Friction

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On this podcast, I interview philosophers and other academics on fascinating philosophical and philosophy-adjacent topics. fric.substack.com

  1. 139. Joseph Mendola | The Neural Structure of Consciousness

    3 DAYS AGO

    139. Joseph Mendola | The Neural Structure of Consciousness

    What is the mind, and how do we address the hard problem? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Joseph Mendola is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His work covers a range of topics, including ethics, metaphysics, and mind. Check out his book, "The Neural Structure of Consciousness!" https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neural-structure-of-consciousness/C7CDE1BEC7582CBE10F6875F56D5EBE0https://a.co/d/3xmkBMz 2. Book Summary Joseph Mendola’s The Neural Structure of Consciousness tackles the “hard problem” by asking how phenomenal features of experience (especially sensory qualia) relate to the physical features of the nervous system, aiming for a physicalist, internalist account that uses color experience as the central test case. The guiding idea is that the rich apparent structure of what we experience—e.g., the way colors stand in relations of similarity, opposition, and inclusion—can be explained by the real modal structure of the neurophysiology that makes those experiences possible: which neural states are available as alternatives, how they exclude or entail others, and how that “space of possibilities” is built into our visual system. Mendola frames this as a “MOUDD” approach: explaining sensory qualia by matching the modal structure of experience to the modal structure of the underlying neurophysiology, while treating many of the “properties” experience seems to present (like phenomenal colors “out there” on objects) as in significant respects illusory. A core commitment of the book is a version of the “whole nervous system” model: rather than locating consciousness in some sharply bounded neural correlate, Mendola argues (with qualifications) that the relevant nervous-system-wide organization bridging sensory receptors and action is what constitutes sensory phenomenality. In detail, he proposes that each particular quale (e.g., a specific red-at-a-location) is constituted by a distinct “modal filament” that links stimulation to action within a fixed background, where the filament is individuated modally (by how it can vary and what alternatives it rules in/out), not necessarily by a single spatial pathway or by representational “information content.” This framework is then used to make sense of introspection and the feel of experience without leaning on standard representationalist machinery, by stressing how actual neural states and their “real possibilities” can be dynamically relevant to what we do and say. The later chapters broaden the application: from color to other senses, then to the layered structure of visual space (including the way experience can attribute properties both to a “visual field” and to robust external objects), and finally to temporal experience, causal experience, and the sense of robust particularity. In discussing time, Mendola engages Husserl-style retentional structure (retention/primal impression/protention) and argues that any adequate view must respect the phenomenology of motion and temporal content in experience. The concluding material confronts familiar anti-physicalist challenges (the “explanatory gap,” bats, zombies, inverted spectra, and Mary) and responds in part by emphasizing differences in concepts and cognitive access: e.g., Mary’s “new knowledge” is cast as acquiring an experience-based concept and learning a coreference claim rather than learning an extra nonphysical fact. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:54 - The hard problem 06:51 - Dualism 10:06 - Panpsychism 12:44 - Panpsychist rejoinders 15:28 - Modal structure 24:13 - Modal structure of neurophysiology 27:22 - Description-sensitivity 32:00 - Identity 34:52 - Type identity theory 36:27 - Boltzmann brains 39:17 - Correlations vs. identity 43:54 - Phenomenal concepts 45:56 - Zombies and inverts 50:07 - A priori reasoning 51:47 - Color experience 57:38 - Are colors real? 1:02:39 - Other senses 1:04:41 - Unity of consciousness 1:09:41 - Unconscious mental states 1:12:29 - Animal consciousness 1:15:48 - Vagueness 1:16:55 - Functionalism 1:20:48 - Artificial intelligence 1:21:28 - Paul Thagard's approach 1:25:51 - Progress 1:27:11 - Value of philosophy 1:28:32 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 29m
  2. 138. Vladimir Krstić | Deception

    27 JAN

    138. Vladimir Krstić | Deception

    What is deception, and can it occur without an intention to mislead, especially when the person being deceived is oneself? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy 1. Guest Vladimir Krstić is Assistant Professor at the United Arab Emirates University, and his work focuses on philosophy of mind, language, philosophy of deception. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/deception-and-selfdeception/F245F27D1A823DB21CC24B9C2D161C7A 2. Book Summary Vladimir Krstić argues that the main puzzles about self-deception come from starting with the wrong theory of interpersonal deception. Traditional “intentionalist” accounts say deception requires an intention to mislead; when that model is applied to self-deception, it generates classic paradoxes (roughly: you’d have to knowingly trick yourself). His alternative is a functional account: something counts as deceptive when its function is to mislead—so deception (including self-deception) may be intentional, but it needn’t be, and crucially it’s never merely accidental or a simple mistake. This functional framework is meant to unify human deception, self-deception, and biological deception under one analysis. On the self-deception side, he applies the same functional idea to explain familiar “motivated” cases (e.g., rationalizing away distressing evidence) without requiring intention to self-deceive, and he suggests a practical marker: self-deception often shows up as a motivated departure from one’s normal standards—being “not oneself.” He also argues against the idea that self-deception must be beneficial or adaptive; some forms can be neutral or even harmful, so it calls for case-by-case treatment. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 – Introduction 00:50 – Overview of the book 11:09 – Intention 17:58 – Is deception always wrong? 29:25 – Functional account 36:29 – Function 43:08 – Sci-fi case 48:13 – Vagueness 53:45 – Objections 57:51 – Self-deception 1:02:15 – Function and self-deception 1:09:12 – Semantics 1:17:27 – Value of philosophy 1:24:33 – Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 25m
  3. 137. Emily Adlam | The Measurement Problem

    20 JAN

    137. Emily Adlam | The Measurement Problem

    If quantum mechanics forces us to rethink what a “measurement outcome” even is, can experiments still count as genuine evidence for any scientific theory? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Emily Adlam is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Chapman University and her work focuses on physics, especially quantum physics, and the philosophy of physics.Check out her book, "Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics: The Epistemology of the Measurement Problem"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/saving-science-from-quantum-mechanics-9780197808856 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0197808859/ 2. Book Summary Emily Adlam’s Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics argues that the quantum ‘measurement problem’ isn’t just a puzzle about what exists (wavefunctions, worlds, collapses, etc.), but a threat to the epistemology of science—our right to treat experimental outcomes as evidence. She frames the central demand as a kind of “closing the circle”: a viable physical story of measurement should be coherent with the idea that measurement outcomes genuinely provide information about what’s measured. Against the background of ordinary assumptions about measurement (value-definiteness, veracity, unique outcomes, shareable records, reliable memory), quantum mechanics and results like contextuality make it hard to keep the whole intuitive package, which means some “solutions” risk making scientific knowledge fragile or even impossible. The book then evaluates leading families of responses to the measurement problem by asking whether they preserve empirical confirmation. For Everettian (many-worlds) approaches, Adlam emphasizes the “probability problem” as an epistemic problem: if we can’t explain why observed relative frequencies should confirm the theory, Everettian QM risks empirical incoherence—undermining the very evidence that would support it. She also examines “observer-relative” approaches (including perspectival/neo-Copenhagen, relational QM, and possibly QBism), characterized by universal unitary dynamics plus unique outcomes that are nevertheless relativized to observers; a key worry is that this picture strains the expectation that different observers can straightforwardly share and align records of outcomes. Stepping back, Adlam’s through-line is that you don’t get to quarantine these issues inside “interpretation”: changing our conception of measurement reshapes what counts as evidence for any scientific theory, since no theory is empirically confirmed without observation and measurement. She uses this lens to assess Bayesian/decision-theoretic moves and their limits for “sceptical” hypotheses like multiverses, where even the relevant priors may be ill-defined without a broader belief-revision story. And she presses that some stances—e.g. “intersubjective QBism” that severs the link between quantum states/probabilities and observed frequencies—would drain quantum mechanics of empirical content and thus of confirmation. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:54 - The measurement problem 05:14 - Shut up and calculate 07:00 - Different senses of "measurement" 09:11 - Bootstrapping 10:18 - Relevance to scientific practice 13:18 - Quantum bayesianism 17:46 - Many worlds 20:05 - Recovering the Born rule 32:21 - Bohmian mechanics 36:09 - Probability 37:58 - All-at-once laws 42:54 - Anti-Humeanism 45:12 - Superdeterminism 48:56 - Naturalness 50:15 - Retrocausality 54:33 - Primitive ontology 57:51 - Fundamentality 1:01:41 - Consistent histories 1:04:38 - Saving quantum mechanics 1:07:25 - Making progress 1:08:38 - Value of philosophy 1:10:20 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 11m
  4. 136. Trenton Merricks | Self and Identity

    13 JAN

    136. Trenton Merricks | Self and Identity

    What if the deepest question about “you” isn’t whether you’re the same person over time, but which future life it’s actually rational for you to anticipate and care about as your survival? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Trenton Merricks is Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, and his work focuses primarily on metaphysics, but also religion, epistemology, language and mind. In this interview, we discuss his book, "Self and Identity". 2. Book Summary In Self and Identity, Trenton Merricks argues that a lot of debate about “personal identity” mixes together two different questions. The first is his What Question: what it is for a future person to have, at that future time, what matters in survival for you. His answer is that survival-relevance is constituted by what it’s appropriate for you to first-personally anticipate and to have future-directed self-interested concern about—where “appropriate” is a distinctive, non-evidential and non-moral norm. He also insists we shouldn’t conflate what matters in survival with what matters to you about the future in general (friends, projects, agency, etc.), since that conflation can distort arguments about survival. The second is his Why Question: what relation to a future conscious person explains why that future person will have what matters in survival for you. Merricks’s headline view is: identity is not what matters in survival, but identity delivers what matters in survival—i.e., numerical identity is (on his favored endurance picture) the right kind of explanation for why survival obtains. He then defends both the sufficiency and the necessity of personal identity for survival, targeting Parfit-style fission reasoning in particular and arguing that (depending on one’s metaphysics of persistence) Parfit’s argument can be blocked; he also rejects the idea that unbranching psychological connectedness/continuity is sufficient for personal identity (and so for what matters in survival). Chapters 4–6 then stress-test rival “psychological” answers to the Why Question—views that tie survival to having the same self (values/desires/projects), the same self-narrative, or forms of agential / narrative continuity—and Merricks argues these proposals mishandle cases of deep transformation (including being “turned” into someone evil in a way that seems bad for you without being merely like ceasing to exist). Finally, Chapter 7 applies the framework to personal immortality (“the hope of glory”): immortality is framed as there always being someone who will have what matters in survival for you, and Merricks uses his earlier claims to respond to familiar worries—e.g., that survival comes in degrees, or that immortality would inevitably be tedious. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:44 - Self and Identity 04:25 - What and why questions 07:25 - Semantics 12:29 - Normative issues 13:29 - What matters in survival 18:36 - Numerical identity 21:04 - More conditions? 22:42 - The past 24:35 - Permanent comatose 30:49 - Memory wipe 36:05 - Psychological continuity 37:25 - Puzzles of identity 40:47 - Persistence and eternalism 46:43 - Relative identity 53:42 - Sci-fi cases 58:17 - Other views 1:00:24 - Non-reductionism 1:05:51 - Examples 1:10:55 - Vagueness 1:14:37 - Narrative accounts 1:18:32 - Christian theology 1:25:03 - A puzzle 1:27:32 - Value of philosophy 1:29:25 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 30m
  5. 135. Paul Thagard | How Brains Build Consciousness

    6 JAN

    135. Paul Thagard | How Brains Build Consciousness

    Can brains build consciousness? In this interview, Paul Thagard argues that they can, and explains his approach. My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Paul Thagard is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Association for Psychological Science. His work focuses on cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science and medicine. Check out his book, "Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness"! https://academic.oup.com/book/60618https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FHQJ3KCS/ 2. Book Summary Paul Thagard’s Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness develops a neuroscientifically grounded, mechanism-based theory meant to explain not just “ordinary” perception, sensation, emotion, and thought, but also the especially puzzling, highly structured forms of experience that show up in dreaming, humour, and music. The core proposal is the “NBC” theory: conscious experience arises from interactions among Neural representation, Binding, Coherence, and Competition—where coherence is understood as constraint satisfaction and competition governs which representations win out for attention and interpretation. After laying out NBC and illustrating it with simpler cases (e.g., how brains build perceptual and bodily experiences and integrate them into unified “compound” consciousness), Thagard uses it to explain three marquee domains. Dreaming is treated as a product of the same mechanisms, aiming to explain why dreams are common, emotionally charged, continuous with daily life yet sometimes bizarre, and still feel intensely “what-it’s-like” (his term “zing”) even when they don’t make ordinary sense. Humour is explained via a characteristic dual shift: incoming words/images trigger an initial interpretation and emotional response, then a change prompts a second interpretation and response, and recognizing that shift yields surprise and laughter. Musical experience is explained as the brain binding basic note-representations into higher-order structures like melody, rhythm, and harmony, then binding these with other modalities (movement, words, visuals, emotion), with competition helping music “break through” into conscious attention. The later chapters broaden the same framework to other conscious domains (e.g., religion, morality, sports performance, romance, and the effects of drugs), and argue that any full theory must handle time consciousness: the brain represents time using “time cells,” binds these into larger “memory units,” and uses coherence and competition to produce an experienced sense of duration and temporal flow. Thagard also evaluates animal consciousness and asks about machine consciousness, arguing that current large language models (including ChatGPT) can be impressive without having felt perceptions, sensations, or emotions, partly because they lack the kind of world- and body-involving understanding central to his story. Finally, he connects the theory to a broader mind–body view he calls “coherent materialism” (or “cohmaterialism”), on which genuinely minded systems are rare because they require tightly coupled hardware/software that coherently satisfies constraints of time, space, energy, and history. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:51 - Overview of book 04:57 - Qualia 08:12 - Illusionism 11:53 - Neural representation 14:58 - Representation 18:14 - Binding 22:40 - Coherence 26:58 - Emotions 28:49 - Competition 31:18 - Getting consciousness 38:13 - Emergence 40:27 - Additional mechanisms 42:50 - Correlates vs. identity 48:00 - Explanatory breadth 50:53 - Dreams 55:59 - Global workspace theory 58:27 - Other approaches 1:01:46 - Animal consciousness 1:05:41 - Vagueness 1:08:37 - Functionalism and AI 1:16:14 - Coherent materialism 1:18:37 - Thought experiments 1:22:30 - Mary's room 1:25:22 - Future research 1:27:57 - Value of philosophy 1:30:01 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 31m
  6. 134. Daniel Whiteson | Do Aliens Speak Physics?

    30/12/2025

    134. Daniel Whiteson | Do Aliens Speak Physics?

    If we ever make first contact, the hard part might not be sending a message across space, but working out whether aliens do science in anything like our sense, share concepts like number and explanation, and could actually understand what we mean by “physics.” My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Daniel Whiteson is an experimental particle physicist and professor of Physics and Astronomy at University of California, Irvine. His work focuses on the analysis of high-energy particle collisions. He co-hosts a podcast about the Universe (Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe). Check out his new book with Andy Warner, "Do Aliens Speak Physics?: And Other Questions about Science and the Nature of Reality"! https://www.amazon.com/dp/1324064641/ 2. Book Summary In Do Aliens Speak Physics? Daniel Whiteson (with Andy Warner) asks what it would take—not just to find intelligent aliens, but to have a meaningful scientific exchange with them. The organizing idea is an “extended Drake equation”: beyond the usual probabilities of life and intelligence, we have to ask what fraction of alien civilizations do something like experiment-driven science (fscience), what fraction of those we could communicate with at all (fcommunication), and then whether we’d even share enough conceptual overlap to ask and answer the “same” scientific questions. The middle of the book is a tour of the ways those terms might collapse. Even if aliens are curious, their “science” might not look like ours; even if we can exchange signals, translating meanings could be brutally hard; and even math—often treated as the obvious shared language—might not function as a universal bridge if aliens don’t carve the world into countable objects the way we do. The authors use vivid hypotheticals to press the point that what feels “obvious” to us can hide deep assumptions (about counting, representation, and what matters), and those assumptions can reshape what we notice and what questions we even think to ask. In the later chapters, they argue that—even granting shared questions—there’s no guarantee of the kind of grand, final alien “answer” we fantasize about. Human physics already looks like a patchwork of domain-specific approximations that don’t neatly sew into one overarching quilt, and there can be multiple incompatible “stories” that fit the same observed data, suggesting a Rashomon-style underdetermination that aliens might resolve differently (or not at all). The upbeat conclusion is that this isn’t just a downer about SETI: thinking through alien science is a way of spotting our own hidden commitments and keeping alternative conceptual paths alive—so the exercise teaches us about our science and our minds, even if no perfectly compatible alien colleagues ever show up. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 01:55 - Overview of book 04:29 - Illustrations 05:31 - Extended Drake equation 08:31 - Navigators 11:44 - Different physics 14:28 - Communication 21:25 - First contact 24:50 - Mathematics 29:33 - Vagueness 33:12 - Indispensability 35:57 - Ontology plus dynamics 39:21 - Arbitrary conventions 41:20 - Varieties of life 48:06 - Friendly? 49:16 - Common concepts 52:51 - Learning about ourselves 54:11 - Progress 1:00:03 - Value of philosophy 1:02:39 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 3m
  7. 133. Graham Oppy | Fine-Tuning and Grim Reapers

    23/12/2025

    133. Graham Oppy | Fine-Tuning and Grim Reapers

    Can a Bayesian look at fine-tuning make “design” less compelling, and do Grim Reaper-style infinity puzzles really show that an infinite past is impossible? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and specializes in Philosophy of Religion. 2. Interview Summary In this interview, Friction speaks with Graham Oppy about two big clusters of issues: a Bayesian way of framing fine-tuning arguments, and how (if at all) Benardete/“Grim Reaper” style paradoxes support causal or temporal finitism. On fine-tuning, Friction sketches a strategy that starts from probabilistic constraints—roughly, that “design” shouldn’t get a higher prior than non-design, and that life-permittingness/fine-tuning isn’t (or needn’t be) more expected on design than on non-design—so that updating on a life-permitting universe won’t, by itself, drive you toward design. Oppy presses on how the hypothesis space is being carved up and what background assumptions are doing the work, noting that fine-tuning defenders often treat “design” as a family of more specific hypotheses—some of which might assign high likelihood to fine-tuning (the “more batter on the design side” idea). A related thread Oppy raises is an “inscrutability” worry: given a designer’s vast option space, it may be hard to say what fine-tuning should even be likely on design, which complicates the likelihood comparisons that fine-tuning arguments rely on. The conversation also touches on how conditioning on extremely specific facts about “these exact parameters” can generate counterintuitive results about what should have been expected a priori, and Oppy connects this to “many-gods” style worries familiar from Pascal’s Wager debates. In the second half, Friction and Oppy turn to Benardete-style setups: infinite sequences of would-be interveners arranged at times approaching a limit, which can make it seem like an outcome must occur even though no particular intervener is ever the one who triggers it. Friction outlines a common finitist dialectic: if an infinite past/regress would allow a Grim Reaper scenario (often via a “patchwork” recombination principle), and if Grim Reaper scenarios are impossible, then infinite pasts/regresses are impossible too. Oppy focuses much of his skepticism on the linking step—especially the idea that you can “piece together” regions from different possible worlds to build the paradox—because the relevant dispositions and actions don’t obviously survive that kind of cut-and-paste. He also emphasizes that there are plenty of coherent infinite-sequence stories that don’t generate contradiction (he offers simple toggle-style examples), which undercuts the claim that infinity as such forces paradox. And a recurring diagnosis is that many paradox presentations under-specify what happens at the crucial infinite-limit case—so the sense of impossibility may come from an incomplete story rather than a genuine contradiction. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 01:18 - Bayesian fine-tuning argument 02:30 - Design vs. non-design hypotheses 03:52 - Two probability constraints 05:17 - Oppy’s first reaction 07:24 - Conditional probabilities questioned 10:11 - Does design predict life? 11:16 - Purely a priori reasoning 15:16 - Causation vs. design 16:36 - Probability 19:54 - Background 22:33 - Simplicity 27:41 - Skeptical theism and fine-tuning 28:22 - Life-permitting vs. fine-tuned 31:39 - Comparing specific hypotheses 37:55 - Simplicity and divine complexity 39:28 - Necessary beings and the universe 43:30 - Intuitions and priors 46:52 - Stalking-horse objection 49:52 - Background knowledge and updating 51:34 - Double-dipping concern 55:44 - Grim reapers 1:01:41 - Patchwork principle 1:10:54 - Thomson’s lamp analogy 1:14:33 - Toe-regrowing variant 1:22:12 - Lewis and patchwork 1:23:41 - Intrinsic powers 1:26:27 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 27m
  8. 132. Karen Stohr | A Kantian Guide to Life

    16/12/2025

    132. Karen Stohr | A Kantian Guide to Life

    What if Kant is right that real freedom is not doing whatever you feel like, but choosing principles you can rationally endorse and then living by them? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Karen Stohr is Ryan Family Chair Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Georgetown University, where she is also a Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Her work focuses on ethics. In this interview, we focus on her book, "Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life". 2. Book Summary Karen Stohr’s Choosing Freedom is a practical guide to living “freely” in a Kantian sense: not doing whatever you feel like, but governing yourself by principles you can rationally stand behind. She emphasizes that the book is not about becoming more like Kant or constantly asking “What would Kant say?”; it’s about using Kant’s insights to illuminate hard-to-notice features of our moral lives and help you live by your own standards. Stohr also frames the book as a short tour of Kant’s systematic ethics followed by lots of attention to the everyday “trees” Kant actually wrote about—things like gossip, friendship, and dinner parties—because Kant meant ethics to guide real life. Kantian freedom, on this telling, often requires self-constraint: exercising autonomy means “getting a grip on ourselves” so we can live according to rationally defensible principles rather than being yanked around by impulse and procrastination. The early chapters lay out the Kantian basics: morality is grounded in reason rather than shifting feelings, and the categorical imperative is presented through three connected ideals—equality, dignity, and community. Stohr stresses that Kant isn’t only about isolated individual choice: the “kingdom of ends” picture highlights how our communities shape our moral lives and how morality asks us to build social relations on the equal value of persons. In the “moral assessment” sections, she connects this framework to knowing and judging ourselves (and others), urging forms of charitable interpretation that keep us from using other people’s flaws as a way to feel superior, and redirecting attention back to our own moral work. Along the way, she squarely acknowledges Kant’s moral failures—especially racist and sexist views—while arguing that Kant’s own framework contains powerful resources against dehumanization, beginning with a strict duty to treat every human being with dignity. Most of the book applies the theory to character, goals, and social life, organized into parts on vices, life goals, socializing, and looking forward. Stohr explains Kantian vices as “monsters” that live inside us and “enslave us from the inside,” warping our reasoning and making it harder to recognize and follow our duties—hence chapters on servility, arrogance, contempt, gossip/defamation, mockery, deceitfulness, and drunkenness. She then turns to constructive practices (self-improvement, resilience, reserve, beneficence, gratitude) and to the moral texture of friendship, love, manners, and even hosting: for Kant, good social rituals can cultivate both understanding and “fellow-feeling,” helping us practice respect in community. The final chapters emphasize hope as a duty-like orientation toward moral progress: we’re to work toward better ethical community (and even peace) by sustained effort, grounding optimism in the idea that people can keep trying to be better than they were yesterday. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Intro 00:43 - Overview of Choosing Freedom 03:03 - Making Kant accessible 06:08 - Everyday Kantian ethics 06:56 - Freedom and rationality 10:16 - Acting irrationally 12:39 - Human nature and evil 16:36 - Can evil be rational? 20:58 - The categorical imperative 21:44 - Universal law formulation 25:55 - Exceptions and universalization 30:48 - Humanity formulation 34:30 - Ends and dignity 37:44 - Kingdom of ends 41:38 - Perfect vs imperfect duties 46:29 - Conscience and moral assessment 51:55 - Reflecting on conscience 52:24 - Vices and virtues 53:06 - Duty not to lie 57:53 - Lies and omissions 1:00:14 - Civility and manners 1:02:59 - Moral improvement 1:06:39 - Teaching ethics 1:09:54 - Philosophy as practice 1:13:09 - Value of philosophy 1:16:34 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

    1h 17m
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On this podcast, I interview philosophers and other academics on fascinating philosophical and philosophy-adjacent topics. fric.substack.com

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