On The Very Idea - A Philosophy Podcast

In this first episode of a three part series, I look at the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein - the enigmatic Austrian philosopher of the early half of the 20th century. I examine his pursuit of the goal of constructing the perfect language - one that was beautiful in its simplicity and could show how each meaningful sentence 'pictured' a part of reality. Language would hook up with reality via simples - basic words that represent simple objects. Wittgenstein had an often puritanical pursuit of truth and I try to show how this helped inform his ambitious philosophy.

In this final episode of a two part series, I look at the work of Martin Heidegger to see how it can provide insights into a critical examination of the techno optimism behind the big data movement and the TED Talk crowd. Can big data craft better social policy by relying on a computational models to determine the best social policy? According to Heidegger, any model based on quantification will miss the ineffable, non-conceptual and purely qualitative aspects of the lived world which is, after all, the world that we inhabit as citizens and people. Plus the obligatory trivia and my endless struggle with pronouncing the word ‘data’ the same way twice.

Big data is the use of extremely large data sets that may be analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations. Some of the more optimistic among us think that big data can be employed to craft better social policy thereby creating more functional and livable societies. I trace the origins of this techno optimism showing its roots in Auguste Comte's Postivism movement in the 19th century and the earlier dreams of the Enlightenment and hint at what may be lacking in such optimism.

In this final part of a two part series on love, I look at a thought experiment by Bernard Williams in which he explores how a Kantian might react when explaining his motivation of why he should save his wife over others in a hypothetical drowning situation. Williams says such an explanation would leave the wife feeling quite cold and unloved. J David Velleman offers a reinterpretation of Kant that allows him to give him a more sweeter, tender explanation to his wife for choosing to save her all the while still fitting tightly into the Kantian framework. Basically, Velleman provides a Kantian construal of love that fits within his rational framework. I think its quite nice.

In this first episode of a two part series, I will look at various definitions of love focusing on the analytic school with also a touch of Freud and Plato. I then examine a claim about whether the demands of love conflict with the demands of morality. For some, to love necessarily means to give your beloved preferential treatment. But, morality demands that we treat all persons equally. Can we reconcile these conflicting claims?

In this final episode of a four part series, I finish my discussion on qualia with a mention of British philosopher CD Broad and a discussion about whether our minds have the cognitive capacity to understand the structure of themselves. Can our minds understand our minds? Do we have the cognitive chops to understand how the mental and the physical interact? Shifting gears a bit,  I explore how the role of the mass media shapes the mainstream understanding of philosophy in the little coverage that philosophy receives in print. I explore how this issue applies in particular to common understandings of developments in the philosophy of mind. I also throw in a little story about the use of chickens and ammonia as torture in Thai prisons if only because sometimes I like to ramble.

In this third episode of a four part series, I first take a brief sojourn into a story involving the unlikely pair of AJ Ayer and Mike Tyson.  Then, I get into the meat of the episode by diving deeper into the work of Daniel Dennett and his criticism of the very notion of qualia and I also touch on some of its similarities to the Private Language Argument of Ludwig Wittgenstein. To counter this criticism of qualia, I then look at a well known thought experiment by Frank Jackson that argues that our mental experience forms an ineliminable part of our epistemology.

In this second episode of a four part series, I start by exploring a little bit of epistemology. What is it that we most intimately know? What piece of knowledge am I most intimately aware of when I see an apple? The actual physical object 'the apple' or my conscious experience of the apple? Many philosophers would argue that we are most aware of the apple of our consciousness (the qualia) and only secondarily aware of the physical object that is the apple. What consequences does this have for our scientific understanding of the world? Are qualia the most fundamental pieces of our epistemic reality? To counteract this point, I look at the work of that naysayer of the mental, Daniel Dennett.

In this first episode of a four episode series on qualia, I will be looking at the role of qualia in the philosophy of mind. Qualia is the stuff of consciousness- it is that which is the qualitative content of our experience. Specifically in this episode, I’ll be looking at a definition of qualia and the role of philosophy in investigating the contents of the mind and the limits of science when it comes to this task. I explore whether philosophy has a unique role in forming our understanding of consciousness.