All Episodes

#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»
#401 Kristina Durante: Female Intrasexual Competition, and Consumer Choices

Dec 7, 2020

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#400 John Hoffecker - Modern Humans: Their African Origin and Global Dispersal

Dec 4, 2020

Dr. John Hoffecker is Fellow of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). He specializes in archaeology and human paleoecology. His primary research focus is the global dispersal of anatomically modern humans, which began more than 50,000 years ago in Africa. He is the author of several books, including Modern Humans: Their African Origin and Global Dispersal (2017). More»
#399 Niels Dingemanse: Ecology, Behavioral Plasticity, and Animal Personality

Dec 3, 2020

Dr. Niels Dingemanse is Tenured Professor in Behavioural Ecology in the Department of Biology at the Ludwig Maximilians University, Germany. He conducts evolutionary behavioral ecology research, asking questions about the adaptive evolution of behavioral strategies, and their genetic architectures, within an ecological context. His research is motivated by behavioral ecology, life-history, and quantitative genetics theory, and seeks to test predictions and assumptions of adaptive theory using observational and experimental approaches in the laboratory and the wild. More»
#398 Stuart Russell: Human-Level AI, How Worried We Should Be About AI, and Its Present and Future

Nov 30, 2020

Dr. Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also holds the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering. He founded and leads the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence there. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, global seismic monitoring, and philosophical foundations. His current concerns include the threat of autonomous weapons and the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity. Dr. Russell is co-author of the most popular textbook in the field of artificial intelligence: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach used in more than 1,400 universities in 128 countries. His most recent book is Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. More»
#397 Gordon Burghardt: The Evolution And Function of Play

Nov 27, 2020

Dr. Gordon M. Burghardt is Alumni Distinguished Service Professor in the departments of Psychology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee. His research focus has been on comparative studies of behavioral development in animals with special attention to reptiles, bears, and the evolution of play, as well as historical and theoretical issues in ethology and psychology. He has served as editor or editorial board member of numerous journals and is past president of the Animal Behavior Society and the Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology (APA Div. 6). He has edited or co-edited 6 books and authored The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits (MIT Press, 2005). More»
#396 Jeff McMahan: Killing in War, and the Ethics of Veganism

Nov 26, 2020

Dr. Jeff McMahan is White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He specializes in Practical Ethics, Political Philosophy, and Ethics. He’s the author of books like The Morality of Nationalism, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life, and Killing in War. More»
#395 Lisa Bortolotti: The Epistemic Innocence of Irrational Beliefs

Nov 23, 2020

Dr. Lisa Bortolotti is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, affiliated with the Philosophy Department in the School of Philosophy, Theology, and Religion; and with the Institute for Mental Health in the School of Psychology. Her research is in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences. She writes about the limitations of human cognition and human agency, investigating faulty reasoning and irrational beliefs, delusions, confabulations, distorted memories, poor knowledge of the self, unreliable self-narratives, self-deception, inconsistencies between attitudes and behavior, unrealistic optimism, and other positive illusions. She is also interested in the philosophy of medicine and how health, wellbeing, rationality, and agency interact. She is the author of The Epistemic Innocence of Irrational Beliefs. More»