In When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Megan Burke considers the relationship of sexual violence to lived time by reexamining and building upon the work of Simone de Beauvoir, and in conversation with Judith Butler, María Lugones, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and many others. Through developing a feminist phenomenology of time, Burke allows us to consider how racialized colonial sexual domination structures feminine subjecti...
Feb 20, 2020•58 min•Ep. 211
If you thought Jacques Lacan’s essay on "Logical Time" was the psychoanalyst’s final word on the subject, then this interview has a lot to teach you! In his new book Subjectivity In-Between Times: Exploring the Notion of Time in Lacan's Work (Palgrave, 2019), emerging scholar of psychoanalytic theory and continental philosophy Chenyang Wang offers the first systematic analysis of the notion of time in Lacan’s work. Wang, based in East China Normal University, begins by telling us about the state...
Feb 12, 2020•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 123
Dispositionalism is the view that there are irreducible causal powers in nature that explain why objects behave as they do. To say salt is soluble in water, for example, is to say that salt has the disposition to dissolve in water, and this disposition is understood as a real causal power of salt. In Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Travis Dumsday articulates a novel version of dispositionalism – nomic dispositionalism – and considers its relati...
Feb 10, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 207
It is obvious that in our day-to-day lives, a lot hangs on trust, and thus on whether those around us are trustworthy. Yet there are several philosophical issues surrounding trust and trustworthiness. For example, is trusting someone different from relying on them? Correspondingly, is being trustworthy different from being reliable? Assuming that there is a difference, in what does the difference consist? What renders one worthy of trust? Is our trustworthiness something under our control? In Ho...
Jan 31, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 210
If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same s...
Jan 30, 2020•38 min•Ep. 103
In 2012, the world-renowned philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek released his 1000-page tome Less Than Nothing, following it up afterwards with its shorter reformulation Absolute Recoil in 2014. The works contained his usual use of movie-references, historical and political events and jokes to engage in some substantial philosophical formulations, particularly in dialogue with Hegel and Lacan. In these books, Žižek forged a new developed a number of innovative approach...
Jan 29, 2020•1 hr 59 min•Ep. 149
Maria Dimova-Cookson's new book Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty (Routledge, 2019) offers an analysis of the distinction between positive and negative freedom building on the work of Constant, Green and Berlin. The author proposes a new reading of this distinction for the twenty-first century. The author defends the idea that freedom is a dynamic interaction between two inseparable, yet sometimes fundamentally, opposed positive and negative concepts – the yin and yang of freedom. Positiv...
Jan 20, 2020•44 min•Ep. 55
Ecological psychology is one of a number of contemporary theories that explains the mind in terms of embodiment and environmental situatedness, rather than inner symbol manipulation by brains. J. J. Gibson, a founder ecological psychology, coined the term “affordance” to express a core concept of the view: as embodied, situated organisms we do not simply perceive objects, such as a chair or a tree, but rather we perceive the object as something that is sit-on-able or climbable. In The Philosophy...
Jan 10, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 208
The eminent scholar of Neo-Kantianism, Frederick Beiser, has struck again, this time bringing his considerable analytical powers and erudition to the task of intellectual biography. For those of you aware of the distinguished philosophical career of Hermann Cohen (1859 - 1918) and the absence of an intellectual biography in English, Beiser’s scholarship is a long time coming. Though Cohen scholarship has experienced a mini-renaissance in the last thirty years in the English speaking world, knowl...
Jan 06, 2020•55 min•Ep. 175
The future is a constant focus of anxiety, and we are all familiar with the pressures that come distinctively from automation – the transformation by which tasks formerly assigned to humans come to be performed by machines. These days, the stakes seem to be higher, as technology now seems poised to render nearly all human labor obsolete. What lies in store for us, and for the flourishing and meaning of our lives, once technology has relieved humans of the need to work? In Automation and Utopia: ...
Jan 02, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 209
In Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Adriel M. Trott argues for understanding the relationship of matter and form in Aristotle’s work on the model of a Möbius strip. With the figure of the Möbius strip, we can identify two planes at any particular point, but, taking in the figure as a whole, we see that those two sides are produced by a torsion of a continuous strip. Through this figure, Trott allows us to think anew with Ar...
Dec 20, 2019•58 min•Ep. 206
It is no easy task to survey and present a comprehensive history of philosophy of an entire intellectual tradition to a broad public audience without compromising on the scholarly rigor demanded by that history’s nuances. In an ambitious endeavor to do precisely that with the Islamic tradition, Peter Adamson masterfully shows how it can be done. His work, Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps (Oxford University Press, 2018) forms the third volume of a larger s...
Dec 16, 2019•57 min•Ep. 92
A basic question in mind and metaphysics is the relation between the nature of mental content (or meaning) and the nature of the domains of entities and relations to which those contents refer or which they are about. Does an explanation of this relation require us to give meaning priority, or instead is the metaphysics of the domain always involved in explaining the content? In his new book, The Primacy of Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2019), Christopher Peacocke argues for the idea tha...
Dec 10, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 204
When asked what democracy is, many of us instantly think of elections, and thus voting. Although we tend to see voting as central to democracy, we also think that voting is optional – a commendable activity that a citizen might choose to do, but one that can be omitted blamelessly. What’s more, political theorists and philosophers tend to regard voting as irrational, reckless, or worse. Some have even suggested that low voter turnout is a signal of the health of a society. In The Duty to Vote (O...
Dec 05, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 205
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, g...
Dec 03, 2019•58 min•Ep. 42
In the United States in particular, there is almost no social space today, whether that’s Thanksgiving dinner or going shopping, that has not become saturated with political meaning. In Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in Its Place (Oxford University Press, 2019), Robert Talisse argues that contrary to what many democratic theorists have argued, democracy is something we can do too much of – and that it is in fact being overdone. Talisse, who is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosoph...
Nov 11, 2019•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 200
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, ...
Nov 03, 2019•39 min•Ep. 45
According to an intuitive view, lives are meaningful when they manifest a directedness or instantiate a project such that the disparate events and endeavors “add up to” a life. John Stuart Mill’s life certainly was devoted to a project in that sense. Yet Mill’s life was in many respects unsatisfying – riven with anxiety and trauma. What does Mill’s life teach us about meaningful lives? In John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life (Oxford University Press 2019), Elijah Millgram weaves intellectual...
Nov 01, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 203
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how t...
Oct 24, 2019•31 min•Ep. 81
In Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics (Northwestern University Press, 2019), Dilek Huseyinzadegan analyzes Kant’s political writings by attending to the role of history, anthropology, and geography in his thought. She shows that Kant employs teleology as a means to orient us within the chaotic contingency of experience in order to plan and navigate a path to just political orders from our current conditions. Teleology, far from functioning as a deterministic principle in Kant’s work, provides a ...
Oct 21, 2019•57 min
Why do zebras have stripes? One way to answer that question is ask what function stripes play in the lives of zebras – for example, to deter disease-carrying flies from biting them. This notion of a function plays a central role in biology: biologists frequently refer to the functions of many traits of evolved organisms. But not everything a trait causes is its function – the stripes might disorient some harmless birds, but that isn’t their function. So what determines the function of a trait? A...
Oct 10, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 199
Much of what we are able to accomplish in our day-to-day lives depends on the ability to act and think in concert with others. Often this involves not only the capacity to perceive together the surrounding world—we must also know that we perceive together. In other words, there must be perceptual common knowledge. Philosophical questions mount quickly: How is this kind of knowledge possible? How does it arise? What does its possibility show us about our sociality? What does it suggest about the ...
Oct 01, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 201
Philosophy of Language was a central concern in classical Indian Philosophy. Philosophers in the tradition discussed testimony, pragmatics, and the religious implications of language, among other topics. In his new book, Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Mukula's 'Fundamentals of the Communicative Function'(Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Malcolm Keating looks at the views of the philosopher Mukula Bhatta, whose innovative position on meaning aimed to capture the di...
Sep 20, 2019•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 198
At the start of the 19th century, the field we now call psychology was still the branch of philosophy that studied the soul. How did psychology come to define itself as a separate area of inquiry, and how did it come to be a science? In Wundt, Avenarius and Scientific Psychology: A Debate at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Palgrave MacMillan 2019), Chiara Russo Krauss considers the conceptual foundations of psychology as a science in the conflicting views of Wilhelm Wundt and Richard Avenariu...
Sep 10, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 195
Amy Olberding’s The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2019) is a joy to read, both entertaining and rich in ideas. The Wrong of Rudeness asks a key question for our times how do we interact with each other, especially in politically contentious situations? Olberding addresses this and related issues by bringing our moderns challenges into dialogue with thinkers from early China. Weaving together modern cultural references with innovative read...
Sep 03, 2019•55 min•Ep. 291
For those who think that philosophy must speak to everyday experience and ordinary life, it would seem that philosophical questions occasioned by love and sex should take center stage. Moral, epistemic, metaphysical, and political issues surrounding sex and love pervade our culture. Where would pop music, television, and fine art be without the dilemmas at the intersection of love and sex? And yet there are some less familiar philosophical issues lurking as well. In Philosophy of Sex and Love (R...
Sep 02, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 197
What is the relationship between the form of writing and what can be thought? How is a writer’s thinking shaped by form? How is a reader’s? Does this matter for philosophy? In Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2018), John T. Lysaker explores the importance of the praxis of writing for philosophy. Essaying a variety of forms, the book invites the reader to investigate the volume in their hands as a performance. It engages with, among others, the work ...
Aug 20, 2019•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 196
Evolutionary biologists standardly treat organisms as agents: they have goals and purposes and preferences, and their behaviors and adaptive traits contribute to the achievement of their goals. This explanatory practice brings evolutionary biology into conceptual contact with rational choice theory, which provides models of how people make decisions and act on them. In Agents and Goals in Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), Samir Okasha explores the fascinating and complex links between e...
Aug 09, 2019•1 hr•Ep. 192
Sometimes people are blameworthy or otherwise not admirable because of what they believe. And sometimes they are blameworthy or otherwise not admirable because of how they believe – broadly, their ways of thinking, inquiring, handling evidence, and managing information. We sometimes criticize others for being careless, dogmatic, gullible, and so on. These evaluations often have the form of appraisals of the persons to whom they are applied. So, just as we might speak of intellectual virtues, we ...
Aug 01, 2019•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 194
How does perception result in thoughts about items in the world (such as dogs or flowers) and in conscious states of many kinds (such as experiences of seeing red)? How does perception provide evidence for our beliefs (such as the belief that there is a red rose in front of you)? In The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, and Evidence (Oxford University Press, 2018), Susanna Schellenberg considers these questions about the role of perception in mind and knowledge. Schellenberg, who is p...
Jul 10, 2019•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 191
