This month we’re joined by Jennifer Frey, Harper Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Click here to listen to our conversation.
In this episode, we begin with an overview of Thomas Aquinas, one of the most prolific philosophers ever. (It is sometimes said that he wrote, on average, about 10,000 words per day.) Frey points out that whereas today it is common to think of philosophy as a set of specialized subdisciplines, Aquinas’ approach was to pursue philosophy as a unified discipline, under the assumption that one can’t have a fully developed ethics (for example) without thinking through the difficult issues in metaphysics.
Knowledge may seem straightforward at first. But try to give an exact definition of what it is, and you’ll soon find that it’s more difficult than you would have thought. Maybe it’s just belief. No, wait–if I believe something false, that probably can’t count as knowledge. Maybe it’s true belief. But I may believe something for the wrong reason, or for no reason at all. So maybe it’s true belief that’s supported by good evidence. Oh, my; it seems there are 
Most of our everyday reasoning involves the notion of things normally being one way rather than another. But sometimes, this gets us into trouble. Statements of prejudice and bigotry, for instance, usually make recourse to the idea of normality. Imagine I’m xenophobe, and I say, ‘Greek people are normally lazy.’ Now, clearly that’s an offensive thing to say because it shows that I’m buying into a harmful stereotype. But to make matters worse, on top of being offensive, it’s difficult to try to refute. Why? Because whenever someone tries to give me a counterexample–a Greek person who isn’t lazy–I can just reply that that counterexample doesn’t matter, because I was only saying that they’re normally lazy. Not that you couldn’t find me the odd Greek person here or there who wasn’t.
Suppose I say there’s a 50/50 chance that when I toss a coin, it will land heads. Is that statement objectively true or false? Am I describing a physical fact about the coin, the air, and the tabletop? Or is it just a subjective statement about how certain I am that the coin will land heads? Maybe, when I say there’s a 50/50 chance that the coin will land heads, all I’m saying is that I have no particular reason to place a bet on one particular outcome over the other. For all I know, either outcome is equally likely. On the one model, when I talk about probabilities, I’m describing physical facts about the way the world works. On the other, when I talk about probabilities, I’m describing my own ignorance.