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About Robert Talisse

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

NBN Episodes hosted by Robert:

Philosophy October 1, 2023

On Taking Offence

Emily McTernan

Hosted by Robert Talisse
A lot of work in moral, political, and legal theory aims to define the offensive. Surprisingly, relatively little attention has been paid to the affectively intoned practice of taking offense …
Philosophy August 1, 2023

Choosing Well

The Good, the Bad, and the Trivial

Chrisoula Andreou

Hosted by Robert Talisse
Listen:
It is common to think that rational agency involves acting in ways that, given one’s options, maximize the satisfaction of one’s preferences. This intuitive understanding has generated a wide-ranging literature …
Philosophy July 1, 2023

Democracy for Busy People

Kevin J. Elliott

Hosted by Robert Talisse
Listen:
John Dewey and Jane Addams are both credited with the claim that the cure for democracy’s ills is more democracy. The sentiment is popular to this day among democratic theorists …
Philosophy May 1, 2023

Mobilizing Hope

Climate Change and Global Poverty

Darrel Moellendorf

Hosted by Robert Talisse
The news concerning climate change isn’t good. The warming of our planet now threatens to trap millions of people in extreme poverty while destabilizing the global order in ways that …
Philosophy April 1, 2023

Who Should We Be Online?

A Social Epistemology for the Internet

Karen Frost-Arnold

Hosted by Robert Talisse
The Internet plays a central role in how we communicate, share information, disseminate ideas, maintain social connections, and conduct business. The Internet also exacerbates existing problems regarding irrationality, bias, wrongful …
Philosophy March 1, 2023

Bias

A Philosophical Study

Thomas Kelly

Hosted by Robert Talisse
The concept of bias is familiar enough, partly because it is deployed frequently and in different contexts. For example, we talk about biased jurors, biased procedures, biased laws, biased decisions …
Philosophy February 1, 2023

A Realistic Blacktopia

Why We Must Unite to Fight

Derrick Darby

Hosted by Robert Talisse
In the United States, unjust disparities in things like income, opportunity, health, safety, and education tightly track racial categorizations of the US population. An intuitive approach to social justice calls …
Philosophy December 30, 2022

The Idea of Prison Abolition

Tommie Shelby

Hosted by Robert Talisse
By any reasonable metric, prisons as they exist in the United States and in many other countries are normatively unacceptable. What is the proper moral response to this? Can prisons …
Philosophy December 1, 2022

Legitimate Opposition

Alexander Kirshner

Hosted by Robert Talisse
The idea of legitimate political opposition is familiar. A decent political order permits citizens, parties, and coalitions to challenge those in power. Under such conditions, there is an ongoing nonviolent …
Philosophy November 1, 2022

Authority, Cooperation, and Accountability

Saba Bazargan-Forward

Hosted by Robert Talisse
We often find ourselves acting in concert with others, where what we do together goes beyond the causal contribution of any single participant. When a collection of individuals works together …
Philosophy October 3, 2022

Making Space for Justice

Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope

Michele Moody-Adams

Hosted by Robert Talisse
A standard way of proceeding in political philosophy is to start with some form of conceptual inquiry: we first try to figure out what justice, equality, and freedom are and …
Philosophy September 1, 2022

The Problem of Blame

Making Sense of Moral Anger

Kelly McCormick

Hosted by Robert Talisse
Blame seems both morally necessary and morally dicey. Necessary, because it appears to be a central part of holding others to account for wrongdoing. Dicey, because – in its standard …
Philosophy August 1, 2022

Spying Through a Glass Darkly

The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence

Cécile Fabre

Hosted by Robert Talisse
On its face, spying and counter-intelligence activities seem morally suspect. They tend to involve sneaking, deceiving, and manipulating, as well as various forms of betrayal, treachery, and disloyalty. Yet intelligence …
Philosophy July 1, 2022

On Believing

Being Right in a World of Possibilities

David Hunter

Hosted by Robert Talisse
According to many standard philosophical accounts, beliefs are a kind of stance one takes toward a proposition. To believe that Nashville is in Tennessee is to adopt a certain attitude …
Philosophy May 3, 2022

Public Reason and Political Autonomy

Realizing the Ideal of a Civic People

Blain Neufeld

Hosted by Robert Talisse
According to a familiar picture, a democracy is a free society of self-governing equals. This means that democratic citizens have a duty to participate in the processes of democratic governance …
Philosophy April 1, 2022

Learning from Our Mistakes

Epistemology for the Real World

William J. Talbott

Hosted by Robert Talisse
The enterprise of Western epistemology has largely been devoted to a collection of issues concerning the definition and analysis of knowledge. What makes knowledge different from true belief? When is …
Philosophy March 1, 2022

The Case for Rage

Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle

Myisha Cherry

Hosted by Robert Talisse
According to a broad consensus among philosophers across the ages, anger is regrettable, counterproductive, and bad. It is something to be overcome or suppressed, something that involves an immoral drive …
Philosophy February 1, 2022

Conceiving People

Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation

Daniel Groll

Hosted by Robert Talisse
In the United States, tens of thousands of children are conceived every year with donated gametes. When people decide to create a child with donated gametes, they’ll typically have to …
Philosophy December 31, 2021

Grief

A Philosophical Guide

Michael Cholbi

Hosted by Robert Talisse
We think of grief as a normal response to the death of a loved one. We’re familiar with the so-called “five stages” of grief. Grief seems as an emotional episode …
Philosophy December 1, 2021

Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States

Should Citizens Pay for Their States' Wrongdoings?

Avia Pasternak

Hosted by Robert Talisse
We tend to think that states can act wrongfully, even criminally. Thus, we also tend to think that states can be held responsible for their acts. They can be made …
Philosophy November 1, 2021

Reasons First

Mark Schroeder

Hosted by Robert Talisse
A leading approach in ethics takes the reason as in some sense primary or basic. This approach claims that a range of moral concepts – goodness, rightness, obligation, and so …
Philosophy October 1, 2021

The Dialogical Roots of Deduction

Historical, Cognitive, and Philosophical Perspectives on Reasoning

Catarina Dutilh Novaes

Hosted by Robert Talisse
If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then it must be that Socrates is mortal. What could be more obvious? Well, sometimes obviousness serves to conceal philosophical …
Philosophy September 1, 2021

The Mismeasure of the Self

A Study in Vice Epistemology

Alessandra Tanesini

Hosted by Robert Talisse
Epistemology traditionally focuses on the analysis of central epistemological concepts, such as knowledge, justification, evidence, truth, and belief. But having knowledge is also a matter of acquiring knowledge. And this …
Philosophy August 2, 2021

The Right to Know

Epistemic Rights and Why We Need Them

Lani Watson

Hosted by Robert Talisse
We often talk as if individuals have entitlements to certain kinds of information: medical test results, political representatives’ voting records, crime statistics, and the like. We also talk as if …