Robinson's Podcast

Barry Lam is the host of Hi-Phi Nation, which is a much better podcast than this one, and which is devoted to exploring pressing philosophical questions through narrative. He did his graduate work at Princeton, then taught at Vassar, and will soon be picking up a new professorial post at UC Riverside. In this episode Robinson and Barry discuss the philosophical problems posed by certain monsters that were the subject of a three-part series in Hi-Phi Nation (namely zombies, cannibals, and vampires), along with David Lewis, the role of imagination in philosophy, and the risks of devoting time to public philosophy in an academic world that doesn’t prioritize it.  

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C Thi Nguyen is a professor in the philosophy department at the University of Utah. Before that, he did his graduate work at UCLA, where he was also a food writer with the LA Times. Robinson and Thi talk about his book, Games: Agency as Art, along with why we call things porn, autonomy and aesthetic judgment, and the difficult epistemic situation of having to select which experts to rely on in fields where we can’t make our own informed decisions.

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Quayshawn Spencer is the Robert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Before taking up his post in Philadelphia, he studied chemistry and philosophy at Cornell and then received his PhD in philosophy and a Masters in biology at Stanford. Quayshawn and Robinson discuss whether or not race in humans is a biological or social phenomenon, the extent and nature of Kant’s of racism, some of the difficulties of researching a sensitive topic in the public eye, and the basics of natural kinds. For more of Quayshawn’s work, you can check out his latest book, "What is Race? Four Philosophical Views.”

Ray Briggs is a professor in the philosophy department at Stanford University. They did their doctoral work at MIT, and have since been working primarily in decision theory, epistemology, and metaphysics. In the last few years Ray has been writing and thinking about sex, gender, and transfeminism, which is what they and Robinson discuss in this episode, along with queer science fiction and thought experiments galore.

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Haim Gaifman is a professor of philosophy at Columbia university in New York City. He is also a mathematician and probability theorist. In this episode (Haim’s fourth appearance), Robinson and Haim discuss the origins of set theory as the mathematical discipline developed to study the infinite, as well as its relation to Richard’s paradox.

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David Albert is the Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and one of the world’s most respected philosophers of physics. He is also the director of the Philosophical Foundations of Physics program at Columbia. David and Robinson talk about the relationship between ancient and contemporary physics, the continuum on which lie theoretical physics, the foundations of physics, the philosophy of physics, and metaphysics, scientific anti-realism, the direction of time, and how moral expressivism relates to the naturalistic project.  

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Christopher Bobonich is the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. After studying government at Harvard, he went on to do his graduate work at Cambridge and Berkeley. He now works broadly across value theory in ancient philosophy, though he is currently writing about knowledge and action in Plato. Among other things, Chris and Robinson talk about ancient and modern languages, etymology, the relevance of ancient ethics to contemporary life, and how well ancient conceptions of morality are preserved today.

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Nick is a software engineer at a biotech company. He studied politics, philosophy, and economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He and Robinson talk about the events that led him to abandon his deeply-held religious beliefs after a lifetime of Christianity. They also talk about moral facts, whether there are any, and whether their absence should play a role in Robinson deciding to shift toward being a vegetarian.

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Ronnie is Robinson’s father. They talk about the Elgin Marbles and also a little bit about ice cream and donuts.

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Ezekiel Quittner-Strom is a physician doing his residency in internal medicine at the University of Iowa. In this episode Robinson and Ezekiel eat a three-course feast of frozen food from Trader Joe’s and talk about it while they eat it, heated up and not frozen. Said talking concerned, in addition to said not-frozen frozen food, Ezekiel’s legendary perfect score on the MCAT and how he got it.

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