Podcast

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, I sit down with Mariam Thalos (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) to discuss freedom. What is it, why do we want it, and how do we attain it? Click here to listen to our conversation. We all categorize ourselves. You might think of yourself as a student, or as a painter, or as being good with numbers, or as being civic-minded. These labels we use to categorize ourselves have a huge effect on how we make our decisions–when faced with the choice of doing X vs. doing Y, whether I think of myself as someone’s who’s civic-minded and whether someone who’s civic-minded would do X can both play a huge role in influencing whether I decide to do X. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       In this episode, Emily Dupree and I had the pleasure of talking to Linda Martín Alcoff (Hunter College & CUNY Graduate Center) about identity. Click here to listen to our conversation. Let’s start with some terminology. ‘Identity’ means different things in different contexts, but in this episode we use it to mean something like: ’the social demographic a person belongs to.’ So for example, my race is part of my identity, my disability status is part of my identity, and my sexual orientation is also part of my identity. Our guest wants to understand how the social group a person belongs to can affect the way they experience the world. For instance, if I came from an upper middle class background, my opinion of schools as an institution might turn out to be pretty high, because the only school I ever experienced was the well-run, well-funded one that I went to. On the other hand, if I grew up poor in a neighborhood with struggling public schools, I might associate school with bad experiences, because for me, going to school always came packaged up with bad experiences. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Full transcript here. This month, it is our privilege to have R. A. Briggs (Stanford University) back on a second time to discuss the nature of gender. Click here to listen to our conversation. What exactly is gender? Simone de Beauvoir drew a distinction between gender and biological sex, and encouraged us to think of the former as the social significance of the latter. There’s the set of social roles that men are expected to play, and the set of social roles that women are expected to play. Whereas in the recent past, it was assumed to be a necessary condition on being a (for instance) a man [woman] that one exhibit the physiological features associated with being biologically male [female], these days, a lot of people either question or fully abandon that assumption. If a person’s biological sex isn’t tied by definition to their gender anymore, you might wonder what the relation between those two things is. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we are joined by R.A. Briggs (Stanford University), who is here to discuss an interdisciplinary area of study called epistemic decision theory. Click here to listen to our conversation. Epistemic decision theory is an area of study that brings together two sub-disciplines. The first is decision theory, which tries to mathematically study the best principles for deciding what to do: what are the costs and benefits of each option you’re considering, and how can you optimize the decision process so as to at least the worst options? The second is formal epistemology, which tries to mathematically study how much credence to place in some hypothesis once you’ve uncovered new evidence for it. It might seem straightforward when you’re looking at just one hypothesis and one piece of evidence, but it quickly gets complicated once you start juggling multiple competing hypotheses and multiple kinds of evidence. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we learn that there’s more to a person’s beliefs than just one big blob of information! Seth Yalcin (University of California, Berkeley) sits down with us to talk about how a person’s beliefs are sorted into answers to various questions. Click here to listen to our conversation. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Full transcript here. This month, Brian Leiter (University of Chicago) makes his third (!) appearance on the program to talk about how Karl Marx can help us understand our current political moment. Click here to listen to our conversation. Karl Marx thought that industrial capitalism had an in-built self-destructive tendency. Capitalism would lead to great technological progress, which would in turn lead to more menial and repetitive careers being replaced by automation processes. Remember how in Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin develops a twitch in his wrists from doing nothing but tightening pairs of bolts for months on end? Why not have a robot do that? The idea was that after the technological boom, we’d be able to get robots to do this type of stuff for us. But then what? It seems we’ll get a big vacuum in the job market for people without elite educational degrees. And if we don’t do anything about that, presumably, we’ll get mass unemployment. And if there’s mass unemployment, no one will be able to buy anything, which will tank the entire economy, including the fortunes of the one percenters, who rely on people purchasing things to continue turning a profit. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we get right into it with Josh Knobe (Yale University) about the notion of a person’s true self. Click here to listen to our conversation. Who are you, deep down, in your core? Maybe it isn’t fully clear what would count as an answer to that question, but it’s still a question we ask all the time. There seems to be some kind of folk intuition that we’re all guided by an inner force, and that this inner force is who we really are. My superficial behavior upon waking up, when I’m in a cranky mood, isn’t indicative of who I really am. Only my behavior once I’ve had my coffee tells you about my ’true self.' ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, Emily and Matt chat with Miranda Fricker (CUNY Graduate Center) about blame and forgiveness. Click here to listen to our conversation. We have a lot of conflicting feelings about blame. When someone does something bad, we feel a strong urge to blame them, and when it all goes down as intended, the person deserves the blame, and they learn that what they did was wrong, we intuitively feel that justice has been done. On the other hand, we also have the sense that blaming can be a corrosive or self-destructive activity–a feeling that is manifested in common expressions like ’let’s not play the blame game.’ So what’s the deal? Is blaming people a useful activity or isn’t it? ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we sit down with Agnes Callard (University of Chicago) to talk about aspiration. Click here to listen to our conversation. Have you ever wanted to get into something? Maybe you find it really boring to sit through an opera right now, but you think you might be missing something and want to learn how to appreciate opera. Or maybe you don’t know anything about how to play football, but you’d really like to learn. In this episode, Agnes Callard argues that both examples are cases of having one set of values, wanting to have a different set of values, and going through the long process of revising the values you’re living according to. You don’t currently know anything about what makes a great opera great, but you hope that after this process is over, you’ll be able to just see it. And you don’t know what being an athlete fully involves, but you want to be in a position where you can truly recognize what makes a great play worthy of admiration. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Full transcript here. This month, we delve back into the early modern period with Steven Nadler, William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy, Evjue-Bascom Professor of the Humanities, and Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Click here to listen to our conversation. ...