All Episodes

#69 Peter Carruthers: Innate Human Cognition

Sep 7, 2018

Dr. Peter Carruthers is a British-American philosopher and cognitive scientist working primarily in the area of philosophy of mind, though he has also made contributions to philosophy of language and ethics. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, associate member of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program and member of the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences. He’s also the author of many books, like The Philosophy of Psychology, The Architecture of the Mind, and the editor of the trilogy Innate Mind. More»
#68 Jerry Z. Muller: History and Philosophy of Capitalism

Sep 6, 2018

Dr. Jerry Muller is Ordinary Professor of History at the Catholic University of America, where he teaches courses on historical and contemporary subjects, including capitalism; nationalism; conservatism; the history of social, political, economic, and religious thought; and modern German and Jewish history. He’s also the author of books like The Mind and the Market, Capitalism and the Jews, and, the most recent one, The Tyranny of Metrics. More»
#67 Martin Schaefer: The Right Way to Preserve Biodiversity

Sep 3, 2018

Dr. Martin Schaefer is a former Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Animal Ecology of the University of Freiburg, Germany. Now, he’s leading a conservation NGO, Fundación Jocotoco (www.fjocotoco.org), based in Ecuador. More»
#66 David Gorski: Science-Based Medicine, Fighting Quackery

Aug 31, 2018

Dr. David Gorski is a surgical oncologist at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute specializing in breast cancer surgery, where he also serves as the Medical Director of the Alexander J. Walt Comprehensive Breast Center. He’s also Professor of Surgery and Oncology at the Wayne State University School of Medicine, and faculty of the Graduate Program in Cancer Biology. He’s also the Managing Editor of Science-Based Medicine (https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/). More»
#65 Dale Purves: How Perception and Cognition Work

Aug 30, 2018

Dr. Dale Purves is Geller Professor of Neurobiology Emeritus at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, at Duke University. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989 for his work on neural development and synaptic plasticity. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. He is the author of many books, including Principles of Neural Development, and Brains: How they Seem to Work, and also the lead author on the textbooks Neuroscience, and Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience. His research during the last 15 years has sought to explain why we see and hear what we do, focusing on the visual perception of lightness, color, form, and motion, and the auditory perception of music and speech. More»
#64 Patricia Churchland: Neurophilosophy, Consciousness, Free Will, and Morality

Aug 27, 2018

Dr. Patricia Churchland is a Canadian-American Philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She is UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989. She is a member of the Board of Trustees Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies of Philosophy Department, at Moscow State University. In 2015, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She’s also the author of a number of books, including Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain, and Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality. More»
#63 Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: The Philosophy of Science, and The Science of Philosophy

Aug 24, 2018

Dr. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American philosopher, novelist and public intellectual. She is a MacArthur Fellow and has received the National Humanities Medal of the US, the National Jewish Book Award, and numerous other honors. She’s the author of ten books, both fiction and nonfiction, including The Mind-Body Problem, Betraying Spinoza, and Plato at the Googleplex. More»
#62 Lewis Goldberg: The Development and Scientific Relevance of the BIG FIVE

Aug 23, 2018

Dr. Lewis Goldberg is an American personality psychologist and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon. He is closely associated with the lexical hypothesis, that says that any culturally important personality characteristic will be represented in the language of the particular culture. This hypothesis led to the discovery of a five-factor structure of personality trait adjectives (which he dubbed the Big Five). More»
#61 Oliver Scott Curry: Morality as Cooperation, Moral Foundations

Aug 20, 2018

Dr. Oliver Scott Curry is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, at the University of Oxford. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics in 2005. In addition to his research, which focuses a lot on morality, Dr. Curry has previously taught courses on evolution and human behavior, covering evolutionary theory, animal behavior, evolutionary psychology, cross-cultural psychology, statistics and research methods. He is also a consultant for kindness.org. More»
#60 Fernanda Drumond (Gapminder): The Right Way to Look at Progress

Aug 17, 2018

Gapminder Foundation is a non-profit venture based in Stockholm, Sweden, that promotes sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels. More»