Robinson's Podcast

Jody Azzouni is a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. While Jody is best known for his nominalist stance in the philosophy of mathematics, he is also an author of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He and Robinson talk about his love of writing and how his interest in mathematics bloomed during in his time spent at NYU and CUNY. They then move on to the debate between nominalists and platonists in the philosophy of mathematics, Jody’s own deflationary stance, and some adjacent concerns about ontological commitment in both formal and informal languages.

Outline:

00:00 Introduction

3:16 Jody’s Writing Background

9:05 Jody’s Poetry

21:20 The Relationship Between Jody’s Philosophy and Everything Else

32:33 Jody’s Interest in the Philosophy of Mathematics

40:02 The Platonist/Nominalist Opposition in the Philosophy of Mathematics

49:29 The Platonist Conception of Mathematical Objects

52:50 A Nominalist Argument Against Mathematical Realism

1:09:41 Varieties of Mathematical Nominalism

1:18:55 Nominalism in Mathematics and Metaphysics

1:24:39 Ontological Commitment in the Vernacular

1:35:30 A Poetry Reading

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Sophie Grace Chappell is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University in the UK. Before that she taught at the University of Dundee and Oxford. Sophie has a wide variety of interests, including ancient philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of literature. She and Robinson speak about her latest book, Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience. More particularly, their discussion centers around philosophy and literature—including a wonderful reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins—the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, and some potential pitfalls of taking a theory-building approach to moral philosophy.

Outline:

00:00 Introduction

2:27 Literae Humaniores

14:42 The Etymology of "Outrage"

19:19 Literature and the Phenomenology of Being Human

36:51 Ethics and Aesthetics

49:13 Poetry and Philosophy

53:40 What Are Epiphanies?

58:56 Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Terrible Sonnets

1:10:20 James Joyce and Epiphanies

1:14:35 Theory-Building Approaches to Ethics

1:24:41 Sophie's Approach to Ethics

1:29:49 Testing Ethical Theories

1:32:12 Sophie the Mountaineer

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Eric Schwitzgebel is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Riverside. Before that, he did his undergraduate work at Stanford, and then received his doctorate from the University of California Berkeley. Eric has worked on an extremely wide array of topics, ranging from Chinese philosophy to philosophy of mind, metaphilosophy, and metaphysics. In this conversation, however, Robinson and Eric talk about his upcoming book on philosophy and weirdness. In particular, they discuss why the United States might be conscious, what Kant and cyberpunk have in common, the moral value of alien microbes, and a lot more about garden snails than you thought you could ever find interesting. Keep up with Eric through his blog, the Splintered Mind, or on Twitter @eschwitz.

Outline:

00:00 Introduction

3:07 A Man of Many Interests

4:21 The Weirdness of the World

12:32 Why the United States May Be Conscious

25:50 Kant and Cyberpunk

35:22 Experimental Evidence for an External World

46:54 Are Ethicists More Ethical Than the Rest of Us?

1:04:47 What It's Like to Be a Garden Snail

1:23:07 The Moral Value of Alien Microbes

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Joel David Hamkins is the O’Hara Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame, where he recently moved from the University of Oxford. Joel is one of the leading set theorists and philosophers of mathematics in the world, and he and Robinson discuss a lot—Hilbert’s Hotel, the continuum hypothesis, the set-theoretic multiverse, and even Joel’s dapper hat collection—but the main subject is his upcoming book, The Book of the Infinite, which is an accessible text on paradoxes and infinity. Joel has made the novel move of serializing it on Substack, so you can participate in its creation by checking out the link below, and otherwise see what he’s thinking about and working on through Twitter, MathOverflow, and his blog. The conversation grows technical from 1:10:26-2:00:25, but for those to whom that doesn’t appeal there are timestamps to navigate around this portion of the show.

Substack: https://joeldavidhamkins.substack.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JDHamkins

MathOverflow: https://mathoverflow.net/users/1946/joel-david-hamkins

Joel’s Blog: http://jdh.hamkins.org

OUTLINE: 

00:00 Introduction 

2:52 Is Joel a Mathematician or a Philosopher? 

6:13 The Philosophical Influence of Hugh Woodin 

10:29 The Intersection of Set Theory and Philosophy of Math 

16:29 Serializing the Book of the Infinite 

20:05 Zeno of Elea, Continuity, and Geometric Series 

39:39 Infinite Games and the Chocolatier 

53:35 Hilbert's Hotel 

1:10:26 Cantor's Theorem 

1:31:37 The Continuum Hypothesis 

1:43:02 The Set-Theoretic Multiverse 

2:00:25 Berry's Paradox and Large Numbers 

2:16:15 Skolem's Paradox and Indescribable Numbers 

2:28:41 Pascal's Wager and Reasoning Around Remote Events 

2:49:35 MathOverflow 

3:04:40 Joel's Impeccable Fashion Sense

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Richard Kimberly Heck has been a professor of philosophy at Brown University since 2005, at which time they left their post at Harvard, where they had taught for over a decade. On the way to receiving their PhD in philosophy and linguistics at MIT, they studied at Duke and Oxford. While Professor Heck’s primary research focus has been logic and Frege, over the past few years they have shifted to the philosophy of sex and pornography. This is Robinson and Riki’s third conversation on the subjects. Their first and second were episodes 5 and 17, though the installments are not sequential and only linked by topic. Among other things, Robinson and Riki discuss empirical approaches to the philosophy of sex, understanding oneself as a gendered person, and the depiction of oral sex in pornography.

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L.A. Paul is the Millstone Family Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science at Yale University. After doing her graduate work on causation and time at Princeton under the guidance of David Lewis, Laurie wrote her groundbreaking book Transformative Experience, and since then has been exploring the intersection of cognitive science and metaphysics (in addition to a myriad of other pursuits). Laurie and Robinson talk about how she went from her undergraduate studies in chemistry and biology to philosophy, the origins of Transformative Experience, and what cognitive science can contribute to the philosophy of time and causation.  

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Peter Adamson is Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at King's College London. He’s also the host of the podcast History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps and the author of the book series by the same name. Robinson and Peter talk about Islamic philosophy broadly conceived, as well as some of its great philosophers—Avicenna in particular—and its most fascinating debates.  

00:00 Introduction

04:46 Can Anything Be the Subject of Philosophy? 

11:03 Dead and Living Languages 

24:35 What Is Islamic Philosophy? 

40:28 Some Distinctive Problems of Islamic Philosophy 

50:40 Metaphysical Debates about the Eucharist and Koran 

59:21 Free Will, Islamic Philosophy, and the Koran 

01:08:56 Islam and the Eternity of the World 

01:29:48 Avicenna's Flying Man Argument 

01:41:25 Al-Farabi and Illuminationism 

01:47:54 What Is Philosophical Mysticism? 

01:55:00 Islamic Mysticism and Sufism 

01:59:18 Philosophy, Reincarnation, and Vegetarianism 

02:03:37 The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps

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Graham Priest is a Distinguished Professor in the philosophy department at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is one of the most influential living philosophers, and has done important work on a wide range of topics, ranging from the philosophy of mathematics (his doctorate is in mathematics from the London School of Economics) to logic and eastern philosophy. In this episode, Robinson and Graham discuss the metaphysics of nothingness and non-being, touching on—among other things—Zen Buddhism, Quine’s conception of ontological commitment, impossible worlds, and why there’s something rather than nothing.

(00:00) Introduction 

(04:59) Graham's Path to Philosophy 

(08:45) On Analytic and Continental Philosophy 

(17:33) On Quine 

(27:23) Quine, Quantifiers, and What There Is 

(41:51) On Nonexistent Objects 

(47:02) Noneism and the Philosophy of Mathematics 

(01:14:14) On Impossible Worlds 

(01:24:35) Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? 

(01:30:55) Zen, Buddhism, and Nothingness 

(01:46:36) The Nyāya Philosophy of Nothingness 

(01:52:59) Graham's Interest in Eastern Philosophy

(02:01:04) Philosophy as World-Building 

(02:05:36) Sylvan's Box 

(02:10:06) Zen and How to Live One's Life 

(02:20:28) Zen on Mind and Language

(02:30:08) The Basics of Buddhist Ethics 

(02:52:08) Graham the Martial Artist

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Paul B Woodruff is a professor in the philosophy department at the University of Texas at Austin. Over the course of his extensive career he’s published numerous books, articles, and translations covering areas ranging from ancient philosophy and Greek tragedy to ethics and aesthetics. In the years between completing his undergraduate work in classics at Princeton and then getting his PhD in philosophy at the same university, he served in the Vietnam War, and it is largely this experience and the philosophical thought that emerged from it which Robinson and Paul discuss. Along with other topics, they talk about the ethics of killing civilians, just war theory, and Socrates’ practical ethics.

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Justin Clarke-Doane is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, where he works on the philosophy of mathematics, physics, and metaethics. After a long-anticipated catch-up on recent ice cream-related activities, Justin and Robinson discuss the question: What is mathematics?

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