Posts

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we talk with Anubav Vasudevan (Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago) about whether there’s any conflict between objective probability and determinism. Click here to listen to our conversation. Suppose I say there’s a 50/50 chance that when I toss a coin, it will land heads. Is that statement objectively true or false? Am I describing a physical fact about the coin, the air, and the tabletop? Or is it just a subjective statement about how _certain _I am that the coin will land heads? Maybe, when I say there’s a 50/50 chance that the coin will land heads, all I’m saying is that I have no particular reason to place a bet on one particular outcome over the other. For all I know, either outcome is equally likely. On the one model, when I talk about probabilities, I’m describing physical facts about the way the world works. On the other, when I talk about probabilities, I’m describing my own ignorance. ...

To learn more about the topics we discussed during our last episode, check out these two papers by Joëlle Proust: Epistemic agency and metacognition: an externalist view, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 2008, CVIII, 3, 241-268. Metacognition and mindreading: one or two functions? in: M. Beran, J. Brandl, J. Perner & J. Proust (Eds.), The Foundations of Metacognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2012), 234-251. Those of you who have access to Philosophy Compass can also look at Proust’s survey article. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month we talk some philosophy of mind with Joëlle Proust, Professor of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure and member of the Jean Nicod Institute. Click here to listen to our conversation. You’re on your way to the supermarket to pick up the ingredients for a delicious vegetable stew. Upon arriving, you discover that you mistakenly left the shopping list on your dresser. Oh, no! You haven’t got time to go all the way back home, pick up the list, and return to the grocery store. Should you try to think back and recall the entire list, or should you just forget about the whole thing and get take-out? In order to make this decision, one of the things you’ll have do is determine whether you’ll be able to remember the whole thing. Whether you give up or try to mentally reconstruct the list will depend on how you evaluate your ability to remember things. That’s metacognition, in a nutshell: it’s what happens any time we evaluate our ability to perform some sort of mental task. ...

If you’d like to hear more about some of the philosophical ideas that Al-Kindi was responding to in the work we discussed during our last episode, you really can’t find a better resource than Peter Adamson’s own History of Philosophy podcast. To learn about Aristotle’s arguments for the eternity of the universe, check out this interview with Richard Sorabji. For a great introduction to Plotinus’ influential idea that the ultimate explanatory principle behind the universe has to be completely unified, check out this episode. ...

For those of you who would like to follow up on our discussion of Al-Kindi’s philosophy, a great place to start is Peter Adamson’s Stanford Encylopedia entry on Al-Kindi. If you’re looking to go into a bit more depth, Adamson’s monograph is a riveting read! And finally, if you’d like to look at some of Al-Kindi’s own writings, take a look at this new collection of translations. Matt Teichman ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we sit down with Peter Adamson, Professor of Philosophy at Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich and King’s College, London. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Al-Kindi may not be required reading for undergraduate philosophy majors these days, but the role he played in the history of philosophy was pivotal. Working in the ninth century, he was one of the first philosophers to try to unify the ancient Greek philosophical tradition with the tenets of Islam. ...

Before we began recording our previous episode, our guest turned the tables and interviewed me! Click here to listen to our conversation about a number of topics, including filmmaking, avant-garde cinema, interdisciplinary work, podcasting, and the illusion of philosophical depth. Matt Teichman ...

If you’re curious to learn more about what we discussed in our previous episode, keep your eye out for Agustín Rayo’s forthcoming book, The Construction of Logical Space. In addition, there are many papers available for download on his website. They cover a wide variety of topics in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, and they’re a pleasure to read! Matt Teichman ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month we’re joined by Agustín Rayo, Associate Professor of philosophy at MIT. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Many things are theoretically possible. In fact, just about anything you can imagine is possible in the broadest sense of the term. I might win the lottery, or win a tennis match, or travel to Mars. It isn’t _ likely _ that I’ll do any of these things, but it’s possible. A fiction author could come up with a story in which a series of extraordinary coincidences end up in my visiting the moon. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       In this episode, we talk some metaethics with David Enoch, Professor of Philosophy and Jacob I. Berman Professor of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Are moral judgments, for example “stealing is wrong,” ever true? Are they even the kinds of things that can be true or false, or are moral judgments just fancy ways of expressing our feelings about stuff, so that “stealing is wrong” is just a fancy way of saying “Boo stealing!”? If there are some true moral judgments, what makes them true? Does the world include special, irreducible moral features, or are “moral facts” reducible to facts about the natural world? ...