Philosophy

Friction

A Philosophy , Society & Culture and Education podcast

About the show

On this podcast, I interview philosophers and other academics on fascinating philosophical and philosophy-adjacent topics. fric.substack.com

Newest episodes

156. Eric Schwitzgebel | AI and Consciousness

Oct 28, 2026 1 hr 28 min

If an AI told you it was conscious, how would you know whether to believe it? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Eric Schwitzgebel is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and University of California MacArthur Foundation Chair. His work has focused on philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, moral psychology, classical Chinese philosophy, epistemology, metaphilosophy, metaphysics, and more. Check out his element with Cambridge Elements, “AI and Consciousness”!https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/ai-and-consciousness/E77C92088DA3C9F89E7FE7C75CBB1896https://a.co/d/01yvIzYI 2. Book Summary Schwitzgebel argues that we don’t know whether near-future AI systems will be conscious, and that we won’t know before we’ve built huge numbers of disputably conscious systems, because engineering is outpacing consciousness science. He first rejects the claim that the answer is obvious either way, pointing to serious experts on both sides: Dehaene, Lau, Chalmers and the IIT camp on one, Seth, Godfrey-Smith, Block and Searle on the other. He defines consciousness by example in the standard phenomenal sense, and argues that “AI” is actually the blurrier concept, which matters because sweeping impossibility arguments usually assume something narrow such as digital computation. The core of the book is an argument built around ten possibly essential features of consciousness: luminosity, subjectivity, unity, access, intentionality, flexible integration, determinacy, wonderfulness, specious presence and privacy. If any of these is essential, it constrains which AI systems could be conscious, but we can’t establish which are. Introspection fails because of its poor historical track record, its structural bias toward experiences that are known and accessed, and the narrowness of a human-only evidence base for claims about all possible minds. Conceptual arguments fare no better: Rosenthal’s case for higher-order theory works only by...

155. Henry Taylor | Mind and Natural Kinds

Aug 18, 2026 1 hr 31 min

What if vision, working memory, and consciousness are not the real joints of the mind, but just the words psychology happens to have inherited? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Henry Taylor is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, and his work has focused on various issues in metaphysics, mind, cultural robotics, and more. Check out his book, "Natural Kinds and the Science of Perception"! https://academic.oup.com/book/62599 https://a.co/d/0gUPbopl 2. Book Summary Taylor develops a property-cluster account of natural kinds tailored to psychology and states it as a sufficient condition, PNK: if a kind’s members instantiate a cluster of properties that co-occur non-accidentally, and the kind earns its keep in prediction, explanation, generalization, or discovery, it’s a psychological natural kind. Two commitments anchor the view — natural kinds are the kinds that serve science’s epistemic goals, and kindhood isn’t up to us, since the clustering has to answer to worldly structure. He deliberately strips the metaphysical commitments that homeostatic, causal, and stable cluster views carry, then defends the resulting liberality: the objection that PNK needs a supplementary mechanistic or causal explanation of the clustering is answered by distinguishing cases, and Block’s necessary-property objection gets a separate reply. Long-term memory serves as the worked example. Chapter 4 isolates the Eliminativist Claim — that a psychological term failing to pick out a natural kind should be dropped — motivates it via the epistemic privilege natural-kind terms enjoy, concedes that non-natural-kind terms can still be useful, and ends up defending a qualified version. The applications are where the framework does real work, and the results are non-uniform. Dorsal and ventral streams each come out as natural kinds — each a non-accidental property cluster with genuine epistemic payoff — which Taylor uses against scepticism about the two visual st...

154. Justin Mooney | Phases of Objects

Aug 4, 2026 1 hr 29 min

When a lump of clay becomes a statue, does one thing get a new job, or does a brand-new thing come into being? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Justin Mooney is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at College of the Holy Cross, and his work has focused on metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and more. Check out his recent book, "Phases of Objects"! https://academic.oup.com/book/62226 https://a.co/d/0eL5AfF9 2. Book Summary Phases of Objects by Justin Mooney (Oxford University Press, 2026) is a work of analytic metaphysics defending a controversial view Mooney calls “phasalism”: the thesis that material objects are not permanent members of their kinds but can survive changes from one kind to another, so long as such changes violate no generic requirements on identity and persistence that hold for all material objects regardless of kind. This directly opposes what Mooney takes to be contemporary orthodoxy—”substantialism,” the widely-held and usually unexamined assumption that objects belong to their kinds permanently and essentially. His entry point is the classic puzzle of the statue and the lump of clay: whereas most solutions treat the statue and the clay as either identical or as two coincident objects, Mooney argues they are one and the same object, with the lump merely coming to “be” a statue in the same way a human person comes to be an adult by maturing. Being a statue, on his view, is a phase the clay passes through, not a new substance. The book builds this position out into a general metaphysics of material objects across five chapters. After laying methodological and metaphysical groundwork and distinguishing phase sortal changes (where the object before and after are numerically identical) from substance sortal changes (where they are distinct), Mooney proposes a phasalist criterion of identity—a broadly spatiotemporal account of persistence conditions—and tests it against a range of cases. He then deploys phasalism against the stand...

Similar podcasts

Dear Hank & John Complexly

The Gray Area with Sean Illing Vox

Philosophize This! Stephen West

The Shawn Ryan Show Shawn Ryan

The Nietzsche Podcast Untimely Reflections

Hermitix Hermitix

History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps Peter Adamson

The Art of Manliness The Art of Manliness

All episodes

156. Eric Schwitzgebel | AI and Consciousness

Oct 28, 2026 1 hr 28 min

155. Henry Taylor | Mind and Natural Kinds

Aug 18, 2026 1 hr 31 min

154. Justin Mooney | Phases of Objects

Aug 4, 2026 1 hr 29 min

153. David Papineau | Mind is Physical

Jul 28, 2026 1 hr 50 min

Is the hard problem of consciousness a real problem, or a question that dissolves once you take physicalism seriously? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest David Papineau is Professor of Philosophy at King's College, London, and his work has focused on epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and mind. 2. Interview Summary Papineau opens by characterizing physicalism via Kripke’s creation metaphor: once God has arranged all the material stuff, the work is done — no further act is needed to install minds. On defining “physical,” he takes the via negativa: whatever isn’t fundamentally mental or vital. He concedes this is cheap but insists it’s adequate for the mind-body problem, since the interesting conclusion is just that the mental is identical to something non-mental; Alyssa Ney has convinced him that a general physicalism about everything owes more (roughly, a few mathematically characterizable basic quantities). He also flags his student Jonathan Emery’s line that one needn’t argue for universal causal closure at all — the relevant question is whether everything going on inside our heads is physical — and grants the point is reasonable, while noting the physicalist still needs a non-question-begging characterization of “brain process” broad enough to cover glia, fields, and whatever physics hasn’t found yet. On the hard problem, he simply rejects the presupposition: brain processes don’t give rise to consciousness; they are consciousness, as H2O arrangements don’t give rise to water. Identities need no explanation — he retells Block’s Twain/Clemens anecdote — and the same applies to generic consciousness if it turns out identical to global workspace activity or reentrant loops. Chalmers’ residue reduces to a tractable question about the reference of phenomenal concepts, settled empirically. He disowns functionalism as a metaphysical mess (second-order role properties can’t be pains, since pains occupy the roles), preferring gener...

152. Daniel Stoljar | The Introspection Principle

Jul 21, 2026 1 hr 59 min

What if introspection isn’t an inner eye watching your own mind, but simply what rationality requires of you? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Daniel Stoljar is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, and his work has focused on philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaethics, metaphysics, and metaphilosophy. Check out his recent book, "The Introspection Principle: Rationalism about Knowledge of Consciousness"! https://academic.oup.com/book/63008 https://a.co/d/0gWXxovb 2. Book Summary Daniel Stoljar’s The Introspection Principle: Rationalism about Knowledge of Consciousness sets out to explain what introspection is — defined nominally as the distinctive way we come to know or reasonably believe that we’re in psychological states that are conscious — and to defend a single unified theory of it. The theory is the rationalist account, built around the titular principle: if you are in a conscious state, you should believe that you are, ceteris paribus and given background conditions. Two theses do the work. First, that this is a genuine principle of rationality, on a par with principles enjoining you to believe the obvious consequences of your beliefs, to coordinate belief with perception, and to act on your beliefs. Second, that you have a capacity for introspection iff you abide by it. Introspective belief is thus the manifestation of a rational disposition, and introspective knowledge is introspective belief that amounts to knowledge — so consciousness turns out to be built into the content of rationality. The first four chapters lay the groundwork. Chapter 2 defends an inclusive notion of a conscious state — one having enough of phenomenal character, awareness, attention, cerebral celebrity, and poise — against the more familiar exclusive (phenomenal, higher-order, access) definitions, while allowing rival theories to help themselves to exclusive notions if useful. Chapter 3 states the principle and fields twent...

151. María Martinez Alles | Torts and Retribution

Jul 7, 2026 1 hr 34 min

What if the point of punitive damages isn’t just to punish wrongdoers, but to tell victims their dignity actually counts? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest María Guadalupe Martínez Alles is Associate Professor of Law at Sturm College of Law, and her work has focused on the philosophy of law. Check out her recent book, "Torts and Retribution: The Case for Punitive Damages"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/torts-and-retribution/6C2E6812DA1D2071DA90DA286FC70285https://a.co/d/06f7e0Kb 2. Book Summary María Guadalupe Martínez Alles’s Torts and Retribution: The Case for Punitive Damages (Cambridge University Press, 2025) sets out to build what she argues has long been missing from tort scholarship: a thorough, cross-jurisdictional theoretical justification for the retributive dimension of tort law, as embodied in punitive damages. She observes that punitive damages sit awkwardly between civil and criminal law—awarded in private lawsuits yet explicitly punitive and noncompensatory—and that the dominant camps in tort theory have mostly avoided reckoning with this. Rights-based and corrective-justice theorists tend either to dismiss punishment as an anomaly or to force it into a compensatory framework, while law-and-economics accounts simply collapse punishment into deterrence. Against this backdrop, Martínez Alles takes the “punishment and deterrence” formula seriously by reconstructing it as “retribution and deterrence,” arguing that stripping punitive damages of their retributive content would gut them of something essential, and that the real question is how retribution and deterrence interact rather than which one to choose. The book’s central contribution is a framework she coins Relational Retribution, developed across its four parts (the place of punishment in torts, the retributive rationale, retribution in the mass-market setting, and why tort law specifically is the right venue). Rather than grounding punitive damages solely in the “jus...

150. Kristie Miller | Life in Four Dimensions

Jun 30, 2026 2 hr 32 min

What if the flow of time is an illusion, and the past, present, and future all exist together right now? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Kristie Miller is the Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and co-director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Time. Her work has focused on metaphysics, especially as it relates to time, temporal passage, identity, and agency.Check out her recent book, "Life in Four Dimensions: A Defence of the Block Universe Theory"!https://academic.oup.com/book/62313https://a.co/d/04YERGhM 2. Book Summary Life in Four Dimensions: A Defence of the Block Universe Theory argues for the block universe view of time—the thesis that reality is a four-dimensional spacetime block in which all events (past, present, and future) exist, with no objective, non-perspectival fact about which events are “really” present. On this static picture, what exists never changes and nothing has the property of being objectively present; talk of past, present, and future is merely talk about where events sit relative to one’s own location. The author’s central target is not dynamical theories of time themselves (presentism, the growing block, the moving spotlight), but a specific family of arguments against the block view, which he calls the General Inference-to-the-Best-Explanation (IBE) argument: the world seems to us as though time robustly passes, the best explanation for this seeming is that time really does pass, and therefore time passes. Rather than taking the usual “gaps” route—conceding the world seems dynamical but explaining that seeming away—the book defends the bolder “no gaps” approach, contending that we live in a block universe and that it seems to us as though we do. What distinguishes the book methodologically is its blend of analytic argument with experimental philosophy: the author reports over forty empirical studies, conducted with collaborators, probing what he terms the “manifest temporal image”—how...

149. Mark Balaguer | How to Be a Presentist

May 5, 2026 3 hr 3 min

What if only the present moment exists, and everything you call the past or the future is, strictly speaking, nothing at all? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Mark Balaguer is professor of philosophy at Cal State LA, and his research has covered a wide range of topics, including metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, free will, and metaethics. Check out his book, "How to Be a Presentist"!https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-to-be-a-presentist-9780197845714https://a.co/d/009UAUtC 2. Book Summary Balaguer’s book sets out to develop and defend an original version of presentism — the view in the philosophy of time that only present objects exist, with no past or future objects in the inventory of reality. Crucially, Balaguer is not arguing that presentism is true; his project is the more modest one of showing that presentism is a live, defensible position and that, if there is a fact of the matter at all, the question of its truth is an open empirical one rather than something settleable by armchair metaphysics. The book is organized around three classical objections to presentism: the ontological-commitment objection (that true sentences like “Obama admires Gandhi” seem to require past objects to exist), the truthmaking objection (that truths about the past need something in reality to make them true), and the special-relativity objection (that physics rules out a privileged “now”). The first part of the book lays metaphilosophical groundwork, arguing against trivialism, against necessitarianism about metaphysics, and in favor of an “anti-metaphysicalist” stance on which presentism, if factual, is a contingent empirical hypothesis rather than something knowable a priori. Part II then mounts the defense proper. Against the ontological-commitment objection, Balaguer endorses a sweeping “FAPP-ist” error theory: the relevant ordinary and scientific sentences about past or future objects are, stric...

148. Matt Duncan | Acquaintance

Apr 21, 2026 1 hr 46 min

What if simply having something consciously present to mind already counts as a form of knowledge, and helps explain not just perception, but beauty, emotion, and moral life? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Matt Duncan is Professor of Philosophy at Rhode Island College, and his work has focused on metaphysics, epistemology, and mind, including the nature of experience and experiential knowledge. Check out his book, "Present to the Mind: Acquaintance and Its Significance"! https://academic.oup.com/book/62315 https://a.co/d/0i7cd8zC 2. Book Summary In Present to the Mind, Matt Duncan develops and defends a Russellian-style notion of ‘acquaintance’: an especially direct form of conscious awareness we bear to things present in experience, such as colors, sounds, pains, smells, and other phenomenal features. The book begins from a striking question about when your ‘epistemic day’ starts. Against the orthodox view that perceptual knowledge arrives only after experience gives rise to belief, Duncan argues that conscious awareness itself already puts us in touch with reality in a knowledge-involving way. The book is organized around three main claims: acquaintance exists, acquaintance is a form of knowledge, and acquaintance is deeply significant in human life. The middle of the book argues first that several forms of acquaintance are real, and then that acquaintance is not just epistemically useful but itself a distinctive kind of knowledge. Duncan’s core idea is that some knowledge of things is constituted by conscious awareness rather than by belief: in perception, you do not first see, then believe, then know; rather, you can see and thereby know. From there he develops an account of ‘knowledge of things’ that is meant to work across different theories of experience, and he argues that acquaintance plays a foundational epistemic role by helping justify beliefs and underpinning much empirical knowledge, even if it is non-propositional. The final...

147. Rivka Weinberg | The Meaning of it All

Apr 14, 2026 1 hr 1 min

If life as a whole has no ultimate point, what kind of meaning can still make it worth living? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Rivka Weinberg is Professor of Philosophy and Mary W. and J. Stanley Johnson Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College. Her work has focused on metaphysics and ethics, especially on meaning/purpose and bioethics. Check out her book, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-meaning-of-it-all-9780197758021 https://a.co/d/0gsQDkWN 2. Book Summary In The Meaning of It All, Rivka Weinberg argues that many disputes about life’s meaning stay confused because they fail to distinguish different senses of ‘meaning’. She separates three kinds: ‘Ultimate Meaning’, ‘Everyday Meaning’, and ‘Cosmic Meaning’, and also distinguishes several aspects of meaning, such as value, significance, impact, explanation, purpose, and point. Her boldest claim is that ‘Ultimate Meaning’—the point of living a life as a whole—is impossible for beings like us. A point, she argues, is a valued end external to the activity it justifies; but since a human life contains all of one’s projects, values, and aims, there is nothing outside the enterprise of living one’s life that could serve as its final point. So life as a whole is, in that specific sense, pointless, even though many things within life are not. That bleak conclusion does not, however, lead Weinberg to nihilism. The second major part of the book argues that ‘Everyday Meaning’ is real, abundant, and objective rather than merely subjective: love, truth, beauty, morality, achievement, and worthwhile engagement can genuinely make a life meaningful, and people can be mistaken both about what matters and about whether their lives are well spent. She also argues that ‘Cosmic Meaning’ is often overrated. Even if there were God, miracles, an afterlife, or some grand cosmic purpose, that would not solve th...

146. Jay Garfield | Norms and Nature

Apr 7, 2026 1 hr 16 min

Where do norms come from: from transcendent reason, or from the customs, practices, and forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Jay Garfield is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Smith College and Harvard Divinity School, and Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University. He work has focused on Buddhist philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, cross-cultural work, and more. Check out his book, "Norms and Nature: A Humean Account of the Sources of Normativity"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/norms-and-nature-9780197839768 https://a.co/d/05nsMQRP 2. Book Summary In Norms and Nature, Jay Garfield argues that the central philosophical question is where normativity comes from: whether norms are grounded in something transcendent, as in broadly Kantian approaches, or instead arise immanently out of human life itself. He frames this through the Euthyphro problem and then broadens it by drawing on Daoist and Buddhist traditions, using them to ask not just whether norms are discovered or made, but also whether they come from “above” in the form of principles or from “below” in patterns of human practice. Garfield’s overall answer is resolutely neo-Humean: norms are real and authoritative, but their source lies in custom, convention, and the natural and social forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures. The book’s middle argument is that this Humean naturalism does a better job than neo-Kantian transcendentalism of explaining both the origin and the authority of norms. Garfield insists that the normative domain is unified across ethics, epistemology, language, politics, and related practices, even if those domains differ in content. He then develops an account of custom as both biological and social, tracing its evolution phylogenetically and ontogenetically: human beings are not simply rule-followers by abstract reason, but animals whose hype...

145. Marc Moffett | The Indispensability of Intuitions

Mar 17, 2026 1 hr 27 min

What are intuitions, and are they indispensable to our knowledge? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Marc Moffett is associate professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, and his work has focused on epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "The Indispensability of Intuitions"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/indispensability-of-intuitions/6F7C18793C39B08507716DD934E4C6A2 https://a.co/d/0bsB4MX1 2. Book Summary Marc A. Moffett’s The Indispensability of Intuitions argues that rational intuitions are not mystical or mysterious, but rather a ubiquitous and essential feature of human cognition. Defending a stance called “moderate dogmatism,” Moffett contends that intuitions serve as basic sources of evidence alongside perception and introspection. He posits that rejecting the role of intuitions would undermine our knowledge on a massive scale, rendering them epistemically indispensable for almost all knowledge, whether a priori or a posteriori. A central part of Moffett’s argument involves rejecting the prevalent idea that the epistemic weight of intuitions (and other “seemings”) relies on a specific “presentational phenomenology” or conscious “feel”. Through thought experiments involving “Cartesian zombies,” he demonstrates that phenomenological properties are not what confer epistemic justification. Instead, he introduces the Attitudinal Theory of Presentationality (ATP), which characterizes presentational states by a unique cognitive posture—specifically, an involuntary “apprehending-as-actual” of certain contents. This non-phenomenological approach successfully addresses skepticism, such as Timothy Williamson’s “Absent Intuition Challenge,” by showing that intuitions can rationally guide our doxastic inclinations without requiring a distinct, introspectively obvious phenomenology. Building on this non-phenomenological foundation, Moffett demonstrates the wide...

144. Michael Hymers | Private Language

Mar 10, 2026 1 hr 27 min

If Wittgenstein is right, the mystery of “private experience” doesn’t point to hidden inner objects or an incommunicable language of sensation, but to a philosophical picture that makes our ordinary talk about pain and perception look far more puzzling than it is. My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Michael Hymers is Munro Professor of Metaphysics at Dalhousie University, Canada and his work has focused primarily on Wittgenstein, 20th-Century philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of language. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "Wittgenstein on Private Language, Sensation and Perception"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/wittgenstein-on-private-language-sensation-and-perception/BC7058BF509740A839271C98B084F176 https://a.co/d/05nGUE5I 2. Book Summary Michael Hymers argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of private language in Philosophical Investigations §§243–315 is best read not as “the” Private Language Argument (centered on the diary passage at §258), and not as an attempt to prove that language is intrinsically social. Instead, the book presents Wittgenstein’s treatment as a cluster of arguments, examples, and reminders whose central target is a picture: the temptation to treat sensations and perceptual experiences as private objects located in a private “phenomenal space,” and to model sensation-words on an “object-and-name” scheme. Hymers frames this as continuous with Wittgenstein’s earlier work (including The Big Typescript) and with his shift away from assumptions carried over from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus about how naming works. Methodologically, the book emphasizes Wittgenstein’s therapeutic/clarificatory aim: dissolving philosophical confusion by giving an overview of our “grammar,” rather than issuing deep theses or scientific-style explanations. A large part of the book (roughly its middle sections) explains why the “private object in phenomenal space” picture is unstable, and why it makes the very idea o...

143. Kevin Richardson | The End of Binaries

Mar 3, 2026 1 hr 45 min

Are gender and sexuality really two neat boxes, or are they better understood as positions in a multidimensional space where people can differ by degree rather than kind? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Kevin Richardson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, and his work has focused on metaphysics, language, and social reality. Check out his book, "The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees"! https://academic.oup.com/book/61709 https://a.co/d/04PYhWSf 2. Book Summary Kevin Richardson’s The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees argues that many contemporary fights over gender and sexuality are fueled by an overly rigid “binary” picture—one that treats people as cleanly classifiable into just two genders (male/female) and two orientations (straight/gay). The book begins by emphasizing the real-world stakes of this picture—how the gender binary is defended not only by conservatives but also, in some contexts, by “gender critical” feminists, and how those defenses show up in social practices and legislation. Against this background, Richardson proposes a different organizing framework: instead of asking which category someone belongs to, we should think of gender and sexual orientation more like “where you live” in a space—something that can be described coarsely (city/state) or very precisely (GPS coordinates), depending on the conversational purpose. The core metaphysical proposal is the “spatial theory.” On this view, we should distinguish gender itself from gender categories: gender is an underlying space of features, while categories like man, woman, and non-binary are socially recognized regions within that space; likewise for sexual orientation and sexual-orientation categories. Thinking spatially makes it straightforward to explain “in-between” and hard-to-classify cases: indeterminacy arises because people often use the same terms to organize overlapping regions, and scalar variat...

142. Dan Nicholson | What is Life?

Feb 24, 2026 1 hr 21 min

1. Guest Daniel Nicholson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University, and his work has focused on the philosophy of science, and in particular biology and life sciences. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "What is Life? Revisited"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/what-is-life-revisited/E6B3EA136720CF50C9480ADB8F41A6F4 https://a.co/d/5aBcmau 2. Book Summary Daniel Nicholson’s What Is Life? Revisited reassesses Erwin Schrödinger’s famous 1944 book What Is Life?—a work that’s widely cited but, Nicholson argues, rarely engaged with carefully—and asks how well Schrödinger’s core ideas have held up. Nicholson reconstructs Schrödinger’s main argument, then evaluates it via two extended critiques (of the “order-from-order” and “order-from-disorder” principles), before turning to the book’s historical influence on molecular biology and (using archival sources) Schrödinger’s deeper motivations for writing it. On Nicholson’s reconstruction, Schrödinger’s central move is to contrast the statistical “order-from-disorder” explanations common in physics and chemistry with a distinctively biological “order-from-order” picture: biological regularities, he thinks, depend on microscopic structural order in hereditary material being amplified into macroscopic organismic order. He proposes that genes must be extraordinarily stable because they are solid-state structures—an “aperiodic crystal” whose nonrepetitive organization can encode a “meaningful design” rather than a simple periodic pattern. On this basis, Schrödinger treats the organism as a kind of “clockwork” mechanism and even suggests that biology may involve “other laws of physics” (not a rejection of physics, but new non-statistical principles suited to living matter). He also offers his influential thermodynamics discussion: organisms avoid equilibrium by importing free energy—his famous (if controversial) talk of feeding on “negative entropy.” Nicholson’s bottom line is that Schrödi...

141. Douglas Allchin | Scientific Error

Feb 17, 2026 1 hr 52 min

What is error, and what is scientific error? Douglas Allchin explores the various types of scientific errors, how to identify them, and how to do science in light of them. My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Author Douglas Allchin is an AAAS Fellow and Resident Fellow at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, and his work has primarily focused on the history and philosophy of science. Check out his book, "Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/toward-a-philosophy-of-error-in-science-9780197827673 https://a.co/d/iobiDIc 2. Book Summary Douglas Allchin’s Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science argues that scientific error shouldn’t be treated as an embarrassing sideshow to “real” science, but as something integral to how science actually learns and progresses. Instead of assuming that good methods straightforwardly yield reliable knowledge, Allchin urges a systematic “philosophy of error” that tracks how a claim can be justified at one time and later become unjustified—i.e., how changes in evidence, framing, and reasoning can overturn what once looked reasonable. The book develops an “inventory” of error types across three layers of scientific justification. At the observational layer, errors can stem from material contamination, instrument problems, sampling and measurement misframing (like small samples, proxies, or confounders), and observer effects and biases. At the conceptual layer, mistakes arise in inference and interpretation—overgeneralization, faulty assumptions, confirmation bias, and culturally inflected biases, alongside a meta-risk Allchin calls “epistemic hubris” (the idea that these pitfalls only happen to other scientists). At the social layer, scientific discourse and institutions can also entrench errors (through weak vetting, communal biases, or distorted incentives), even though—ideally—organized skepticism and reciprocal criticism are supposed to help filter mistakes. Finally...

140. Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen | Wrongful Discrimination

Feb 10, 2026 1 hr 27 min

What is discrimination, and what makes it wrongful? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Author Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen is professor in political theory at University of Aarhus, Denmark. His work has focused primarily on applied and normative ethical issues.Check out his Cambridge Element, “Wrongful Discrimination”! https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/wrongful-discrimination/6E0371A0B8D60E14E657153706F6F3EChttps://a.co/d/fjqivMb 2. Book Summary Lippert-Rasmussen’s Wrongful Discrimination asks what “discrimination” is and, more importantly, what makes it wrongful when it is. He starts by distinguishing mere (generic) discrimination—just differentiating—from “group discrimination,” where people are treated differently because they’re seen as members of socially salient groups (race, gender, religion, etc.). He then maps key varieties of group discrimination (especially direct vs. indirect, plus structural patterns), and stresses that “wrongful” and “morally impermissible” can come apart: discrimination can wrong someone even in cases where (all things considered) an act might still be permissible, and vice versa. The core of the book is a critical survey of three leading families of explanations for wrongfulness: harm-based views, disrespect-based views, and views that tie wrongfulness to sustaining or expressing relations of social inequality (a “social equality”/relational-egalitarian approach). Lippert-Rasmussen argues that each can explain many paradigm cases of wrongful direct discrimination, but each runs into serious trouble once you press on hard cases—e.g., cases that look wrongful without straightforward harm, or cases where harms are present but don’t seem to generate a complaint in the right way. He then uses three especially important “non-paradigmatic” domains—indirect discrimination, implicit-bias discrimination, and algorithmic discrimination—to test these theories. The upshot is pessimistic about any single master explanation: these...

139. Joseph Mendola | The Neural Structure of Consciousness

Feb 3, 2026 1 hr 28 min

What is the mind, and how do we address the hard problem? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Joseph Mendola is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His work covers a range of topics, including ethics, metaphysics, and mind. Check out his book, "The Neural Structure of Consciousness!" https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neural-structure-of-consciousness/C7CDE1BEC7582CBE10F6875F56D5EBE0https://a.co/d/3xmkBMz 2. Book Summary Joseph Mendola’s The Neural Structure of Consciousness tackles the “hard problem” by asking how phenomenal features of experience (especially sensory qualia) relate to the physical features of the nervous system, aiming for a physicalist, internalist account that uses color experience as the central test case. The guiding idea is that the rich apparent structure of what we experience—e.g., the way colors stand in relations of similarity, opposition, and inclusion—can be explained by the real modal structure of the neurophysiology that makes those experiences possible: which neural states are available as alternatives, how they exclude or entail others, and how that “space of possibilities” is built into our visual system. Mendola frames this as a “MOUDD” approach: explaining sensory qualia by matching the modal structure of experience to the modal structure of the underlying neurophysiology, while treating many of the “properties” experience seems to present (like phenomenal colors “out there” on objects) as in significant respects illusory. A core commitment of the book is a version of the “whole nervous system” model: rather than locating consciousness in some sharply bounded neural correlate, Mendola argues (with qualifications) that the relevant nervous-system-wide organization bridging sensory receptors and action is what constitutes sensory phenomenality. In detail, he proposes that each particular quale (e.g., a specific red-at-a-location) is constituted by a distinct “modal filament” that li...

138. Vladimir Krstić | Deception

Jan 27, 2026 1 hr 24 min

What is deception, and can it occur without an intention to mislead, especially when the person being deceived is oneself? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy 1. Guest Vladimir Krstić is Assistant Professor at the United Arab Emirates University, and his work focuses on philosophy of mind, language, philosophy of deception. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/deception-and-selfdeception/F245F27D1A823DB21CC24B9C2D161C7A 2. Book Summary Vladimir Krstić argues that the main puzzles about self-deception come from starting with the wrong theory of interpersonal deception. Traditional “intentionalist” accounts say deception requires an intention to mislead; when that model is applied to self-deception, it generates classic paradoxes (roughly: you’d have to knowingly trick yourself). His alternative is a functional account: something counts as deceptive when its function is to mislead—so deception (including self-deception) may be intentional, but it needn’t be, and crucially it’s never merely accidental or a simple mistake. This functional framework is meant to unify human deception, self-deception, and biological deception under one analysis. On the self-deception side, he applies the same functional idea to explain familiar “motivated” cases (e.g., rationalizing away distressing evidence) without requiring intention to self-deceive, and he suggests a practical marker: self-deception often shows up as a motivated departure from one’s normal standards—being “not oneself.” He also argues against the idea that self-deception must be beneficial or adaptive; some forms can be neutral or even harmful, so it calls for case-by-case treatment. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 – Introduction 00:50 – Overview of the book 11:09 – Intention 17:58 – Is deception always wrong? 29:25 – Functional account 36:29 – Function 43:08 – Sci-fi case 48:13 – Vagueness 53:45 – Objections 57:51 – Self-deception 1:02:15 – Function and self-deception...

137. Emily Adlam | The Measurement Problem

Jan 20, 2026 1 hr 10 min

If quantum mechanics forces us to rethink what a “measurement outcome” even is, can experiments still count as genuine evidence for any scientific theory? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Emily Adlam is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Chapman University and her work focuses on physics, especially quantum physics, and the philosophy of physics.Check out her book, "Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics: The Epistemology of the Measurement Problem"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/saving-science-from-quantum-mechanics-9780197808856 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0197808859/ 2. Book Summary Emily Adlam’s Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics argues that the quantum ‘measurement problem’ isn’t just a puzzle about what exists (wavefunctions, worlds, collapses, etc.), but a threat to the epistemology of science—our right to treat experimental outcomes as evidence. She frames the central demand as a kind of “closing the circle”: a viable physical story of measurement should be coherent with the idea that measurement outcomes genuinely provide information about what’s measured. Against the background of ordinary assumptions about measurement (value-definiteness, veracity, unique outcomes, shareable records, reliable memory), quantum mechanics and results like contextuality make it hard to keep the whole intuitive package, which means some “solutions” risk making scientific knowledge fragile or even impossible. The book then evaluates leading families of responses to the measurement problem by asking whether they preserve empirical confirmation. For Everettian (many-worlds) approaches, Adlam emphasizes the “probability problem” as an epistemic problem: if we can’t explain why observed relative frequencies should confirm the theory, Everettian QM risks empirical incoherence—undermining the very evidence that would support it. She also examines “observer-relative” approaches (including perspectival/neo-Copenhagen, relational QM, and possibly QBis...

136. Trenton Merricks | Self and Identity

Jan 13, 2026 1 hr 29 min

What if the deepest question about “you” isn’t whether you’re the same person over time, but which future life it’s actually rational for you to anticipate and care about as your survival? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Trenton Merricks is Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, and his work focuses primarily on metaphysics, but also religion, epistemology, language and mind. In this interview, we discuss his book, "Self and Identity". 2. Book Summary In Self and Identity, Trenton Merricks argues that a lot of debate about “personal identity” mixes together two different questions. The first is his What Question: what it is for a future person to have, at that future time, what matters in survival for you. His answer is that survival-relevance is constituted by what it’s appropriate for you to first-personally anticipate and to have future-directed self-interested concern about—where “appropriate” is a distinctive, non-evidential and non-moral norm. He also insists we shouldn’t conflate what matters in survival with what matters to you about the future in general (friends, projects, agency, etc.), since that conflation can distort arguments about survival. The second is his Why Question: what relation to a future conscious person explains why that future person will have what matters in survival for you. Merricks’s headline view is: identity is not what matters in survival, but identity delivers what matters in survival—i.e., numerical identity is (on his favored endurance picture) the right kind of explanation for why survival obtains. He then defends both the sufficiency and the necessity of personal identity for survival, targeting Parfit-style fission reasoning in particular and arguing that (depending on one’s metaphysics of persistence) Parfit’s argument can be blocked; he also rejects the idea that unbranching psychological connectedness/continuity is sufficient for personal identity (and so for what matte...

135. Paul Thagard | How Brains Build Consciousness

Jan 6, 2026 1 hr 30 min

Can brains build consciousness? In this interview, Paul Thagard argues that they can, and explains his approach. My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Paul Thagard is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Association for Psychological Science. His work focuses on cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science and medicine. Check out his book, "Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness"! https://academic.oup.com/book/60618https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FHQJ3KCS/ 2. Book Summary Paul Thagard’s Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness develops a neuroscientifically grounded, mechanism-based theory meant to explain not just “ordinary” perception, sensation, emotion, and thought, but also the especially puzzling, highly structured forms of experience that show up in dreaming, humour, and music. The core proposal is the “NBC” theory: conscious experience arises from interactions among Neural representation, Binding, Coherence, and Competition—where coherence is understood as constraint satisfaction and competition governs which representations win out for attention and interpretation. After laying out NBC and illustrating it with simpler cases (e.g., how brains build perceptual and bodily experiences and integrate them into unified “compound” consciousness), Thagard uses it to explain three marquee domains. Dreaming is treated as a product of the same mechanisms, aiming to explain why dreams are common, emotionally charged, continuous with daily life yet sometimes bizarre, and still feel intensely “what-it’s-like” (his term “zing”) even when they don’t make ordinary sense. Humour is explained via a characteristic dual shift: incoming words/images trigger an initial interpretation and emotional response, then a change prompts a second interpretation and response, and recognizing that...

134. Daniel Whiteson | Do Aliens Speak Physics?

Dec 30, 2025 1 hr 3 min

If we ever make first contact, the hard part might not be sending a message across space, but working out whether aliens do science in anything like our sense, share concepts like number and explanation, and could actually understand what we mean by “physics.” My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Daniel Whiteson is an experimental particle physicist and professor of Physics and Astronomy at University of California, Irvine. His work focuses on the analysis of high-energy particle collisions. He co-hosts a podcast about the Universe (Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe). Check out his new book with Andy Warner, "Do Aliens Speak Physics?: And Other Questions about Science and the Nature of Reality"! https://www.amazon.com/dp/1324064641/ 2. Book Summary In Do Aliens Speak Physics? Daniel Whiteson (with Andy Warner) asks what it would take—not just to find intelligent aliens, but to have a meaningful scientific exchange with them. The organizing idea is an “extended Drake equation”: beyond the usual probabilities of life and intelligence, we have to ask what fraction of alien civilizations do something like experiment-driven science (fscience), what fraction of those we could communicate with at all (fcommunication), and then whether we’d even share enough conceptual overlap to ask and answer the “same” scientific questions. The middle of the book is a tour of the ways those terms might collapse. Even if aliens are curious, their “science” might not look like ours; even if we can exchange signals, translating meanings could be brutally hard; and even math—often treated as the obvious shared language—might not function as a universal bridge if aliens don’t carve the world into countable objects the way we do. The authors use vivid hypotheticals to press the point that what feels “obvious” to us can hide deep assumptions (about counting, representation, and what matters), and those assumptions can reshape what we notice and what questions we even...

133. Graham Oppy | Fine-Tuning and Grim Reapers

Dec 23, 2025 1 hr 27 min

Can a Bayesian look at fine-tuning make “design” less compelling, and do Grim Reaper-style infinity puzzles really show that an infinite past is impossible? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and specializes in Philosophy of Religion. 2. Interview Summary In this interview, Friction speaks with Graham Oppy about two big clusters of issues: a Bayesian way of framing fine-tuning arguments, and how (if at all) Benardete/“Grim Reaper” style paradoxes support causal or temporal finitism. On fine-tuning, Friction sketches a strategy that starts from probabilistic constraints—roughly, that “design” shouldn’t get a higher prior than non-design, and that life-permittingness/fine-tuning isn’t (or needn’t be) more expected on design than on non-design—so that updating on a life-permitting universe won’t, by itself, drive you toward design. Oppy presses on how the hypothesis space is being carved up and what background assumptions are doing the work, noting that fine-tuning defenders often treat “design” as a family of more specific hypotheses—some of which might assign high likelihood to fine-tuning (the “more batter on the design side” idea). A related thread Oppy raises is an “inscrutability” worry: given a designer’s vast option space, it may be hard to say what fine-tuning should even be likely on design, which complicates the likelihood comparisons that fine-tuning arguments rely on. The conversation also touches on how conditioning on extremely specific facts about “these exact parameters” can generate counterintuitive results about what should have been expected a priori, and Oppy connects this to “many-gods” style worries familiar from Pascal’s Wager debates. In the second half, Friction and Oppy turn to Benardete-style setups: infinite sequences of would-be interveners arranged at times approaching a limit, which can make it seem like an outcome must occur even though no particular inte...

132. Karen Stohr | A Kantian Guide to Life

Dec 16, 2025 1 hr 16 min

What if Kant is right that real freedom is not doing whatever you feel like, but choosing principles you can rationally endorse and then living by them? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Karen Stohr is Ryan Family Chair Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Georgetown University, where she is also a Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Her work focuses on ethics. In this interview, we focus on her book, "Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life". 2. Book Summary Karen Stohr’s Choosing Freedom is a practical guide to living “freely” in a Kantian sense: not doing whatever you feel like, but governing yourself by principles you can rationally stand behind. She emphasizes that the book is not about becoming more like Kant or constantly asking “What would Kant say?”; it’s about using Kant’s insights to illuminate hard-to-notice features of our moral lives and help you live by your own standards. Stohr also frames the book as a short tour of Kant’s systematic ethics followed by lots of attention to the everyday “trees” Kant actually wrote about—things like gossip, friendship, and dinner parties—because Kant meant ethics to guide real life. Kantian freedom, on this telling, often requires self-constraint: exercising autonomy means “getting a grip on ourselves” so we can live according to rationally defensible principles rather than being yanked around by impulse and procrastination. The early chapters lay out the Kantian basics: morality is grounded in reason rather than shifting feelings, and the categorical imperative is presented through three connected ideals—equality, dignity, and community. Stohr stresses that Kant isn’t only about isolated individual choice: the “kingdom of ends” picture highlights how our communities shape our moral lives and how morality asks us to build social relations on the equal value of persons. In the “moral assessment” sections, she connects this framework to knowing and judging our...

131. Dan Linford | The Causal Principle

Dec 9, 2025 1 hr 24 min

If causation is not fundamental, what keeps reality from turning into chaos with things randomly popping into existence, and does the kalām’s claim that whatever begins to exist has a cause really explain the order we see? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Dan Linford is lecturer at Old Dominion University, Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies. His work focuses on physics and the philosophy of physics, philosophy of religion. 2. Interview Summary In this interview, Dan Linford discusses his paper “Without microphysical causation, just anything cannot begin to exist just anywhere,” motivated in part by debates around the causal principle often associated with the kalām cosmological argument. He frames the core question as whether the order we observe in the universe really requires causation—specifically, whether “whatever begins to exist must have a cause”—or whether there are non-causal ways to explain why we don’t see arbitrary “raging tigers” popping into existence out of nowhere. A major focus is a traditional line of support for the causal principle that Linford labels the Hobbes–Hume–Edwards–Pryor principle (HPP): roughly, if the causal principle were false, we’d lack a good explanation for why things don’t begin to exist at arbitrary times, places, in arbitrary numbers, and of arbitrary kinds. Linford and the host also pause on how strong the causal principle is supposed to be (mere accident vs physical/metaphysical necessity), and note that once you add extra metaphysical commitments (the interview uses the A-theory of time as an example), the principle can become either harder to justify or even vacuously true in a way that won’t do the work causal-principle defenders want. Linford then develops an alternative picture—drawing on “neo-Russellian” themes—on which causation isn’t fundamental to microphysics (for Russell-style reasons like time-symmetry), but causal talk remains useful in the special sciences for identifying “effe...

130. Phil Halper and Niayesh Afshordi | Battle of the Big Bang

Dec 2, 2025 1 hr 9 min

What, if anything, happened before the Big Bang, which origin story is right, and what future observations could finally decide between them? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guests Phil is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Socieity, science popularizer, and runs the excellent YouTube channel "Phil Halper", aka Skydivephil. Niayesh Afshordi is professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo. He is also a founding faculty member at the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics and an Associate Faculty in the Cosmology and Gravitation group at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. 2. Book Summary Battle of the Big Bang argues that what most people call “the Big Bang” is really two things: a well-tested story about a very hot early universe, and a much less secure story about an initial “bang” or singular beginning. The authors frame the hot early universe as “science’s earliest memory,” while emphasizing that cosmologists are now trying to recover an even earlier “lost memory,” using new physics rather than just extrapolating familiar laws backwards forever. They set the stage with a brisk history of cosmological thinking and with the central puzzle: the standard picture explains a lot about how the universe evolves, but it does not straightforwardly tell us what (if anything) happened before the Big Bang, or what replaces the would-be singularity. The middle of the book is a guided tour through today’s rival “origin stories,” presented as a genuine competition with strengths, weaknesses, and lots of unfinished business. Using inflation and its offshoots as one major contender, the authors then explore a sequence of alternatives: multiverse ideas, Hawking-style “no boundary” beginnings, string-theoretic scenarios like colliding branes and string-gas phases, loop-quantum-gravity-inspired “big bounce” pictures, cyclic models, “born from a black hole” proposals, varying-speed-of-light approaches, holographic cosmology, and even self-...

129. Chloe Romanis | Biotechnology, Gestation, and the Law

Nov 25, 2025 1 hr 14 min

What happens to our laws about pregnancy, parenthood, and abortion when “gestation” can be shared, transferred, or even moved outside the human body by new biotechnology? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Elizabeth Chloe Romanis is Associate Professor in Biolaw in the Durham Law School as well as in the Durham Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences, and her work focuses on healthcare law and bioethics. Check out her book! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/biotechnology-gestation-and-the-law-9780198873785 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198873786 2. Book Summary In Biotechnology, Gestation, and the Law, Elizabeth Chloe Romanis argues that debates about reproduction are often built on shaky concepts, and that this matters once new technologies make “ordinary” assumptions about pregnancy and birth start to wobble. A central move is to separate pregnancy (a state of being) from gestation (a generative process), and to show how legal thinking slides between incompatible pictures, sometimes implicitly treating the fetus as part of the pregnant person, but more often treating the pregnant person as a “container.” This conceptual work is not just metaphysical housekeeping: it exposes the background assumptions that structure current legal schemas and shape how people’s lives are regulated. Building on that foundation, Romanis proposes treating “technologies enabling gestation” as a genus that includes surrogacy, uterus transplantation (UTx), and ectogestation, and she argues that the law’s focus on “assisted conception” is a poor fit for regulating this very different procreative enterprise. She then tracks how existing frameworks can blunt the technology’s transformative potential by trying to force new modalities of gestation to mimic “natural” procreation, a pattern tied to deeper forms of biological essentialism and a tendency to privilege the binary, two-parent nuclear family. On sex and gender, she argues that these technologies can be...

128. Dan Zahavi | Being We

Nov 18, 2025 1 hr 35 min

What if the most important thing about acting together is not that our individual intentions line up, but that it can genuinely change how the world shows up to us through a first-person plural perspective? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Dan Zahavi is professor of philosophy and the director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen and is editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, with Shaun Gallagher. His work focuses on phenomenology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Check out his book, "Being We: Phenomenological Contributions to Social Ontology"! https://academic.oup.com/book/59446 https://www.amazon.com/dp/019289448X 2. Book Summary Zahavi’s Being We argues that debates about ‘collective intentionality’ miss something central if they focus only on how individual intentions line up. The phenomenological tradition, he claims, forces us to take seriously the *qualitative* character of doing things together: feeling, thinking, and acting “as part of a we” can transform one’s sense of self, one’s relation to others, and one’s experience of the world. On this view, *we*-perspectives and *we*-experiences are not optional add-ons to an already complete theory of mind; they are genuine explananda that constrain what we can plausibly say about selfhood and social cognition. In Part I (“We and I”), Zahavi tackles the “primacy” question: does the first-person plural precede the first-person singular, or vice versa? He argues that talk of a we requires plurality and differentiation, and that we-experiences presuppose (rather than erase) the self–other distinction; attempts to derive phenomenal consciousness or basic subjectivity from communal life don’t succeed. That doesn’t mean sociality is irrelevant to selfhood, but it does mean we need careful distinctions between cultural/conceptual accounts of the self and the minimal first-personal “for-me-ness” of experience—because an i...

127. Barry Loewer | Laws of Nature

Nov 4, 2025 1 hr 36 min

What are laws of nature, do they govern the universe or merely summarize it, and what do those answers imply about induction, chance, and time’s arrow? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Barry Loewer is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and the director of the Rutgers Center for Philosophy and the Sciences. In this interview, we explore philosophical issues related to laws of nature and related topics. 2. Interview Summary Barry Loewer begins by situating the very idea of “laws of nature” historically: people have long noticed regularities, and often tied them to theology, but the modern notion of simple mathematical laws that describe motion and form the aim of physics really crystallizes in the 17th–18th centuries (especially in Descartes, influenced by Galileo). On that early picture, laws were not just descriptions but part of how God “governed” inert matter, since matter itself was taken to be passive. This historical backdrop sets up the interview’s central contrast between “governing” (non-Humean) and “systematizing” (Humean) conceptions of laws. Loewer then develops the Humean line through David Lewis’s “best system” idea: take the total distribution of fundamental properties across spacetime, and the laws are whatever axioms best systematize it by balancing simplicity and informativeness. He contrasts this with Maudlin-style governance using a vivid joke: on the governing view, God sets initial conditions + laws and can “go on vacation,” whereas on the Humean view God would have to create the whole history “all at once,” and we later extract the best system from it. The conversation then turns to why many philosophers resist Humeanism: they want something to “hold the universe together,” and they worry that if laws are mere regularities then induction becomes unjustifiable; Loewer replies that Hume shows there’s no guarantee of induction anyway—science is inherently risky—and he brings in Goodman’s “grue” prob...

126. Emma Borg | Acting for Reasons

Oct 28, 2025 1 hr 20 min

If humans are as irrational and “automatic” as some psychologists suggest, why does explaining what people believe and want still feel like the best way to understand what they do? 1. Guest Emma Borg is Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, although before that was for a long time Professor at the University of Reading. Her work focuses on the philosophy of language, mind, and cognitive science. In this interview, we focus on her recent book, "Acting for Reasons: In Defence of Common-sense Psychology". Check out her book! https://academic.oup.com/book/58959 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DNCYHXC5/ 2. Book Summary Emma Borg’s Acting for Reasons: In Defence of Common-sense Psychology argues that the familiar ‘common-sense psychology’ (CP) framework—explaining action via contentful mental states like beliefs and desires—remains broadly vindicated despite recent experimental and theoretical backlash. Borg characterizes CP as combining (i) a claim about action generation (typically, behaviour is caused “in the right way” by an agent’s reasons) and (ii) a claim about action understanding (typically, we explain and predict others by attributing mental states and inferring what those states should lead them to do). The book’s central aim is to resist the increasingly popular conclusion that “common-sense psychology is wrong” and to show that CP’s reach is much broader than “high days and holidays” cases of explicit deliberation. The first half of the book takes on the Heuristics-and-Biases-inspired attacks on CP’s picture of decision-making. Borg distinguishes two strands: the No Reasons challenge, where heuristics are treated as automatic, “gut-feel” processes that bypass reasons altogether, and the Insufficient Reasons challenge, where people do consult reasons but in a biased, evidentially thin, or otherwise irrational way. She argues that defining heuristics as reasons-insensitive (or inferring that from their “fast, au...

125. Malcolm Keating | Reason in an Uncertain World

Oct 21, 2025 1 hr 29 min

How can Nyāya philosophy teach us to argue better, spot bad reasoning, and still live well amid uncertainty? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Smith College. His work focuses primarily on Indian philosophy. In this interview, we focus on his book, "Reason in an Uncertain World: Nyāya Philosophers on Argumentation and Living Well". Check out his book! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DG5ZTTCP/ https://global.oup.com/academic/product/reason-in-an-uncertain-world-9780197634257 Check out his page! https://www.youtube.com/@UCtmzNhD4qq9HZYKkqBV3C8A 2. Book Summary Reason in an Uncertain World argues that Nyāya philosophers offer something modern “critical thinking” usually doesn’t: a unified picture of how reasoning and argumentation connect to living well. Keating starts from the fact that we now face an overwhelming stream of claims and controversies, and while people often look to “ancient wisdom” for emotional stability, they look elsewhere for tools to sort truth from fiction. Nyāya, he argues, can do both: it treats reasoning skills and debate practices as socially embedded ways of getting to truth and as crucial for leading happy, virtuous, meaningful lives. The first half of the book develops Nyāya’s epistemology as a response to uncertainty and suffering. Chapter 1 sets the historical stage and introduces the Nyāya thought that understanding (especially epistemology) can relieve pain and suffering, orienting inquiry toward an “excellent” human goal; Keating illustrates this with Nyāya reflections on duḥkha and the attraction of a final state without pain and suffering. Chapters 2–6 then build a toolkit of “ways of knowing” (including perception, inference, and testimony), highlighting the idea of “certification” (reflectively checking that one really knows), the structure and varieties of inference (and how counterfeit inferences arise through pseudo-reasons), how to evaluate testimony and...

124. Amir Horowitz | Intentionality Deconstructed

Oct 14, 2025 1 hr 34 min

Can anything be genuinely about the world, or is intentionality just a useful way of organizing our thoughts and talk? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Amir Horowitz is head of the PPE program and professor at the Open University of Israel. His work covers a range of topics, but especially the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and language. Check out his recent book, "Intentionality Deconstructed: An Anti-Realist Theory"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/intentionality-deconstructed-9780198896432 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0198896433 2. Book Summary Horowitz’s Intentionality Deconstructed argues for intentional anti-realism: the view that intentionality (aboutness, reference, “think-about,” etc.) is not merely absent from the world, but cannot be instantiated because the very concept is “inherently flawed,” making the thesis a necessary, conceptual, a priori one rather than an empirical eliminativist proposal. He begins by focusing on how we could ever settle questions of reference/content in the first place, using disputes surrounding the Gödel–Schmidt case in experimental philosophical semantics to motivate the claim that neither armchair intuitions nor theoretical “constraints” can genuinely determine reference. The core idea is that you can’t extract an intentional “function” from a representation itself (anything “encoded” would still require interpretation), and the concept of reference is too neutral to privilege one candidate relation over others. The middle of the book is largely negative: it targets prominent ways of securing intentionality. Against the phenomenal intentionality thesis (roughly, that phenomenology alone constitutes intentional directedness), Horowitz argues that no intrinsic mental property—including phenomenal character—can do the grounding work required, and that “intrinsic intentionality” makes explicit a tension (intrinsicness vs transcendence) that cannot be resolved. He then attacks naturalistic red...

123. David Copp | Moral Naturalism

Oct 7, 2025 3 hr 29 min

Can ethics be fully naturalistic while still explaining why moral reasons genuinely have authority over us? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest David Copp is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis, and his work has focused on moral and political philosophy. Check out his new book, "Ethical Naturalism and the Problem of Normativity"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ethical-naturalism-and-the-problem-of-normativity-9780197601587 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DPGFFK2W 2. Book Summary David Copp frames the book around what he takes to be metaethics’ central puzzle: the ‘problem of normativity’. He wants a theory-neutral grip on what needs explaining when we say that reasons, oughts, and values are ‘normative’, and he treats this as a problem not just for ethical realism in general, but especially for ‘ethical naturalism’. The worry is straightforward: if normative facts are what would make basic moral claims true, it’s hard to see how such facts could fit into a world that we learn about through experience and science—since it doesn’t look like experience (ordinary or scientific) can simply reveal that (say) torture is wrong or compassion is a virtue. To make the dispute precise, Copp develops an ‘empirical criterion’ of the natural: roughly, a property counts as natural only if no synthetic truth about its instantiation is ‘strongly a priori’—so, for the naturalist, substantive basic ethical truths (if any) must be empirically defeasible. He then maps the space of ethical naturalisms: non-reductive views (often cast in terms of grounding/supervenience) versus reductive views, and within reductionism, ‘analytic’ versus ‘non-analytic’ versions—where he explicitly favors the non-analytic, metaphysical-analysis approach. Along the way he argues that to take the normativity problem seriously, it’s not enough to say ethical facts are natural (or grounded in natural facts); we need some reductive story...

122. Craige Roberts | Formal Semantics

Sep 30, 2025 2 hr 47 min

Craige Roberts explains how formal semantics and pragmatics model meaning by tracking context, presupposition, and modality to show why what we say depends so deeply on discourse structure. My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Craige Roberts is Professor Emerita at the Department of Linguistics of Ohio State University. Her work has focused on the philosophy of language, primarily on formal semantics and pragmatics. 2. Interview Summary Craige Roberts is introduced as a leading figure in formal semantics and pragmatics, with work on topics like modal subordination, anaphora, and the way context shapes interpretation. In the interview, the emphasis is repeatedly on using explicit, formal tools (in the Montague-style tradition the host flags) to build increasingly good models of linguistic data—models that make predictions you can test and then refine. A central thread is how Roberts thinks about the semantics/pragmatics boundary: rather than treating pragmatics as an unstructured “everything else,” the discussion treats it as something that can itself be modeled, especially once you track context, discourse goals, and what counts as an appropriate contribution in conversation. This comes out as the host contrasts “more ‘formal’ approaches” with speech-act frameworks (with John Searle as the reference point) and presses on whether there’s any deep tension here. A related point that’s explicitly highlighted is that for certain expressions—like epistemic modals—you can’t just “read off” the relevant domain without knowing the conversational setting. From there, the conversation spotlights several of Roberts’s hallmark topics: the possible-worlds way of modeling propositional content (the host frames this in a Stalnaker-style key and asks how much metaphysics about “possible worlds” the framework really commits you to), and how that connects to context dependence in modal talk. The host also brings up her work on presupposition “triggers” and “project...

121. Polly Jacobson | Formal Semantics

Sep 23, 2025 1 hr 35 min

Can sentence meaning be built up locally from the meanings of words and their modes of combination, without positing a separate intermediate “logical form” to do the interpretive work? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Polly Jacobson is Professor of Linguistics at Brown University, where she has been a professor for many years. Her work focuses on linguistics and formal semantics, and especially on the formal tools needed to model the syntactic and semantic systems of natural languages. 2. Interview Summary After the introductions, Polly Jacobson (Brown University) and the host of Friction move straight into compositionality: the idea (roughly) that sentence meanings are determined by the meanings of their parts plus the rules for putting those parts together. Jacobson treats some compositionality as non-negotiable, but emphasizes that the real controversies concern how much compositionality natural language exhibits, what the composition rules are, and how the topic developed into a live research program rather than a slogan. From there, the interview centers on Jacobson’s “direct compositionality” approach by contrasting it with an “indirect” picture where syntax first generates an intermediate representation (often described as a kind of “logical form”) and semantics interprets that representation afterward. The direct-compositional alternative aims to avoid that intermediate interpretive layer and keep syntax and semantics working in tighter tandem. This leads into the “degrees” or “types” of direct compositionality: at the strong end, syntax is (in a sense) “blind” to structure and semantics does the interpretive work; at weaker ends, syntax is allowed more operations—without collapsing back into the idea that it’s merely producing a logical form for semantics to read off. A recurring payoff claim is that direct compositionality helps preserve local interpretation—making it clearer how meaning can be built up step-by-step without global “...

120. Cristina Bicchieri | Social Norms

Sep 16, 2025 1 hr 2 min

What really makes a behavior a social norm, and how can measuring people’s expectations about what others do and approve of help us change it? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Cristina Bicchieri is the S.J.P. Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the Philosophy and Psychology Departments at the University of Pennsylvania, professor of Legal Studies in the Wharton School, and director of the Master in Behavioral Decision Sciences program and the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program. 2. Interview Summary Bicchieri starts by pushing back against how loose and “catch-all” talk of social norms can be—especially definitions that treat a norm as simply “what people commonly do.” Instead, she frames social norms as genuinely social rules of behavior: shared within a group (sometimes local, sometimes society-wide) and “alive” in the sense that they’re sustained by what people expect of one another. On her view, two kinds of expectations matter—empirical expectations about what others do, and normative expectations about what others think one ought to do—and a behavior counts as governed by a social norm only when people’s preference to comply is conditional on those expectations. A key selling point is that this makes norms testable: you can measure the relevant expectations and the conditionality, which in turn makes norm talk more predictive and scientifically usable. From there she emphasizes both the psychology and the methodology. Psychologically, she notes that many everyday norms function like default rules: we often follow them automatically because they coordinate social life and spare us constant deliberation (her example is familiar “greeting” behavior like handshaking). Methodologically, she’s interested in detecting conditionality rather than just asking people what they personally endorse. So she stresses the importance of specifying the relevant reference group, then measuring empirical and normative expecta...

119. Graham Oppy | Religion

Sep 9, 2025 1 hr 16 min

A probing conversation with Graham Oppy on why classical arguments for God often fail to establish their intended conclusions, and on how pragmatics, metaphysics, and Bayesian reasoning shape debates in philosophy of religion. My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and specializes in Philosophy of Religion. 2. Interview Summary Graham Oppy (a philosophy of religion professor at Monash University) begins by describing how he lost his childhood Christianity around age 12–13, then—after reading Bertrand Russell’s autobiography as a teenager—decided he wanted a life in philosophy. From there, several questions press him on “existential inertia” and classical theistic arguments: he says the label covers different theses, but in the basic sense—if something exists at a time and nothing intervenes to destroy it, it continues to exist—he accepts it (not as a special force, just as the idea that things don’t pop out of existence without a cause or reason). In a related exchange about agency, he’s skeptical of “agents without mechanisms,” arguing that positing such a category is theoretically costly (it multiplies kinds of agents without clear explanatory payoff), whereas ordinary organisms act via mechanisms, and our intuitions about “mechanism-free” agency are both fallible and malleable. He also flags a physicalist/identity-theory picture on which mental states just are brain states, dissolving certain “mysteries” about mind–body correlation. On religious language and theological discourse, he dismisses A. J. Ayer–style verificationism as self-undermining, and he’s likewise unconvinced by some later “Wittgensteinian” moves in philosophy of religion. A concrete example he uses is Norman Malcolm’s famous line that it can be conversationally odd to say “I believe” when one knows; Oppy follows H. P. Grice in treating this as pragmatics (a norm of being maximally informative), not as evidence that kn...

118. Teddy Seidenfeld | Decision and Statistics

Sep 2, 2025 2 hr 29 min

Can getting more information ever make a rational agent worse off, not better, once you factor in real-world costs, group disagreement, and the way inquiry can change the very decision you face? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Ted Seidenfeld is Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Philosophy and Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, and his work focuses on decision theory, statistics, and related topics. 2. Interview Summary Seidenfeld frames the conversation around a classic decision-theoretic result associated with Jack Good: in a simplified Bayesian/expected-utility setting, if there is an experiment whose possible outcomes would rationally lead you to act differently, then (given a “free” chance to learn) it is instrumentally rational to delay and gather that information, since it has expected value precisely by guiding action. But his main aim is to stress that this is a mathematical theorem with substantive assumptions, and once you relax them the “value of information” conclusion can flip: additional information can, by your current lights, predictably make decision-making worse rather than better. He then walks through several ways those assumptions fail. One route is social: if the “agent” is really a group with multiple probability/utility perspectives, new evidence can surface latent disagreements and turn prior unanimity into polarization, forcing compromises that both parties regard as worse than the pre-inquiry choice, which raises the question of whether inquiry is worth it when it predictably destabilizes collective action. Another route concerns what counts as ‘cost-free’ information: if your utilities include valuing uncertainty (the theater mystery example), information can be costly simply by spoiling an experience. He also emphasizes ‘moral hazard’ and ‘act–state dependence’, where the very act of setting up or pursuing inquiry changes the relevant state of the world (or your future dispositions), so dominance-st...

117. Geoffrey Hellman | Math Without Numbers

Aug 26, 2025 3 hr 14 min

Can we keep everything that makes mathematics rigorous by treating it as the study of possible structures, without committing to a mysterious realm of abstract objects? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Geoffrey Hellman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the philosophy of mathematics, logic, science and metaphysics. 2. Interview Summary Geoffrey Hellman frames the philosophy of (pure) mathematics as a contest between a default “objectivist” or Platonist picture—where mathematics is about abstract objects—and a structuralist impulse that treats mathematics as primarily about patterns of relations rather than special entities. They note how, after Richard Dedekind and David Hilbert, this structuralist thought was often sidelined by approaches that re-centered “definite objects,” most notably in Principia Mathematica and related work by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Hellman’s guiding complaint is the familiar epistemic worry: if mathematical objects are outside space, time, and causation, what could ground our knowledge of them—so the philosophical pressure is to keep what’s powerful in mathematics without buying a mysterious ontology. Against that background, the Hellman reconstructs the route to “modal structuralism” by weaving together historical foundations work and a modal turn. They highlight the need for a rigorous account of the structuralist idea that axioms characterize any system of objects interrelated in the right way (rather than a single privileged domain), an idea they connect to Howard Stein and especially to Hilary Putnam’s suggestion that foundations should explicitly use necessity/possibility talk—mathematics as the study of possible structures. They then use set theory as the main case study, sketching the standard ZFC story associated with Ernst Zermelo (plus choice) and Abraham Fraenkel (replacement), and motivating an “indefinite extensibility” picture: any given model can...

116. Steven Nadler | The Good Cartesian

Aug 19, 2025 59 min

How did a little-known 17th-century physician help shape Cartesian philosophy after René Descartes by trying to complete its account of the mind, the body, and their union? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work focuses on 17th century philosophy, and he has a variety of published works in this area. Check out his book, "The Good Cartesian: Louis de La Forge and the Rise of a Philosophical Paradigm"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-good-cartesian-9780197671719 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0197671713 2. Book Summary Steven Nadler’s The Good Cartesian tells the story of how Louis de La Forge—a young provincial physician—helped René Descartes’s philosophy become a dominant “new” paradigm in the decades after 1650. Nadler opens with the broader French and European backdrop: institutional anxiety about “philosophical novelties” and the way Cartesianism was increasingly seen as a threat to traditional Scholastic frameworks, especially in sensitive theological contexts. Against that setting, Nadler argues that La Forge’s role has been underappreciated: not only is he a key early figure in debates about occasionalism, but he is also central to how second-generation Cartesians tried to complete, correct, and extend Descartes’s system while still presenting themselves as faithful disciples. The book then reconstructs La Forge’s life, networks, and projects in detail, showing how a thinker working far from Paris nonetheless became deeply involved in the Cartesian movement—through local intellectual milieus, ties to Cartesian promoters, and access to manuscripts and correspondence. Nadler portrays La Forge as “the most loyal of all Cartesians,” someone who wanted to articulate not just what Descartes said but what Descartes would have said if he’d lived longer, done more anatomical work, and absorbed later scient...

115. Alex Malpass | Religion

Aug 12, 2025 1 hr 35 min

How far can arguments like the Grim Reaper paradox, divine conceptualism, and the problem of evil really take us in deciding whether theism is philosophically credible? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Alex Malpass's work focuses on philosophical logic, philosophy of time, philosophy of physics, and more. His website is https://useofreason.wordpress.com/, and he runs the Thoughtology YouTube channel. 2. Interview Summary Alex explains that his route into philosophy was basically driven by curiosity: as a kid he read a book of “great philosophers,” latched onto Socrates as a model of irreverent questioning, and then just kept following whatever topics struck him as interesting. He emphasizes that he approaches philosophy as an independent hobby—doing it because it’s fun rather than because he’s representing an institution or defending a fixed “doctrinal” package—so he’s comfortable treating big debates (including the ‘fine-tuning argument’) as open-ended problems where you can explore multiple frameworks without having to “take a view on everything.” The first major topic is the ‘Grim Reaper paradox’ (presented as a descendant of a “Benedetti/Benedetti paradox” in the transcript): Alex walks through how you can set up an infinite sequence of “reapers” (or triggers) arranged so that any given event is prevented by an earlier one, and yet there’s no first event—pushing you toward an inconsistent description of what happens. He discusses why this is often taken to be evidence against an actually infinite past, and he engages an objection that uses a kind of “copy-and-paste”/recombination principle (if one reaper-scenario is possible, why not infinitely many?), explaining how the paradox is meant to show that certain infinite constructions you might have thought were coherent actually aren’t. From there the conversation broadens into several connected philosophy-of-religion disputes. On abstract objects, he discusses the move to ‘divine conceptual...

114. Meg Wallace | Parts and Wholes

Aug 5, 2025 1 hr 20 min

Can the strange “odd universe” result be defused by rethinking how parts, wholes, and counting fit together, rather than by giving up on common-sense mereology? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Meg Wallace is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Kentucky, and specialize in metaphysics and ontology. Check out her book, "Parts and Wholes"! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C94RMGVM 2. Book Summary In Parts and Wholes, Meg Wallace uses the “odd universe argument” as a hook: from a small package of seemingly intuitive assumptions about parthood, composition, and counting, you can (purportedly) derive a priori that the universe contains an odd number of things—a conclusion that feels both wild and philosophically revealing. She treats that “something has gone weirdly wrong” reaction as a diagnostic tool: it pushes us to locate which assumption (or background method) is responsible, and Section 1 supplies the needed toolkit—basic mereology plus plural-logic resources for talking carefully about “the parts, taken together” versus “the whole.” Section 2 turns to two big structural questions: composition (building up) and decomposition (breaking down). On the composition side, Wallace frames the Special Composition Question (SCQ) and walks through the familiar triad: universalism (“always” compose), nihilism (“never” compose), and moderation (“sometimes” compose). Universalism threatens to look “ontologically explosive,” but she sketches ways it can be tamed—e.g., by identifying the right sums with ordinary objects, or by pairing it with a view that preserves parsimony (eventually, her favored route goes through composition-as-identity). Nihilism gets its standard “arranged mug-wise” style defense and the idea that ordinary talk can still work without rampant error theory, while also facing serious worries about self-defeat if there are, strictly speaking, no speakers, utterances, or other composites. Moderation is...

113. Muhammad Ali Khalidi | Natural Kinds

Jul 29, 2025 1 hr 20 min

What makes a scientific category more than a convenient label, and when do our classifications really track the causal structure of the world? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. His work focuses on the philosophy of science, particularly cognitive science and social science, as well as some work on classical Arabic-Islamic philosophy. Check out his book in Cambridge Elements on "Natural Kinds"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/natural-kinds/8CA215EA3A1878FC4856B84E28F4C447 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1009005065 2. Book Summary Khalidi argues that science can’t even get off the ground without classifying its subject matter, and that a central aim of scientific taxonomy is to carve reality “at the joints” by identifying categories that correspond to natural kinds. Adopting a broadly naturalist stance, the book treats scientific practice as a (defeasible) guide to what kinds there are, while still allowing that scientists can misclassify, over-lump, or over-split. The overall structure reflects that agenda: it first lays out metaphysical background (what “natural” amounts to, realism vs. anti-realism, and pluralism), then compares leading theories of kinds, then distinguishes different kinds of kinds, and finally tests the resulting framework on concrete scientific case studies. In evaluating theories, Khalidi highlights a widely accepted constraint on bona fide scientific categories: projectibility—roughly, whether membership in the category supports nontrivial induction (e.g., from “x is beryllium” to further expectations about melting point, etc.). He then argues that traditional essentialism and even more recent “homeostatic property cluster” approaches can be too restrictive, especially when mechanisms are absent, multiple, or not what really explains a category’s stability. In place of these, he defends a “simple causal th...

112. Peter van Inwagen | Being

Jul 22, 2025 1 hr 17 min

What does it take for a theory of being to earn its ontological commitments, and can we make sense of nonexistence, properties, and possibility without bloating our inventory of what there is? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Peter van Inwagen is John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, and is Research Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He is well-known for his work in a variety of fields, but primarily metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of action. Check out his book, "Being: A Study in Ontology"! https://academic.oup.com/book/44876 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0192883968 2. Book Summary Being: A Study in Ontology by Peter van Inwagen has a two-part aim: to lay out a meta-ontology (what we’re doing when we ask “What is there?” and how to answer it) and then to use that meta-ontology to do substantive ontology. He explicitly frames ontology as a systematic answer to “What is there?” and meta-ontology as reflection on the question and method; on his map of the book, Chapters I and V are meta-ontology, while II–IV (and VI) apply it to specific disputes. The meta-ontological stance is “deeply Quinean”: he’s willing to present it as (roughly) W. V. Quine’s view, sharply tied to how quantification works and how ontological commitment is extracted from what we accept. With that Quinean methodology in hand, the middle of the book argues for several “anti-Quinean” ontological results (even while agreeing with Quine about non-existent things). In the Introduction he flags the central applications: whether there are things that “do not exist,” whether there are abstract objects, and whether modal discourse commits us to a realm of possibilities and possible worlds. On the abstract-object side, he pushes toward a picture in which properties and propositions are hard to avoid, and he develops a positive account of properties as “assertibles”: propositions are “saturated assertibles” (thi...

111. Graham Oppy | Religion

Jul 15, 2025 1 hr 23 min

Can a stripped-down naturalism really match theism’s explanatory ambitions, or does it secretly inherit the very mysteries it’s meant to avoid? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and specializes in Philosophy of Religion. 2. Interview Summary Oppy opens by stressing that debates about God rarely turn on a single knockdown proof, and he thinks there are no convincing arguments for God (or against) that should force assent. Still, he thinks some arguments are instructive and carefully built: he says he recently published a long paper on Thomas Aquinas’s First Way, and argues that you can make it deductively valid only by weakening the conclusion, whereas the stronger Thomistic conclusion needs extra premises. He adds that he finds ontological arguments especially interesting, and wrote a book-length study cataloguing different kinds of them. When asked who presents the strongest case for theism, he points to Richard Swinburne, praising The Existence of God as a well-constructed cumulative-case presentation, even though he remains unconvinced by it. A recurring theme is that many “cosmological” moves look dialectically symmetric: whatever explanatory pressure you feel about a first cause, a beginning, or an initial explanatory posit arises just as much for the naturalist as for the theist. In response to contingency arguments, he’s happy (in principle) to grant talk of a “necessary being” so long as it’s identified with the initial, fundamental part of causal reality on a naturalistic picture. He also presses a familiar worry (associated with Peter van Inwagen): if you start from something necessary and claim “all contingency” comes from it, you still owe an account of whether the link is necessary or contingent, and either answer threatens the intended contingency/necessity contrast. Relatedly, when people build modalized explanatory principles into “new” cosmological arguments, he note...

110. José Zalabardo | Pragmatist Semantics

Jul 8, 2025 2 hr 36 min

How can sentences still represent the world if their meanings are grounded not in reference but in the practical rules that govern how we use and accept them? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest José Zalabardo is a Spanish-British philosopher who works on epistemology, metaphysics, and related areas. He is a professor of philosophy at University College London. Check out his book, "Pragmatist Semantics!" https://global.oup.com/academic/product/pragmatist-semantics-9780192874757 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1W1BTLF 2. Book Summary In Pragmatist Semantics: A Use-Based Approach to Linguistic Representation, José Zalabardo starts from the intuitive idea that many declarative sentences represent the world, and asks what grounds their meanings—what facts make it the case that a sentence has the meaning it does. He frames the central dispute as a contest between representationalism (meanings are grounded in language–world relations like reference) and pragmatism (meanings are grounded in patterns of use). A key target is what he calls the RR assumption: that any sentence that represents things as being a certain way must have a representationalist meaning ground. He then develops “open-question” style arguments—first in ethics and then (more centrally for his project) in semantic discourse about truth, meaning, and propositional attitudes—to motivate the claim that attempts to give representationalist meaning grounds for these discourses run into serious trouble (e.g., by undermining the idea that their core predicates have referents). Zalabardo’s positive proposal is that we can reject RR: a sentence can still be genuinely representational even if its meaning ground is pragmatist. The general template is to explain meaning in terms of acceptance procedures—roughly, the actual rules/practices by which speakers regulate when to accept or reject sentences of a discourse. He illustrates the template across the “problem” discourses: for belief/desire ascri...

109. Mona Simion | Resistance to Evidence

Jul 1, 2025 2 hr 29 min

Why do people sometimes refuse to update on clear evidence, and what would a properly functioning epistemology say we ought to believe when the evidence is right in front of us? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Mona Simion is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow where she is also deputy director of the COGITO Epistemology Research Centre. Her work focuses on a range of topics, including epistemology, ethics, language, and feminist philosophy. Check out her book, "Resistance to Evidence"! https://www.amazon.com/dp/1009298526 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/resistance-to-evidence/147AC15A7EA89095A820FF16B1D0525A 2. Book Summary In Resistance to Evidence, Mona Simion (University of Glasgow) argues that a central epistemic problem of our time is not just believing on insufficient evidence, but failing to believe (or suspending) when sufficient, undefeated evidence is easily available—a distinctive kind of epistemic failure she calls ‘resistance to evidence’. She frames this as “positive epistemology”: a project aimed at articulating epistemic obligations to update and form beliefs in response to available evidence (a counterpart to the familiar evidentialist worry associated with W. K. Clifford). The first part of the book links philosophical normativity with the empirical literature and offers a taxonomy of resistance cases (spanning testimony, perception, inference, bias, motivated reasoning, etc.), then pressures standard accounts of what evidence one has (and of permissible suspension, responsibility, and vice) for lacking the resources to explain why paradigmatic resistance is epistemically impermissible. The second part builds Simion’s positive alternative: an epistemology grounded in proper function. Our cognitive systems, she proposes, have an epistemic function of generating knowledge, and epistemic norms “drop out” of that function; on this picture, resistance to evidence is an input-level epistemic malfunction—a fa...

108. Eric Scerri | Chemistry

Jun 24, 2025 1 hr 17 min

Can chemistry really be reduced to physics, or do concepts like elements and the periodic table show that it has its own irreducible structure? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Eric Scerri is a lecturer at UCLA, and focuses on chemistry, the philosophy of chemistry, and science more generally. 2. Interview Summary Eric Scerri argues that philosophy of chemistry arrived relatively late partly because chemistry sits so close to physics in the usual “hierarchy of the sciences,” which encourages the popular thought that chemistry is “nothing but” physics—and so not in need of its own philosophical scrutiny. He suggests that the right question isn’t whether chemistry is or isn’t reduced to physics (as if it were all-or-nothing), but how far reduction goes and in what sense, since both scientific practice and philosophical models of reduction have shifted over time. On his picture, the most sensible stance is to talk about “degrees” of reduction that can increase as molecular quantum chemistry advances, rather than expecting a clean yes/no verdict. A major theme is the concept of a chemical element: Scerri emphasizes that “element” is used in (at least) two senses—an element as a simple substance (often associated with Antoine Lavoisier) and an element as a more abstract bearer of properties (revived in Dmitri Mendeleev’s thinking about the periodic system). He illustrates the abstract sense by noting that pointing to “carbon” on the periodic table is not pointing to diamond or graphite (or any particular isotope), but to something that underlies them all—something that can be characterized in modern chemistry chiefly by atomic number. He then uses the sodium/chlorine → sodium chloride case to argue that the familiar simple substances can “disappear” in compounds while the elements persist in the abstract sense, which helps explain chemical novelty. Scerri adds that this dual usage is often left implicit (even by IUPAC), and that chemical education...

107. Mary Leng | Mathematics

Jun 17, 2025 1 hr 39 min

Can we keep the predictive power of mathematics in science while refusing to believe in mathematical objects at all? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Mary Leng is a professor at the University of York, specializing in the philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. 2. Interview Summary Mary Leng begins by laying out her ‘mathematical functionalist’ (or fictionalist-leaning) view: ordinary mathematical talk looks like it’s about objects—numbers, functions, real-valued magnitudes, infinitely many primes—but she thinks we shouldn’t automatically read that surface grammar as a commitment to a realm of abstract entities. In the interview’s opening framing (including her background in philosophy of mathematics and science and her book Mathematics and Reality), she contrasts this stance with more realist options like Platonism and with structuralist approaches that try to treat mathematics as “about” abstract structures rather than particular objects. A central motivation, she says, is epistemic: the standard “negative characterization” of mathematical objects (not spatiotemporal, not causal, not mental, etc.) makes it hard to give any satisfying story about how we could know truths about them—yet mathematical knowledge is supposed to be among our most secure. So her proposal is to rethink what we’re doing when we do mathematics: instead of aiming at literal truths about abstract objects, we speak as if there are such objects and investigate what would be the case if there were. Along the way she presses familiar trouble for robust Platonism—like “embarrassment of riches” (many distinct set-theoretic reductions can equally play the natural-number role), and the way working mathematicians tend to be relaxed about identity conditions (they don’t worry whether “2” is this set or that set so long as the axioms are satisfied). She also locates herself on the “revolutionary” side of the revolutionary/hermeneutic divide: even if mathematicians oft...

See all 106 episodes

–

0 ratings from members

Rate this podcast

No reviews yet — be the first member to rate "Friction".

This podcast, its content and its artwork are not owned by, affiliated with, or endorsed by Castquire.

156. Eric Schwitzgebel | AI and Consciousness

Share this podcast

Live Chart rankings

#98 Philosophy 🇵🇭 PH

Chart history

🇵🇭 Philosophy Best #98

Holding at #98 — the line fills in as this chart moves.

Podcast details

Created by: Philosophy
Status: Active
Latest episode: Oct 28, 2026
Episodes: 106
Release period: Every two weeks
Avg. episode length: 1 hr 40 min
Explicit: No
Language: English

Links

Official website ↗ Apple Podcasts ↗ RSS feed ↗

Is this your podcast?

Claim it to show it on your profile. Using the email from your RSS feed approves it instantly.

Keep listening

Discover more podcasts like this.

Browse podcasts See the charts