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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....

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....

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?...

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...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month we’re joined by Robert van Rooij, Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Language at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation, at the University of Amsterdam. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. As it happens, nearly everything we say is imprecise. For example, when I indicate where I want you to stand while posing for a photo, I don’t give exact coordinates; I just point with my finger....

For those of you who’d like to read more about the issues we discussed with Martha Nussbaum in Episode 35, we recommend you check out her recent book, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Belknap Press, 2011). The book provides a wonderful and concise presentation of the capabilities approach to human development, and contains an excellent bibliography. Matt Teichman...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we speak with Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. You can listen to our conversation here. What do we mean when we talk about nations being more or less developed? Is it simply a matter of being financially better-off? If not, then what would be a better measure of how well a country is doing?...

If you’d like to read up on the epistemology of moral disagreement, you can have a look at: Adam Elga, ‘Reflection and Disagreement‘ Tom Kelly, “Peer Disagreement and Higher-Order Evidence“ Those two articles set the stage for the following article by Kieran Setiya: Kieran Setiya, “Does Moral Theory Corrupt Youth?“ In addition, keep your eye open for his forthcoming monograph: Kieran Setiya, Knowing Right From Wrong Matt Teichman...