You've Got It All Wrong

If all of the cells in your body get replaced every ten years, will you still be the same person a decade from now? If all of your memories get erased today, will you still be the same person tomorrow? In this episode we take a look at tough questions about personal identity and the nature of the self. We review the work of some of the great philosophers who have tackled these problems, including John Locke, Thomas Reid and Derek Parfit. Along the way we also learn a lot about Star Trek’s greatest hairstylist, read some poems about fish and learn how to pronounce teletransportation with an Australian accent.

Questions from our listeners have been stacking up, and in this episode we tackle a few of your your most pressing concerns. Is there such a thing as an evil person, and if so, does Gary Busey have anything to do with it? What’s up with Thomas Aquinas's DDE (doctrine of double effect), and does it apply to Jake the Snake’s famous DDT (Demonic Death Trap)? Last but not least, we address our sporadic use of the f-bomb on the show, and hear what the Allen Brothers’ mom has to say about it.

What’s in a name? In his 1892 paper, “Sense and Reference,” the German philosopher Gottlob Frege gave an unconventional answer to this question. Up until that point, most philosophers thought of names as simple labels or pointers that referred to physical objects. If you wanted to know the meaning of “Clark Kent,” you just had to look at the guy typing away behind his desk at the Daily Planet. But Frege asked us to think about the fact that sometimes a single object has two names that mean very different things. For example, “Superman” refers to the same physical object as “Clark Kent,” but Superman can fly, while Clark Kent can’t. In this episode we explore Frege’s response to the puzzle of how names work. We also get the inside scoop on some of DC Comic’s most ridiculous super villains, learn about Frege’s mysterious secret diaries and complete a crash course in how elections should really work.

Inductive reasoning is the process whereby we take a lot of specific observations and use them to form more general conclusions. For example, because we’ve seen millions of black ravens, we conclude that all ravens are black. In this episode we review some of the problems with inductive reasoning. We start with Hume’s observation that we can never know for sure if the future will be like the past, so we can never know for sure if our inductive conclusions will continue to be true. We then review some of the more contemporary work on the problem of induction, namely Nelson Goodman’s “New Riddle of Induction.” Along the way we learn about the history of video games, why you should avoid Grues in the dark, the number of times Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote “ejaculate” in the Sherlock Holmes stories and which member of the show can do the best Scottish accent (hint: nobody).

The Ship of Theseus is one of longest-standing paradoxes in philosophy. It asks us to consider how something can change over time, but still remain the same thing. If we take a ship, like the Ship of Theseus, and gradually replace all of the planks and sails and other parts, is there a point at which it’s no longer the Ship of Theseus? Are we something more than just the sum of our parts? We try to solve this age-old riddle on today’s show with the help of Leibniz, Wittgenstein and others. We also provide suggestions for naming your new boat, from “The Codfather” to “Cirrhosis of the River.” Along the way we uncover some interesting trivia about another famous boat, “The S.S. Minnow” from Gilligan’s Island.

The problem of free will has long haunted philosophers who also want to believe that the laws of physics govern everything in the universe. According to determinism, once set in motion the universe is essentially a giant “clockwork” where all future events can be predicted. But if that’s true, then why do we feel like we can change the course of future events through our decisions? A relatively recent movement in philosophy called “compatibilism” tries to reconcile the concepts of free will and determinism. But is it just an artful dodge? In this episode we take a close look at the main arguments for compatibilism, and philosophers behind those arguments, including David Hume, Daniel Dennett, Peter Strawson and Harry Franfurt. Mark tries to get off the hook for making bad food choices (Paco ordered those doughnuts!) while Chad notes that nachos are “compatible” with both the concept of “entree” and the concept of “appetizer.” We also dig into some listener questions about the existential state of running shoes, which doesn’t really have anything to do with free will at all.

The traditional definition of “knowledge,” first put forward by Plato, is a “justified, true belief.” That definition stuck for a few thousand years until Edmund Gettier wrote a famous paper in 1963. The eponymous “Gettier problems” outlined in the paper threw a wrench in the works for the field of epistemology, and philosophers have been trying to get things back on track ever since. In this episode we review some examples of Gettier problems and try to come up with our own responses. We also take a look at how elephants, Bruce Lee, Doctor Who, and Donald Rumsfeld help us understand how we know what we know.