Podcast

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month we talk to Christopher Frey, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Click here to listen to our conversation. Aristotle thought that after you chop off a person’s hand, it ceases to be a hand in the original sense of the term. Sure, we _ call _ it a hand. But it just isn’t a hand in the same sense. It can’t pick up a glass of orange juice, twist doorknobs, or make obscene gestures. It can’t do any of the things that real hands do; and if you can’t do any of the things that real hands do, you don’t get to count as a hand. This is because being a hand–according to Aristotle–isn’t just a matter of having a certain shape, weighing a certain amount, or being located near an arm. Being a hand is really about serving a certain purpose in a person’s life: namely, that of allowing her to grasp objects, use tools, build things, and so on. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       In this episode, Matt continues his European adventure by sitting down with Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Assistant Professor and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the University of Groningen. Click here to listen to their conversation. Philosophers want to answer big, sexy questions like how one should live or what knowledge is. How should one go about answering questions like that? Random guessing is definitely out. That’s because philosophical insight is supposed to be the result of some kind of rigorous investigation. But what is that kind of investigation supposed to look like? This is a question about philosophical methodology, and an extremely important one. After all, if we don’t know what methods we can use to gain philosophical insight, it’s hard to know whether we’re on the right track when we try to answer those big, sexy questions. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month we’re joined by Robert van Rooij, Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Language at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation, at the University of Amsterdam. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. As it happens, nearly everything we say is imprecise. For example, when I indicate where I want you to stand while posing for a photo, I don’t give exact coordinates; I just point with my finger. When I tell you my friend Janine is really tall, I don’t specify her height right down to the last millimeter. Would six feet count as tall? Probably. How about 5'11"? Or 5'10"? 5'9"? The closer we get to the middle of the boundary between people who are tall and people who aren’t, the more of a challenge it is to say, because the boundary is blurry. And when I tell you that my sixth grade music teacher was bald, it isn’t clear exactly how much hair I’m saying he had. Maybe he had absolutely no hair, or maybe he had a little bit. In any event, he didn’t have much. But how much does it take to be ‘much’? What are we to make of the fact that we can’t give an exact answer to that question? ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we speak with Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. You can listen to our conversation here. What do we mean when we talk about nations being more or less developed? Is it simply a matter of being financially better-off? If not, then what would be a better measure of how well a country is doing? ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       In this episode, we’re joined by Kieran Setiya, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Disagreement in ethical matters is a common enough phenomenon. Yet, what exactly is the appropriate way to respond when one is confronted with it in one’s own life? Sometimes such disputes can be resolved easily enough—perhaps there is a piece of missing information or an error in reasoning that can simply be pointed out by one interlocutor to the other. ...

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. Consider the number 3. In the room where I’m sitting, there are three bottles of detergent. But what about the number three itself? Where is that? On the shelf, where the bottles themselves are? Is the number three itself sitting here in the room, next to me? That seems like kind of a strange thing to say. So maybe it isn’t anywhere. But how could there be something that isn’t anywhere? Isn’t everything in our lives located somewhere? Sheesh. Ok, I give up. I guess there isn’t any such thing as the number three. But wait a minute–if numbers aren’t real, then what exactly was I doing all those years in math class?! It certainly seemed like I was hard at work, solving problems that ought to be taken seriously. ...

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. “Politeness,” he says as he cuts off another guest’s attempt to get a word in, “is all about consideration for others. It’s about the little things, like making eye-contact,” he adds, failing to make eye contact. As you look for an opportunity to get away, you ask yourself: “What is wrong with this guy?” ...

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? ...

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_._ If you’ve never taken an introductory course in logic before, I recommend taking a look at my entry from earlier this year at the Partially Examined Life blog, which introduces some of the basic concepts in philosophical logic. ...

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. ...