan (Mercatus Center) to talk about what the future holds for India. Click here to download episode 150 of Elucidations. We often have a tendency to think of the current economic and geopolitical situation as simply the way things are....
The philosopher Wittgenstein famously said in Culture and Value: “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” My interest in this article is to analyze what Wittgenstein here means. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein described the task of philosophy as being “to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” Humor has a certain way of cutting through language, of getting to the truth of whatever game is at hand....
Subscribe to Elucidations: 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. Click here to download episode 149 of Elucidations. In our previous episode with Christos, we talked about death and the vexed history of attempts to define it....
The law is not philosophy. Therefore, lawyers are not philosophers? My interest in this article is to show that lawyers may not produce philosophy but can be philosophers in virtue of engaging in philosophical reasoning some of the time. Of course, this claim is not entirely original. As the philosopher Ronald Dworkin writes: “Lawyers are always philosophers because jurisprudence is part of any lawyer’s account of what the law is, even when the jurisprudence is undistinguished and mechanical....
Subscribe to Elucidations: 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 death, period. Click here to donwload episode 148 of Elucidations. Modern life support technology really hit its stride in the 1960s, allowing doctors to buy themselves more time to save their patients by connecting them to machines that could assist with breathing, blood oxygenation and/or heart pumping....