Friction

What if getting clear on perception, number, and the self depends on metaphysics coming first, rather than on meaning or concepts setting the rules?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Christopher Peacocke is Johnsonian professor of philosophy and director of graduate studies in philosophy at Columbia University, and his work has focused on mind, epistemology, and metaphysics. His most recent book is "The Primacy of Metaphysics".

2. Interview Summary

Christopher Peacocke frames the interview around a drive for understanding—especially of how perception, thought, and justification connect—rather than around “applications” as the main motivation for doing philosophy. He then lays out the central dispute from The Primacy of Metaphysics: what it is for one thing to be explanatorily prior to another, and whether the metaphysics of a domain is prior to (or instead depends on) our concepts and meanings for talking about that domain. Peacocke distinguishes three broad positions—“metaphysics-first,” “no-priority,” and “meaning-/concept-first”—and argues that the last view is generally untenable once you take seriously the idea that concepts are individuated by the relation a thinker must stand in to something in order to think of it under that concept. Because which relations are even available depends on what the relevant entities are like (their metaphysics), the domain’s metaphysics constrains the shape of our legitimate ways of thinking about it—an idea he connects to themes associated with Gareth Evans and uses to push back against concept-first approaches he associates with Michael Dummett and Robert Brandom. He also stresses a key distinction: having a concept (standing in the right relation) is different from giving a philosophical theory of what that relation is.

From there Peacocke applies this framework to several domains where epistemology and metaphysics have to “fit together,” linking the project to his earlier Being Known and its “integration challenge.” On modality, he sketches a constraints-based (“principle-based”) approach aimed at steering between mind-dependent accounts and David Lewis–style modal realism, while keeping modal knowledge intelligible. He notes affinities (and differences) with views in the neighborhood of Simon Blackburn, especially regarding how “responses” might relate to modal or moral truths. For arithmetic, he proposes a two-stage treatment: natural numbers are individuated by their application conditions (e.g., being “the number of Fs”), and grasp of number concepts involves tacit knowledge that guides correct application—his slogan is “individuation precedes representation.” He suggests this model might extend to moral properties too, again as a “middle way” between mind-dependence and the kind of metaphysically “inaccessible realm” criticized by John Mackie. Along the way he revisits Gottlob Frege: Peacocke accepts the non-negotiability of shared content across thinkers, but argues that any “third realm” picture has to be constrained by an account of what it is to grasp senses/thoughts—precisely where the relational individuation story is meant to help.

Later, Peacocke reflects on how his views have shifted since A Study of Concepts: he moved toward a more rationalist picture for logical constants, where understanding can ground appreciation of principles, and he gives tacit knowledge a bigger explanatory role than the earlier “conceptual role + referential constraints” framework allowed. He credits pressure from Fregean-style constraints and post-Rudolf Carnap debates about what it is to understand an expression, a theme he develops further in Truly Understood. He also discusses “boundedness of the conceptual” by criticizing John McDowell’s stronger claim that a true thought itself explains a particular judgment; Peacocke argues instead that what does explanatory work are objects’ having properties (and facts), not objects “under a mode of presentation,” echoing disputes he associates with Donald Davidson and G. E. M. Anscombe. Finally, turning to the self and the first person (in connection with The Mirror of the World), he distinguishes subjects of experience from first-person representation: many creatures can be genuine subjects without any first-person concept, and personal identity over time depends on the persistence of an “integrating apparatus.” He argues that even unconscious perceptual states must be states of a subject, because representational content is tied to its significance for the subject’s potential actions, and he treats richer, reflective self-consciousness as built up from this more primitive base—rejecting “narrative” conceptions as fundamental to being a subject of experience.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:48 - Explanatory priority and metaphysics

10:36 - Individuation

16:34 - Mind-independence

19:20 - Integration challenge

22:47 - Primary thesis

25:35 - Understanding concepts

29:02 - The master argument

32:07 - Nominalism and Frege

34:57 - Numbers

40:09 - Higher mathematics

46:03 - Notion of concepts

51:59 - Boundedness of the conceptual

57:55 - Mathematical ontology vs. knowledge

1:03:21 - The self

1:12:12 - Musical experience and metaphor

1:24:40 - Variable experience

1:27:02 - Mendelssohn’s point

1:30:58 - Identifying emotion without having it

1:35:23 - Hypothetical example

1:39:18 - Relevance to other domains

1:43:25 - Value of philosophy

1:44:55 - Conclusion

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Can moral flaws make a work artistically worse—and why do we seek out horror if it’s supposed to scare and disgust us?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Noël Carroll is distinguished professor of philosophy at the graduate centre of the City University of New York, and his work has focused on the philosophy of aesthetics, art, film, and more.

2. Interview Summary

The interview opens with a discussion of Noel Carroll’s ‘moderate moralism’: the idea that (at least sometimes) a moral defect in a work can count as an artistic defect, because artworks are designed to elicit certain responses, and moral flaws can make the intended response unavailable (or “misfired”). Along the way, Carroll situates the view against ‘autonomism’—the thought that moral criticism is irrelevant to artistic assessment—invoking Oscar Wilde as a familiar inspiration for stronger autonomy claims and noting how debates like the controversies around Robert Mapplethorpe often prompt “separate-realms” replies. Carroll’s own strategy is to treat the moral dimension as sometimes internal to artistic success or failure (a “design error”), and he addresses worries about audience-relativity by appealing to an idealized morally sensitive audience while acknowledging that complexity can cause audiences to miss morally salient elements (his example is the rapid, easily-overlooked moment in Hamilton involving Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings).

They then turn to Carroll’s well-known treatment of the “paradox of horror”: why people seek out art that aims to frighten and disgust them. Carroll argues that horror centrally involves both fear and disgust, and while fear can be “fun” when it’s safely simulated, disgust is harder to explain away because it has its own felt cost. His proposal is a trade-off: we tolerate the unpleasantness because horror promises fascination—especially fascination with “categorical violations” that jam our ordinary categories (the living/dead mixtures of Frankenstein or the undead of The Walking Dead). Importantly, the promise doesn’t always pay off: some horror turns ridiculous rather than riveting, and he uses Robot Monster as a childhood example of a would-be monster movie that becomes laughable. He also connects this to evaluative practice by noting how exemplary horror (here The Bride of Frankenstein, highlighted via Anne Rice’s praise) can combine multiple virtues that help explain its enduring status.

In the final stretch, Carroll focuses on criticism and evaluation: he insists on separating liking from assessing, emphasizing that you can judge a work excellent without enjoying it—and enjoy things you readily admit are not that good (“guilty pleasures,” illustrated with a philosopher who loved The Three Stooges). He also distinguishes two senses of “appreciation”: casual approval (“I appreciate your garden”) versus a more analytic sizing-up (like a chess or military “appreciation”), and argues that criticism should explain how a work achieves (or fails to achieve) its aims rather than functioning merely as consumer guidance. This framework supports a larger point about the contingency between popularity and value: critical consensus can shift dramatically over time, as with Vertigo being elevated in Sight and Sound’s 2012 poll above Citizen Kane. The conversation closes on a deliberately conversational stance about “greatest films”: Carroll prefers to answer boldly—naming The Rules of the Game by Jean Renoir—because giving reasons invites a better argument than refusing the question.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:03 - Moderate moralism

10:18 - Audience dependence

13:57 - Weakness of thesis

15:10 - Paradox of horror

22:48 - Individuality of horror

31:10 - Liking vs. assessing

36:15 - Appreciation

39:02 - Relationship between liking and assessing

45:14 - Great films

49:46 - Appreciation from an outside perspective

58:52 - Aesthetic experience

1:02:13 - Criticism: too narrow

1:09:11 - Criticism: too broad

1:16:17 - Criticism: doesn’t account for finer distinctions

1:25:56 - Criticism: too simple

1:33:45 - Philosophy of humor

1:40:17 - Value of philosophy of aesthetics

1:43:23 - Conclusion

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What do Grim Reaper paradoxes actually show about infinity in time and causation, and why might the best response be that the scenario is simply unsatisfiable?

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

The conversation opens by framing the topic as a set of arguments about whether the past is finite and whether something like causal finitism is true, and then quickly moves into a core “Grim Reaper” style setup. The host lays out the familiar structure: infinitely many reapers are assigned times converging on a limit (e.g., one minute past noon, 30 seconds past, 15 seconds past, and so on), each instructed to act only if no earlier reaper has already acted—yielding an “impossible” situation that some philosophers take to pressure claims about dense time, infinitary causal structure, or a beginningless past.

Nicholas Shackel’s preferred diagnosis is that these cases are best treated as an “unsatisfiable pair”: once you formalize what the story is requiring, the constraints amount to an inconsistent schema—so nothing (in any domain) could satisfy them. On this view, you don’t need to “escape” the paradox by adding heavyweight metaphysical principles; you can simply say the setup describes an impossible structure. He then addresses the “mysterious force” worry (pressed in the literature by people like Lorenzo Luna) that logic can’t make a reaper fail. The reply is that this is a misunderstanding: logic isn’t a causal agent, but inconsistent stories still don’t correspond to genuine possibilities—much like time-travel “grandfather paradox” cases, where (as David Lewis emphasizes) there are consistent continuations (e.g., the gun jams) and the inconsistent one is simply not a real option.

The interview then pivots toward modality and whether principles about recombining possibilities could undercut the “unsatisfiable pair” move. The host raises a Lewis-style “patchwork” idea: if separate spacetime regions are each possible, perhaps they can be “patched” into a single world (e.g., to build a world containing arbitrarily many reapers). Malpass argues that while this feels intuitive, stating it in a defensible way is surprisingly hard (since even toy examples generate constraints about overlap, size/shape, etc.), so it’s not a reliable guarantee that you can freely combine any set of individually possible “patches.” He also sketches a branching picture of metaphysical possibility—often associated with Aristotle and Saul Kripke—on which genuinely possible worlds must overlap the actual world and then diverge; with an infinite coin-flip case, this yields the striking result that you can secure “any finite divergence” but not a world that differs at every past point, which provides a principled stopping point for “keep adding one more reaper” challenges. The broader methodological thread is a kind of epistemic humility: you can’t survey every consideration at once, so inquiry involves taking informed leaps and seeing what survives pressure.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:42 - Grim Reaper paradox

20:34 - Mysterious forces

25:09 - Consistent?

30:47 - Metaphysically possible?

40:58 - Dense time case

43:48 - Branching view of modality

47:56 - Choosing modalities

51:42 - True modality

57:09 - Patchwork principle

1:07:56 - Patchwork principles and theism

1:13:48 - Principle of logic/metaphysics?

1:18:04 - Counterexample

1:22:11 - Amending the principle

1:23:56 - Guilt by association

1:28:31 - Hilbert’s hotel

1:32:43 - Finite vs. infinite sets

1:38:31 - Questioning principles of logic

1:42:29 - Counting arguments

1:47:40 - When are conditions sufficient?

1:53:42 - Explaining the entire count

1:57:53 - Conclusion

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What are you, really—and if consciousness can’t be reduced to mindless matter, what does that imply about where minds come from and how free we can be?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Joshua Rasmussen is Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University, and his research focuses primarily on metaphysics, necessary existence, theology, truth, and a number of big, related topics.

2. Interview Summary

Rasmussen sketches his forthcoming book Who Are You Really? as an inquiry into both the nature of consciousness (what thoughts, feelings, and selves are like “from the inside”) and the origin of conscious beings (what sort of reality could produce persons at all). He emphasizes writing for a broad audience without giving up technical precision, and he frames the whole project around shared “tools of inquiry”: introspection (as a way of detecting experience and examining the structure of thought), reason (as a way of checking and extending what introspection reveals), and the scientific method (as a disciplined way of fitting hypotheses to observations). Along the way, he argues that radical doubts about consciousness (or about introspection’s reliability “to any degree”) undercut themselves, since even running those skeptical arguments seems to presuppose some introspective access to one’s own judging and reasoning.

From there, the conversation moves into Rasmussen’s strategy for making progress on what consciousness is: start with the “data” of experience and then test identity-claims carefully. He introduces a “direct comparison test,” where (roughly) if two items can be held together in conscious awareness, you can compare them; and if one item is directly available in acquaintance while another isn’t, that difference can itself support a non-identity verdict. This is used to carve away certain overly quick identifications (e.g., treating a felt quality like happiness as literally identical to some mindless item like a triangle/pinecone), while still leaving room for a “dual-aspect” picture where neurological and phenomenal aspects are deeply related. He then connects this methodological posture to his “counting argument” about thought: by focusing on the combinatorial/logical structure of thought-contents and using Cantor-style reasoning, he argues there are more possible thoughts than (mindless) microphysical states—pressuring any neat one-to-one reduction from thought to brain states, and motivating further distinctions about functionalism and the uniformity of what thoughts are across different possible kinds of thinkers.

Finally, Rasmussen zooms out to the “origin question” and the broader metaphysical stakes. He proposes reframing familiar debates about the “physical” by asking whether reality is fundamentally mindless or fundamentally mental, and suggests that once we’re clearer on the nature of conscious properties, the classic origin-puzzles (the hard problem, identity/accommodation-style worries, etc.) come into sharper focus. He notes that a “fundamental mentality” thesis can sit within many bigger pictures—e.g., priority monism, idealism, panpsychism, or various theistic options—and the discussion also touches free will as a graded notion centered on whether we are genuinely sources of our actions rather than merely having our behavior pulled by external strings. The interview closes on the practical “why care?”: for Rasmussen, getting clearer on consciousness and its origin is tied to seeing more accurately the intrinsic value of persons and their power to choose—culminating in the thought that each of us is an “extraordinarily valuable unit of reality.”

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:05 - Goal of the book

02:35 - Audience

05:20 - Tools of inquiry

10:32 - Eliminativism

18:10 - True nature

23:04 - Direct comparison

25:04 - Contents of perception

28:53 - Contents vs. objects of perception

30:59 - Comparing mental state with external object

31:54 - Aspects of mental states

34:41 - Counting arguments

40:35 - Individuating thoughts

44:26 - Philosophical distinctions

46:06 - Uniformity of thought

53:03 - Reductive functionalism

54:04 - Functional view of thoughts

55:43 - Token thoughts vs. the thought

56:44 - Physical properties

1:01:01 - Fundamentality

1:03:06 - Idealism

1:05:04 - Free will

1:08:19 - Verbal disputes

1:11:37 - Window theory of perception

1:17:15 - Direct acquaintance

1:19:19 - Value of the philosophy of mind

1:22:03 - Conclusion

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How far can testimony take us toward believing in miracles like the resurrection, and what follows for how we understand religious belief, fine-tuning, and decision theory?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Arif Ahmed is a philosopher at the University of Cambridge. He is a Reader in Philosophy, University of Cambridge, and is Nicholas Sallnow-Smith Lecturer in Philosophy, Gonville and Caius College. His work focuses on decision theory, philosophy of religion, Wittgenstein, and other topics.

2. Interview Summary

In this interview, Arif Ahmed—introduced as a philosopher at University of Cambridge and Gonville and Caius College whose work spans decision theory and philosophy of religion—revisits his debate with Gary Habermas about the resurrection and miracle testimony. He argues that once you “let miracles in,” you open the door to indefinitely many rival miracle-stories, so “a miracle occurred” by itself doesn’t single out the resurrection without substantial ancillary evidence. Jesus is used as the central case, but Ahmed stresses that even broader religious experience reports don’t straightforwardly raise the probability of that specific event, and he draws a sharp line between near-death experiences and bodily resurrection. He emphasizes that mundane explanations—mistake, exaggeration, deception—are vastly more common than resurrections, and so (absent extra evidence) testimony is typically less credible than the miracle claim it’s meant to support.

The discussion then turns to Ahmed’s provocative view that many religious people may not literally believe their religious doctrines. His thought is that genuine belief should typically (i) “penetrate” a person’s life—showing up robustly in action, fear, risk-taking, etc.—and (ii) display a kind of evidential responsiveness; but many ordinary religious “commitments” look patchier than that. He suggests that the concept of belief may function more like a rough, useful label over a complicated range of brain-and-behavior patterns (with vague boundaries), rather than naming a sharp natural kind; he illustrates this with examples where someone talks as if a proposition is true but won’t bet on it, and he compares disputes about whether the state “counts as belief” to Ship of Theseus-style borderline cases. He also draws on W. V. Quine’s idea that belief-attribution is a “dramatic idiom,” and he notes that many otherwise secular religious people continue to fear death, trust medicine, and live by largely non-religious moral norms—often fitting religion around prior moral commitments rather than the other way around.

Finally, Ahmed engages fine-tuning arguments and then pivots into decision theory. On fine-tuning, he’s sympathetic to the idea that specific “designer” hypotheses should often get a much lower prior than broad naturalism, potentially offsetting any likelihood advantage, and he adds a further worry: fine-tuning claims often rely on unsupported choices of “uniform” priors and parameterizations. Since we observe only one universe, he doubts we have the frequency-style grounding needed to justify probability assignments that make life “extremely unlikely” on naturalism in the first place—especially given how results can swing with different ways of measuring the same parameter. He then discusses why evidential and causal decision theories are highly idealized (axioms real agents don’t satisfy), yet still useful as clarifying models and as a way to make disputes more precise; he endorses loosening the formal assumptions where possible, and he comments on pressure points for causal decision theorists (including arguments associated with Adam Elga) and on proposals that try to “fix” causal decision theory by restricting attention to certain worlds. He also praises Richard Pettigrew’s work on choices affecting future selves while questioning whether we should model intertemporal choice as a literal “vote” among temporal selves versus a present-self weighting that merely takes account of them.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:03 - Habermas and the resurrection of Jesus

03:41 - Testimony and the Humean argument

05:24 - Near-death experiences

08:40 - Choosing between miracle hypotheses

10:23 - Religious belief

15:38 - Sufficient condition vs. necessary condition

17:37 - Vagueness of mental categories

19:17 - Potential criticisms

23:34 - Cautious conclusion

24:33 - Applicability elsewhere

26:58 - Approach to fine-tuning

34:52 - Design hypothesis

40:14 - Difficulties with priors

40:56 - Ahmed’s response to fine-tuning

43:09 - The space of possibilities

46:01 - Decision theory as overly idealized

50:00 - Expanding the theory

52:18 - Richard Pettigrew and Choosing for Changing Selves

56:10 - No need to change standard decision theory

58:07 - The Value of the Future and discounting

1:05:40 - Relevance to extended life

1:07:21 - Confession of a causal decision theorist

1:10:56 - Causalism and one-boxing in Newcomb’s problem

1:12:02 - Determinism, Counterfactuals, and Decision

1:16:24 - Motivating the view

1:20:56 - Argument for two-boxing

1:23:30 - Analyzing the conditionals

1:26:22 - Fatalist argument

1:27:45 - Salvaging Pascal’s Wager

1:31:39 - Deciding between actions with infinite utility

1:36:32 - Issue with infinite utilities

1:38:06 - Responses

1:41:22 - Value of philosophy

1:44:38 - Conclusion

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Can perceptual noise and a non-representational notion of acquaintance explain why experience feels so authoritative while still undercutting higher-order theories of consciousness?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Benj Hellie is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and his research focuses primarily on mind, epistemology, and semantics.

2. Interview Summary

Benj Hellie starts by walking through his work on perception, with a focus on how perceptual noise should change what we think perceptual experience represents. He frames the discussion around Delia Graff Fara’s treatment of “Nelson-type” cases—where a subject can’t discriminate A from B and can’t discriminate B from C, yet can discriminate A from C—and argues that this pushes against theories that treat “looks the same” as straightforwardly intransitive. His preferred diagnosis is that what’s really non-transitive here is discriminability, and noise gives a natural explanation of why those patterns show up. He also distinguishes a “naturalistic” motivation (signal chains are imperfect, so exact representation is too much to expect) from a “phenomenological” motivation (the felt “jumpiness” or instability in experience can seem to get in the way of latching onto the color itself).

The interview then shifts to higher-order intentionality and the idea that consciousness requires a mental state to represent itself. After the host introduces William Lycan’s quick argument from “awareness” → “intentional object” → “representation” → higher-order representation, Hellie’s main pushback targets the move that treats awareness as necessarily intentional/representational. Drawing on Gilbert Harman’s “star/dagger” contrast, he suggests there’s a non-intentional relational sense of seeing (the kind that requires the object to be present) as opposed to the non-factive, objectless kind you get in hallucination (the “dagger” case, illustrated with Macbeth). In that spirit, he floats an explanatory line: the “epistemic power” of phenomenal character—its seeming like an “immovable basis” for justification—is better accounted for if our access is a non-intentional acquaintance relation rather than another representational state aimed at it.

In the later discussion, Hellie reflects on how far he’s moved from some of the metaphysical background assumptions that shaped those older papers. He says he’s less drawn to positing “objects of mentation,” and more inclined to treat the action as being about contents rather than a special ontology of intentional objects. More radically, he describes coming to see “phenomenal character” talk (and even “mental properties” talk) as a kind of semantic confusion, which pushes him toward an expressivist/anti-realist attitude about mental discourse: talk like “Fred believes that p” isn’t describing Fred as instantiating an inner property so much as expressing a stance grounded in simulation/empathy. This broader orientation connects to his interest in treating one’s present mental state as “theoretical bedrock” for exploring the space of intelligible mental states and to the idea that logic/inference might be better understood in terms of what you’re committed to endorsing (rather than truth-preservation alone).

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:35 - Perceptual noise

06:29 - Indiscriminability is non-transitive

08:51 - Sense data theory

11:45 - Coarse color concepts

15:44 - Arguments for inexactness

17:17 - Intentional and non-intentional awareness

21:16 - Intentional objects

22:57 - Intentionality as ubiquitous

25:13 - Higher order theories of intentionality

29:01 - Relation of acquaintance

31:55 - Higher order theories and skepticism

35:06 - Current view

38:34 - Qualia

43:46 - “Must”

47:06 - Semantic dispute?

51:53 - Modality

55:22 - Possible criticism

57:08 - Logic as rules of endorsement preservation

1:00:13 - Possible counterexample

1:04:52 - Counterintuitive?

1:07:05 - Discovering inference rules

1:12:48 - Is modality relative?

1:14:32 - Modal system

1:16:54 - Upcoming book

1:19:00 - Metaphysical modality

1:25:42 - Notion as circular?

1:27:28 - Primitive vs. reductive

1:29:00 - Conventionalism

1:30:48 - Value of philosophy

1:37:11 - Conclusion

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Can liberal legal interpretation, free speech absolutism, and neutral “public meaning” really survive once you admit that texts, norms, and institutions only make sense inside purposive social practices?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Stanley Fish is a literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, and has been a professor at other universities, including, among others, Florida International University.

2. Interview Summary

Fish opens by laying out his “intentionalist” picture of interpretation: to understand a legal text you have to recover the purpose/aim of its authors at the moment of production, not treat “the text” (or “original public meaning”) as a self-standing object that can yield determinate answers by itself. He argues that textualism is ultimately a nonstarter because it can’t specify what exactly it is interpreting once you detach words from speaker-intentions and purposive contexts, and he adds that “original public meaning” is best understood as a sociological regularity rather than a normatively authoritative entity. When the interviewer presses on group-authored texts (legislatures, institutions), Fish leans on the idea of a “standing intention” (the enterprise-level aim you commit to by joining the practice), stressing that intention-talk needn’t be psychological “mind-reading” but can track shared purposes embedded in institutions. He connects this to broader issues about meaning by treating language as a usable “code”: even a lone speaker (Robinson Crusoe) can have meaningful terms so long as they’re in principle teachable.

A large middle portion turns to religion, education, and liberalism. Fish frames the question as whether religion is “special” (not merely one discourse among others): if it is special, then its core isn’t just doctrines and rituals describable from the outside, but a kind of commitment to an external authority (God) that doesn’t sit comfortably with liberal ideals of free individual deliberation. On that view, you can “teach” religion in the academy only by taking the heart out of it—domesticating it into a historical-cultural object compatible with liberal state aims. He links this to constitutional development: the Establishment Clause, he claims, has been steadily eroded (beyond a narrow area like school prayer), while Free Exercise has become increasingly powerful, enabling religious opt-outs from generally applicable laws. And he emphasizes the deep clash between liberal pluralism (no discourse gets privileged “in advance”) and religious commitment (which does claim antecedent authority when “push comes to shove”). A telling contrast appears when he compares moral-philosophy commitments to religious faith: you can be argued into or out of utilitarianism, but the catechism-style “who made you?” structure points to a kind of allegiance that isn’t governed by ordinary evidential bargaining.

In the later segments Fish applies the same anti-abstraction impulse to free speech and contemporary politics. He rejects the philosophical stability of the speech/action distinction—arguing that speech is itself a form of action with real-world consequences—so the idea that “speech as such” deserves categorical immunity is hard to defend. He also attacks the Brandeis-style “more speech is better” optimism, saying history (and especially the internet’s explosion of unfiltered communication) suggests that more speech often makes things worse, not better, and that serious regulation becomes unavoidable. When asked about cancel culture, he treats it as a kind of left-wing “party-ism” analogous to McCarthy-era career-destruction, while still allowing that some cases of social/professional sanction are plainly warranted and others wildly disproportionate. Finally, he’s skeptical that highly abstract philosophy reliably shapes real-world decision-making: people with opposing metaethical or epistemological theories can converge on the same policy or judicial outcomes, because practice is often driven by institutional constraints, precedent, and case-specific tests rather than top-down philosophical commitments.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:00 - Textual interpretation

07:26 - Original public meaning

14:41 - Group-produced texts

18:28 - Private language

22:23 - Teaching religion

33:05 - Political influence in education

44:00 - Defining “religion”

55:20 - Establishment and free exercise clauses

58:04 - Clauses inconsistent?

1:01:44 - Free speech and the first amendment

1:06:10 - Regulating speech

1:13:27 - Problems with unfiltered speech

1:16:02 - Pluralism

1:19:37 - Unique to religion?

1:25:50 - Cancel culture

1:30:46 - Prejoratives and use/mention

1:33:44 - Poetry

1:36:35 - Trump’s rhetoric

1:41:20 - Philip Pettit and the value of philosophy

1:55:05 - Value of philosophy experts

2:02:10 - Conclusion

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How can a physicalist account of the mind survive the intuitive pull of Mary’s Room while still explaining what we genuinely learn when we first experience color?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Frank Jackson is Professor Emeritus at Australian National University and was a visiting professor at Princeton University. His work focuses primarily on mind, language, and ethics, among other things, and most listeners will probably recognize him for the "Mary's Room" argument.

2. Interview Summary

Frank Jackson begins by unpacking what “physicalism” is even claiming, stressing that the thesis only looks empty if we’re sloppy about what counts as “physical.” He highlights two natural ways to draw the line: (i) “physical” as whatever properties we need to explain the non-sentient world, and (ii) “physical” as whatever properties govern the causal interactions that link brains to behavior and perception. On this framing, physicalism is a substantive bet that mentality can be explained using the same property-base that already earns its keep in explaining the non-mental world, and he’s happy to defend it as a challenging, contingent a posteriori claim about our world (without insisting it must hold across all nearby possible worlds).

The interview then turns to the legacy of the “Mary’s Room” argument: Jackson says he no longer accepts it, but insists it’s a genuinely deep challenge that has pushed philosophers into fruitful work on the ties between epistemology, concepts, reference, and the necessary a posteriori. His preferred diagnosis is broadly representationalist: when Mary leaves the black-and-white room, she doesn’t necessarily gain new propositional information so much as enter new kinds of representational states that make similarity-and-difference relations vividly available “for free,” rather than via laborious calculation—analogous to finally being able to see faces as alike rather than inferring it. This picture feeds into his views about color (as located in a similarity space rather than grasped by “acquaintance” with intrinsic qualia), his skepticism about “pure” demonstrative phenomenal concepts, and his broader take on mind–brain identity and multiple realizability: what’s shared across creatures is the functional role (e.g., being in pain), while the realizing states can differ by kind.

A third through-line is methodology—what thought experiments and conceptual analysis are for. Discussing Edmund Gettier and Timothy Williamson, Jackson treats Gettier-style cases as revealing both something about how we actually apply “knowledge” and something substantive about an easily missed possibility: justified true belief can still be true “by fluke,” and so fall short of epistemic gold-standard. He resists a caricature where “conceptual analysis” is anti-metaphysical; instead, he frames it as a bridge-project that connects how our language carves things up to the best overall metaphysical picture (his example is how talk of “change” relates to a four-dimensional spacetime view). In ethics, he brings the same naturalist impulse: start with plausible constraints like supervenience-style dependence of the ethical on the descriptive, then look for naturalistically acceptable properties that play the right functional roles for terms like “morally obligatory.” He also connects this to a decision-theoretic treatment of what one “ought” to do—favoring an “expected/prospect” notion of ought over a stark “objective” ought, and separating questions about right action from questions of praise and blame; where values come from may be partly preference-based, but he argues that the decision-theoretic framework itself doesn’t force any particular metaphysics of value.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:51 - Characterizing the physical

05:26 - Causal closure argument

06:41 - Clarifying definition

09:12 - Modal concern for defining physicalism

11:29 - Physicalism as a thesis about only the actual world

13:40 - The knowledge argument

17:18 - Current response

22:27 - Functional account incomplete?

27:22 - Functional properties not required?

31:30 - Phenomenal concepts strategy

35:34 - Knowledge vs. abilities

37:03 - Different ways of knowing

38:06 - Contingent identities

42:27 - Multiple realizability

46:11 - Thought experiments

52:06 - Opposing approaches

56:23 - Reductionism in ethics

1:01:00 - Arguing for property identities

1:04:44 - Decision theory in ethics

1:10:24 - Subjectivist theory?

1:12:50 - Nothing special about ethical decisions?

1:17:29 - Language, names, and information

1:22:03 - Similarity with causal theory

1:25:43 - Direct reference

1:29:19 - Singular propositions

1:33:59 - Kripke’s arguments against descriptivism

1:39:00 - Value of philosophy

1:43:27 - Conclusion

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Can a perceptual experience be rational or irrational in the same way a belief can, and what happens when fear or prejudice shapes what you literally see?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Susanna Siegel is Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, and her work focuses on mind, epistemology, perception, and related topics.

2. Interview Summary

Susanna Siegel lays out and defends the central idea of The Rationality of Perception: perceptual experiences themselves can be rational or irrational, and so can be appropriate targets of epistemic “reactive attitudes,” not just beliefs. She suggests this hasn’t been mainstream largely because perception feels “given”—you open your eyes and the world simply shows up—so the mind’s constructive contribution is easy to miss. Once you take seriously what the sciences of perception reveal about that constructive machinery, the live philosophical question becomes: which constructive aspects are epistemically assessable, and why?

A big part of the interview is her model for how experiences can inherit epistemic status from the processes that generate them. She motivates the “downgrade” thesis: when an experience is produced as the conclusion of a psychologically real-time inference that relies on epistemically bad “premises” (misinformation, prejudice, fear), that very same type of experience has less justificatory power than it otherwise would. To make the inference idea plausible, she resists the “reckoning” view on which inference requires an extra, articulable state that one’s premises support one’s conclusion; instead, she emphasizes a distinctive inferential responsiveness that can occur without any such reckoning state. She also pushes back on treating “association” as a grab-bag category for everything non-inferential, distinguishing psychologist-style associative learning from broader (often misleading) philosophical uses—and she sketches an “outlook + input → what comes to mind” (XYZ) framework she’s developing in a book on salience.

The conversation then turns to objections and real-world stakes. One thread asks whether the “bad-making feature” in biased perception might instead be framed in terms of prior obligations or failures of agency (rather than the inference structure itself), and Siegel teases apart when that would be an add-on versus a substitute explanation. Another thread concerns how to weigh intuitive “clear cases” (like familiar “tomato” scenarios) against more morally charged examples, and Siegel situates her view as neither straightforward reliabilism nor simple introspection-based internalism—many epistemically relevant processes can be “internal to the mind” while still inaccessible to introspection. She stresses that once you focus on high-stakes cases—e.g., perception shaped by fear and prejudice in policing—the framework has implications for how we should think about standards like the “reasonable person” in law. Closing out, she ties the project to a broader picture of philosophy’s value: as an intellectual practice that clarifies problems by mapping the space of potential solutions, and helps us reflect on which questions are worth pursuing in the first place.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:37 - Rationality of perception

05:26 - Myth of the given

07:22 - Downgrade thesis

12:15 - Inference without reckoning

20:42 - Inference vs. learned associations

29:04 - Vagueness

32:59 - Oversimplification?

36:02 - Another view

45:13 - Fixing the obligations

49:53 - Epistemic externalism

57:37 - Weighing intuitions

1:00:49 - Explaining false intuitions

1:03:15 - Connection to epistemology more generally

1:05:54 - Attention and perceptual justification

1:12:11 - Epistemic weight of attention

1:19:04 - Value of philosophy

1:23:36 - Conclusion

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Can racism be understood as a historically evolving system of domination, and do near-death experiences and the prospect of immortality really support the big metaphysical conclusions people often draw from them?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Sam Houston State University and his work focuses on ethics, action, racism, as well as death and dying.

2. Interview Summary

Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin begins by laying out a “genealogical” account of racism: to understand what racism is (and how it works), you need an essentially historical lens rather than a timeless list of necessary and sufficient conditions. On his view, racism is pluralistic in its basic structure: psychological elements (attitudes, dispositions, patterns of perception) and social-structural elements (institutions, norms, policies) are co-fundamental and develop together over time. A central through-line is domination—both a “drive to dominate” at the individual level and a broader “dominion of the dominant,” where those with power shape institutions and public narratives in ways that reinforce hierarchy. He connects this to contemporary politics—e.g., how leadership and public rhetoric can normalize racial antipathy and help explain downstream social effects.

The conversation then shifts to near-death experiences (NDEs) and the attempt to use them as evidence against physicalism. Mitchell-Yellin (drawing on work with John Martin Fischer) argues that prominent “NDEs refute physicalism” arguments are typically much weaker than advertised: the inference from “people report vivid experiences” to “mind is non-physical” makes big, contestable leaps, and appeals to simplicity often backfire because “soul” hypotheses introduce a lot of new explanatory burdens (especially about mind–body interaction). He also emphasizes the interdisciplinary point: physicians and researchers can contribute crucial data, but philosophers are doing something different—evaluating whether the metaphysical conclusions actually follow. And when it comes to controlled tests aimed at verifying “out-of-body” perception (hidden targets near ceilings, etc.), he notes that results have not produced the sort of clear “hits” we’d expect if literal disembodied observation were common.

Finally, they discuss immortality—especially whether it would be necessarily boring, and whether it would be desirable even if boredom isn’t guaranteed. He engages Bernard Williams’s famous Makropulos-style argument, stressing that the relevant “boredom” is a deep, existential disengagement (not mere restlessness), and he suggests there are plausible routes by which interests could remain resilient (old projects becoming newly meaningful, new cultural products continuing to appear, etc.). But he also develops a further worry about meaning: if what you value depends on ongoing engagement with valuable objects (people, projects, environments), then very long lives risk outlasting—or watching the degradation of—the very things that make life worth continuing. He highlights climate change as an under-discussed example of how the long-run disappearance of valued activities and conditions could threaten the desirability of immortality, even for someone who initially wants it.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:40 - Genealogical view of racism

05:06 - Cause of racism vs. racism itself

11:04 - Importance of history

14:31 - Weakness of theory?

19:20 - Potential counterexample

21:28 - Inferring racism in new cases

26:01 - Drive to dominate

27:44 - Racism and Trump

31:57 - Revealing racism

35:23 - Benefit of historical view

36:18 - Near-death experiences and physicalism

41:03 - Dependence on prior views

45:45 - Philosophical input

51:32 - NDE data limited

57:21 - NDE’s are real

1:00:05 - Experience vs. interpretation of experience

1:01:41 - Fake reports

1:05:02 - Immortality and boredom

1:12:41 - Memory

1:14:06 - Other problems with immortality?

1:19:03 - Extending life

1:25:05 - Value of philosophy

1:29:41 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe