All Episodes

#154 Robert McCauley: Cognitive Science of Religion, Culture, Cognition, Evolution, and Ritual

Mar 22, 2019

Dr. Robert McCauley is the William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, at Emory University. Dr. McCauley is a professor of philosophy, psychology, religion, and anthropology who is a pioneer in the cognitive science of religion. He is also the author of Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not and of Philosophical Foundations of the Cognitive Science of Religion as well as the co-author with E. Thomas Lawson of both Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms and Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture. Dr. McCauley is also the editor of The Churchlands and Their Critics and the co-editor with Harvey Whitehouse of Mind and Religion. More»
#153 Jessica Pierce: Animal Morality, Animal Ethics, and Veganism

Mar 21, 2019

Dr. Jessica Pierce is an American bioethicist, philosopher, and writer. She currently has a loose affiliation with the Center for Bioethics and Humanities, University of Colorado Denver, but considers herself mostly independent. She has previously worked variously at the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and Randolph-Macon Women's College, having studied at the University of Virginia, Harvard Divinity School and Scripps College. Early in her career, she focused on questions of human health and the environment, co-authoring Environmentalism and the New Logic of Business (Oxford, 2000) and The Ethics of Environmentally Responsible Health Care (Oxford, 2004). Since the 2000s, much of her work has focused on human relationships with animals. She collaborated with Marc Bekoff for Wild Justice (Chicago, 2010), and authored The Last Walk (Chicago, 2012), Run, Spot, Run (Chicago, 2016), and The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age (2017). More»
#152 Erica van de Waal: Social Cognition and Culture in Primates

Mar 18, 2019

Dr. Erica van de Waal is Professor of Primatology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She is also Director of the Inkawu Vervet Project, at the Mawana Game Reserve, in South Africa, an experimental field site with a study population of over 200 wild vervet monkeys, and a Branco Weiss Fellow of the Society in Science at the University of Zurich. She is interested in the evolution of primate social behaviors with a main focus on cultural transmission and cognition. More»
#151 Richard Wrangham: The Goodness Paradox, Human Self-Domestication and Aggression

Mar 15, 2019

Dr. Richard Wrangham is Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and founded the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in 1987. He has conducted extensive research on primate ecology, nutrition, and social behavior. He is best known for his work on the evolution of human warfare, described in the book Demonic Males, and on the role of cooking in human evolution, described in the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Together with Elizabeth Ross, he co-founded the Kasiisi Project in 1997, and serves as a patron of the Great Apes Survival Partnership (GRASP). He has also recently published the book The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution (2019). More»
#150 Steve Stewart-Williams: The Ape That Understood The Universe, Biology and Human Culture

Mar 14, 2019

Dr. Steve Stewart-Williams is Associate Professor of Psychology at Nottingham University Malaysia Campus. His research revolves around the idea that theories from evolutionary biology can shed light on human psychology. In particular, he’s interested in the evolutionary origins of altruistic behavior and human sex differences. He also has a long-standing interest in the philosophical implications of evolutionary theory. He’s also the author of the books Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life (2010) and The Ape That Understood the Universe (2018). More»
#149 Martin Daly: Evolution, Inequality, Violence, And Homicide

Mar 11, 2019

Dr. Martin Daly is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour at McMaster University, Canada. His areas of interest are human violence (especially homicide), family relations, and evolutionary psychology. He is a founding member and past-president (1991-1993) of the Human Behavior & Evolution Society (HBES), and with his late wife Margo Wilson, he served as co-editor-in-chief of the society's journal Evolution & Human Behaviour for its first decade. In 1998, Dr. Daly was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. They also co-authored three books: Sex, Evolution and Behavior (1978, 1983), Homicide (1988), and The Truth about Cinderella (1998). Dr. Daly’s latest book (July, 2016) is entitled Killing the Competition: Economic Inequality and Homicide. More»
#148 David Benatar: Anti-Natalism, Abortion, Suicide, Euthanasia, Environmentalism

Mar 8, 2019

Dr. David Benatar is professor of philosophy at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa. He is best known for his advocacy of antinatalism in his book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, in which he argues that coming into existence is a serious harm, regardless of the feelings of the existing being once brought into existence, and that, as a consequence, it is always morally wrong to create more sentient beings. He’s also the author of books like The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys (2012), and The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions (2017). More»
#147 Rebecca Roache: Philosophy of Psychiatry, Depression, Human Enhancement, and Crime

Mar 7, 2019

Dr. Rebecca Roache is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. She teaches practical ethics, logic, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, philosophy of language, and early modern philosophy. She’s also been Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and Programme Manager of the Oxford Loebel Lectures and Research Programme, at the University of Oxford. Before that, she was James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute. Since 2013, Dr. Roache has been an Associate Editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, and since 2007 she has also been a contributor to Oxford's Practical Ethics: Ethics in the News blog. More»
#146 Peggy Mason: The Neuroscience of Empathy and Helping Behavior

Mar 4, 2019

Dr. Peggy Mason is a Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago. She received both her BA in Biology and her Phd in Neuroscience from Harvard. Professor Mason has been on the faculty of University of Chicago since 1992. She has taught undergraduate, graduate and medical students and has received numerous teaching awards. Using her nearly 15 years of experience teaching medical students, Professor Mason wrote a single-author textbook designed for medical students (Medical Neurobiology, Oxford University Press, 2017). Professor Mason's research focuses on the neurobiological basis of empathy and helping. More»
#145 Filipe Nobre Faria: Evolutionary Theory, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics, and Market Liberalism

Mar 1, 2019

Dr. Filipe Nobre Faria currently works as a post-doctoral researcher in ethics and political philosophy at the Institute for Philosophy of the Nova University of Lisbon (IFILNOVA). Furthermore, he lectures on subjects of his expertise at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences/Nova. Previously, he earned his PhD in Political Theory (2016) from King’s College London and his master degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (2011) from the University of East Anglia. He also taught within the areas of political theory and political economy at King’s College London. His main research interest lies in applying the insights of the behavioural and evolutionary sciences to issues in social and political philosophy. More»