Episode 52: Rafeeq Hasan discusses Rousseau on freedom and happiness

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Note: there is a problem with Acast’s backend, preventing their player from being able to play this episode, and also breaking the link on our RSS feed. To tide yourself over until Acast’s engineering team are able to fix it, you can download a backup copy of episode 52 here and you can also listen to it by pressing the play button here:...

Episode 51: Jeroen Groenendijk and Floris Roelofsen discuss inquisitive semantics

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we get a little bit meta and ask our distinguished guests some questions about questions. Or at least about the semantics of questions. Jeroen Groenendijk is Professor of Philosophy of Language and Floris Roelofsen is Assistant Professor of Logic and Semantics at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation in Amsterdam....

Episode 50: Greg Salmieri discusses the Aristotelian good life and productive work

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month it is our pleasure to discuss Aristotle’s ethics with Greg Salmieri, Visiting Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Boston University. Click here to listen to our conversation. Aristotle was somewhat ambivalent about the activity of craftsmanship: i.e. the activity of making things like shoes, clothes, or pottery. On the one hand, he had great respect for it, and of course acknowledged that it was something that needed to be done....

Episode 49: Hans Kamp discusses discourse representation theory

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we talk dynamic semantics with Hans Kamp, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Natural Language Processing in Stuttgart. Click here to listen to our conversation. The goal of formal semantics is to explain how the meaning of a whole sentence is derived from the words that make it up and the way they’re put together....

Episode 48: Jennifer Frey discusses the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month we’re joined by Jennifer Frey, Harper Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Click here to listen to our conversation. In this episode, we begin with an overview of Thomas Aquinas, one of the most prolific philosophers ever. (It is sometimes said that he wrote, on average, about 10,000 words per day....

Episode 47: Alexandru Baltag discusses the logic of knowledge

Subscribe to Elucidations:       In our latest episode, we talk some epistemology with Alexandru Baltag, Associate Professor of Logic at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation in Amsterdam. Click here to listen to our conversation. Knowledge may seem straightforward at first. But try to give an exact definition of what it is, and you’ll soon find that it’s more difficult than you would have thought....

Episode 46: Frank Veltman discusses normality

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we talk with Frank Veltman, Professor of Logic and Philosophy at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation in Amsterdam. Click here to listen to our conversation. Most of our everyday reasoning involves the notion of things normally being one way rather than another. But sometimes, this gets us into trouble....

Episode 45: Anubav Vasudevan discusses probability and determinism

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?...

Episode 44: Joëlle Proust discusses metacognition

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....

Episode 43: Peter Adamson discusses the philosophy of Al-Kindi

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....