Thinking Hard and Slow: Recent Episodes
The Royal Institute of Philosophy
Mind-expanding long-form philosophy talks and discussions that are both rigorous and accessible. Recorded live from our annual themed lecture series, special lectures and our big debate, the series features leading figures in philosophy, from distinguished senior professors to up and coming talent. This is real, in-depth philosophy without the jargon, for minds that like a good workout. Presented by Julian Baggini, Academic Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
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Stephen Hawking's proclamation that philosophy is dead was clearly hyperbole. But when it comes to understanding the fundamental nature of reality, has philosophy really got anything left to contribute? Does the rise of physics demand the end of metaphysics?
Debating these questions are Carlo Rovelli (Centre de Physique Théorique of the Aix-Marseille University), Eleanor Knox (King’s College London) and Alex Rosenberg (Duke University) with the BBC’s Ritula Shah in the chair.
Over the past two decades, our view of the ideals for science in society has changed. Discussions of the roles for values in science and changes in the views on the responsibilities in science have shifted the understanding of science from ideally value-free to properly value-laden. This shift, however, seems to remove a key difference between science and politics, as now both science and politics are value-laden, and disputes in both can arise from value disagreements. If science is not value-free (nor should it be), what differentiates science from politics? Heather Douglas lays out norms for scientific inquiry that make it distinct in practice from politics and argues that understanding and defending these differences help to protect science from abuses of power.
Heather Douglas is a philosopher of science who works on the relationships among science, values, and democratic publics. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University, Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh (2021-2022), and a AAAS fellow. She is the author of "Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal" (2009), "The Rightful Place of Science: Science, Values, and Democracy" (2021), and editor of the book series "Science, Values, and the Public" for University of Pittsburgh Press.
Justyna Bandola-Gill, a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, offers a response.
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Axel Honneth’s 2021 Royal Institute of Philosophy Dublin Lecture seeks briefly to reconstruct the history of conceptual disputes about the meaning of work from the beginning of capitalist industrialisation. Initially, the only kind of activity that counted as work in the proper sense was the industrialised manufacture of goods. Subsequently, this extremely narrow view of work was challenged by a succession of social actors who attempt to expand the definition by interpreting additional kinds of activity as work. At the present juncture, there is widespread acceptance of the view that caring and curative activities, be they in private households or in public facilities, should also count as work in the strict sense. However, this new, broader notion of work poses the problem of how to distinguish socially important work from activities performed for merely private ends. Honneth concludes with a proposal for resolving this conceptual difficulty.
Axel Honneth holds professorships at both Columbia University and the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. His work focuses on social-political and moral philosophy, especially relations of power, recognition, and respect. One of his core arguments is for the priority of intersubjective relationships of recognition in understanding social relations. He has been awarded the Ernst Bloch-Preis from the City of Ludwigshafen, the Bruno-Kreisky Prize from the Karl-Renner Stiftung in Vienna and the Ulysses Medal, University College Dublin’s highest honour.
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Certain philosophies describe us as prone to forms of attachment that are illusory, and promise to indemnify us against the hazards of life by exposing such illusions. One such hazard is that of transience and temporal life itself, and it is sometimes urged that since the present is the only genuine reality, attachments to the past or the future are forms of illusion we can and should be free of. In the 2021 Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Cardiff Lecture, Richard Moran questions the ideal of “living in the present” and so escaping the contingencies and loss that are part of temporal life.
Richard Moran is the Brian D. Young professor of philosophy at Harvard University. His primary philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind and moral psychology, aesthetics, the philosophy of literature, and the later Wittgenstein. His book, "Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge" was one of the most lauded and influential works in the field in recent times. His most recent book is "The Exchange of Words: Speech, Testimony and Intersubjectivity".
The terms 'systemic injustice' and 'structural injustice' are often used interchangeably and are often equated with 'institutional injustice.' But in order to understand these different forms of injustice, we should have a clear idea of what they are and how to distinguish them. Using racism as a paradigm case, Sally Haslanger sketches an account of society as a complex system and shows how relations that make up the structures are constituted by social practices. This helps us locate some of the leverage points for social change.
Sally Haslanger is Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT. She has published in metaphysics, theory of knowledge, feminist theory, and critical race theory. Her work links issues of social justice with contemporary work in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Haslanger is deeply committed to promoting diversity in philosophy and beyond, and was the founder and convener of the Women in Philosophy Task Force. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.
There was an editing error on Ep. 10: Culture and Value in Du Bois’ The Gift of Black Folk with Chike Jeffers which has since been corrected. If you downloaded the episode before July 6th, please download the corrected version here: https://shows.acast.com/thinking-hard-and-slow/culture-and-value-chike-jeffers or by finding Ep. 10 on any podcast app.
What would it mean to do justice to testimonies of traumatic experience? That is, how can experiences which do not fit the customary scripts of sense-making be heard? Whereas processes of official memorialization or legal redress often demand that victims and survivors convey their experiences through familiar modes of narration, María del Rosario Acosta López's project on “grammars of listening” asks how it might be possible to hear these experiences on their own terms and what are the challenges that we encounter when trying to do so. She argues that doing justice to trauma requires a profound philosophical questioning of the conditions that allow us to listen to testimony, and a true reckoning of the responsibility that we bear as listeners.
María del Rosario Acosta López is a professor at the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California Riverside where she is also a co-operating faculty member of the philosophy department. Her teaching and research is in areas around romanticism and German idealism, aesthetics, contemporary political European philosophy and more recently questions of decolonial and Latin American studies with an emphasis on questions of memory and trauma in the Americas.
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Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) lived what was in many ways an astonishingly modern, transcultural and translingual life. He was born in Lisbon and grew up in Anglophone Durban, acquiring a life-long love for English poetry and language. Returning to Lisbon, from where he would never again leave, he set himself the goal to travel throughout an infinitude of inner landscapes, to be an explorer of inner worlds. He published very little, but left behind a famous trunk containing a treasure-trove of scraps, on which were written some of the greatest literary works of the 20th century, mainly in Portuguese but also substantially in English and French. He is now acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, and he has emerged over the last decade as a forgotten voice in 20th century modernism, taking his rightful place alongside C. P. Cavafy, Franz Kafka, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Jorge Luis Borges. Pessoa was also a serious student of philosophy and himself a very creative philosopher, yet his genius as a philosopher has hardly been recognized. In this episode, Jonardon Ganeri sets out to put that right.
Jonardon Ganeri holds the Bimal Matilal Distinguished Professorship in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His work draws on a variety of philosophical traditions to construct new positions in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and theory of knowledge. He's a great advocate for an expanded role for cross-cultural methodologies and his research subjects include consciousness, self, attention, the idea of philosophy as a practice and its relationship to literature. His books include "Attention Not Self"; "Inwardness: An Outsider's Guide" and most recently "Fugitive Selves: Fernando Pessoa and His Philosophy".
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The classical Greeks give us a concept of substance that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. Roger Ames argues that in the Yijing or "Book of Changes" we find a stark alternative to this ontology which reflects a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. This cosmology begins from “living” itself as the motive force behind change, and gives us a world of boundless “becomings:” not “things” that are, but “events” that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of human “beings” and a process conception of what Ames calls human “becomings.”
Roger Ames is the Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University in Beijing and also Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. He's the author and co-author of many books including his study of ancient Chinese political thought, "The Art of Rulership" and "Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary".
Lewis Gordon examines what it means for philosophy to be ‘colonised’ and the challenges involved in ‘decolonising’ it in philosophical and political terms.
Lewis Gordon is professor of philosophy and head of the department of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He works in a number of areas of philosophy including Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political thought, post-colonial thought and on the work of thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Franz Fanon. His most recent books are "Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization" and "Fear of Black Consciousness".
In his famous 1897 essay, “The Conservation of Races”, Du Bois advocated that African Americans hold on to their distinctiveness as members of the black race because this enables them to participate in a cosmopolitan process of cultural exchange in which different races collectively advance human civilization by means of different contributions. Philosophers like Kwame Anthony Appiah and Tommie Shelby have criticised the position that Du Bois expresses in that essay as a problematic form of racial essentialism. Chike Jeffers explores how Du Bois' 1924 book "The Gift of Black Folk" escapes or fails to escape that criticism. He argues that recognising the cultivation of historical memory as a form of cultural activity is key to understanding the concept's unity.
Chike Jeffers is associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Dalhousie university. He is the co-presenter of the Africana philosophy editions of the "History of Philosophy without Any Gaps" podcast and two forthcoming books based on it. He is also the co-author of "What is Race? Four Philosophical Views", and editor of "Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy".
Some of our emotions are bad – unpleasant to experience, reflective of dissatisfactions or even heartbreak – but nonetheless quite important to express and, more basically, to feel. Grief is like this, for example. So, too, is disappointment. Amy Olberding explores how our current social practices may fail to support expressions of disappointment and thus suppress our ability to feel it well. She draws on early Confucian philosophy and its remarkable attention to everyday social interactions and their power to steer our emotional lives. She makes the case that although there are losses to our moral lives where we are socially encouraged to emotions such as anger, outrage, or cynical resignation, we must struggle to find a place for disappointment.
Amy Olberding is the Presidential Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma Her research is largely concentrated on the ethical aspects of ordinary life, especially as these feature as prominent concerns in early Confucianism. Her most recent book, The Wrong of Rudeness, considers just what might tempt us to rudeness and incivility, and reflects on the moral, social, and political reasons we shouldn’t be easy and free with rudeness and incivility.
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While Heidegger and Derrida both contributed groundbreaking reflections on hospitality (and “hostipitality”), they failed to recognize that the host-guest relationship can only succeed if it is correlated with the notion of mutual guardianship. The lecture will describe historic guardian civilizations and then turn to Ricoeur’s linguistic hospitality as a possible blueprint for future cultural hospitality. However, the latter scenario will have no need for a third party, i.e., a “translator” who mediates between host and guest. The challenge consists of designing a host-guest relationship in which both parties become each other’s translators - and guardians.
Tamara Albertini is a professor and department chair at the university of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Professor Albertini’s research in Renaissance philosophy focuses on Nicholas of Cusa (mathematics, cosmology), Marsilio Ficino (metaphysics, aesthetics) and Charles de Bovelles. Within Islamic philosophy, Professor Tamara Albertini’s publications aim at reintroducing the vigor and vision of Muslim intellectual contributions from the classical period.
We live in an age of anger and shameless disregard for what is true and good. What can we learn from other cultures about better ways to do anger and shame? How can we develop better norms for being angry at the right things, in the right way, at the right times? How can we inculcate norms for proper shame at callous disregard for what is true and good? Flanagan argues that attention to how other cultures do anger and shame provides tools to enlarge our moral imagination.
Owen Flanagan is the James B Duke University Professor Philosophy and Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University. Owen is the author of numerous books on a range of subjects in the philosophy of mind, piths and moral psychology, such as The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalised (2011), The Geography Of Morals (2016), and most recently How To Do Things with Emotions: Anger and Shame Across Cultures (2021).
Aesthetic theories in the Western tradition, like most philosophical theories, do not set out to have only local application, as they try to articulate generally relevant and illuminating theoretical concepts and values. But can and should philosophical aesthetics have global significance? Can aesthetic theories find fruitful general application while also respecting the locality and variability of aesthetic sensitivity? What kinds of theoretical ambition and humility are called for in philosophical aesthetics?
Eileen John is associate professor of philosophy at the university of Warwick and director of the Warwick Centre for research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts. She has a specific interest in literature and its philosophical and ethical roles and she tries to show the relevance of literary works to contemporary debates concerning, for example, personhood ethical disagreement and value formation
In classical South Asian philosophy, as in common sense, most thought that the first-person pronoun “I” stands for the self, something that persists through time, undergoes conscious thoughts and experiences, and exercises control over actions. The Buddhists accepted the “no-self” thesis: they denied that such a self is substantially real. This gave rise to a puzzle for these Buddhists. If there is nothing substantially real that “I” stands for, what are we talking about when we speak of ourselves? Nilanjan Das presents one Buddhist answer to this question, an answer that emerges from the work of the 4th-5th century CE Abhidharma thinker, Vasubandhu.
Nilanjan Das is a lecturer philosophy at University College London. He works on the connections between self-knowledge and irrationality and also debates between buddhist and brahmanical thinkers about the nature of the self, knowledge and self-knowledge. He's also currently writing a book on the 12th century Indian philosopher and poet Śrīharṣa.
Plato has been one of the most important philosophers in the West and is now read all over the world. He has undergone a lot of research in academia, but Noburu Notomi suspects that modern readers have missed some essential factors in analyzing Plato’s texts and thoughts. In order to correctly understand his central theory of Ideas and reconsider the potential of Plato’s philosophy in the modern world, Notomi discusses the reactions of four Japanese philosophers of the twentieth century to Plato’s Ideas, showing how a Japanese perspective can shed light on how to read Plato today.
Noburu Notomi is a professor at the graduate school of humanities and sociology at the university of Tokyo. He specializes in western ancient philosophy and in his career he’s been in many different universities including Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in classics. He is the author of many published works in Japanese and in English his most notable work is The Unity of Plato’s Sophist (1999)
Self-described ‘hippie eco-philosopher’ Joanna Burch-Brown takes us on a deep dive into the philosophy of green finance and a step closer to addressing climate change, by way of a lively tale of philosophy going banking. Joining the discussion is Sean Edwards, chairman of the International Trade and Forfaiting Association Annual Conference.
Joanna Burch-Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at University of Bristol. Her work has focused on issues of contested heritage and public memory. She is a founding member of the University of Bristol's Centre for Black Humanities, academic director for the Fulbright Summer Institute on ‘Arts, Activism and Social Justice’ and served on the Bristol History Commission.
Philosophers enjoy telling stories. Sometimes the stories are very short, but they can be long and detailed as well, for example in the form of utopian narratives by More, Cavendish and others. Why do philosophers invent such stories, and what do they want to accomplish with them? Helen de Cruz argues that existing accounts of thought experiments cannot easily explain the range and variety of thought experiments. In her view, philosophical thought experiments are not merely prettily dressed up arguments. Neither are they only mental models or intuition pumps. Rather, thought experiments help us through a variety of tools that fictions employ to get rid of certain biases and preconceptions, and thus to look at a philosophical idea with a fresh perspective.
Helen de Cruz holds the Danforth Chair in the Humanities at Saint Louis University. Her main areas of specialization are philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of religion and she also works in general philosophy of science, epistemology, aesthetics, and metaphilosophy. She is the co-editor of Philosophy and science fiction stories (2021) and author of Philosophy Illustrated (2021)
The methods of philosophy may be associated with practices such as rational dialogue, logical analysis, argumentation, and intellectual inquiry. However, many philosophical traditions in Asia, as well as in the ancient Greek world, consider an array of embodied contemplative practices as central to the work of philosophy and as philosophical methods in themselves. Leah Kalmanson surveys a few such practices, including those of the ancient Greeks as well as examples from Jain, Buddhist, and Confucian traditions. She argues that revisiting the contemplative practices of philosophy can help us to rethink the boundaries of the discipline, the nature and scope of scholarly methods, and the role of philosophy in everyday life.
Leah Kalmanson is an Associate Professor and the Bhagwan Adinath Professor of Jain Studies at the University of North Texas. She works at the intersection of comparative philosophy and postcolonial theory, with special interests in the liberational philosophies of China's Song dynasty and related discourses on issues of cultivation and transformation in philosophy more broadly, both personal and socio-political. She is the author of Cross-Cultural Existentialism (2020) and co-author of A Practical Guide to World Philosophies (2021).
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Since 1925, the Royal Institute of Philosophy has been on a mission to help those interested in and perplexed by the problems of modern life to ask the right questions. Following in that tradition, we bring you Thinking Hard and Slow, a show that asks for your full attention with the promise of rich lectures and discussions.
Join host Julian Baggini and leading figures in the world of philosophy as they tackle a range of issues such as: The Philosophy of Green Finance, The Ethics of Anger and Shame, How To Get Good at Bad Emotion, and Decolonizing Philosophy.
Full episodes starting on April 15, 2022