All Episodes

#269 Colin Allen: Minds, Cognition, and Cognitive Ethology

Dec 16, 2019

Dr. Colin Allen is Distinguished Professor, and Director of Graduate Admissions in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Allen's main areas of research concern the philosophical foundations of cognitive science and neuroscience. He is particularly interested in the scientific study of cognition in nonhuman animals and computers, and he has published widely on topics in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, and artificial intelligence. More»
#268 Stephen Sanderson: Gender Roles, Marriage, And Parenthood Across Societies

Dec 13, 2019

Dr. Stephen K. Sanderson is an American sociologist. He was a professor of sociology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Since 2007 he has been a visiting scholar at the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California, Riverside. His areas of focus include comparative sociology, historical sociology, sociological theory and sociocultural evolution. He is a specialist in sociological theory and comparative and historical sociology and is one of the leading sociologists to develop a Darwinian understanding of human society. He has written or edited ten books, including “The Evolution of Human Sociality: A Darwinian Conflict Perspective”, “Evolutionism and Its Critics”, “Human Nature and the Evolution of Society”, and “Religious Evolution and the Axial Age”. More»
#267 Richard Jean So: Cultural Analytics, Literary Studies, And Race

Dec 12, 2019

Dr. Richard Jean So is Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Analytics at McGill University in Montreal. Previously, he served as an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he co-founded the university's first digital humanities lab ("Textual Optics Lab"). He earned his BA at Brown University in English and Economics, and PhD in English at Columbia University. More recently, he has retrained in Computer Science at the University of Washington, and Statistics at the University of Michigan. Broadly, he works in the fields of cultural analytics and American culture, with a particular focus on race and inequality. Increasingly, he also works on the Internet and social media. His first book was Transpacific Community: America, China and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network. More»
#266 Lyn Wadley: Archaeology, And The Evolution of Human Cognition

Dec 9, 2019

Dr. Lyn Wadley is jointly Honorary Professor of Archaeology in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, and the Evolutionary Studies Institute, at University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She directs a Wits-recognized programme called ACACIA (Ancient Cognition and Culture in Africa). Her specialty is the African Stone Age: Middle Stone Age (which lasted from approximately 300,000 to 25,000 years ago) and Later Stone Age (the last 25,000 years). She began her career researching social and ecological issues during the past 25,000 years of the Later Stone Age in southern Africa. Data for her interpretations were obtained from sites in Namibia and South Africa. Dr. Wadley’s current research is dedicated to the cognition of people who lived in the Middle Stone Age. More»
#265 Reinout de Vries: Personality, The HEXACO, and Communication Styles

Dec 6, 2019

Dr. Reinout E. de Vries is Associate Professor at the VU University Amsterdam and Full Professor at the University of Twente. Together with researchers like Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee, he has worked on the HEXACO model of personality, showing that it provides a more optimal description of personality than the Big Five model and showing that it is, through its addition of Honesty-Humility, better able to predict a number of counterproductive behaviors than the Big Five model. His main research interests are in the areas of personality, communication styles, and leadership. Recent work has focused on the construction of a six-dimensional Communication Styles Inventory (CSI), a Brief HEXACO personality Inventory (BHI), the relation between Impression Management and Overclaiming and HEXACO personality, and on the relation between self- and other-rated HEXACO personality on the one hand and leadership, proactivity, impression management, and overclaiming on the other. He is currently working on lexical studies on sport personality and leadership and followership styles. More»
#264 Kevin Zollman: Game Theory, Evolutionary Biology, And Social Dynamics

Dec 5, 2019

Dr. Kevin Zollman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. In addition to his primary appointment at Carnegie Mellon, he is an associate fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, a visiting professor at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (part of Ludwig-Maximilians Universität), and an associate editor of the journal Philosophy of Science. With Paul Raeburn, he is the author of The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting. More»
#263 Mark Alfano: Virtue Ethics, And Moral Psychology

Dec 2, 2019

Dr. Mark Alfano is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Delft University of Technology and the Australian Catholic University. Dr. Alfano uses tools and methods from philosophy and the sciences to explore topics in moral psychology, epistemology, and digital humanities. He studies how people become and remain virtuous, how values become integrated into people's lives, and how these virtues and values are (or fail to be) manifested in their perception, thoughts, feelings, deliberations, and behavior. One of the guiding themes of his work is that moral philosophy without psychological content is empty, but psychological investigation without philosophical insight is blind. He’s the author of books like Character as Moral Fiction, and Nietzsche's Moral Psychology. More»
#262 Indre Viskontas: The Psychology of Music

Nov 29, 2019

Dr. Indre Viskontas is a Professor of Psychology at the University of San Francisco, and serves on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She is also the Creative Director of Pasadena Opera. Dr. Viskontas is a neuroscientist and operatic soprano. She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience and a M.M. in opera. She’s the author of How Music Can Make You Better. More»
#261 Noam Chomsky: Cognitive Revolution, Piaget, Foucault, And Evolutionary Psychology

Nov 28, 2019

Dr. Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, political activist, and social critic. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Dr. Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He holds a joint appointment as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and laureate professor at the University of Arizona, and is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. More»
#260 Kathleen Stock: Fiction, And Transgenderism

Nov 25, 2019

Dr. Kathleen Stock is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex. She has published on aesthetics, fiction, imagination, and sexual objectification. She is currently the vice-president of the British Society of Aesthetics. In her monograph Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination (2017) she examines the nature of fictional content. She has expressed critical views on the UK Gender Recognition Act and trans self-identification. More»