Podcast

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.) Frey points out that whereas today it is common to think of philosophy as a set of specialized subdisciplines, Aquinas’ approach was to pursue philosophy as a unified discipline, under the assumption that one can’t have a fully developed ethics (for example) without thinking through the difficult issues in metaphysics. ...

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. Maybe it’s just belief. No, wait–if I believe something false, that probably can’t count as knowledge. Maybe it’s true belief. But I may believe something for the wrong reason, or for no reason at all. So maybe it’s true belief that’s supported by good evidence. Oh, my; it seems there are famous counterexamples to that definition as well. ...

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. Statements of prejudice and bigotry, for instance, usually make recourse to the idea of normality. Imagine I’m xenophobe, and I say, ‘Greek people are normally lazy.’ Now, clearly that’s an offensive thing to say because it shows that I’m buying into a harmful stereotype. But to make matters worse, on top of being offensive, it’s difficult to try to refute. Why? Because whenever someone tries to give me a counterexample–a Greek person who isn’t lazy–I can just reply that that counterexample doesn’t matter, because I was only saying that they’re normally lazy. Not that you couldn’t find me the odd Greek person here or there who wasn’t. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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? ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       In this episode, we talk to Johan van Benthem, University Professor of pure and applied logic at the University of Amsterdam and Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of philosophy at Stanford University. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Logic is traditionally assumed to have deductive reasoning as its subject matter. A valid deductive argument is one in which it’s impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. For instance, if it’s true that I’m a German composer, then it absolutely must be the case that I am a composer. I couldn’t not be one! The conclusion of the argument is just inevitable. Over the past century, philosophical and mathematical logicians have developed a wide array of formal techniques to study arguments of this sort. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month we’re joined by Nicholas Asher, research director at the CNRS and the IRIT in Toulouse, and former longtime Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Remember Spanish class? You had to learn all those rules about where to put the verb, where to put the subject, which nouns have which genders, which prepositions to use when, etc. What a pain. Now try to imagine what it would be like to try to explain all of the rules of English to someone from a different country. It’s actually pretty difficult. If you did try to do this, you’d find that you were following all kinds of subtle grammatical conventions without even realizing it. You’d be pronouncing everything a certain way without realizing it. Although the rules we follow when we speak English are incredibly complicated, we native speakers do it effortlessly, as if by reflex. And that’s part of the difficulty: our knowledge of how to speak English is tacit. ...