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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. However, John Protevi argues that disasters really reveal more about our prejudices–that in spite of the fact that recent major disasters actually gave rise to cooperation, they were reported as having given rise to frantic competitiveness. He argues that in fact, most of the evidence in paleoanthropology, evolutionary psychology, and sociology seems to favor the hypothesis that we evolved to cooperate with one another. ...

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. It wasn’t brought into existence by people agreeing that anything about it was true. But not everything is like that. The law not to cross the street when the light is red, for instance, only is the way it is because we all agree that that should be the law. If we were to change our minds about it, the law would thereby change. This raises an interesting question: which of these two things are numbers more like? Are they the way they are independently of what human beings decide, or are facts about numbers constituted by the conventions we decide to adopt? ...

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. That way, the competitions associated with these sports can remain a test of the athlete’s hard work and natural ability, rather than a test of who took the most extreme (and potentially dangerous) chemical shortcut. ...

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. Some versions of the story attribute to analytic philosophy some sort of characteristic method: they tell us that analytic philosophy is the kind of philosophy based on analyzing concepts, or perhaps that it’s the kind of philosophy where you formalize arguments using the tools of modern logic. Some versions of the story define analytic philosophy in terms of a thematic reorientation: they tell us that whereas pre-20th century philosophy studied topics like the nature of subjectivity, the possibility of free will, or whether we can be certain that there is an external world, analytic philosophy turned its attention to matters like whether the theorems of mathematics are justified, how a word can refer to an object, or how to precisely define the meaning of the word ’every.' ...

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. We do more than cry out in anger, laugh, and greet each other; we also refer to things and states of things in the world. Reference, some philosophers would argue, is the basis of our being able to convey more than just what we’re feeling inside. The fact that some of the words we utter refer to objects in the world is what allows us to convey information about the world. ...

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. (For those following along at home, the crux of the rule-following paradox can be found in §§185-202 of the Investigations; Kripke’s (articulation of what he takes to be Wittgenstein’s) criticism of the dispositionalist response can be found on pages 22-35 of Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.) ...

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. Kant thought that ethics was based on a fundamental, universal principle that held necessarily for all people, regardless of time or circumstance: respect the dignity of all rational nature. What does that mean, exactly? Something like: in deciding how to act, always do the thing which will allow you and everyone else to most fully express your freedom. For example, don’t lie. If you lie, you’ll be spreading misinformation around, and if misinformation is allowed to spread around, then you won’t know the things you have to know in order to act freely. There’s something inherently self-undermining about the act of lying. ...