This month, we speak with Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. You can listen to our conversation here.

What do we mean when we talk about nations being more or less developed? Is it simply a matter of being financially better-off? If not, then what would be a better measure of how well a country is doing?

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If you’d like to read up on the epistemology of moral disagreement, you can have a look at:

Adam Elga, ‘Reflection and Disagreement‘
Tom Kelly, “Peer Disagreement and Higher-Order Evidence”

Those two articles set the stage for the following article by Kieran Setiya:

Kieran Setiya, “Does Moral Theory Corrupt Youth?”

In addition, keep your eye open for his forthcoming monograph:

Kieran Setiya, Knowing Right From Wrong

In this episode, we’re joined by Kieran Setiya, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Click here to listen to our conversation with him.

Disagreement in ethical matters is a common enough phenomenon. Yet, what exactly is the appropriate way to respond when one is confronted with it in one’s own life? Sometimes such disputes can be resolved easily enough—perhaps there is a piece of missing information or an error in reasoning that can simply be pointed out by one interlocutor to the other.

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If you’re interested in reading about some of the issues that came up during our conversation with Daniel Sutherland, you can check out these articles:

Paul Benacerraf, “Mathematical Truth”
The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 70, No. 19, (Nov. 8, 1973), pp. 661-679.

W.D. Hart, “Benacerraf’s Dilemma”
CRÍTICA, Vol. XXIII, No. 68 (August 1991): 87-10

Unfortunately, you need online access to JSTOR to view those papers.  Sorry we weren’t able to provide freely available background readings this time!  If you don’t have online access to JSTOR, you can look them up in your nearest university library.

In this episode, we’re joined by Daniel Sutherland, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Click here to listen to our conversation with him.

In this technological age, most of our day-to-day tasks involve numbers and arithmetic. And yet, it can be difficult to say what a number is. Consider the number 3. In the room where I’m sitting, there are three bottles of detergent. But what about the number three itself? Where is that? On the shelf, where the bottles themselves are? Is the number three itself sitting here in the room, next to me? That seems like kind of a strange thing to say. So maybe it isn’t anywhere. But how could there be something that isn’t anywhere? Isn’t everything in our lives located somewhere? Sheesh. Ok, I give up. I guess there isn’t any such thing as the number three. But wait a minute–if numbers aren’t real, then what exactly was I doing all those years in math class?! It certainly seemed like I was hard at work, solving problems that ought to be taken seriously.

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This month we’re joined by Jennifer Lockhart, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University and recent graduate of the PhD program in Philosophy at the University of Chicago.  Click here to listen to our conversation with her.

You’re at a party. Some guy is dominating the conversation, holding forth loudly and at great length about the importance of politeness. “Politeness,” he says as he cuts off another guest’s attempt to get a word in, “is all about consideration for others. It’s about the little things, like making eye-contact,” he adds, failing to make eye contact. As you look for an opportunity to get away, you ask yourself: “What is wrong with this guy?”

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Anyone who’s curious to learn more about the fallacies of inductive reasoning covered in our last episode can take a look at the following:

On the base rate fallacy, see Jonathan J. Koehle’s “The base rate fallacy reconsidered: Descriptive, normative, and methodological challenges”

On the conjunction fallacy, see Vincenzo Crupi, Branden Fitelson, and Katya Tentori’s “Probability, confirmation, and the conjunction fallacy”

Professor Fitelson has also kindly shared the following lecture notes, closely related to his conversation with us, and which include a very useful bibliography.

Jaime Edwards

In this episode, Branden Fitelson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, joins us to discuss reasoning fallacies.  Click here to listen to our conversation with him.

Imagine that you are worried that you have a rare disease for which there is a reliable test. If you take this test and it returns a positive result, how certain should you be that you have the disease?

Or consider the following: Linda was a philosophy student at Berkeley in the 1960’s who fought for social justice and nuclear disarmament. Is it more likely that she is currently a bank teller or a feminist bank teller?

Professor Fitelson provides the answers to these questions, observes the surprising fact that a supermajority of us consistently answer these sorts of questions incorrectly, and offers an illuminating account of why this might be.

Jaime Edwards

Much of our last episode dealt with what Aristotle meant by words like ‘every’ and ‘some.’  As we discussed at some length in our previous post, in the Aristotelian setting, the meaning of ‘every’ was slightly different from what we’re used to.  Under today’s meaning of the word ‘every,’ when I say ‘every frog is green,’ you can check to see whether what I just said is true by checking to see whether the set of frogs is a subset of the set of green things.  But in Aristotle’s philosophy, it takes more to make the sentence ‘every frog is green’ true.  It’s not enough for the set of green things just to contain the set of frogs.

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Marko Malink is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.  Click here to listen to our conversation with him.

An episode on modal syllogistic is guaranteed to sound a bit challenging to someone who hasn’t ever studied logic.  But the topic isn’t just fascinating–it’s easy to grasp once you’ve learned some of the relevant terminology. If you’ve never taken an introductory course in logic before, I recommend taking a look at my entry from earlier this year at the Partially Examined Life blog, which introduces some of the basic concepts in philosophical logic.

Our discussion with Marko Malink turns on the meaning of words that philosophers and linguists call quantifiers.  Quantifiers are the words we use to make generalizations, including every, some, all, no, most, few, and many.

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