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About Carrie Figdor

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

NBN Episodes hosted by Carrie:

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 …
Philosophy June 10, 2020

Ancient Relativity

Plato, Aristotle, Stoics and Skeptics

Matthew Duncombe

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
As a matter of basic metaphysics, we classify individuals in terms of their relations to other things – for example, a parent is a parent of someone, a larger object …
Philosophy May 11, 2020

Love Drugs

The Chemical Future of Relationships

Brian Earp and Julian Savulescu

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Consider a couple with an infant (or two) whose lives have become so harried and difficult the marriage is falling apart. Would it be ethical for them to take oxytocin …
Philosophy April 14, 2020

Human and Animal Minds

The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest

Peter Carruthers

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Do nonhuman animals have phenomenally conscious mental states? For example, do they have the types of conscious experiences we have when, in our case, we experience the smell of cinnamon …
Philosophy March 10, 2020

Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge

Kareem Khalifa

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
What is the relation between understanding and knowledge in science? Can we understand a scientific theory if it is false? Do we understand a scientific proposition we can’t elaborate or …
Philosophy February 10, 2020

Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science

Travis Dumsday

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Dispositionalism is the view that there are irreducible causal powers in nature that explain why objects behave as they do. To say salt is soluble in water, for example, is …
Philosophy January 10, 2020

The Philosophy of Affordances

Manuel Heras-Escribano

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
Ecological psychology is one of a number of contemporary theories that explains the mind in terms of embodiment and environmental situatedness, rather than inner symbol manipulation by brains. J. J …
Philosophy December 10, 2019

The Primacy of Metaphysics

Christopher Peacocke

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
A basic question in mind and metaphysics is the relation between the nature of mental content (or meaning) and the nature of the domains of entities and relations to which …