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About Carrie Figdor
Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.
NBN Episodes hosted by Carrie:
November 10, 2024
Alien Structure
It is not uncommon to encounter people who think and talk about the world so differently from the way you do that it’s not really possible to put your…
October 10, 2024
The Land Is Our Community
Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic has been both hugely influential in the environmental conservation movement – and also often misinterpreted. In The Land is …
August 10, 2024
Evolution and Development
It was an astounding discovery in the early 1980's that the same genetic sequence, the homeobox, controlled the development of basic body plans across…
July 10, 2024
The AI Mirror
There's a lot of talk these days about the existential risk that artificial intelligence poses to humanity -- that somehow the AIs will rise up and de…
June 10, 2024
From Deep Learning to Rational Machines
Artificial intelligence started with programmed computers, where programmers would manually program human expert knowledge into the systems. In sharp …
May 10, 2024
The Ecological Brain
Ecological psychology holds that perception and action are best explained in terms of dynamic interactions between brain, body, and environment, not i…
April 10, 2024
The Weirdness of the World
"What's life for if there's no time to play and explore?" In The Weirdness of the World (Princeton UP, 2024), Eric Schwitzgebel invites the reader to…
March 10, 2024
Aesthetic Testimony
A lot of what we claim to know we learn from other people's testimony: they tell us, and in many ordinary contexts that is enough to gain knowledge. B…
February 10, 2024
Biological Essentialism
What makes a species a species? Aristotle answered the species question by positing unchanging essences, properties that all and only members of a spe…
January 10, 2024
Dancing with the Devil
How could a good life include one with anger, or jealousy, or spite? In Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good (Oxford UP, 2023), Kri…
December 10, 2023
Why? The Purpose of the Universe
Does the universe have a purpose? If it does, how is this connected to the meaningfulness that we seek in our lives? In Why? The Purpose of the Univer…
November 10, 2023
The Modal Future
What does “will” mean? A standard view is that it is a tensed mirror-image of “was”, and that the truth-conditions of past and future sentences – “He …
September 12, 2023
Mind As Metaphor
Folk psychology (on a standard reading) is the way we attribute contentful mental states to others in order to explain and predict their behavior – fo…
August 10, 2023
On the Temporality of Emotions
When someone close to us dies, intense grief is an expected and reasonable response. But while the reason for our grief – the loss of the person who i…
July 10, 2023
The Matter of Consciousness
Frank Jackson’s "Knowledge Argument" introduced the philosophical world to Mary the brilliant neuroscientist, who knows everything there is to know ab…
June 14, 2023
A Philosophy of Beauty
The third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) was a troubled soul – negative, misanthropic, and deeply troubled by his negativity and misanthropy. In A Ph…
May 10, 2023
Realism for Realistic People
For a certain kind of standard realist, science aims at getting the absolute truth about the universe. For Hasok Chang, this view is unrealistic becau…
April 10, 2023
Distracted from Meaning
Social scientists have long studied the ways in which smartphone use can distract us from the proper performance of means-ends tasks, such as driving …
March 10, 2023
Grief Worlds
The grief we feel when someone close to us dies is characterized by a complex and profound experience of loss. But what is this experience? In Grief W…
February 10, 2023
Beyond Words
It seems undeniable that language has limits in what it can express – among other philosophers, Wittgenstein famously drew a line of this sort in his …
January 12, 2023
After Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions revolutionized the way philosophers and historians of science thought about science, scientific …
December 10, 2022
Interdisciplinarity in the Making
Based on examining physics and the practices of physicists, philosophers of science often see models in science as representational intermediaries bet…
November 10, 2022
Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity
In 1980, the philosopher and logician Saul Kripke published a small but hugely influential book, Naming and Necessity, in which he argued that some cl…
October 10, 2022
Bad Beliefs
Misinformation, disinformation, fake news, alternative facts: we are awash in a vast sea of epistemically questionable, not to mention false, testimon…