All Episodes

#411 Ann-Sophie Barwich - Smellosophy: What the Nose tells the Mind

Dec 31, 2020

Dr. Ann-Sophie Barwich is Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and Cognitive Science at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a cognitive scientist and empirical philosopher & historian of science, technology, and the senses. She divides her brain-time between the Department of History & Philosophy of Science and the Cognitive Science Program. Estimated begin of lab (EEG/Olfactometry) in early 2021. She’s the author of Smellosophy: What the Nose tells the Mind. More»
#410 Edward Watts - Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny

Dec 28, 2020

Dr. Edward Watts is presently the Vassiliadis Professor of Byzantine Greek History at UC San Diego, where he was formerly Co-Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies. His research interests center on the intellectual and religious history of the Roman Empire and the early Byzantine Empire. He is the author of several books on ancient history, the most recent one being Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny. He also has a new book coming out in 2021, The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea. More»
#409 Gordon Gallup: Orgasm, Sperm Competition, Mating Strategies, Self-Recognition, and Religion

Dec 25, 2020

Dr. Gordon Gallup is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Albany. He is best known for developing the mirror test, also called the mirror self-recognition test, or MSR, in 1970, which gauges self-awareness of animals. He also studied tonic immobility, or "animal hypnosis,". His later work on animal behavior focused on ethological approaches to the study of animal behavior under laboratory conditions. Since the 1990s, Dr. Gallup has researched human evolutionary psychology exclusively. More»
#408 Victoria Dougherty: Writing Fiction, Religion, Politics, Comedy, and Interesting Villains

Dec 24, 2020

Victoria Dougherty is the author of The Bone Church, Welcome to the Hotel Yalta, and Cold. She writes fiction, drama, and essays that revolve around lovers, killers, curses, and destinies. Her work has been published or profiled in the New York Times, USA Today, The International Herald Tribune, and elsewhere. Earlier in her career, while living in Prague, she co-founded Black Box Theater, translating, producing, and acting in several Czech plays. Her blog – COLD – features her short essays on faith, family, love, and writing. WordPress, the blogging platform that hosts some 70 million blogs worldwide, has singled out COLD as one of the Top 50 Recommended Blogs by writers or about writing. More»
#407 Joseph LeDoux: The Deep History of Ourselves

Dec 21, 2020

Dr. Joseph LeDoux is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science, Professor of Neural Science, Professor of Psychiatry, and Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at New York University. His work is focused on the brain mechanisms of emotion and memory. He’s the author of many books, the most recent one being The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. More»
#406 Caleb Scharf: Life, on Earth and Elsewhere

Dec 18, 2020

Dr. Caleb Scharf is the director of the multidisciplinary Columbia Astrobiology Center at Columbia University. He works in the fields of exoplanetary science and astrobiology, and writes extensively about science for a popular audience. One ultimate goal of his research is to find planets that could harbor recognizable life, and to detect the presence of that life—an effort that falls under the banner of astrobiology. More»
#405 Andrew Gallup: The Evolution of Aggression, and Yawning

Dec 17, 2020

Dr. Andrew Gallup is Assistant Professor of Psychology and the director of the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) Lab at SUNY Poly. His research spans a variety of topics, including contagious behavior and comparative neuroanatomy, brain thermoregulation and vigilance, collective behavior and social cognition, aggression and sexual conflict, the evolution of cooperation, sports and athletic competition from an evolutionary perspective, biomarkers of Darwinian fitness, and the effects of neuromodulation on adaptive responses. More»
#404 Hanno Sauer: Ethics, Moral Realism, Moral Progress, and Human Rationality

Dec 14, 2020

Dr. Hanno Sauer is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Utrecht University. His main research interests are in moral psychology and empirically informed metaethics. He is interested in whether and how we can bring empirical data from diverse disciplines such as social psychology, neuroscience or cognitive science to bear on questions of normative and/or metaethical interests, and what the limits of this approach are. He is the author of Moral Judgments as Educated Intuitions (2017), Debunking Arguments in Ethics (2018), and Moral Thinking, Fast and Slow (2018). More»
#403 Christopher Freiman - Why It's OK to Ignore Politics

Dec 11, 2020

Dr. Christopher Freiman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of William & Mary. His research interests include democratic theory, distributive justice, and immigration. He’s the author of two books, Unequivocal Justice, and the most recent one, Why It’s OK to Ignore Politics. His work has appeared in venues such as the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, and The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy. More»
#402 David Geary - Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences

Dec 10, 2020

Dr. David C. Geary is Curators’ Professor and Thomas Jefferson Fellow in the Department of Psychological Sciences and Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. He’s the author of several books including Children's mathematical development, Male, female: The evolution of human sex differences, and Evolution of vulnerability: Implications for sex differences in health and development. More»