Podcast

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Note: this episode was recorded in August of 2022. In the latest Elucidation, Matt talks to Witold Więcek about the difficulties that come up for researchers who would like to draw upon statistics. Click here to download episode 151 of Elucidations. Lots of academic fields need to draw heavily on statistics, whether it’s economics, psychology, sociologym, linguistics, computer science, or data science....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Note: this episode was recorded in April of 2023. In this episode, Matt sits down with Shruti Rajagopalan (Mercatus Center) to talk about what the future holds for India. Click here to download episode 150 of Elucidations. We often have a tendency to think of the current economic and geopolitical situation as simply the way things are....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         In this episode, we are joined by Lainie Ross (University of Rochester Medical Center) and (once again!) Christos Lazaridis (UChicago Medicine), this time to talk about the different ways of defining death. Click here to download episode 149 of Elucidations. In our previous episode with Christos, we talked about death and the vexed history of attempts to define it....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         In this episode, Matt sits down with Christos Lazaridis (University of Chicago Medicine) to chat about what brain death is and whether brain death should count as death, period. Click here to donwload episode 148 of Elucidations. Modern life support technology really hit its stride in the 1960s, allowing doctors to buy themselves more time to save their patients by connecting them to machines that could assist with breathing, blood oxygenation and/or heart pumping....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         In this episode, Matt talks to Gabriella Gonzalez about how basic concepts from the branch of math known as abstract algebra can help us simplify our computer programs and organize our thoughts. Click here to download episode 147 of Elucidations. Algebra. That thing they make us do in school. What was that again?...

Subscribe to Elucidations:         In this episode, Matt sits down with Gaurav Vankataraman (Trisk Bio) to talk about how human memory is physically realized. Click here to download episode 146 of Elucidations. Where do your memories live? In the brain, right? They’re, like, imprinted there somehow? We often think of memories as analogous with recordings, like when you do an audio recording and the air vibrations get translated into an electrical signal which reorients the magnetic particles on some tape....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This episode, Matt Teichman and Joseph Diller sit down with Andrew Sepielli (University of Toronto) to talk about metaethical quietism. His new book on the topic, Pragmatist Quietism, is out now from Oxford University Press. Click here to listen to episode 145. Metaethical quietism is the view that ethical statements—or anyway, a large portion of the ethical statements we’re usually interested in—can’t be justified or disproved by statements from outside of ethics....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This episode, Matt talks to Christopher Beem (Penn State University) about how we can cultivate those skills that conduce to having a functioning democracy. His book on the topic, The Seven Democratic Virtues, is out now from Penn State University Press. Click here to download Episode 144 of Elucidations....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This episode, Matt Teichman talks to Mark Linsenmayer about alternative models of education. Mark is creator and host of the Partially Examined Life, Nakedly Examined Music, Pretty Much Pop, and Philosophy vs. Improv podcasts. He is also the author of the recent book, Philosophy For Teens. You can download Episode 143 by clicking here....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         In this episode of Elucidations, Matt sits down with Emily Dupree to learn about whether it’s rational or irrational to try to seek revenge. Click here to download episode 142 of Elucidations. As a culture, we kinda can’t decide what we think about revenge. Out of one side of our mouths, we talk a big game about letting bygones be bygones, about how revenge and retaliation lead to cycles of violence, and about how nothing good can really come of getting back at people....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This time around, Matt sits down with Rob Goodman to talk about political eloquence. Goodman is the author of a new book on this topic called Words on Fire, which you can pick up a copy of wherever you like to get books. As for this interview, you can click here to download episode 141 of Elucidations....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, Meghan Sullivan returns to Elucidations with her co-author Paul Blaschko to discuss their new book on how to live a good life. Click here to download episode 140 of Elucdiations. Intro philosophy classes often get stuck in a rut. Some philosophy classes go through a list of old dead people and try to understand excerpts from some of their most influential writings, over the course of a semester....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, Jessica Tizzard (University of Tuebingen) makes her second appearance on Elucidations to talk to Matt about pregnancy. Click here to download episode 139 of Elucidations. Human pregnancy is weird. Try talking to a reproductive endochrinologist about it, and you’ll soon find that there’s a lot we don’t really understand about it even at the scientific level....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, Toby Buckle, host of the Political Philosophy Podcast, returns to talk about John Stuart Mill’s liberty principle! (Also sometimes called the ‘harm principle’.) Click here to download episode 138 of Elucidations. The occasion for the episode is the recent release of Toby’s cool new book, What is Freedom?...

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, I talk to Bryan Caplan (George Mason University) about what a world without immigration restrictions could look like. Click here to download episode 137 of Elucidations. The work discussed in this episode comes out of Bryan’s incredible non-fiction graphic novel, Open Borders, which I highly recommend checking out....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, Yuezhen Li and I sit down with Christian Miller (Wake Forest University) to talk about how to be virtuous. Also known as how to be good. Click here to download episode 136 of Elucidations. ‘Virtue’ is sort of an old-timey word. But the concept is still alive and well today, even though we tend to use different words for it....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, Charlie Wiland and I sit down with Sara Protasi to talk about envy. Which she just came out with a whole book about! Awesome. Click here to download episode 135 of Elucidations. You might think that it’s pretty clear what envy is. Isn’t envy just when someone else has something you want, you don’t have it, and that makes you feel annoyed?...

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, Josh Kaufman and I talk to Claire Kirwin (Clemson University) about whether things are objectively good or bad, or whether it’s all in the eye of the beholder. Click here to download Episode 134 of Elucidations. Professor Kirwin is a fan of peanut butter cup ice cream, and Josh and I are fans of mint chocolate chip....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, Agnes Callard and I talk to Aristotle about his philosophy, including his work on physics, biology, and ethics. Featuring an introduction by our awesome intern, Noadia Steinmetz-Silber! Click here to download Episode 133 of Elucidations. Not everyone is familiar with Aristotle’s work today, but the case could be made that science, political theory, logic, ethics, and philosophy exist in their current form largely due to the precedent he set....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, we sit down with Rebecca Valentine (co-founder of Queerious Labs) to talk about anarchism, feminism, tech culture, and creative hacking. Click here to download Episode 132 of Elucidations. Hack this, hack that. What is a hacker, anyway? In pop culture, it’s common to use the term ‘hacker’ as a synonym for ‘cybercriminal’—that is, a person who engages in illegal activity over a computer network, usually involving gaining access to something they shouldn’t....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, Greg Salmieri (University of Texas at Austin) returns for his third (!!) appearance on Elucidations, this time to talk about doing right by yourself. Click here to download Episode 131 of Elucidations. What was the last thing you did? The last thing I did was pull a shot of espresso....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, Long Dang and I sit down to talk to Jessica Tizzard (University of Connecticut, Storrs) about weakness of the will. Click here to download Episode 130 of Elucidations. You’re at a party hosted by a close friend. It’s been three hours since you got there, and the evening thus far has been chock full of scintillating conversation, a fun round of Charades followed by Assassins, first rate cocktails, and a dessert to die for....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, Ben Andrew and I are joined by Nethanel Lipshitz (Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University) to talk about discrimination. Click here to download Episode 129 of Elucidations. If someone treats me unequally—that is, if they give other people a relative advantage but not me—am I the victim of discrimination?...

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. In this episode, Melissa Fusco (Columbia University) and I discuss a difficult problem in philosophical logic called the puzzle of free choice permission. Click here to download Episode 128 of Elucidations. One of the foundational ideas behind philosophical logic is that when you say something, that has further implications beyond the single thing you said....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here.In this episode, Nic Koziolek (Washington University in St. Louis) returns to talk to me and Nora Bradford about self-consciousness. Click here to download Episode 127 of Elucidations. Self-consciousness, as philosophers use the term, is a word for when you know something about one of your own mental states....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Episode transcript here. Three philosophers. Eight head-scratchers. 50 minutes. In this episode, Agnes Callard, Ben Callard and I respond to the world’s most awesome listener-recorded questions. Click here to download Episode 126 of Elucidations. A lot of people have the impression that philosophy is, first and foremost, an enterprise in which college professor types read books that no one can understand, then issue a response in the form of more books that no one can understand....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Episode transcript here. In this episode, James Koppel (MIT, James Koppel Coaching) joins me and Dominick Reo to talk about how we can write software to help identify the causes of disasters. Click here to download Episode 125 of Elucidations. These days, there’s often a tendency to think of software primarily as a venue for frivolous pleasures....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. In this episode, Graham Priest returns to discuss Buddhist political philosophy with me and Henry Curtis. (Last month, we talked with him about Buddhist metaphysics.) Click here to download Episode 124 of Elucidations. Last month, we discussed the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: that suffering happens, that this suffering is (partially) caused by emotional attachment, that you can deal with it by changing your headspace, and that you can change your headspace by understanding the world, understanding your mind and body, and treating other people well....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, Henry Curtis and I sit down with Graham Priest (CUNY Graduate Center) to get the straight dope on Buddhist metaphysics. Click here to download Episode 123 of Elucidations. Buddhism isn’t just a religion—it’s an entire family of philosophical traditions that took root all over the Asian continent for thousands of years....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, we sit down with Frithjof Bergmann (University of Michigan) and David Helmbold to talk about work that we really, really want. Not just kind of, but like, really really. Click here to download Episode 122 of Elucidations. Most of us spend the majority of our waking hours at work....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, Julia Liu and I talk to Aaron Ben Ze’ev (University of Haifa) about romantic love: what it is, what makes it last for a long time when it lasts for a long time, what makes it end when it ends, and so on. Click here to download Episode 121 of Elucidations....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Episode transcript here. This month, I talk to Robin Dembroff (Yale University) about the gender binary: what it is, what people mean when they say they’re outside of it, and what political motivation there may be for resisting it. Click on this link to download Episode 120 of Elucidations....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Episode transcript here. This month, Henry Curtis and I sit down to talk to Stephanie Kapusta (Dalhousie University) about misgendering. Click here to download the episode. In the ordinary sense of the term, misgendering is when someone addresses someone else in a way that corresponds to the wrong gender. Like if Elizabeth Warren was on the street in front of me, dropped her wallet, and I picked it up and yelled: “Sir, you dropped your wallet,” then I would be misgendering her....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Episode transcript here. This month, we’re joined by Tyler Cowen (Professor of Economics at George Mason University), to talk about utilitarianism, economic growth, and the future. Click here to download the episode. Utilitarianism is the name we give a family of normative ethical theories, most of which are variations on the idea that doing the right thing involves imparting the greatest amount of benefit to the greatest number of people....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we talk to Brian L. Frye (University of Kentucky College of Law) about how we deal with and react to plagiarism. Click here to listen to our conversation. Plagiarism is obviously terrible, and plagiarizers should be punished to the full extent of the law. Or should they? Our guest this month thinks there are a number of issues with that position....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, we sit down with Tommy Curry (University of Edinburgh currently; Texas A&M at the time of the recording) to discuss a new area of academic research called black male studies. You can see his full bio at the end of this entry, and you can click here to listen to our conversation....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, I sit down with Katherine Ritchie (CUNY Graduate Center, City College) to talk about what a social group is. Click here to listen to our conversation. What is there to being a group of people? Does being in a group basically just mean you’re on the list of people who are in the group, or is there more to it?...

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, Emily Dupree and I talk to Sally Haslanger (MIT) about ideology. Click here to listen to our conversation. We throw the word ‘ideology’ around a lot, but what does it actually mean? Well, unfortunately, different people mean different things by it at different times. One thing we often mean by it is ‘a person’s political outlook or worldview....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Ever wonder what quantum mechanics is? You are not alone. This month, we talk to Tom Pashby (University of Chicago) about what makes quantum mechanics so hard to interpret, despite the fact that it makes incredibly accurate empirical predictions. Click here to listen. Quantum mechanics is hard to interpret for a number of reasons, but very high on the list is the way it uses the notion of probability....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         In this episode, Myisha Cherry (UC Riverside) and I talk about talking. What makes someone good at at, and what makes someone bad at it? Click here to listen to our conversation. We don’t always think of conversation as a skill. Often, we think of it as something that just happens automatically; I need to talk someone, and I walk over and just tell them what’s on my mind....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, we talk to Greg Kobele (Universität Leipzig) about what linguistics is and how abstract mathematics can be of use to it. Click here to listen to our conversation. Linguists study the rules that speakers of a given language actually follow when they speak. Not made-up rules like “never end a sentence with a preposition,” which no one ever follows (including the teachers who shame their students for not following them), but the actual rules you need to know in order to understand English....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, we sit down with Chike Jeffers (Dalhousie University) to discuss the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. Click here to listen to our conversation. It’s the end of the American civil war. 4 million slaves have just been freed. Now what do we all do? The question still wasn’t settled by the turn of the century, when an interesting debate between Booker T....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, Toby Buckle of the Political Philosophy Podcast and I are doing a joint episode. Click here to listen to it! Instead of the usual format wherein I draw that month’s guest out about a particular topic, Toby Buckle and I have a freeform conversation about why we do podcasts, the universality of fundamental moral principles, and the nature of political disagreement....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, I sit down with Mariam Thalos (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) to discuss freedom. What is it, why do we want it, and how do we attain it? Click here to listen to our conversation. We all categorize ourselves. You might think of yourself as a student, or as a painter, or as being good with numbers, or as being civic-minded....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         In this episode, Emily Dupree and I had the pleasure of talking to Linda Martín Alcoff (Hunter College & CUNY Graduate Center) about identity. Click here to listen to our conversation. Let’s start with some terminology. ‘Identity’ means different things in different contexts, but in this episode we use it to mean something like: ‘the social demographic a person belongs to....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, it is our privilege to have R. A. Briggs (Stanford University) back on a second time to discuss the nature of gender. Click here to listen to our conversation. What exactly is gender? Simone de Beauvoir drew a distinction between gender and biological sex, and encouraged us to think of the former as the social significance of the latter....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we are joined by R.A. Briggs (Stanford University), who is here to discuss an interdisciplinary area of study called epistemic decision theory. Click here to listen to our conversation. Epistemic decision theory is an area of study that brings together two sub-disciplines. The first is decision theory, which tries to mathematically study the best principles for deciding what to do: what are the costs and benefits of each option you’re considering, and how can you optimize the decision process so as to at least the worst options?...

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we learn that there’s more to a person’s beliefs than just one big blob of information! Seth Yalcin (University of California, Berkeley) sits down with us to talk about how a person’s beliefs are sorted into answers to various questions. Click here to listen to our conversation....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, Brian Leiter (University of Chicago) makes his third (!) appearance on the program to talk about how Karl Marx can help us understand our current political moment. Click here to listen to our conversation. Karl Marx thought that industrial capitalism had an in-built self-destructive tendency....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we get right into it with Josh Knobe (Yale University) about the notion of a person’s true self. Click here to listen to our conversation. Who are you, deep down, in your core? Maybe it isn’t fully clear what would count as an answer to that question, but it’s still a question we ask all the time....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, Emily and Matt chat with Miranda Fricker (CUNY Graduate Center) about blame and forgiveness. Click here to listen to our conversation. We have a lot of conflicting feelings about blame. When someone does something bad, we feel a strong urge to blame them, and when it all goes down as intended, the person deserves the blame, and they learn that what they did was wrong, we intuitively feel that justice has been done....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we sit down with Agnes Callard (University of Chicago) to talk about aspiration. Click here to listen to our conversation. Have you ever wanted to get into something? Maybe you find it really boring to sit through an opera right now, but you think you might be missing something and want to learn how to appreciate opera....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Full transcript here. This month, we delve back into the early modern period with Steven Nadler, William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy, Evjue-Bascom Professor of the Humanities, and Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Click here to listen to our conversation. Baruch Spinoza is known for his views about how the mind and body are the same thing (see our Episode 70), and for coming up with a completely non-anthropomorphic notion of God....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we talk to Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern University) about what it means to be too trustful of another person. Click here to listen to our conversation. For some time, feminist authors have been concerned about the fact that women tend to be believed less than men, simply because they’re women....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, Meghan Sullivan (University of Notre Dame) urges us to consider how we feel about the past, present, and future. Click here to listen to our conversation. Remember the marshmallow test? Back in the 1970s, some psychological experiments suggested that people who opted to delay short-term rewards if it meant a bigger reward in the future were likely to have more successful lives....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we talk to Nic Koziolek (Auburn University) about some big, meaty topics, including but not limited to thought, judgment, belief, reasoning, and knowledge. Click here to listen to our conversation. We engage in reasoning on a constant basis. Here’s an example of the kind of reasoning I engage in all the time: they’re working on the water main, my car is parked right in front of the water main, I want them to be able to work on the water main, so I guess I have to go move it....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we talk to Zed Adams (New School for Social Research) about colors like red, blue, and green. Click here to listen to our conversation. What is the color red? Is it a physical property of certain chemicals–the fact that they tend to reflect light with a wavelength of about 670 nm and absorb the rest?...

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we talk to Zsofia Zvolenszky (Eötvös University) about fictional characters and places. Click here to listen to our conversation. Han Solo and Luke Skywalker sneak on board the Death Star and attempt to rescue to Princess Leia. The escape plan goes awry, and pretty soon it looks more like Princess Leia is rescuing them....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we talk about whether we owe the dead anything with Barry Lam. Barry Lam is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College, Story Lab Fellow at Duke University, and creator, producer, and lead host of Hi-Phi Nation, an exciting new philosophy podcast that turns stories into ideas. Click here to listen to our conversation....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Note: this episode was recorded in 2016, prior to the US presidential election. Kristie Dotson will be coming back in a future episode to give us her latest thoughts on these topics in light of recent developments in US politics! Full transcript here. This month, we talk to Kristie Dotson (Michigan State University) about how people’s ability to gather and share information can be negatively impacted under oppressive social systems....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we talk to Paolo Santorio about counterfactuals, also known as statements of the form ‘If A were, then B would be.’ Click here to listen to our conversation. Counterfactual statements, those funny conditional statements where the word ‘would’ comes after the word ‘then,’ play an absolutely central rule both in everyday commonsense reasoning and in our more formal scientific theorizing....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we talk to Ásta Sveinsdóttir (San Francisco State University) about social-institutional entities, like money, the economy, political borders, nation states, and, interestingly, categories of people. Click here to listen to our conversation. For a while now, philosophers have been interested in the status of things like money. A $5 bill has the purchasing power it has not because of any intrinsic features that belong to the paper it’s printed on, but because we all agree to treat it as having that purchasing power....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This time, we have the privilege of talking to John Collins (University of East Anglia) as we shift our attention to the human language faculty. Click here to listen to our conversation. Human beings are the only animal in the world that can natively acquire a language like English, French, Czech, Nahuatl, Yoruba, or Tamil....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Episode transcript here. This month, we talk to Kent Bach (San Francisco State University) about his picture of how beliefs relate to particular thoughts. Click here to listen to our conversation. In this episode, Kent Bach discusses two of his big ideas at the border between the philosophy of mind and epistemology....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we sit down with Susanna Schellenberg to talk about what ordinary perception does and doesn’t have in common with hallucination. Click here to listen to our conversation. When you picture to yourself how vision works, you probably imagine something along the following lines. There’s some light which gets projected into your eyes, and the light stimulates the rod and cone cells in your retina....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we discuss photographs and their vicissitudes with Daniel Smyth, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Sage School of Philosophy of Cornell University. (And yes, Smyth used to study and teach at the University of Chicago!) Click here to listen to the episode. In this episode, Smyth asks: What does a photograph evidence?...

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we discuss race and cognitive science with Bryce Huebner, associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. Click here to listen to our conversation. Of course, we as individuals can be racist. Of course, so can our institutions. But when do we realize this, so that we might get something done about it?...

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Last year, we talked about anarchism. This year, we turn to democracy with Amanda Greene, Lecturer in Philosophy at University College, London, and Law and Philosophy Fellow at the University of Chicago. Click here to listen to our discussion. In the West, at least, most of us consider democracy to be the obvious choice for the best form of government, but we rarely take a step back to think about why....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we discuss genealogical anxiety with Bob Simpson, lecturer in philosophy at Monash University. Click here to listen to our conversation. If you listen to this podcast, then for better or worse, you have likely been exposed to some Nietzsche (hopefully at a safe level!). In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche (perhaps notoriously) introduced an epistemological sense of genealogy – a genealogy of what we purport to know – by telling a story about how we have come to know the things we purport to know....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we pull up our chairs and sit down once again with Robert May, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of California, Davis. Click here to listen to our conversation. It seems sublime, unbelievable, groundbreaking – but maybe it actually doesn’t mean anything at all:...

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we talk with Catherine Legg, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at New Zealand’s University of Waikato. She teaches us about the philosophical categories of Charles Sanders Peirce’s (pronounced like the bag “purse”). Click here to listen to our conversation. At Legg’s university, philosophy is part of the School of Social Sciences....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we discuss love and moral value with Mark Hopwood, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sewanee: The University of the South, and former co-host of this podcast! Click here to listen to our conversation. In discussing rights, religion, politics, and much more, we ask: Who has moral value? Who are we obliged to accommodate, support, even love?...

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we discuss conditionals with Anthony (Thony) Gillies, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Click here to listen to our conversation. Lately, philosophers have resurrected interest in formal theories of what’s meant by conditional statements, or if-then statements. Conditionals are basic, because they relate conditions – knowns and unknowns, actions and results, etc....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         Episode transcript here. This month, we discuss the categorical imperative with Stephen Engstrom, professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Click here to listen to our conversation. True to the Chicago tradition, we philosophers spend a lot of time asking – but perhaps not so much time answering – an everyday question: What’s the right thing to do?...

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we discuss reasons for action and belief with Mark Schroeder, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. Click here to listen to our conversation. Consider one question from this episode. Can we decide what to believe, the way we decide how to act? We can, for instance, decide to worship at a church or temple....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we discuss gratitude with Barbara Herman, Griffin Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles. Click here to listen to our conversation. Is our subject this week, well, gratuitous? Given the dearth of philosophical attention to it in the last century or two, gratitude might not seem worth studying....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we discuss non-monotonic logic with Malte Willer, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. Click here to listen to our conversation. If you have been so lucky as to take an introductory logic class, then you will learn a conception of logic that is, well, downright logical....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we discuss gender and medieval mysticism with Christina Van Dyke, professor of philosophy, director of gender studies, and executive director of the Society of Christian Philosophers at Calvin College. Click here to listen to our conversation. How might the notion of God to have meaning to us? God today can increasingly seem to us a mere historical phenomenon–a subject of past peoples’ energy, but presently only a subject of professors’ study....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we discuss Ayn Rand’s moral philosophy with Greg Salmieri, who teaches at Rutgers University and Stevens Institute of Technology and is co-secretary of the American Philosophical Association’s Ayn Rand Society. Click here to listen to our conversation. But wait: Ayn Rand is most famous for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged....

Subscribe to Elucidations:         This month, we discuss pejorative expressions with Robert May, distinguished professor of philosophy and linguistics at University of California, Davis. Click here to listen to our conversation. So pejorative expressions are politically incorrect. We should not, say, call Jews kikes. How should we understand why we should not? May says we should not for the simple reason his mother taught him as a child: “There are no such things as kikes....