All Episodes

#428 Stanley Fish - There's No Such Thing as Free Speech

Feb 8, 2021

Dr. Stanley Fish is Professor of Law at Florida International University and Visiting Professor of Law at Cardoso Law School. In addition to being one of the country’s leading public intellectuals, Professor Fish is an extraordinarily prolific author whose works include He has authored over 200 scholarly publications and books. While his research covers a variety of fields, Professor Dr. Fish has written for many of the country’s leading law journals. including Stanford Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and Texas Law Review. His books include Is there a Text in This Class? Interpretive Communities and the Sources of Authority (1980); There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too (1994); Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1995); The Trouble with Principle (1999); How Milton Works (2001); and The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump (2019). More»
#427 Arthur Glenberg: Embodied Cognition, Simulation, Mirror Neurons, and Education

Feb 5, 2021
#426 Lyle Steadman: Society, Kinship, Tradition, Ancestor Worship, and Religion

Feb 4, 2021

Dr. Lyle Steadman is Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University. Dr. Steadman focuses on religion and kinship, especially their interrelationship, and the influence of natural selection on human social and cultural behavior. He has done extensive research among the Hewa, a society in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. A short period of fieldwork was also conducted in an Indian village in Baja California, Mexico. More»
#425 Azar Gat - Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism

Feb 1, 2021

Dr. Azar Gat is the Ezer Weizman Professor of National Security at Tel Aviv University, in Israel. He is the founder and head of the University's International Program in Security and Diplomacy Executive Master’s Program in Diplomacy and Security. He’s also the author of books like A History of Military Thought, War in Human Civilization, and Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. More»
#424 Stefaan Blancke: Science, Pseudoscience, Rationality, and Cultural Evolution

Jan 29, 2021

Dr. Stefaan Blancke is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University, Netherlands. He studies the diffusion of (pseudo)scientific beliefs from an epidemiological perspective. His research focuses on the psychological and environmental factors that shape and constrain the development and distribution of these beliefs in the history and philosophy of science, science education and the public understanding of science. He is also interested in the philosophy of cultural evolution and the role of reasons in cultural phenomena such as science, morality and the self. More»
#423 Andrew Delton: Evolution, Politics, the Welfare State, Partisanship, and Voting Behavior

Jan 28, 2021

Dr. Andrew Delton is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Center for Behavioral Political Economy at Stony Brook University. His research is at the intersection of political science, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral economics. Topics include collective action and public goods, generosity and redistribution, voting and political mobilization, partisanship, risk and time preferences, and emotions such as anger, compassion, and shame. Methods include behavioral economic games, population-based surveys, decision making tasks, implicit social cognition measures, game theoretic analysis, agent-based simulations, and cross-cultural data collection. More»
#422 Michael Tomasello: Interdependence, Shared Intentionality, Culture, and Morality

Jan 25, 2021

Dr. Michael Tomasello is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as linguist. He is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and professor of psychology at Duke University. Earning many prizes and awards from the end of the 1990s onward, he is considered one of today's most authoritative developmental and comparative psychologists. He is "one of the few scientists worldwide who is acknowledged as an expert in multiple disciplines". His "pioneering research on the origins of social cognition has led to revolutionary insights in both developmental psychology and primate cognition." He’s also the author of several books, including The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999), A Natural History of Human Thinking (2014), A Natural History of Human Morality (2016), and Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (2019). More»
#421 Steven Heine: Cultural Psychology, and How Psychology Varies Across Cultures

Jan 22, 2021

Dr. Steven J. Heine is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Social and Cultural Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Heine’s pioneering research has challenged key psychological assumptions in self-esteem, meaning, and the ways that people understand genetic constructs. He is the author of many acclaimed journal articles and books in the fields of social and cultural psychology including Cultural Psychology, the top-selling textbook in the field. In 2016, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. More»
#420 Stephen Stearns: Life History Theory, and Evolutionary Medicine

Jan 21, 2021

Dr. Stephen Stearns is Edward P Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Yale University. Dr. Stearns specializes in life history evolution, which links the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology, and in evolutionary medicine. His books include “Evolutionary Medicine” (Sinauer, 2015) with Ruslan Medzhitov, “Evolution, an introduction” (Oxford, 2000, 2nd Ed 2005) with Rolf Hoekstra, “Watching, from the Edge of Extinction” (Yale, 1999) with his wife Beverly Peterson Stearns, “The Evolution of Life Histories” (Oxford, 1992), and two edited volumes, “Evolution in health and disease” (Oxford, 1998, 2nd Ed 2008) and “The Evolution of Sex and its Consequences.” More»
#419 Christian List: Why Free Will Is Real

Jan 18, 2021

Dr. Christian List is Professor of Philosophy and Decision Theory at LMU Munich and Co-Director of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. He’s the author of Why Free Will Is Real. More»