John Rawls is easily the most celebrated and influential political philosopher of the 20th Century, and his impact remains remarkably strong today. The central concepts with which his theory of justice begins are now components of the philosophical vernacular: The Original Position, Veil of Ignorance, Primary Goods, and his Two Principles of Justice (especially the Difference Principle) all will be well known to the majority of professional philosophers. It is less commonly acknowledged that the...
Jun 01, 2018•1 hr 6 min
Kant famously asked the question, how is knowledge possible? In her new book, Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information (Oxford University Press, 2018), Ruth Garrett Millikan responds to this question from a naturalistic, and specifically evolutionary, perspective. Millikan, who is distinguished professor emerita at the University of Connecticut, has long been a leading figure in theorizing about language and thought. Her latest work considers the “clumpy” world that organisms...
May 15, 2018•1 hr 5 min
My guest today is Christian Miller. Christian is A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He is a moral philosopher specializing on character, with special interest in the empirical study of the virtues and vices. He currently directs The Beacon Project, which studies morally exemplars; and he has recently completed a 5-year research project called The Character Project. His latest book is titled The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (Oxford University Press, 2017) Moral think...
May 01, 2018•1 hr 2 min
The ancient Maya are popularly known for their calendar, but their concept of time and the metaphysics surrounding that conception are not. In Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time (Lexington Books, 2018), Alexus McLeod reconstructs an ancient Mayan metaphysical system based on key texts and other artifacts plus using analogies with ancient Chinese philosophical thought. On his view, the Maya held that we can understand everything in temporal terms but that everything does not reduce to ...
Apr 16, 2018•1 hr 7 min
We all put a great deal of care into protecting, managing, and monitoring our reputation. But the precise nature of a reputation is obscure. In one sense, reputation is merely hearsay, a popular perception that may or may not have any basis in fact. Yet we rely heavily on reputations for example, when were choosing a restaurant, mechanic, or physician. Accordingly, multiple sites on social media are devoted to helping us to discover the reputation of service providers, social events, and even pe...
Apr 02, 2018•1 hr 2 min
Thomas Kuhn upset both scientists and philosophers of science when he argued that transitions from one scientific framework (or “paradigm”) to another were irrational: the change was like a religious conversion experience rather than a reasoned shift from one theory to another based on the best evidence. But even if one disagrees with Kuhn, how can this change be shown to be rational? More generally, how can transitions from one set of normative standards to another be rational, given that there...
Mar 15, 2018•1 hr 7 min
The two biggest problems of understanding the mind are consciousness and intentionality. The first doesn’t require introduction. The latter is the problem of how we can have thoughts and perceptions that about other things for example, a thought about a tree, or a perception of a tree. How can mental states be about other things? A naturalistic theory of intentionality is one that explains intentionality using just those resources available from the natural sciences, such as causal relationships...
Feb 15, 2018•1 hr 4 min
It’s intuitive to think that statements of the form “lying is wrong” ascribe a property—that of wrongness—to acts of the type lying. In this way, one might think that statements of this kind are much like statements of the form “Bill is left-handed,” which also seems to attribute a property—left-handedness to Bill. But what about a statement like “Bill is a Wookie?” As there is no property of being a Wookie, the statement seems then to be false. What’s called the error theory is the view that st...
Feb 01, 2018•1 hr 5 min
Here’s a true sentence: The number seven is odd. What’s philosophically odd about the sentence is that it seems to imply that there must be numbers, including the number seven just as the truth of The Statue of Liberty is in New York implies that there is such a statue. But the number seven, unlike the statue, isn’t located anywhere, and we can’t see it or touch it. It is, Plato argued long ago, an abstract entity. But should we think reality includes abstract entities? In his deftly written cri...
Jan 15, 2018•1 hr 8 min
Middle-agedness is a curious phenomenon. In many ways, one is at one’s peak and also at the early stages of decline. There is much to do, but also dozens of paths irretrievably untaken. Successes, but also regrets. It’s no wonder that the idea of a midlife crisis is so familiar. But midlife is not commonly a subject of explicit philosophical study. In Midlife: A Philosophical Guide (Princeton University Press, 2017), Kieran Setiya develops a philosophical account of the crises associated with mi...
Jan 01, 2018•1 hr 6 min
What is it to be moral, to lead an ethically good life? From a naturalistic perspective, any answer to this question begins from an understanding of what humans are like that is deeply informed by psychology, anthropology, and other human-directed perspectives as these are constrained by evolution. In The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility (Oxford University Press, 2017), Owen Flanagan sets out to clarify the landscape of moral possibility for actual human beings. He defends a p...
Dec 15, 2017•1 hr 7 min
Epistemology is the area of philosophy that examines the phenomena of and related to knowledge. Traditional core questions include: How is knowledge different from lucky guessing? Can knowledge be innate? Is skepticism a threat, and if so, how should it be countered? And: Is it possible to know something simply on the basis of another person’s say-so? In the background of all of these traditional questions is a broad concern thats not often explicitly addressed—the concern is with ignorance. We ...
Dec 01, 2017•1 hr 3 min
Seeing is often a good reason for believing—when things go well. But suppose we have a case like this: Jill believes that Jack is angry, although she has no good grounds for this belief. Nevertheless, when she sees him, she sees his face as angry even though it is neutral. Is it reasonable for Jill to believe he is angry on the basis of what she sees? No, argues Susanna Siegel: her perception has been hijacked by her prior unfounded belief, and so it cannot turn around and justify that belief ev...
Nov 15, 2017•1 hr 10 min
We all recognize that parenting involves a seemingly endless succession of choices, beginning perhaps with the choice to become a parent, through a sequence of decisions concerning the care, upbringing, acculturation, and education of a child. And we all recognize that many of these decisions are impactful. More specifically, we know that the choices parents make often deeply impact the lives of others, including especially the life of the child. Given the sheer number of impactful and other-reg...
Nov 01, 2017•55 min
Social constructionists hold that the world is determined at least in part by our ways of representing it. Recent debates regarding social construction have focused on categories that play important roles in the human social world, such as race and gender. Social constructionists argue that these categories are not biological or natural and that alleviating social injustice begins with recognizing they are not. At the same time, the case of Rachel Dolezal, a woman born of white parents who consi...
Oct 15, 2017•1 hr 6 min
According to a challenge going back to Plato, democracy is unacceptable as a mode of political organization, because it distributes political power equally among those who are unequal in wisdom. Plato goes on to object that democracies are suspicious of the very idea of expertise in political matters. Long traditions in political philosophy have proposed various responses to Plato. According to a predominant trend in contemporary democratic theory, public deliberation can serve to meet Plato’s c...
Oct 01, 2017•1 hr 4 min
In the 1960’s Thomas Kuhn argued, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that scientists’ choices between competing theories could not be determined by the empirical evidence. Ever since, philosophers of science have debated the role of non-epistemic values and interests in science, generally agreeing that such influences are undesirable even if they are inevitable. In Interests and Epistemic Integrity in Science (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Jan de Winter argues that the direct influen...
Sep 15, 2017•1 hr 5 min
When Descartes famously concluded “I think, therefore I am”, he took for granted his ability to use the first person pronoun to refer to himself. But how do we come to have this capacity for self-conscious thought? We aren’t born with it, and while we may not be the only creatures that can think thoughts about ourselves, this ability does not seem to be very widespread. For starters, to be able to think of oneself, it seems one must first possess a concept of the self of what the “I” refers to. ...
Aug 15, 2017•1 hr 6 min
We are accustomed to the thought that individuals facing dire circumstances may rightfully take use of others’ property in order to save their own lives. For example, one thinks it obvious that in order to avoid freezing to death, a lost mountain hiker may rightfully break into and make use of a heated cabin that is not his property. But what justifies this idea? And what are its implications for a world where millions are subjected to sustained and systematic depravation? In The Right of Necess...
Aug 01, 2017•1 hr 8 min
A popular way of thinking about the mind and its relation to physical stuff is in terms of computation. This general information-processing approach to solving the mind-body problem admits of a number of different, often incompatible, elaborations. In Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account (Oxford University Press, 2016), Gualtiero Piccinini integrates research in mechanistic and psychological explanation, computability theory, and other areas to provide a detailed account of the sense in w...
Jul 15, 2017•1 hr 6 min
When we are thinking about what we ought to do, we are nearly always deciding among options. And we often talk in ways that reflect this; statement about what one ought to do are frequently explicitly statements that identify some act as the one to be performed from a broader set of alternatives. Accordingly, we recognize that a consideration which favors some act among one set of options might favor a different act among a different set of options. This has led some to think that normative reas...
Jul 01, 2017•1 hr 9 min
Shame is a complex social emotion that has a particularly negative valence; in the West it is associated with failure, inappropriateness, dishonor, disgrace. But within the Confucian tradition, there is in addition a distinct, positive variety of moral shame a virtue that, as Bongrae Seok writes, “is not for losers but for self-reflective moral leaders”. In Moral Psychology of Confucian Shame: Shame of Shamelessness (Rowman and Littlefield), Seok draws on textual evidence from Confucius, Mencius...
Jun 15, 2017•1 hr 6 min
The freedoms prized and secured in a modern liberal democratic societies give rise to significant forms of moral and social diversity. In many cases, these forms of diversity must be dealt with by the state and its citizens. A standard way of trying to address social diversity is to call for toleration. But toleration can seem to have a dark side: it might appear that we tolerate only that which we, to some degree, disparage or disapprove of. In this way, toleration might also be a way of affirm...
Jun 01, 2017•1 hr 1 min
For many cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of mind, the best current theory of cognition holds that thinking is in some sense computation “in some sense,” because that core idea can and has been elaborated in a number of different ways that are or at least seem to be incompatible in at least some respects. In Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models (MIT Press, 2014), David Danks proposes a version of this basic theory that links the mind closely with ...
May 15, 2017•1 hr 10 min
Many of the longstanding debates in moral philosophy concern the question of where more theorizing should begin. Some hold that moral theories should start with definitions of moral terms like good; others contend instead that we should begin by identifying the conditions under which an action is right; still others maintain that one must start by developing a procedure for deciding what acts to perform. The thought is that once a theory accounts for whatever is properly first, the rest of moral...
May 01, 2017•1 hr 3 min
Many environmentalists approach the problem of motivating environmentally friendly behavior from the perspective that nature is good and that we ought to act so as to maximize the good environmental consequences of our actions and minimize the bad ones. An environmental activist turned academic philosopher, Benjamin Hale argues against this dominant consequentialist approach towards environmentalism in favor of a Kantian view. In The Wild and the Wicked: On Nature and Human Nature (MIT Press, 20...
Apr 15, 2017•1 hr 9 min
Humans engage in a wide variety of collective behaviors, ranging from simple customs like wearing a heavy coat in winter to more complex group actions, as when an audience gives applause at the close of a musical performance. Some of these collective behaviors are cases of imitation, of doing what others do. In other cases, the behavior is driven by individuals’ expectations about what certain people both do and believe others should do. When confronting real-world cases where groups act in ways...
Apr 01, 2017•59 min
The idea that the sciences can’t be unified–that there will never be a single ‘theory of everything’–is the current orthodoxy in philosophy of science and in many sciences as well. But different versions of pluralism present very different views of what exactly they are pluralistic about, why sciences cannot be unified, and what the failure of unification entails about the world and about our knowledge of it. In Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered: A New Approach to the Dis(unity) of Science (Univ...
Mar 15, 2017•1 hr 7 min
The idea that a political order derives its authority, legitimacy, and justification from some kind of initial agreement or contract, whether hypothetical or tacit, has been a mainstay of political philosophy, at least since Hobbes. Today, the leading approach to theorizing justice–John Rawls’ conception of “justice as fairness”– employs a contract doctrine, albeit of a somewhat modified kind. There, too, the idea is that an initial agreement, struck under special conditions of fairness, settles...
Mar 01, 2017•1 hr 4 min
Are complex phenomena “nothing but the sum of their parts”, or are they “more than the sum of their parts”? Physicists, chemists, and biologists as well as philosophers have long argued on both sides of this debate between the idea of reduction and that of emergence. At this point, argues Carl Gillett, the sides have reached a stalemate, where it is difficult to know in what ways the sides fundamentally disagree about the nature of the relation between a composite whole and its parts. In Reducti...
Feb 15, 2017•1 hr 10 min
