All Episodes

#939 Michael Petraglia: The Origins and Migrations of H. Sapiens

May 10, 2024

Dr. Michael Petraglia is Director of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University, Australia. Dr. Petraglia’s archaeological research is interdisciplinary, involving collaboration with geneticists, physical anthropologists, paleontologists, geographers, geologists, and environmental scientists, amongst others. His research has centered on a range of subjects concerning human evolution, including the evolution of cognition, the evolution of behavior, and the relations between climate change and hominin dispersals. More»
#938 Duncan Pritchard: Truth, and Cultivating Intellectual Virtues

May 9, 2024

Dr. Duncan Pritchard is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy in the Philosophy School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Oxford University Press's Oxford Bibliographies: Philosophy and the co-Editor-in-Chief (and co-Founder) of the International Journal for the Study of Skepticism. Dr. Pritchard mostly works in epistemology, and has written on most of the topics in this field, including radical skepticism, theory of knowledge, virtue epistemology, modal epistemology, epistemic luck/risk, social epistemology, understanding, inquiry, know-how, and so on. More»
#937 Oliver Traldi - Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction

May 6, 2024

Dr. Oliver Traldi is a John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He studies epistemology, focusing on questions about the nature of epistemic norms and the epistemology of the social world, especially the epistemology of politics. He works on norms of inquiry, conceptual engineering, reasons for belief, inferring beliefs from actions, the epistemology of disagreement, and the epistemology of moral progress. He is the author of Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction. More»
#936 David Pietraszewski: Alliances, Intergroup Conflict, Politics, and the Science of Psychology

May 3, 2024

Dr. David Pietraszewski is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an experimental psychologist who applies evolutionary theorizing to Social, Cognitive, and Developmental questions. He is particularly interested in characterizing the psychology of multi-agent conflict and cooperation ("coalitional psychology"). More»
#935 Mazviita Chirimuuta: The Brain Abstracted

May 2, 2024

Dr. Mazviita Chirimuuta is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy in the School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. She has focused on philosophical issues around vision, mind-brain and consciousness, and in the last few years she has mostly been writing about the problem of color, and how ideas from neuroscience can bring fresh light on the realism vs. anti-realism debate. She is the author of Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy, and The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience. More»
#934 Gordon Ingram: Adolescent Use of New Media and Internet Technologies

Apr 29, 2024

Dr. Gordon Ingram is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at RMIT University Vietnam. His research centers on children’s and adolescents’ everyday communication online. He is the author of Adolescent Use of New Media and Internet Technologies: Debating Risks and Opportunities in the Digital Age. More»
#933 Samuel Veissière: The Psychological Effects of the Internet, and Human Cognition and Culture

Apr 26, 2024

Dr. Samuel Veissière is a clinician-researcher at RAPS (réseaux Recherche et Action sur les Polarisations Sociales), formerly Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. He is an anthropologist and psychosocial clinician working at the intersection of psychiatry, cognitive science and the social sciences. Dr. Veissière has held multiple research grants to study the impact of the Internet on cognition, wellbeing and social relations. Past research includes leading experimental studies on social, symbolic, and ritual dimensions of placebo effects, and making original contributions to theoretical models of the co-evolution of cognition and culture that draw on Bayesian brain, active inference, and ecological niche construction paradigms. His current works examines risk and protective factors against violent radicalization and extremism, with an emphasis on digital, narrative, and gendered dimensions of social polarization. More»
#932 Matti Häyry - Antinatalism, Extinction, and the End of Procreative Self-Corruption

Apr 25, 2024

Dr. Matti Häyry is Professor of Philosophy at Aalto University School of Business, Finland. Dr. Häyry’s main fields of interest have been moral and political philosophy and philosophical bioethics. His practical topics in bioethics have ranged from abortion, euthanasia, and resource allocation to genetics, systems biology, and synthetic biology. Theoretically, his work has centered on the main normative doctrines of European moral and political philosophy. He is the co-author of Antinatalism, Extinction, and the End of Procreative Self-Corruption. More»
#931 Michael Hudson: The Collapse of Antiquity

Apr 22, 2024

Dr. Michael Hudson is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (Editions 1968, 2003, 2021), “…and forgive them their debts” (2018), The Collapse of Antiquity, and his latest book, Temples of Enterprise. More»
#930 Rebecca Earle: The History and Politics of the Potato

Apr 19, 2024

Dr. Rebecca Earle is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. She is a historian, specializing in the history of food and colonial and 19th-century Spanish America. She is the author of books like “The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700”, “Potato”, and “Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato”. More»