All Episodes

#291 Nicholas Stang: The Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Ethics of Kant

Feb 6, 2020

Dr. Nicholas Stang is Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department of the University of Toronto, and also a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His primary research interests are metaphysics and its history (mainly in German philosophy). His first book, Kant’s Modal Metaphysics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. While most of Dr. Stang’s published work has been about Kant, he is increasingly interested in pre-Kantian rationalism (Leibniz, Spinoza) and in post-Kantian figures, especially Hegel and Heidegger. He also works on contemporary metaphysics and aesthetics. His side interests include: Jewish philosophy, early analytic philosophy, philosophy of mathematics, and critical theory. More»
#290 Colin Camerer: The Economics And Neuroscience Of Decision-Making

Feb 3, 2020

Dr. Colin F. Camerer is the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Finance and Economics at the California Institute of Technology, where he teaches cognitive psychology and economics. His work seeks a better understanding of the psychological and neurobiological basis of decision-making in order to determine the validity of models of human economic behavior. His research uses mostly economics experiments—and occasionally field studies—to understand how people behave when making decisions (e.g., risky gambles for money), in games, and in markets (e.g., speculative price bubbles). In 2013, Dr. Camerer was named a MacArthur Fellow. More»
#289 Colin DeYoung: The Big Five And The Ten Aspects; Politics, Gender, And Psychopathology

Jan 31, 2020

Dr. Colin DeYoung is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. In his research in personality psychology, he has examined the theoretical structure of personality and the biological basis of personality. More»
#288 Joanna Schug: Emotional Expressions, and Relational Mobility

Jan 30, 2020

THIS INTERVIEW IS AUDIO-ONLY. More»
#287 John Danaher: Automation and Utopia; The End of Work, Cyborgs, And Virtual Worlds

Jan 27, 2020

Dr. John Danaher is a senior lecturer in the Law School at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He holds a BCL from University College Cork (2006); an LLM from Trinity College Dublin (2007); and a PhD from University College Cork (2011). He was lecturer in law at Keele University in the UK from 2011 until 2014. He joined NUI Galway in July 2014. Dr. Danaher’s research focuses on the ethical, legal and social implications of new technologies. He maintains a blog called Philosophical Disquisitions, and produces a podcast with the same title. He also writes for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and is the author of the recent book, Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work. More»
#286 Andrew Piper: Data Science, Reading, And Literary Criticism

Jan 24, 2020

Dr. Andrew Piper is Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. He directs .txtLAB, a laboratory for cultural analytics at McGill, and is also an editor of the Journal of Cultural Analytics. His work focuses on applying the tools and techniques of data science to the study of literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on questions of cultural equality. He has on-going projects that address questions of cultural capital, academic publishing and power, and the visibility of knowledge. He’s the author of books like “Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age”, and “Enumerations: Data and Literary Study”. More»
#285 Nicholas Christakis: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

Jan 23, 2020

Dr. Nicholas Christakis is Sterling Professor of Social & Natural Science, and Professor of Internal Medicine and General Medicine at Yale University. He’s a sociologist and physician known for his research on social networks and on the socioeconomic, biosocial, and evolutionary determinants of behavior, health, and longevity. Dr. Christakis was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006; of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010; and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. In 2009, he was named to the Time 100, Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2009 and again in 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. He’s the author of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. More»
#284 Abraham Tesser: The Self-evaluation Maintenance Model

Jan 20, 2020

Dr. Abraham Tesser is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Georgia. His research has made significant contributions to several areas in the field of Social Psychology. He created the self-evaluation maintenance model, a theory in social psychology that focuses on the motives for self-enhancement. More»
#283 Max Krasnow: The Evolution of Cooperation, Punishment, Honesty, and Deterrence

Jan 17, 2020

Dr. Max Krasnow is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. His research interests include: evolutionary psychology, evolution of sociality, psychology of cooperation and punishment, ecological rationality, and psychology of foraging. Dr. Krasnow’s primary line of research focuses on the evolutionary origins and computational design of the mechanisms underlying human cooperation and social behavior. Why are we more generous, trusting and cooperative, but also vengeful and punitive than an otherwise rational analysis would predict? He has been exploring how the answers to these questions neatly fall out by considering reliable features of the ancestral ecology and simple cognitive mechanisms that could evolve to benefit from them. More»
#282 Menelaos Apostolou: The Evolution of Singlehood, Parental Mate Choice, and Sexual Orientation

Jan 16, 2020

Dr. Menelaos Apostolou is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus. He was born in Athens, Greece and he completed his post-graduate and graduate studies in the United Kingdom. He has published several peer-reviewed papers, books and chapters in books in the area of evolutionary psychology. More»