Philosophy Overdose

Professor Emma Borg gives the second lecture in a series on "Reasons for Action" as part of the 2024 Frege Lectures in theoretical philosophy at the University of Tartu.

Uploaded 08-04-25

Do people generally do what they do on the basis of the reasons they have for acting? The standard philosophical answer - common-sense psychology or folk psychology - says yes. But recently the idea that humans are generally rational, reasons-responsive beings has come under considerable pressure, as a number of empirical findings (often in the fields of social, comparative, and developmental psychology) seem to suggest that, on the contrary, people are often blind to reasons, acting on gut feelings and intuitions, and are subject to various biases and other errors of reasoning. Although these empirical findings are now well-known (reaching beyond the ivory tower into the public consciousness), Emma Borg suggests that the precise problem for common-sense psychology remains unclear. There are (at least) three different arguments that could be made based on the empirical data. In her lectures, Emma Borg explains these three arguments and argues that the proponent of the common-sense view has responses to each of them. She concludes that the case against common-sense psychology can be rejected, and that we should hold on to the notion that action (of a typical adult) involves acting based on reasons.

Emma Borg is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London. Her main research interests are the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and business ethics. Borg is the author of Minimal Semantics (2004) and Pursuing Meaning (2012), as well as two forthcoming books: A Very Short Introduction to Meaning and Acting for Reasons: In Defence of Common-Sense Psychology (all published by Oxford University Press). The latter book is also the basis for her Frege Lectures.

00:00 Talk
1:16:47 Q and A

#philosophy #epistemology #psychology #rationality



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Audio recording of a lecture given by professor Herbert Feigl on free will and science at Coffman Union in 1963 at the University of Minnesota. After introducing the traditional problem of free will, he goes on to discuss how determinism and indeterminism fit into our conception of science. He then goes on to argue that free will is not only consistent with determinism, but it seems to presuppose it. He thereby tries to dissolve the traditional issue by showing the underlying compatibility between free will and that of causal determinism.

Uploaded 12-01-25

#philosophy #determinism #science #freewill #causality #causation #philosophyofscience



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In this sixth lecture, James Conant continues to discuss the Kantian problematic, and does so by discussing the work of John McDowell. He particularly focuses on the case of perception and then of action and intentions. In the case of perception, the problem involves avoiding the myth of the Given without thereby falling into an empty kind of coherentism or idealism.

Uploaded 03-07-21

In this series of lectures on varieties of philosophical skepticism, James Conant distinguishes between two forms of philosophical skepticism: Cartesian skepticism and Kantian skepticism. He discusses their general structure and shows how they're related. This sheds light on issues in various different areas, including within the philosophy of perception, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Some of the philosophers discussed throughout this course include Wittgenstein, Sellars, Hilary Putnam, Kripke, C.I. Lewis, John McDowell, and Stanley Cavell.

This series of lectures was given in 2005 at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bergen, Norway. Note, the audio has been slightly edited and improved.

"When Kant describes the understanding as a faculty of spontaneity, that reflects his view of the relation between reason and freedom: rational necessitation is not just compatible with freedom but constitutive of it. In a slogan, the space of reasons is the realm of freedom. But if our freedom in empirical thinking is total, in particular if it is not constrained from outside the conceptual sphere, that can seem to threaten the very possibility that judgements of experience might be grounded in a way that relates them to a reality external to thought. And surely there must be such grounding if experience is to be a source of knowledge, and more generally, if the bearing of empirical judgements on reality is to be intelligibly in place in our picture at all. The more we play up the connection between reason and freedom, the more we risk losing our grip on how exercises of concepts can constitute warranted judgements about the world. What we wanted to conceive as exercises of concepts threaten to degenerate into moves in a self-contained game." McDowell

"The idea of the Given is the idea that the space of reasons, the space of justifications or warrants, extends more widely than the conceptual sphere." McDowell

00:00 Introduction
07:33 Perception
49:05 Action

All lectures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhP9EhPApKE8muoMpX8qQ-14zKnYPc5VI

#philosophy #epistemology #skepticism #philosophyofmind #kant #historyofphilosophy



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A clip of Professor James Rachels presenting a version of his "basic argument for vegetarianism" in the context of why Raymond Frey should be a vegetarian by his own principles. This comes from a 1991 lecture on Darwin and animal ethics at Georgetown University. The full video can be found here: https://youtu.be/NBjOqexaFys

Uploaded 30-09-24

#philosophy #ethics #moralphilosophy #animalethics #animalrights



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Professor J.M. Bernstein introduces Hegel and discusses his initial moves and philosophical project, including the departure from Kant and Kantianism. This is the first lecture in his 2007 course on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, known as "the Bernstein Tapes". Note, the audio has been heavily edited and improved (especially the first 45 minutes or so). The reason for this was simply to make it easier to listen to and thus to appreciate these great lectures.

Uploaded 27-08-21

#philosophy #hegel #kant #epistemology



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A brief introductory clip about Aristotle's ethics. It comes from the series on great ideas of philosophy.

Uploaded 07-04-24

#philosophy #aristotle #ethics



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A clip of Iris Murdoch discussing the similarities and differences between literature and philosophy in an interview with Bryan Magee from 1977 that I quite like. This is a re-upload from the previous channel. The full interview can be found here: https://youtu.be/3tbr5Y7iLwY

Uploaded 23-07-21

#Philosophy #BryanMagee #Literature



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Audio recording of a lecture by Ronald M. Dworkin on his book "Justice for Hedgehogs" at the Carnegie Council in 2011. The title is a reference to the Ancient Greek poet Archilochus who wrote that "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Ronald Dworkin argues for one big thing: the unity of value.

Uploaded 13-09-25

#philosophy #politicalphilosophy #ethics #moralphilosophy #jurisprudence



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Professor Dan Robinson gives the third in a series of 8 lectures on Thomas Reid's critique of David Hume at Oxford in 2014. Causality arises from a habit of the mind formed by repeated experiences. “There is nothing in any objects to persuade us, that they are either always remote or always contiguous; and when from experience and observation we discover, that their relation in this particular is invariable, we, always conclude there is some secret cause, which separates or unites them…”

Uploaded 19-06-21

Under “David Hume”, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy begins with, “The most important philosopher ever to write in English”. His most formidable contemporary critic was the fellow Scot, Thomas Reid, the major architect of so-called Scottish Common Sense Philosophy. The most significant features of Hume’s work, as understood by Reid, are the representive theory of perception, the nature of causation and causal concepts, the nature of personal identity and the foundations of morality. Each of these topics is presented in a pair of lectures, the first summarizing Hume’s position and the second Reid’s critique of that position.

All Lectures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhP9EhPApKE9nki7CXFPi7PMOi5W2g2-q

#philosophy #davidhume #causation #skepticism #causality #historyofphilosophy



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We are all familiar with the notion that time passes, but what does this mean? In this talk, Dr Simon Prosser argues that time does not pass. He begins by outlining some philosophical theories of temporal passage (A-theories of time, including presentism and the growing block view), along with a class of theories according to which time does not objectively pass (the B-theory of time, what's called eternalism or the block universe). He then goes over traditional problems for the notion of passage, including McTaggart's argument, the issue of the rate of passage, and the argument that passage is incompatible with modern physics (particularly with Einstein's special theory of relativity). He then goes on to argue that, despite appearances to the contrary, it is not actually possible to experience time passing. But because the best reason for thinking that time passes is our experience of it, we no longer have any good reason for thinking that time actually passes. If this is right, then it is an important project for philosophers and psychologists to explain why it seems to us that time passes when it doesn't really do so.

Uploaded 05-07-21

This was given at Durham University in 2012.

Read more about the nature of time and some of the philosophical issues which arise: https://iep.utm.edu/time/

00:00 Introduction
01:39 A-Series and B-Series
04:35 The A-Theory of Time
05:34 The B-Theory of Time
08:05 The Ontology of the A and B Theories
11:13 Four Arguments Against Passage
11:44 McTaggart's Paradox
15:23 The Rate of Passage
17:27 Einstein's Theory of Relativity
20:07 Final Argument
20:58 Could we Build a Device that detects Passage?
23:07 Why No Physical Device can detect Passage
25:25 Eddington on Experiencing Passage
29:42 The Impossibility of Experiencing Passage
39:56 Time does not Pass
43:55 Summary

#philosophy #time #philosophyoftime #metaphysics #epistemology #historyofphilosophy



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