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If you’re interested in reading about some of the issues that came up during our conversation with Daniel Sutherland, you can check out these articles: Paul Benacerraf, “Mathematical Truth”, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 70, No. 19, (Nov. 8, 1973), pp. 661-679. W.D. Hart, “Benacerraf’s Dilemma”, CRÍTICA, Vol. XXIII, No. 68 (August 1991): 87-10 Unfortunately, you need online access to JSTOR to view those papers. Sorry we weren’t able to provide freely available background readings this time!...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       In this episode, we’re joined by Daniel Sutherland, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. In this technological age, most of our day-to-day tasks involve numbers and arithmetic. And yet, it can be difficult to say what a number is....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month we’re joined by Jennifer Lockhart, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University and recent graduate of the PhD program in Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Click here to listen to our conversation with her. You’re at a party. Some guy is dominating the conversation, holding forth loudly and at great length about the importance of politeness....

Anyone who’s curious to learn more about the fallacies of inductive reasoning covered in our last episode can take a look at the following: On the base rate fallacy, see Jonathan J. Koehle’s “The base rate fallacy reconsidered: Descriptive, normative, and methodological challenges” On the conjunction fallacy, see Vincenzo Crupi, Branden Fitelson, and Katya Tentori’s “Probability, confirmation, and the conjunction fallacy” Professor Fitelson has also kindly shared the following lecture notes, closely related to his conversation with us, and which include a very useful bibliography....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       In this episode, Branden Fitelson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, joins us to discuss reasoning fallacies. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Imagine that you are worried that you have a rare disease for which there is a reliable test. If you take this test and it returns a positive result, how certain should you be that you have the disease?...

Much of our last episode dealt with what Aristotle meant by words like ‘every’ and ‘some.’ As we discussed at some length in our previous post, in the Aristotelian setting, the meaning of ‘every’ was slightly different from what we’re used to. Under today’s meaning of the word ‘every,’ when I say ‘every frog is green,’ you can check to see whether what I just said is true by checking to see whether the set of frogs is a subset of the set of green things....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Episode transcript here. Marko Malink is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. An episode on modal syllogistic is guaranteed to sound a bit challenging to someone who hasn’t ever studied logic. But the topic isn’t just fascinating–it’s easy to grasp once you’ve learned some of the relevant terminology....

In our latest episode, Peter Kail addressed a popular misreading of David Hume’s views about induction—the process of inferring things about the future on the basis of facts about the past. According to this reading, Hume is a skeptic about induction. Let’s distinguish skeptical from non-skeptical views about induction like this: Skepticism about induction: we are never justified in believing things about the future on the basis of facts about the past....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Peter Kail is University Lecturer in the History of Modern Philosophy at St. Peter’s College, University of Oxford. For our belated celebration of David Hume’s 300th birthday, Prof. Kail joins us to discuss Hume’s life and philosophical legacy. You can listen to our interview with Prof. Kail by clicking here. Hume’s work has had an enormous impact on contemporary thought about induction and moral psychology, to name just two....

Thus far, three of our episodes (12, 25 and 28 have contained some discussion of possible worlds semantics. Most memorably, we learned in our last episode that John Searle is rather critical of the enterprise. But what is possible worlds semantics? Let’s take a look. This possible worlds business originally stems from the work of 17th-century philosopher and polymath, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz got the ball rolling on possible worlds by putting forth the idea that a statement is necessarily true just in case it is true in all possible worlds, and possibly true just in case it is true in some possible world....