All Episodes

#543 Orestis Palermos: Epistemology, Technology, Extended Cognition, and Philosophical Engineering

Nov 4, 2021

Dr. Orestis Palermos is Lecturer in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University. He works at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, epistemology, philosophy of science and philosophy of technology. He is interested in the idea of philosophical engineering: the way philosophy can impact the design of emerging technologies and socio-technical systems. More»
#542 Paul Bloom - The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

Nov 1, 2021

Dr. Paul Bloom is Professor Emeritus at Yale University and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, fiction, and art. His new book is The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. More»
#541 Charles Foster - Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness

Oct 29, 2021

Dr. Charles Foster is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, a member of the Oxford Law Faculty (where he is a Visiting Professor), a Senior Research Associate at the Uehiro Institute for Practical Ethics (within the Faculty of Philosophy), and a Research Associate at the Ethox Centre and the Helex Centre (both within the Faculty of Medicine). His main areas of interest are medical law and ethics. Recently he has been focused particularly on questions of identity, personhood, and authenticity, on whether theories of human dignity can do any real work in the law, and on the use of intuitions in moral and legal reasoning. He is the author of many books, including his most recent one, Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness. More»
#540 Itai Yanai: The Society of Genes; Genome Evolution, Epigenetics, Health, and Gene Editing

Oct 28, 2021

Dr. Itai Yanai is Founding Director of the Institute for Computational Medicine at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He is also a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at NYU. He does research on cancer, computational biology, developmental genetics, genomics, microbiome, systems biology, single-cell transcriptomics, gene expression atlas construction, genome evolution. He is the author of The Society of Genes. More»
#539 Ralph Hertwig - Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know

Oct 25, 2021

Dr. Ralph Hertwig is Director of the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. His research interests include models of bounded and ecological rationality; decisions from experience; the psychology of risk; lifespan development of decision making; and evidence-based public policy. He is the editor of Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know. More»
#538 Stephen Gaukroger - The Failures of Philosophy: A Historical Essay

Oct 22, 2021

Dr. Stephen Gaukroger is Emeritus Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney. Dr. Gaukroger has completed a long-term project on the emergence and consolidation of a scientific culture in the West from 1210 to 1935: The Emergence of a Scientific Culture (Oxford, 2006),The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility(Oxford, 2010),The Natural and the Human (Oxford, 2016), Civilization and the Culture of Science (Oxford, 2020). His re-working of the history of philosophy, The Failures of Philosophy (Princeton), was published in 2020. His current project is ‘The Uniqueness of the West: Classical Antiquity, the Orient, and the Construction of a European Cultural Identity, 1550-1914’. His new book is The Failures of Philosophy: A Historical Essay. More»
#537 Christopher Kuzawa: Developmental Plasticity, Life History, and Epigenetics

Oct 21, 2021

Dr. Christopher Kuzawa is Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. He uses principles from anthropology and evolutionary biology to gain insights into the biological and health impacts of human developmental plasticity. His primary field research is conducted in Cebu, the Philippines, where he works with a large birth cohort study that enrolled more than 3,000 pregnant women in 1983 and has since followed their offspring into adulthood (now 30 years old). He uses the nearly 3 decades of data available for each study participant, and recruitment of generation 3 (the grandoffspring of the original mothers), to gain a better understanding of the long-term and intergenerational impacts of early life environments on adult biology, life history, reproduction, and health. A theme of much of his work is the application of principles of developmental plasticity and evolutionary biology to issues of health. More»
#536 James Pennebaker: Language Use, Writing, Personality, and Stories

Oct 18, 2021

Dr. James Pennebaker is the Regents Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts and Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He and his students are exploring natural language use, group dynamics, and personality in both laboratory and real-world settings. His earlier work on expressive writing found that physical health and work performance can improve by simple writing and/or talking exercises. His cross-disciplinary research is related to linguistics, clinical and cognitive psychology, communications, medicine, and computer science. Author or editor of 12 books and over 300 articles, Pennebaker has received numerous research and teaching awards and honors. More»
#535 Glenn Geher: Politics and Academic Values in Higher Education

Oct 15, 2021

Dr. Glenn Geher is Professor of Psychology at the State University of New York at New Paltz where he has been awarded SUNY Chancellor Awards for Excellence for both Teaching and Research. In addition to teaching various courses and directing the New Paltz Evolutionary Psychology Lab, Dr. Geher serves as founding director of the campus’ Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program. He is also credited as the founder of the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society (NEEPS). He has also published several books including Evolutionary Psychology 101, Mating Intelligence Unleashed: The Role of the Mind in Sex, Dating, and Love, and Straightforward Statistics. In Darwin's Subterranean World: Evolution, Mind, and Mating Intelligence, his Psychology Today blog, Dr. Geher addresses various topics related to the human condition. His most recent book is Positive Evolutionary Psychology: Darwin's Guide to Living a Richer Life. More»
#534 Michael Huemer: Moral Realism, Ethical Intuitionism, and Veganism

Oct 14, 2021

Dr. Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is the author of more than seventy academic articles in epistemology, ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy, as well as several books, like Skepticism and the Veil of Perception, Ethical Intuitionism, The Problem of Political Authority, Approaching Infinity, Paradox Lost, and Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism. More»