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About Carrie Figdor

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

NBN Episodes hosted by Carrie:

Philosophy September 12, 2023

Mind As Metaphor

A Defence of Mental Fictionalism

Adam Toon

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Listen:
Folk psychology (on a standard reading) is the way we attribute contentful mental states to others in order to explain and predict their behavior – for example, saying that John …
Philosophy August 10, 2023

On the Temporality of Emotions

An Essay on Grief, Anger, and Love

Berislav Marusić

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Listen:
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 is the …
Philosophy July 10, 2023

The Matter of Consciousness

From the Knowledge Argument to Russellian Monism

Torin Alter

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Listen:
Frank Jackson’s "Knowledge Argument" introduced the philosophical world to Mary the brilliant neuroscientist, who knows everything there is to know about the physical world while living in a completely black …
Philosophy June 14, 2023

A Philosophy of Beauty

Shaftesbury on Nature, Virtue, and Art

Michael B. Gill

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Listen:
The third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) was a troubled soul – negative, misanthropic, and deeply troubled by his negativity and misanthropy. In A Philosophy of Beauty: Shaftesbury on Nature, Virtue …
Philosophy May 10, 2023

Realism for Realistic People

A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science

Hasok Chang

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
For a certain kind of standard realist, science aims at getting the absolute truth about the universe. For Hasok Chang, this view is unrealistic because we have no way of …
Philosophy April 10, 2023

Distracted from Meaning

A Philosophy of Smartphones

Tiger C. Roholt

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
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 or medical procedures. In Distracted from …
Philosophy March 10, 2023

Grief Worlds

A Study of Emotional Experience

Matthew Ratcliffe

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
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 Worlds: A Study …
Philosophy February 10, 2023

Beyond Words

Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable

Timothy Cleveland

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
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 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But what …
Philosophy January 12, 2023

After Thomas Kuhn

The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions

Oana Serban

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions revolutionized the way philosophers and historians of science thought about science, scientific progress, and the nature of scientific knowledge. But Kuhn himself also …
Philosophy December 10, 2022

Interdisciplinarity in the Making

Models and Methods in Frontier Science

Nancy J. Nersessian

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Based on examining physics and the practices of physicists, philosophers of science often see models in science as representational intermediaries between scientific theories and the world. But what do scientists …
Philosophy November 10, 2022

Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity

Tristan Grøtvedt Haze

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
In 1980, the philosopher and logician Saul Kripke published a small but hugely influential book, Naming and Necessity, in which he argued that some claims that we discover empirically to …
Philosophy October 10, 2022

Bad Beliefs

Why They Happen to Good People

Neil Levy

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Misinformation, disinformation, fake news, alternative facts: we are awash in a vast sea of epistemically questionable, not to mention false, testimony. How can we discern what is epistemically good to …
Philosophy August 10, 2022

The Art of Abduction

Igor Douven

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
How should we form new beliefs? In particular, what inferential strategies are epistemically justified for forming new beliefs? Nowadays the dominant theory is Bayesianism, whereby we ought to reason in …
Philosophy July 11, 2022

Perspectival Realism

Michela Massimi

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
For many philosophers, the fact that scientists take different perspectives on the world is an obstacle to being a realist about the world. In Perspectival Realism (Oxford University Press, 2022) …
Philosophy June 10, 2022

Immaterial

Rules in Contemporary Art

Sherri Irvin

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Art forms have rules, usually implicit, that govern the experiences that artists want their audiences to have: for example, a representational painting should be hung right-side-up, the same sort of …
Philosophy May 20, 2022

Metaphysical Emergence

Jessica M. Wilson

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Is a tree nothing but its material makeup, or does reality include trees above and beyond what they are made of? How about consciousness – nothing but neural activity, or …
Philosophy April 12, 2022

Wittgenstein's Artillery

Philosophy as Poetry

James C. Klagge

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
“One should really only do philosophy as poetry.” What could Ludwig Wittgenstein have meant by this? What was the context for this odd remark? In Wittgenstein’s Artillery: Philosophy as Poetry …
Philosophy March 10, 2022

Metaphysical Animals

How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
What are the proper things for a philosopher to worry about? And who should be able to worry about them? These two questions, raised in the context of the disruptions …
Philosophy February 11, 2022

Causation with a Human Face

Normative Theory and Descriptive Psychology

James Woodward

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
How do we reason about causal relationships, how do we determine what the causal relatiomships in nature are, and how are these two things – causal cognition and causation – …
Philosophy November 10, 2021

Living as a Bird

Vinciane Despret

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Birds sing to set up a territory, but the relationships between the bird, the song, the territory, and the bird’s community are highly complex and individually variable. In Living as …
Philosophy October 11, 2021

Artful Truths

The Philosophy of Memoir

Helena de Bres

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
What is a memoir? What makes a memoir both nonfictional and literary? What are the memoirist’s moral obligations to the people they write about besides themselves, and to their potential …
Philosophy September 10, 2021

Leveraging Distortions

Explanation, Idealization, and Universality in Science

Collin Rice

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Most of us agree that science aims to tell us what is true about the world. But how do we get at the truth by using theories and models that …
Philosophy August 10, 2021

When Maps Become the World

Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
There are maps of the Earth’s landmasses, the universe, the ocean floors, human migration, the human brain: maps are so integral to how we interact with the world that we …
Philosophy July 9, 2021

The World in the Wave Function

A Metaphysics for Quantum Physics

Alyssa Ney

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Quantum mechanics is full of weird findings – for example, that systems widely separated can somehow still be correlated, and that a system may be in two different possible states …