Podcast

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we are delighted to make our return to the topic of vagueness, this time in conversation with Stewart Shapiro, Professor of Philosophy at The Ohio State University. Click here to listen to our discussion. You may remember from our previous episode on vagueness that most of the adjectives, common nouns, verbs, and prepositions we use are vague. To illustrate the idea, think of the adjective blue. In the philosophical setting, to say that the adjective blue is vague is to say a couple of things. First, although some things clearly are blue (like bluejays) and some things clearly aren’t (like lemons), some things are right at the border (like this). Should we call that last borderline case blue or not? It’s not particularly clear. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month we sit down with Julia Annas, Regents Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, to talk about virtue ethics. Click here to listen to our conversation. Today we’re used to thinking of ethics as the study of how to act in certain situations. Given any particular hypothetical scenario, what would be the right thing for you to do? If your friend wants you to stay up late to help him study for an exam, but you yourself need to go to bed early in order to get a good night’s sleep for the exam, what do you do? This is the sort of thing we usually have in mind when it comes to ethics: ethicists devise sophisticated theories that tell us the most general laws of good behavior. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we sit down with Philip Pettit to discuss some of his work on whether corporations have rights. Click here to listen to our conversation. Much of what goes on in today’s world is the work of corporations, which command far more money and power than any individual person can. And that already puts us in challenging philosophical territory. Can corporations *do* things? Can a corporation be held responsible for what it does? Not too long ago, there were strong legal barriers to holding corporations responsible for their actions. But these days, most of us seem to think that a company should be held to account when it commits acts of negligence. (Recall the BP spill from 2010, where it was generally agreed that the company should indeed be held responsible for the disaster.) ...

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 55 here and you can also listen to it by pressing the play button here: ...

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 54 here and you can also listen to it by pressing the play button here: ...

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 53 here and you can also listen to it by pressing the play button here: ...

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: ...

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. Click here to listen to our conversation. ...

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. But on the other, he thought it wasn’t the best possible way you could spend your time. The best possible life you could live, according to Aristotle, would be one in which philosophical contemplation played a central role. In the ancient world, looking at craftsmanship as something which had to be done, but wasn’t the best possible thing you could be doing, led to a society stratified into two classes: the slaves and the leisure class. Effectively, the people who had the social standing to do nothing but contemplate the truths of the universe all day farmed the activity of making things off to others. ...

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. Give me some definitions of individual words, tell me the order in which they were combined, and by means of a mechanical algorithm, my theory will predict what the resulting sentence means. ...