Portugal Street Philosophy Podcast LSE SU Philosophy Society

Welcome to the ninth episode of the Portugal Street Philosophy Podcast, the official podcast of the LSE Philosophy Society. In each episode, we take an important philosophical question and explore our best current attempts to answer it. For this episode, our question is “What is the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics?” and our guide to the topic is Professor Sean Carroll.

In this episode we discuss:


Interpreting quantum mechanics: the measurement problem and the reality problem
Schrödinger evolution and the Born rule
A brief history of interpretations of quantum mechanics
The many-worlds interpretation
Entanglement, decoherence, and branching
Many-worlds and probabilities: decision theory, self-locating uncertainty, and quantum immortality
Other interpretations: hidden variables, objective collapse, and epistemic approaches
The role of philosophy in the foundations of physics

About our guest:

Sean Carroll is a Research Professor of Physics at Caltech and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on foundational questions in quantum mechanics, spacetime, cosmology, emergence, entropy, and complexity, occasionally touching on issues of dark matter, dark energy, symmetry, and the origin of the universe. Professor Carroll is the author of numerous books, including From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, and The Big Picture. His latest best-seller, Something Deeply Hidden, is about the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. He is also the host of the fantastic Mindscape podcast. Check out Sean's website here: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/
Check out the Mindscape Podcast here: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/
Link to Something Deeply Hidden (Carroll, 2019): https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/somethingdeeplyhidden/

About your host:

Eric Chen is an undergraduate studying Philosophy and Economics at the London School of Economics.

Welcome to the eighth episode of the Portugal Street Philosophy Podcast, the official podcast of the LSE Philosophy Society. In each episode, we take an important philosophical question and explore our best current attempts to answer it. For this episode, our question is “What are probabilities?” and our guide to the topic is Professor Anna Mahtani.

In this episode we discuss:


Subjective and objective probabilities
The Kolmogorov axioms
Interpretations of probability
Dutch Book arguments and rationality
Subjective probabilities and epistemic states
Epistemic states of real vs. ideal agents
Open questions in bounded rationality: awareness growth, imprecise probabilism

About our guest:

Anna Mahtani is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics. She works on the philosophy of language, decision theory, formal epistemology, and welfare economics, as well as the relationship between these areas. She has published on a wide range of topics, including vagueness, imprecise probabilism, arguments for probabilism, and the ex-ante Pareto principle. She is currently writing a book called The Objects of Credence. Check out Anna's website here: https://personal.lse.ac.uk/mahtania/

About your host:

Eric Chen is an undergraduate studying Philosophy and Economics at the London School of Economics.

Welcome to the seventh episode of the Portugal Street Philosophy Podcast, the official podcast of the LSE Philosophy Society. In each episode, we take an important philosophical question and explore our best current attempts to answer it. For this episode, our question is “How should we make decisions under uncertainty?” and our guide to the topic is Professor Richard Bradley. 

In this episode we discuss:


The relationship between descriptive and normative decision theory
Expected utility theory
Rationality constraints and representation theorems
vNM and Savage’s representation theorems
Foundationalism vs. reflective equilibrium
Idealizations within expected utility theory
Confidence, resilience, and the paradox of ideal evidence
Unawareness, cluelessness, and ‘medium-termism’
Evaluative uncertainty
The relationship between ideal and bounded rationality

About our guest:

Richard Bradley is a Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics and a leading thinker in philosophical decision theory. He also works in related fields such as formal epistemology and semantics. Recently, he has been working on the nature of chance and our attitudes towards it, as well as the issue of decision-making under severe uncertainty. He is also the author of the book Decision Theory with a Human Face, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. Check out Richard's website here: https://personal.lse.ac.uk/bradleyr/

Link to Decision Theory with a Human Face (Bradley, 2017): https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/philosophy/philosophy-science/decision-theory-human-face?format=HB&isbn=9781107003217

About your host:

Eric Chen is an undergraduate studying Philosophy and Economics at the London School of Economics.

Welcome to the sixth episode of the Portugal Street Philosophy Podcast, the official podcast of the LSE Philosophy Society. In each episode, we take an important philosophical question and explore our best current attempts to answer it. For this episode, our question is “What are the requirements of instrumental rationality?” and our guide to the topic is Professor Johanna Thoma. 

In this episode we discuss:


Instrumental rationality: coherence of attitudes and reasons
Basic ingredients of normative decision theory and traditional instrumental rationality
Normative decision theory as a theory of instrumental rationality: interpretation and justification
Practical reason: Humeanism vs. Kantianism
Two requirements of decision theory: consistent preferences, and acting in accordance with preferences
Requirements on preferences in cases of certainty, risk, and uncertainty
Instrumentalist arguments for coherence requirements
Preferences as foundational vs. utility as foundational
The Money Pump Argument for transitive preferences
Why the Money Pump Argument doesn’t work

About our guest:

Johanna Thoma is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics. She works broadly at the intersection of philosophy, economics, and public policy. She has published on practical rationality and decision theory, ethics, and public policy, as well as economic methodology and the application of economic methods to philosophical problems. Much of her work is united by the goal of better understanding what morality and rationality require of us when we are facing uncertainty about the future. Check out Johanna's website here: https://johannathoma.com/

About your host:

Eric Chen is an undergraduate studying Philosophy and Economics at the London School of Economics.

Welcome to the fifth episode of the Portugal Street Philosophy Podcast, the official podcast of the LSE Philosophy Society. In each episode, we take an important philosophical question and explore our best current attempts to answer it. For this episode, our question is “Are there any successful arguments for or against the existence of God?” and our guide to the topic is Professor Graham Oppy.

In this episode we discuss:


What makes a successful argument?
What makes an agent rational?
Bounded, ideal and minimal rationality
Why there aren’t any successful arguments for and against the existence of God
The relationship between argument and theory
Theories and theoretical virtues
Trading-off simplicity and explanation
The future of this debate

About our guest:

Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and the foundation editor of the Australasian Philosophical Review. Professor Oppy is a leading thinker on the philosophy of religion, but he has also published on a broad range of topics within metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and epistemology. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including ‘Arguing about Gods’, ‘The Best Argument Against God’ and more recently, ‘A Blackwell Companion to Atheism and Philosophy’. Check out Graham's website here: https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/graham-oppy

About your host:

Eric Chen is an undergraduate studying Philosophy and Economics at the London School of Economics.

Welcome to the fourth episode of Portugal Street Philosophy, the official podcast of the LSE SU Philosophy Society! In each episode, we take a deep dive into a different cutting-edge field of philosophy with world-leading philosophers.

About our Speaker:

David Papineau is a Professor of Philosophy of Science at King’s College London and a Professor at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. He was the President of the British Society for Philosophy of Science from 1993-95, President of the Mind Association in 2009, and President of the Aristotelian Society in 2014. Professor Papineau has written widely on epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science and mind. He has also written numerous books, the latest of which, titled “Knowing the Score”, explores a number of ways in which sporting issues cast light on long-standing philosophical problems.

Link to the Metaphysics of Sensory Experience (forthcoming, 2021): https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-metaphysics-of-sensory-experience-9780198862390?cc=us&lang=en&

About your hosts:

Eric Chen and Karina Vasiliades are undergraduate students at the London School of Economics and Political Science, reading for degrees in Economics and Philosophy and Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, respectively.