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Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we chat with John Protevi (Professor of Philosophy and Phyllis M. Taylor Professor of French Studies at Louisiana State University) about whether human beings may have evolved an altruism instinct. Click here to listen to our conversation. Thomas Hobbes famously argued that deep down, we’re all selfish creatures. Some philosophers think that disaster situations are test cases for this hypothesis, because it’s in the midst of a crisis that we shed all of our politeness and express our natural instinct for self-preservation....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we talk recreational mathematics with Haim Gaifman, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Click here to listen to our conversation. Are numbers mind-independent entites, or are they just social constructs? A mountain is definitely real–you can climb it, take pictures of it, fall off it, show it to your friends, and so on....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we consider the role of enhancement in sports with Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford. Click here to listen to our conversation. These days, we take it for granted that taking drugs to enhance athletic performance is wrong. After all, it’s cheating: the rules of all professional sports place strict limits on which drugs their athletes are allowed to use, and for good reason....

Those of you who would like to follow up on our latest episode, look no further! Here are the introduction and afterword to the volume we discussed. Matt Teichman...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we talk analytic philosophy with James Conant (Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Chicago) and Jay Elliott (Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Classical Studies at Bard College). Click here to listen our conversation. A lot of us learned a certain story about what analytic philosophy is when we were in college....

If you’d like to read up on some of the topics from our previous episode, Michael Devitt recommends the following book: Language and Reality, Kim Sterelny & Michael Devitt Alternatively, if you don’t have access to a library or a bookstore, you can look at the following survey article: “Reference,” Marga Reimer Matt Teichman...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Joining us this month to talk about a foundational topic in the philosophy of language is Michael Devitt, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Some animals make noises to express emotions they’re having. But other animals–notably, we humans–make utterances that do more....

If you’d like to read more about Hegel’s repsonse to Kantian ethics, you might take a look at the following two books by our distinguished guest: Sally Sedgwick, Hegel’s Critique of Kant Sally Sedgwick, Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: An Introduction Matt Teichman...

In “Kripke and Functionalism” (Episode 61), Buechner describes how Kripke’s criticism of the dispositionalist response to the ‘rule-following paradox,’ found in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations,can be generalized as a criticism of functionalist accounts of mental states, the thesis that mental states are abstract computational states realized in physical objects, like a brain. Here, I’d like to give a sketch of the rule-following paradox, the dispositionalist response, and Kripke’s criticism in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, in order to give you a clearer idea of the criticism of functionalism Buechner points to....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we talk to Sally Sedgwick Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Affiliated Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago) about Hegel’s critique of Kantian ethics. Click here to listen to our conversation. Over 200 years after Immanuel Kant published his work on ethics, it still represents one of the most influential perspectives in the field....