Category: Supplements

If you’d like to hear more about some of the philosophical ideas that Al-Kindi was responding to in the work we discussed during our last episode, you really can’t find a better resource than Peter Adamson’s own History of Philosophy podcast. To learn about Aristotle’s arguments for the eternity of the universe, check out this…

If you’re interested in learning about how the ancient Stoic philosopher Chrysippus tried to deal with the sorites paradox, give episode 61 of the amazing History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast a listen.

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…

In our latest episode, Peter Kail addressed a popular misreading of David Hume’s views about induction—the process of inferring things about the future on the basis of facts about the past.  According to this reading, Hume is a skeptic about induction.  Let’s distinguish skeptical from non-skeptical views about induction like this: Skepticism about induction: we…

Thus far, three of our episodes (12, 25 and 28) have contained some discussion of possible worlds semantics.  Most memorably, we learned in our last episode that John Searle is rather critical of the enterprise.  But what is possible worlds semantics?  Let’s take a look. This possible worlds business originally stems from the work of…

Thus far, a number of our interviews have alluded to what philosophers of language call indexical expressions. (In particular, episodes 12, 25, and 27.) Although the theory of what these words and phrases mean represents one of the major developments in philosophy over the past fifty or so years, it can seem counterintuitive at first.…