Generous Questions

Bob Plant puts out music as Portland Vows, and you should definitely go and listen to his releases on the Concrète Tapes label here and on the Third Kind label here and here.

A list of his published philosophical works can be found on PhilPapers here.

In the episode I mentioned a book by Stella Sandford, Vegetal Sex: Philosophy of Plants which is published by Bloomsbury Press, you can find it here.

I also mentioned Robert Porter's project on 'Philosophy, Theory and the Politics of Everyday Life', you can find out more about it on the Ulster University website here.

Niall Grimes has a website here, he's the host of Jam Crack podcast, which you can find on all good podcasting apps or click here:

At one point in the conversation I mention the concept of 'grip', which is used by philosophers and psychologists interested in embodied (and specifically 'enactive') cognition, and which has its origin in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, specifically the following text:

For further reading about the ideas associated with 'embodied' cognition, here's the Stanford Encyclopedia entry – §2.4 addresses focuses on enactivism in particular:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/

As ever, please get in touch to send any thoughts, responses, ideas, reactions, feedback or ideas about this episode or any of the others, it's always great to hear from you, particularly if you want to say encouraging things. To drop me a line you can just head over to the contact page, or tweet at me on twitter (@drjoemorrison)

The theme music is from li_serios05 by TVO on Broken20 records under Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA.

Susan suggested a bunch of things to read about the philosophy and ethics of listening, for you to follow up:

And here are some other things for you to explore that came up in our conversation:

You can find Susan online on twitter (@susannotess), and her academic webpage is here, where you can find links to her work, including this excellent article:

As ever, please get in touch to send any thoughts, responses, ideas, reactions, feedback or ideas about this episode or any of the others, it's always great to hear from you, particularly if you want to say encouraging things. To drop me a line you can just head over to the contact page, or tweet at me on twitter (@drjoemorrison)

The theme music is from li_serios05 by TVO on Broken20 records under Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA.

Here are some links to find out even more:

Our guest for this episode: Dr Clare Moriarty!

For some introductory things to learn more about Berkeley's views:

We talk a bit about what it's like to on a temporary employment contract in univerisities (I think I say that I've held 2 or 3 'permanent' appointments, but I meant to say 'temporary'!), and there's widespread growing concern about the way that universities have decided to keep people on 'precarious' contracts.

We also talk a bit about some of the challenges that go with working on a topic of research that straddles several different disciplines (history, philosophy, mathematics). Jo Wolff mentions the latter in his column for the Guardian here, including a shout-out to Berkeley's ideas about tar water!

At one point in our talk we touch briefly on some examples of reviews of philosophical books (by other philosophers) which are pointedly blunt (to the point of being amusing). Here are some links:

In this episode I try (in the first couple of minutes) to summarise what I understand Berkeley's 'idealism' to involve, and then I try to explan why it might mean that a Berkeleian idealist has some resistance to some bits of mathematics. I don't think I did a great job of summarising it, but here's what I said, if it helps to read it:

Berkeley’s famous for maintaining a position that we call ‘idealism’, which says that the only things that exist are minds and mental events – that’s all there is, minds and mental events. So, for example, physical things like coconuts or trampolines or jellyfish exist only in so far as they’re being perceived by a mind. It’s as though there aren’t really any coconuts or trampolines independently of us, instead they’re just sort of composed out of bundles of our ideas. But while this is the normal story that we tell about what Berkeley thinks about everyday objects in the external world, I really didn’t know much about Berkeley’s philosophy of mathematics before talking with Clare.

I suppose one way to think about it is this: that if like Berekely you think that for something to exist it has to be perceived by a mind, then there’ll be some things that mathematicians talk about which Berkelian idealists are going to balk at. For example, mathematical work in calculus deals with infinitesimals, and one of the things that we know about infinitesimals is that they’re really hard for us humans to think about, or to imagine or conceive of. And if Berkelely’s right, and that for something to exist it has to be perceived by a mind, then since we can’t perceive infitinitesimals (even in our imaginations), I guess he’s going to want to say that they don’t exist.

And the upshot would mean that Berkeley would have to say that the whole of calculus is concerned with something that doesn’t really exist. And as it happens, that’s precisely what he did say: in his book The Analyst Berkeley refers to Isaac Newton’s infinitesimal calculus as dealing with the ‘ghosts of departed quantities’.

The challenge that Berkeley created for himself by being an idealist is that he then needed to be able to give mathematics, and the newly invented calculus (which was proving to be really successful!), a more secure foundation in the kinds of qualities that our minds can perceive.

And as Clare mentions in the episode, one person who tried to carry out this Berkelian project is Oliver Byrne (1810–1880), and Irish mathematician who wrote a work called The Trinal Calculus which says on its title page:

"The object of the Trinal Calculus, like that of Geometry, is the investigation of the propositions of the assignable extensions, and there is no need to consider quantities, either infinitely great or indefinitely small".

Byrne also made a 'coloured Euclid', a version of the first six books of Euclid's Elements "in which Coloured Diagrams and Symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of learners". While it sounds like the colours are there to assist people to understand the mathematics, it's clear that Byrne's ultimate goal is to show that a huge amount of mathematics can be successfully carried out without appealing to any entities (like infinitesimals) that cannot be perceived by a mind.

Shortly after we recorded this episode, Clare was working in TCD's archive of historic books, and sent me some snapshots of their copy of Byrne's Trinal Calculus (in the back of which he had included his annotated copy of Berkeley's Analyst – a gift to posterity). Here they are:

I didn't know much about Icelandic Sagas before I heard about Aoife's project, I just knew that they were long and complicated and involved feuds and fate. But Aoife, a philosophy student at Queen's University Belfast, knew a lot more and wanted to try to make sense of all the heavyweight moral decisions and decisive actions that go on in them. Her project is partly an investigation of a moral framework, and partly a research project into historical and anthropological reconstruction, but along the way she tries out a number of philosophical different approaches to understanding character traits.

Here are some things that Aoife's suggested for you to read:

As ever, please get in touch to send any thoughts, responses, ideas, reactions, feedback or ideas about this episode or any of the others, it's always great to hear from you, particularly if you want to say encouraging things. To drop me a line you can just head over to the contact page, or tweet at me on twitter (@drjoemorrison)

The theme music is from li_serios05 by TVO on Broken20 records under Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA.

We talk about ethical egoism, which Rupert seems to feel is dismissed a little bit too lightly, and we hear about how he's going to try to defend it. While Rupert’s talking about ethics and about what determines or fixes ethical truths – where they come from – at the same time in the background there are lot of other issues about political philosophy and authority and freedom and the state. I cut some of that discussion out just to help keep this episode focused on a particular subject, but Rupert's made some reading suggestions for you to follow-up, and they cover some of these broader topics.

So, some things for you to explore:

As ever, please get in touch to send any thoughts, responses, ideas, reactions, feedback or ideas about this episode or any of the others, it's always great to hear from you, particularly if you want to say encouraging things. To drop me a line you can just head over to the contact page, or tweet at me on twitter (@drjoemorrison)

The theme music is from li_serios05 by TVO on Broken20 records under Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA.

A transcript of this conversation is available from the episode website, just go to this episode and click on the button that says 'transcript'. The transcripts for every episode have been beautifully prepared by Becci. Thanks Becci!

This is a conversation with a final-year student in Philosophy. Aine graduated from Queen's University Belfast in the summer of 2019, and like many students she used her final year of studies to work on an extended independent research project. Dissertation students write about a philosophical topic of their own devising, working alongside individual members of faculty who help to steer their project. Aine worked with my colleage Roger Clarke on an epistemology project to do with ancient skepticism – the philosopher Sextus Empiricus tells us about the Pyhrrohnic skeptics, who thought that there's something desirable about freeing oneself from the tyranny of 'dogmatic' beliefs and making a concerted effort to free oneself of any knowledge.

Here are some things you might like to look up to find out more about Aine's topic:

Aine's dissertation is exploring the question of whether a Pyrhhonic skeptic is 'practical', whether they can 'act normally' or 'live their skepticism', and for this specific question she recommends the following papers:

Please get in touch to send any thoughts, responses, ideas, reactions, feedback or ideas about this episode or any of the others, it's great to hear from you, particularly if you want to say encouraging things. To drop me a line you can just head over to the contact page.

The theme music is from li_serios05 by TVO on Broken20 records under Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA.

A transcript of this conversation is available from the episode website, just go to this episode and click on the button that says 'transcript'. The transcripts for each episode have been beautifully prepared by Becci. Thanks Becci!

Prof. Nancy Jecker came to Queen's University Belfast to speak at this philosophy conference on the ethics of chronic illness, and I used that opportunity to ask her about her philosophical interests and work.

We talked about life and death – in particular, lives lived with chronic illneses, and the ways that a person's story doesn't end just at the moment that they die. We talked about intergenerational ethical issues (for example, about caring for the dependent elderly). She introduced me to the concept of an 'itai hoteru', which are Japanese hotels-for-the newly-deceased, and the 421-problem in China.

Here are some links to help you find out more about Nancy and her work:

Please do feel encouraged to get in touch to send any thoughts, responses, ideas, reactions, feedback or ideas about this episode or any of the others, I'd love to hear from you. To do that, you can just head over to the contact page.

The theme music is from li_serios05 by TVO on Broken20 records under Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA.

A transcript of this conversation is available, you just need to click on the button that says 'transcript'. The transcripts for each episode have been beautifully prepared by Becci.

This is part two of the interview with Jonathan Webber about his book 'Rethinking Existentialism', and in this one we talk about existentialist ideas around freedom and ethical action, which is why I'm calling it I'm calling it 'Freedom and Morality'. I asked him some questions about how he knew that he had a big enough idea to start thinking about the topic as a 'book' project rather than a series of philosophy papers. We also got chatting about the current vogue of contemporary writing about Fanon, Beauvoir, existentialism, and (in contrast) a resurgence of essentialist positions in popular science writing.

You can find part one of this interview, which is about what existentialism is, and how to think about 'projects' and 'choices', by clicking here.

Here are some things that you might find useful – they're the same things that I linked to in episode 1, but here they are again:

I'd really like you to get in touch if you've any feedback about this episode, particularly if it's supportive and encouraging. Just head over to the contact page.

The theme music is from li_serios05 by TVO on Broken20 records under Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA.

A transcript of this conversation is available, you just need to click on the button that says 'transcript'. The transcripts for each episode have been beautifully prepared by Becci.

It's the first episode! And that means all the work that's been building for over year gets unleashed RIGHT HERE and it's pretty exciting and terrifying at the same time. So where better to start than with a conversation with a lovely friendly philosopher, discussing his fascination with soul-searching French philosophy?

Jonathan Webber is a professor of philosophy at the University of Cardiff. He came to Queen's University Belfast in April 2018 to do a viva voce examination of one of our PhD students. He was just about to publish his new book about existentialism and it seemed like the perfect time to grab him for a chat.

In fact, the conversation went so well that I'm putting it out in two parts. This is part one, where we talk about how he thinks we should think about what existentialism is. I'm calling it 'Projects and Choices'. Part two covers morality and freedom, and will be released as Generous Questions episode 2.

Here are some things that you might find useful:

I'd really like you to get in touch if you've any feedback about this episode, particularly if it's supportive and encouraging. Just head over to the contact page.

A transcript of this conversation is available, you just need to click on the button that says 'transcript'.