Podcast

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Episode transcript here. This month, we talk to Kent Bach (San Francisco State University) about his picture of how beliefs relate to particular thoughts. Click here to listen to our conversation. In this episode, Kent Bach discusses two of his big ideas at the border between the philosophy of mind and epistemology. The first is that when someone is engaged in everyday, commonsense reasoning, the fact that that person isn’t thinking about irrelevant distractions irrelevant can in and of itself be evidence that those consideration are indeed irrelevant. For instance, if I’m trying to remember which presidents were carved into Mount Rushmore, the fact that I’m not even considering Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush can actually serve as evidence that they aren’t worth considering as possibilities. (Assuming my ability to make accurate snap judgments is in order.) Adopting this perspective on fast, everyday reasoning means taking seriously a lot of what we do subconsciously. Snap judgments can carry real evidential weight, not just in the conclusions they reach, but in what they exclude from consideration. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we sit down with Susanna Schellenberg to talk about what ordinary perception does and doesn’t have in common with hallucination. Click here to listen to our conversation. When you picture to yourself how vision works, you probably imagine something along the following lines. There’s some light which gets projected into your eyes, and the light stimulates the rod and cone cells in your retina. These sensations create a blob of unanalyzed, 2D sensory information that doesn’t ‘mean’ anything yet. Then your mind goes to work on that 2D sensory information and interprets it, so that instead of looking like a meaningless blob, it ends up looking like e.g. a pine tree to the left of another pine tree. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we discuss photographs and their vicissitudes with Daniel Smyth, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Sage School of Philosophy of Cornell University. (And yes, Smyth used to study and teach at the University of Chicago!) Click here to listen to the episode. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we discuss race and cognitive science with Bryce Huebner, associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. Click here to listen to our conversation. Of course, we as individuals can be racist. Of course, so can our institutions. But when do we realize this, so that we might get something done about it? In this sense, two years ago, we here at the University of Chicago found ourselves “ahead of the curve.” ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Last year, we talked about anarchism. This year, we turn to democracy with Amanda Greene, Lecturer in Philosophy at University College, London, and Law and Philosophy Fellow at the University of Chicago. Click here to listen to our discussion. In the West, at least, most of us consider democracy to be the obvious choice for the best form of government, but we rarely take a step back to think about why. Amanda Greene agrees that democracy is the best choice, but thinks that most attempts to understand why it is the best choice build the idea that democracy is the most legitimate form of government into the very definition of democracy. That makes democracy hard to object to, but it also isn’t very illuminating as an explanation. Her approach, instead, is to start with a pretty austere definition of legitimacy, which allows that some governments can be legitimate without being democratic, and then argue that democracy is the best way to achieve that. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we discuss genealogical anxiety with Bob Simpson, lecturer in philosophy at Monash University. Click here to listen to our conversation. If you listen to this podcast, then for better or worse, you have likely been exposed to some Nietzsche (hopefully at a safe level!). In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche (perhaps notoriously) introduced an epistemological sense of genealogy – a genealogy of what we purport to know – by telling a story about how we have come to know the things we purport to know. Of course, many others have developed intellectual history – history of ideas – history of what and how people and communities have thought and developed. Such history can at least encourage scholarship to be self-aware. Well and good. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we pull up our chairs and sit down once again with Robert May, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of California, Davis. Click here to listen to our conversation. It seems sublime, unbelievable, groundbreaking – but maybe it actually doesn’t mean anything at all: ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we talk with Catherine Legg, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at New Zealand’s University of Waikato. She teaches us about the philosophical categories of Charles Sanders Peirce’s (pronounced like the bag “purse”). Click here to listen to our conversation. At Legg’s university, philosophy is part of the School of Social Sciences. Here at Chicago, philosophy is part of the Division of the Humanities. But given some modern discourse, characterized as philosophically naturalist, you’d wonder if philosophy should be housed under the natural sciences. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we discuss love and moral value with Mark Hopwood, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sewanee: The University of the South, and former co-host of this podcast! Click here to listen to our conversation. In discussing rights, religion, politics, and much more, we ask: Who has moral value? Who are we obliged to accommodate, support, even love? ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we discuss conditionals with Anthony (Thony) Gillies, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Click here to listen to our conversation. Lately, philosophers have resurrected interest in formal theories of what’s meant by conditional statements, or if-then statements. Conditionals are basic, because they relate conditions – knowns and unknowns, actions and results, etc. But how do they relate them? Let’s examine one simple example that turns out to complicate this question. ...