About Carrie Figdor

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

NBN Episodes hosted by Carrie:

March 3, 2026

Epistemic Ecology

Catherine Elgin

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

Humans are highly inquisitive, yet fallible and cognitively limited. How can we improve our epistemic lot despite our limitations? In Epistemic Ecolog…

February 10, 2026

The Units of Life

Ellen Clarke

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

While we tend to think of biological individuals in terms of paradigmic cases – a dog, a starfish, a bacterium – our ordinary criteria for distinguish…

January 10, 2026

Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation

Kenneth Aizawa

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

How do scientists reason when they posit unobservables to explain their observed results? For example, how did Watson and Crick reason that DNA had a …

November 10, 2025

Rethinking Metaphysics

Amie Thomasson

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

The word “metaphysics” conjures up thoughts of very hard questions about reality and deep, perhaps unresolvable, metaphysical mysteries. But is that t…

October 10, 2025

Cyborg Rights

S. Orestis Palermos

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

Until recently, no one could access the detailed contents of your mind directly the way only you can. This level of protection of our mental data was …

September 10, 2025

Presentist Social Functionalism

Armin W. Schulz

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

Humans live in richly normatively structured social environments: there are ways of doing things that are appropriate, and we are aware of what these …

August 10, 2025

Deflating Mental Representation

Frances Egan

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

The human mind has the curious, even mysterious, ability to generate thoughts about things with which we are not in causal contact, such as when we th…

May 10, 2025

Operationism in Psychology

Uljana Feest

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

About 100 years ago, prominent psychologists Stanley Smith Stevens, Edward Tolman and Clark Hull spearheaded the idea of linking psychological concept…

April 10, 2025

The Philosophy of Theoretical Linguistics

Ryan M. Nefdt

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

Between the study of specific languages and the philosophy of language lies what Ryan Nefdt calls a “Goldilocks zone” of theoretical issues related to…

March 10, 2025

The Brain Abstracted

M. Chirimuuta

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

This book is available open access here. The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024), Mazvi…

February 13, 2025

The Quality of Thought

David Pitt

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

The idea that there is a distinct phenemenology of thought – that there is thinking experience just as there is visual experience or auditory experien…

January 11, 2025

The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference

John D. Norton

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

This book is free to download here. Science depends essentially on inductive inferences – inferences that go beyond the evidence on which they are b…

December 10, 2024

Emotion Theory: The Routledge Comprehensive Guide

Andrea Scarantino

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

This interview is an exception to our “single author monographs” rule, because the edited collection that is its topic is an intellectual achievement …

November 10, 2024

Alien Structure

Matti Eklund

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

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

Roberta L. Millstein

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

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

Alan C. Love

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

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

Shannon Vallor

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

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

Cameron J. Buckner

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

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

Luis H. H. Favela

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

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

Eric Schwitzgebel

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

"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

Jon Robson

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

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

Michael Devitt

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

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

Krista K. Thomason

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

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

Philip Goff

Hosted by Carrie Figdor

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…