Journal Entries

Tracking Hate Speech with Shannon Fyfe

September 24th, 2021 | 33 mins 15 secs

africa, crime, criminal, ethics, free speech, genocide, hate, language, law, lawyer, philosophy of language, race, racism, speech, violence

Shannon Fyfe (George Mason University) talks about her paper on hate speech and prosecuting incitement to genocide in international criminal law.

Foul Behavior with Victor Kumar

September 13th, 2021 | 27 mins 1 sec

disgust, emotion, feeling, moral judgment, moral psychology, nussbuam, rationality, thinking

Victor Kumar (Boston University) talks about his paper on disgust, and why sometimes at least, disgust is a fitting reaction to moral wrongs.

Alive Inside with Andrew Peterson

September 6th, 2021 | 29 mins 55 secs

bioethics, consciousness, fairness, theory of mind

Andrew Peterson (GMU) talks about his paper on the ethical concerns raised by new ways of using neuroimaging to assess brain‐injured patients.

Knowledge Before Belief with Jonathan Phillips

August 31st, 2021 | 32 mins 41 secs

belief, cognitive science, knowledge, theory of mind

Jonathan Phillips (Dartmouth) talks about his paper on knowledge attribution and how this capacity is actually more basic than belief representation is in theory of mind.

Evidentialism and Moral Encroachment with Georgi Gardiner

October 16th, 2020 | 38 mins 17 secs

base rates, belief, epistemology, justification, moral encroachment, morality, probability, racism, social justice

Georgi Gardiner (University of Tennessee) talks about her paper arguing against moral encroachment, or the thesis that the epistemic justification of a belief can be affected by moral factors.

The Science of Wisdom with Igor Grossmann

October 5th, 2020 | 43 mins 59 secs

character, cognition, culture, emotions, measurement, situation, wisdom

Igor Grossmann (Waterloo) talks about his paper with the Wisdom Task Force on the state of the art of psychological research on wisdom.

Can’t Complain with Kathryn Norlock

June 4th, 2020 | 33 mins 25 secs

character, duty, friendship, gender, morality, social media

Kathryn Norlock (Trent) argues that complaining can be good and is sometimes a thing that we ought to do, even when we can’t fix the thing that makes us sad. Exposing our vulnerabilities creates a space to commiserate, validate, and feel less alone.

Situating Feminist Epistemology with Natalie Alana Ashton and Robin McKenna

April 28th, 2020 | 40 mins 47 secs

bias, epistemology, evidence, feminism, justification, knowledge, science, theory choice, values

Natalie Ashton (Stirling) and Robin McKenna (Liverpool) argue that feminist epistemologies can help us understand how some knowledge is socially constructed...and that this idea isn't a very radical one at all.

Games and the Art of Agency with Thi Nguyen

April 15th, 2020 | 32 mins 37 secs

aesthetics, agency, art, games, rules

C. Thi Nguyen (Utah Valley/University of Utah) argues that games are a unique form of art and a valuable tool for human self-development. By creating rules and abilities, they specify new modes of agency for their players to temporarily adopt, which both reveals what’s beautiful about them--and kind of like yoga--forces us to try out unfamiliar ways of being.

The Unreliability of Naive Introspection with Eric Schwitzgebel

April 8th, 2020 | 30 mins 36 secs

descartes, emotion, introspection, pain, vision

Eric Schwitzgebel (University of California, Riverside) argues that introspection is highly untrustworthy and that most people are poor introspectors of their own ongoing conscious experience.

Redefine Statistical Significance with Edouard Machery

April 4th, 2020 | 51 mins 38 secs

bayes, false positives, replication crisis, statistics

Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh) talks about his paper with Benjamin et al. in Nature Human Behavior arguing that we should change the default threshold for “statistical significance" by an order of magnitude.

Stop Talking About Fake News! with Joshua Habgood-Coote

April 4th, 2020 | 34 mins 50 secs

concepts, linguistics, meaning, ordinary language, propaganda

Joshua Habgood-Coote (University of Bristol) argues that we should abandon the terms "fake news" and "post-truth" because they are defective, redundant, and harmful to democracy.

Episode Archive