philosophy

#205 Laura Cabrera: The Philosophy of Human Enhancement

Jul 31, 2019

Dr. Laura Cabrera is Assistant Professor in the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences and the Department of Translational Science & Molecular Medicine at Michigan State University. Dr. Cabrera's interests focus on the ethical and societal implications of neurotechnology and neuroscientific advances. She has been working on projects that explore the media coverage and the attitudes of the general public toward pharmacological and novel neurosurgical interventions for the treatment of psychiatric disorders. She has also worked on the public perceptions towards the use of different modalities of neuromodifiers for enhancement purposes, as well as their normative implications. Her current work focuses on the ethical and social implications of environmental changes for brain and mental health. She’s also the author of the book Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies. More»
#209 Cecilia Heyes: Cultural Evolutionary Psychology, Imitation, And Mindreading

Jul 29, 2019

Dr. Cecilia Heyes is a Professor of Psychology and Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Science at All Souls College, University of Oxford. She was trained as an experimental psychologist at University College London (UCL, 1978-84). As a Harkness Fellow in the United States (1984-6), she studied evolutionary epistemology with Donald T. Campbell and philosophy of mind with Daniel Dennett. She’s done experimental work, initially in animal cognition and later in cognitive neuroscience, and more recently her group developed and tested an associative account of the origins of imitation and the mirror neuron system. She’s the author of Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. More»
#196 Peter Singer: Ethics, Veganism, And Effective Altruism

Jul 25, 2019

REUPLOAD OF PETER SINGER'S INTERVIEW More»
#180 Joseph Bulbulia: Religion, Cognition, Ritual, Morality, And Meaning

May 23, 2019

Dr. Joseph A. Bulbulia is a Professor in the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts at the University of Auckland, where he was appointed the Maclaurin Goodfellow Chair in Theological and Religious Studies in 2018. Dr. Bulbulia is regarded as one of the founders of the contemporary evolutionary religious studies. He is a past President of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion and is currently co-editor of Religion, Brain & Behavior. Dr. Bulbulia is one of four on the Senior Management Team of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, a 20-year longitudinal study tracking over 15,000 New Zealanders each year. He is an associate investigator for Pulotu, a database of 116 Pacific cultures purpose-built to investigate the evolutionary dynamics of religion. In 2016, Dr. Bulbulia won a Research Excellence Award at Victoria University. More»
#170 Steven Hales: Philosophy of Luck, Relativism and Perspectivism, And Evolutionary Psychology

Apr 29, 2019

Dr. Steven Hales is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University, US. His areas of specialization include epistemology and metaphysics. He’s the author of books like Metaphysics, A Companion to Relativism, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, and This Is Philosophy. More»
#167 Rani Lill Anjum: Philosophy of Causation, Scientific Models, and Medicine

Apr 22, 2019

Dr. Rani Lill Anjum is Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) School of Economics and Business, and Leader of the CAPS – Center for Applied Philosophy of Science since 2018. She spent two years at the University of Nottingham, working with Professor Stephen Mumford on dispositions and causation from 2007 to 2009. Together they developed a new theory of causation. After Nottingham, she got funding from FRIPRO NFR for a 4-year research project, Causation in Science (CauSci), hosted by the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) from January 2011. In May 2014 she was offered a permanent contract as Research Fellow at HH NMBU. In December 2014 her new research project Causation, Complexity and Evidence in Health Sciences (CauseHealth) got funded by FRIPRO and started up in the spring 2015 at NMBU. In 2018 she established NMBU CAPS – Centre for Applied Philosophy of Science. Dr. Lill Anjum has coauthored 4 books with Dr. Stephen Mumford: Getting Causes from Powers (2011), Causation: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Causation in Science and the Methods of Scientific Discovery (2018), and What Tends to Be: The Philosophy of Dispositional Modality (2018). More»
#165 Stephen Law: Naturalism, Liberalism, And The Religious And The Atheists

Apr 18, 2019

Dr. Stephen Law is formally Reader in Philosophy at Heythrop College, and before that Research Fellow at The Queen’s College Oxford. He is currently editor of the Royal Institute of Philosophy journal THINK. He has published several books, including The Philosophy Gym, A Very Short Introduction to Humanism, and Believing Bullshit. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts and Commerce and in 2008 became the provost of the Centre for Inquiry UK. More»
#162 Philip Goff: Materialism, Consciousness, And The Nature of Reality

Apr 11, 2019

Dr. Philip Goff is a philosopher and consciousness researcher at Durham University, UK. His main research focus is trying to explain how the brain produces consciousness. He thinks we need to radically rethink our understanding of matter in order to explain consciousness, in something like the way Einstein radically rethought the nature of space and time. Dr. Goff also has a sideline in political philosophy, focusing on issues pertaining to taxation, globalization and social justice. He’s also the author of the book Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. More»
#156 Samuel Andreyev: Innate and Acquired Aesthetic and Artistic Tastes

Mar 28, 2019

Samuel Andreyev is a Canadian music composer and writer residing in France. He also has a YouTube channel with his name. 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»