ICE@Dartmouth Podcast

We make moral judgements all the time, every time we say something is good, bad, evil, or right. Despite their ubiquity, we do not usually stop to wonder whether making moral judgments is a good thing. Nor do we typically even ask what the point of making a moral judgement is. These are some of the questions that those who study ethics pose, especially in the sub-field of meta-ethics. I'm going to talk to Dr Eric Campbell about some of these tricky questions about moral systems and how we might think about them differently and a little more deeply.

Over many millennia, different cultures have told many different stories, and held many different beliefs about, the stars. Studying these different belief systems is part of what archaeoastronomers, or cultural astronomers, do. In the process, they give us the opportunity to not only learn what others have thought or believed about the sky, but also to explore our own relationship with the sky and with science more generally. These are some of the things I will talk with Dr Tony Aveni about in this episode.

Philosophers use representation as a way to understand how we can talk, think, and describe the world around us. But how does representation work? It is difficult to say precisely and a satisfactory answer is made more elusive by our varied means of representation, which can range from pictures and photographs to verbal descriptions, texts, and many, many other forms. How do we use all these different systems to represent reality?

Dr Gabriel Rabin is a philosopher who studies some of these problems and in this episode, we're going to talk in particular about analogue representation and how it works. 

What is the nature of time? Contemporary physics is one field to wrestle with this question. This episode explores the challenges of understanding time in contemporary physics through a conversation with Philipp Höhn, who works on reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity, particularly with respect to time.

For our first full length episode, Franklin Jacoby will chat with the director of ICE@Dartmouth, Marcelo Gleiser, about what the institute is and why their work is so important. 

In this first episode, the host, Franklin Jacoby, will introduce the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth (ICE@Dartmouth) and discuss how their fellows program is making important contributions to not only the sciences and humanities, but also to some of the deep questions and issues we face as people. In later episodes he'll converse with the director, Marcelo Gleiser, and then with past fellows of the Institute.