Podcast

Subscribe to Elucidations:       We are pleased to present John Searle, Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, who joins us for a stimulating and wide ranging conversation (click here). First he gives his assessment of how the field of philosophy has changed since his time as a graduate student at Oxford in the 1950’s, charting the decline of ‘ordinary language’ philosophy and the reemergence of Metaphysics and substantive ethics. Professor Searle tells us why he lacks sympathy for contemporary philosophy’s emphasis on formal methods of analysis. These methods, he worries, lose sight of the problems that they were originally developed to solve. Consequently, it is not so much that their results are wrong as that they are unilluminating. In contrast, his interest is in giving an account of human reality (of ourselves as mindful, social, political, aesthetic, speech-act users) that is consistent with our understanding of the world as a chemical-physical system. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Emma Borg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, and was the White Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago Spring Quarter 2011. Click here to listen to our conversation with her. In linguistics and the philosophy of language, semantics is the study of literal meaning, and pragmatics is the study of implied meaning. For example, if I say ‘It’s cold in here,’ all I’m literally saying is that the temperature in the room is low. But one could imagine a situation in which I said that in order to request that someone turn on the heat. In that case, I wouldn’t literally be saying, ‘Please turn on the heat,’ but I would be implying something to that effect. Try taking a second look at most of the things you said over the past few days: you’ll be surprised to find that you rarely mean exactly what you say! ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Robert Richards is the Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor in the History of Science, and Professor in the Departments of Medicine, Philosophy, History, Psychology, and in the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science; and he is director of the Fishbein Center for History of Science. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Robert Stalnaker is Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. Philosophers of language have always been interested in how the context of a conversation can affect what the participants in the conversation are saying. (For some examples of how the context of a conversation can affect the meaning of what the conversational participants are saying, see our episode on contextualism.) But in this episode, Robert Stalnaker draws a distinction between two senses in which philosophers of language talk about ‘context.’ In the first sense of the term, the context of a statement is the situation in which it takes place. In the second sense of the term, the context of a statement is the whole of what has been said or established so far: something like ’the conversation up to that point.’ ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Christopher Peacocke is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Click here to listen to our conversation with him. In this episode, Christopher Peacocke discusses what it is to hear an emotion in a piece of music. Even instrumental music seems to be emotionally charged–minor chords, for example, usually have a melancholy ring to them. But it isn’t entirely clear why this should be. What it is about certain combinations of notes that makes them feel a certain way? ...