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About Carrie Figdor

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

NBN Episodes hosted by Carrie:

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 …
Philosophy June 10, 2021

Shifty Speech and Independent Thought

Epistemic Normativity in Context

Mona Simion

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
At the intersection of epistemology and philosophy of language is a puzzle. First, it seems we don’t need less evidence for a claim that we know something if the practical …
Philosophy May 10, 2021

Cassirer

Samantha Matherne

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) was a leading neo-Kantian who developed a systematic view of how we construct and experience culture, widely construed to include mathematics, science, religion, myth, art, politics, ethics …
Philosophy April 9, 2021

Marcus Aurelius

John Sellars

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is one of the most popular philosophical works by sales to the public, while in academic philosophy he is considered somewhat of a philosophical lightweight. In Marcus …
Philosophy March 10, 2021

Explaining Imagination

Peter Langland-Hassan

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
How do we think about situations and things do not exist but might, engage in pretense and fiction, and create new works of art? These are central cases in which …
Philosophy February 10, 2021

Philosophy of Immunology

Thomas Pradeu

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Vaccines make us wholly or partly immune to disease, such as Covid-19. But what is it to be immune? What is an immune system, and what does it do? In …
Philosophy January 11, 2021

Wild Animal Ethics

The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering

Kyle Johannsen

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Many sentient (or possibly sentient) wild animals follow a reproductive strategy whereby they have large numbers of offspring, the vast majority of which suffer and die quickly or suffer and …
Philosophy December 10, 2020

Causation in Psychology

John Campbell

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Our practices of holding people morally and legally responsible for what they do rests on causal relationships between our mental states and our actions – a desire for revenge or …
Philosophy November 10, 2020

Games

Agency As Art

C. Thi Nguyen

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Monopoly, Solitaire, football and Minecraft are all games, but for C. Thi Nguyen they are also an art form – specifically, the art form of agency, our capacity to set …
Philosophy October 12, 2020

Attentional Engines

A Perceptual Theory of the Arts

William P. Seeley

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
How do we distinguish art from non-art artifacts, and what does cognitive science have to do with it? In Attentional Engines: A Perceptual Theory of the Arts (Oxford University Press …
Philosophy September 10, 2020

Smellosophy

What the Nose Tells the Mind

Ann-Sophie Barwich

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Smells repel and attract; they bring emotionally charged memories to mind; they guide behavior and thought nonconsciously; they give food much of its taste; and the loss of sense of …
Philosophy August 10, 2020

On Inhumanity

Dehumanization and How to Resist It

David Livingstone Smith

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
The phenomenon of dehumanization is associated with such atrocities as the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the Holocaust in World War II. In these and other cases, people are described …
Philosophy July 10, 2020

Games in the Philosophy of Biology

Cailin O’Connor

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
The branch of mathematics called game theory – the Prisoners Dilemma is a particularly well-known example of a game – is used by philosophers, social scientists, and others to explore …