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. 149. Mark Balaguer | How to Be a Presentist

    HACE 15 H

    149. Mark Balaguer | How to Be a Presentist

    What if only the present moment exists, and everything you call the past or the future is, strictly speaking, nothing at all? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Mark Balaguer is professor of philosophy at Cal State LA, and his research has covered a wide range of topics, including metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, free will, and metaethics. Check out his book, "How to Be a Presentist"!https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-to-be-a-presentist-9780197845714https://a.co/d/009UAUtC 2. Book Summary Balaguer’s book sets out to develop and defend an original version of presentism — the view in the philosophy of time that only present objects exist, with no past or future objects in the inventory of reality. Crucially, Balaguer is not arguing that presentism is true; his project is the more modest one of showing that presentism is a live, defensible position and that, if there is a fact of the matter at all, the question of its truth is an open empirical one rather than something settleable by armchair metaphysics. The book is organized around three classical objections to presentism: the ontological-commitment objection (that true sentences like “Obama admires Gandhi” seem to require past objects to exist), the truthmaking objection (that truths about the past need something in reality to make them true), and the special-relativity objection (that physics rules out a privileged “now”). The first part of the book lays metaphilosophical groundwork, arguing against trivialism, against necessitarianism about metaphysics, and in favor of an “anti-metaphysicalist” stance on which presentism, if factual, is a contingent empirical hypothesis rather than something knowable a priori. Part II then mounts the defense proper. Against the ontological-commitment objection, Balaguer endorses a sweeping “FAPP-ist” error theory: the relevant ordinary and scientific sentences about past or future objects are, strictly speaking, false, but they function fine “for all practical purposes.” Against the truthmaking objection, he develops a position he calls nothingism, on which past-tense sentences that presentists count as true don’t have truthmakers because they aren’t really making claims about reality at all. Against special relativity, he constructs a relativized presentism compatible with the relativity of simultaneity, avoiding any appeal to a privileged frame. He also takes on subsidiary worries about time travel and change. The book’s most distinctive move comes in Part III, where Balaguer pushes presentism toward what he calls metaphysically minimal or timeless presentism. Here he argues — surprisingly, given the near-universal assumption that presentists must endorse the A-theory — that presentists should reject the existence of time itself, of times (including the present time), of temporal passage, and of metaphysically substantive A-facts (facts about something being past, present, or future). On the resulting picture, talk of time is best treated as a useful fiction layered over a more fundamental notion of intrinsic change, yielding a presentism that is ontologically lean, empirically respectable, and stripped of the heavy metaphysical machinery usually thought to come with the view. The overall result is a defense of presentism that is at once more concessive (presentism is not proven, just shielded from refutation) and more radical (presentism without time) than standard treatments in the literature. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introductio 00:57 - Overview of book 02:47 - Substantive dispute 06:31 - Non-factualism 09:15 - Substantialese 13:58 - Understanding the difference 21:40 - Contingent thesis 28:35 - A posteriori identities 41:10 - Scientism 47:55 - Ontological commitment objection 53:39 - Relevance of physics 1:00:25 - FAPP truth 1:05:03 - Truthmakers objection 1:08:19 - Potential reply 1:17:45 - Present truthmakers? 1:19:43 - Abandon physicalism? 1:20:54 - Swamp world 1:22:17 - The actual world and modal realism 1:36:26 - Nothingism 1:38:40 - Claims about reality 1:42:27 - Understanding the claims 1:53:16 - Counterfactuals 2:04:09 - Understanding modality 2:16:53 - Special relativity 2:26:53 - Avoiding anti-realism and eternalism 2:39:43 - Lean view 2:45:19 - What is time? 2:49:43 - William Lane Craig 2:52:06 - Summary of view 2:54:24 - Future work 2:56:08 - Temporal phenomenology 3:01:11 - Value of philosophy 3:03:31 - 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

    3 h y 4 min
  2. 148. Matt Duncan | Acquaintance

    21 ABR

    148. Matt Duncan | Acquaintance

    What if simply having something consciously present to mind already counts as a form of knowledge, and helps explain not just perception, but beauty, emotion, and moral life? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Matt Duncan is Professor of Philosophy at Rhode Island College, and his work has focused on metaphysics, epistemology, and mind, including the nature of experience and experiential knowledge. Check out his book, "Present to the Mind: Acquaintance and Its Significance"! https://academic.oup.com/book/62315 https://a.co/d/0i7cd8zC 2. Book Summary In Present to the Mind, Matt Duncan develops and defends a Russellian-style notion of ‘acquaintance’: an especially direct form of conscious awareness we bear to things present in experience, such as colors, sounds, pains, smells, and other phenomenal features. The book begins from a striking question about when your ‘epistemic day’ starts. Against the orthodox view that perceptual knowledge arrives only after experience gives rise to belief, Duncan argues that conscious awareness itself already puts us in touch with reality in a knowledge-involving way. The book is organized around three main claims: acquaintance exists, acquaintance is a form of knowledge, and acquaintance is deeply significant in human life. The middle of the book argues first that several forms of acquaintance are real, and then that acquaintance is not just epistemically useful but itself a distinctive kind of knowledge. Duncan’s core idea is that some knowledge of things is constituted by conscious awareness rather than by belief: in perception, you do not first see, then believe, then know; rather, you can see and thereby know. From there he develops an account of ‘knowledge of things’ that is meant to work across different theories of experience, and he argues that acquaintance plays a foundational epistemic role by helping justify beliefs and underpinning much empirical knowledge, even if it is non-propositional. The final chapters broaden the project beyond epistemology. Duncan argues that acquaintance is aesthetically significant because genuine aesthetic appreciation depends on conscious awareness of aesthetically relevant features; emotionally significant because acquaintance with affective experience helps us know and appreciate the value of people; and morally significant because what we are able to notice and know is intertwined with moral character, producing a reciprocal moral-epistemic relationship. So the book’s overall message is not just that acquaintance is a defensible theoretical posit in philosophy of mind and epistemology, but that it is a basic feature of how we encounter beauty, respond to others, and live morally. Duncan’s concluding thought is that acquaintance matters every day, from ordinary perception all the way to our deepest forms of appreciation and care. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:36 - Overview of book 03:30 - Bertrand Russell 07:30 - Directness 08:57 - Objects of acquaintance 14:03 - Strong vs. weak acquaintance 17:24 - Naive realism 22:34 - Mind 24:14 - Argument for weak acquaintance 26:10 - Absolutely strong acquaintance 27:53 - Doubt test 30:05 - Fallibility 31:22 - Certainty 37:33 - Hallucination 43:06 - Modal acquaintance 44:56 - Coextensive? 47:30 - Essence acquaintance 50:49 - Properties 55:02 - Knowledge 57:00 - Varieties of knowledge 58:51 - Argument for acquaintance knowledge 1:00:47 - Semantics 1:05:24 - Knowledge without belief 1:11:40 - Other animals 1:13:09 - Vagueness 1:18:11 - Theory of knowledge 1:23:01 - Subconscious acquaintance 1:27:05 - Foundationalism 1:34:59 - Moral significance 1:40:03 - Rationality of perception 1:42:50 - Summary 1:44:22 - Value of philosophy 1:45:31 - 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

    1 h 47 min
  3. 147. Rivka Weinberg | The Meaning of it All

    14 ABR

    147. Rivka Weinberg | The Meaning of it All

    If life as a whole has no ultimate point, what kind of meaning can still make it worth living? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Rivka Weinberg is Professor of Philosophy and Mary W. and J. Stanley Johnson Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College. Her work has focused on metaphysics and ethics, especially on meaning/purpose and bioethics. Check out her book, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-meaning-of-it-all-9780197758021 https://a.co/d/0gsQDkWN 2. Book Summary In The Meaning of It All, Rivka Weinberg argues that many disputes about life’s meaning stay confused because they fail to distinguish different senses of ‘meaning’. She separates three kinds: ‘Ultimate Meaning’, ‘Everyday Meaning’, and ‘Cosmic Meaning’, and also distinguishes several aspects of meaning, such as value, significance, impact, explanation, purpose, and point. Her boldest claim is that ‘Ultimate Meaning’—the point of living a life as a whole—is impossible for beings like us. A point, she argues, is a valued end external to the activity it justifies; but since a human life contains all of one’s projects, values, and aims, there is nothing outside the enterprise of living one’s life that could serve as its final point. So life as a whole is, in that specific sense, pointless, even though many things within life are not. That bleak conclusion does not, however, lead Weinberg to nihilism. The second major part of the book argues that ‘Everyday Meaning’ is real, abundant, and objective rather than merely subjective: love, truth, beauty, morality, achievement, and worthwhile engagement can genuinely make a life meaningful, and people can be mistaken both about what matters and about whether their lives are well spent. She also argues that ‘Cosmic Meaning’ is often overrated. Even if there were God, miracles, an afterlife, or some grand cosmic purpose, that would not solve the problem of ‘Ultimate Meaning’, and it might not add nearly as much significance as people hope. Cosmic purpose, eternal bliss, or communion with the divine may sound impressive, but Weinberg thinks they do less philosophical work than many assume. The final movement of the book shifts from meaning in general to death and time. Weinberg argues, against a common view, that death is not the main thing that either gives life meaning or takes it away. Rather, time is the real double-edged condition of meaningful life: it is what makes narrative shape, risk, effort, achievement, and change possible, but it is also what erodes all of these things. Hence her ‘time-meaning conundrum’: we need time for meaning, yet time steadily wears meaning down. Her concluding outlook is tragic but not hopeless. We cannot escape this condition, and ‘living in the moment’ is not a real solution; instead, the best response is to engage deeply in everyday goods, attend properly to past, present, and future, and accept suffering and loss as part of what a meaningful human life inevitably involves. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:44 - Overview of book 03:52 - Meaning of ‘meaning’ 05:59 - Ultimate meaning 10:14 - God 13:24 - Skeptical worries 16:47 - Religious practice 20:14 - Everyday meaning 22:38 - Sources of meaning 27:18 - Subjective response 28:29 - Cosmic meaning 34:04 - Scale 39:49 - Transience 45:54 - Death 51:09 - Eternity 55:28 - Practical significance 59:00 - Value of philosophy 1:01:28 - 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

    1 h 2 min
  4. 146. Jay Garfield | Norms and Nature

    7 ABR

    146. Jay Garfield | Norms and Nature

    Where do norms come from: from transcendent reason, or from the customs, practices, and forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Jay Garfield is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Smith College and Harvard Divinity School, and Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University. He work has focused on Buddhist philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, cross-cultural work, and more. Check out his book, "Norms and Nature: A Humean Account of the Sources of Normativity"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/norms-and-nature-9780197839768 https://a.co/d/05nsMQRP 2. Book Summary In Norms and Nature, Jay Garfield argues that the central philosophical question is where normativity comes from: whether norms are grounded in something transcendent, as in broadly Kantian approaches, or instead arise immanently out of human life itself. He frames this through the Euthyphro problem and then broadens it by drawing on Daoist and Buddhist traditions, using them to ask not just whether norms are discovered or made, but also whether they come from “above” in the form of principles or from “below” in patterns of human practice. Garfield’s overall answer is resolutely neo-Humean: norms are real and authoritative, but their source lies in custom, convention, and the natural and social forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures. The book’s middle argument is that this Humean naturalism does a better job than neo-Kantian transcendentalism of explaining both the origin and the authority of norms. Garfield insists that the normative domain is unified across ethics, epistemology, language, politics, and related practices, even if those domains differ in content. He then develops an account of custom as both biological and social, tracing its evolution phylogenetically and ontogenetically: human beings are not simply rule-followers by abstract reason, but animals whose hypersociality, trust, language, and inherited practices generate the normative space they inhabit. In that sense, normativity is neither an illusion nor a mysterious extra ingredient added to nature; it is a natural, emergent feature of human life. In the final part, Garfield applies this framework to particular domains—especially language, knowledge, ethics, and politics—and then turns to personhood itself. His picture is that to be a person is to be formed within a web of shared meanings, customs, and mutually reinforcing social practices that both shape us and are sustained by us. The result is a conception of human beings as thoroughly natural creatures whose normative lives are nonetheless fully real and binding. So the book is not just an argument about Hume versus Kant; it is a broader attempt to explain what it is to be human as a socially constituted, norm-governed being without collapsing into nihilism or crude relativism. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:49 - Overview of book 04:51 - Unity of norms 09:08 - Further source? 14:11 - Transcendent views 19:38 - Why listen to God? 22:28 - Religious communities 25:58 - David Hume 33:23 - Language and norms 34:33 - Other animals 37:16 - Authority of norms 43:04 - Worry 44:53 - Moral intuitions 50:52 - Moderate relativism 54:37 - Open question argument 57:41 - Political norms 1:03:53 - Normative skepticism 1:09:30 - Cross-cultural work 1:10:46 - Trust 1:14:16 - What is a norm? 1:15:04 - Value of philosophy 1:15:59 - 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

    1 h 16 min
  5. 145. Marc Moffett | The Indispensability of Intuitions

    17 MAR

    145. Marc Moffett | The Indispensability of Intuitions

    What are intuitions, and are they indispensable to our knowledge? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Marc Moffett is associate professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, and his work has focused on epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "The Indispensability of Intuitions"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/indispensability-of-intuitions/6F7C18793C39B08507716DD934E4C6A2 https://a.co/d/0bsB4MX1 2. Book Summary Marc A. Moffett’s The Indispensability of Intuitions argues that rational intuitions are not mystical or mysterious, but rather a ubiquitous and essential feature of human cognition. Defending a stance called “moderate dogmatism,” Moffett contends that intuitions serve as basic sources of evidence alongside perception and introspection. He posits that rejecting the role of intuitions would undermine our knowledge on a massive scale, rendering them epistemically indispensable for almost all knowledge, whether a priori or a posteriori. A central part of Moffett’s argument involves rejecting the prevalent idea that the epistemic weight of intuitions (and other “seemings”) relies on a specific “presentational phenomenology” or conscious “feel”. Through thought experiments involving “Cartesian zombies,” he demonstrates that phenomenological properties are not what confer epistemic justification. Instead, he introduces the Attitudinal Theory of Presentationality (ATP), which characterizes presentational states by a unique cognitive posture—specifically, an involuntary “apprehending-as-actual” of certain contents. This non-phenomenological approach successfully addresses skepticism, such as Timothy Williamson’s “Absent Intuition Challenge,” by showing that intuitions can rationally guide our doxastic inclinations without requiring a distinct, introspectively obvious phenomenology. Building on this non-phenomenological foundation, Moffett demonstrates the widespread payoff of his theory by linking intuitions directly to concept application. He explains that philosophical thought experiments, such as the famous Gettier cases, rely on these concept-application intuitions to guide our judgments. Furthermore, Moffett expands his scope to argue that acts of explicit inference, as well as the higher-level presentational contents of normal perceptual experiences, fundamentally rely on the application of concepts, and therefore on intuitions. Consequently, intuitions are not just tools for abstract philosophy, but are intimately integrated into nearly all of our everyday cognitive functioning. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:54 - What are intuitions? 03:06 - Absent intuition worry 06:55 - John Bengson 08:22 - Terminological dispute 12:20 - Methodological worry 14:53 - Moderate dogmatism 18:38 - Foundationalism 23:10 - Internalism 26:39 - Blindsight 30:10 - Zombie argument 36:52 - Rejoinder 43:09 - Non-phenomenal presentational dogmatism 45:48 - Upshot 47:47 - Another rejoinder 51:48 - Indispensability 55:46 - Are intuitions needed? 59:47 - Intuitions as content-determining 1:02:07 - Animal concepts 1:06:10 - Inferences1:08:39 - Inference without reckoning 1:10:59 - Philosophy without intuitions? 1:14:14 - Ethics 1:17:29 - Perceptual experience 1:23:54 - Value of philosophy 1:27:32 - 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

    1 h 28 min
  6. 144. Michael Hymers | Private Language

    10 MAR

    144. Michael Hymers | Private Language

    If Wittgenstein is right, the mystery of “private experience” doesn’t point to hidden inner objects or an incommunicable language of sensation, but to a philosophical picture that makes our ordinary talk about pain and perception look far more puzzling than it is. My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Michael Hymers is Munro Professor of Metaphysics at Dalhousie University, Canada and his work has focused primarily on Wittgenstein, 20th-Century philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of language. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "Wittgenstein on Private Language, Sensation and Perception"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/wittgenstein-on-private-language-sensation-and-perception/BC7058BF509740A839271C98B084F176 https://a.co/d/05nGUE5I 2. Book Summary Michael Hymers argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of private language in Philosophical Investigations §§243–315 is best read not as “the” Private Language Argument (centered on the diary passage at §258), and not as an attempt to prove that language is intrinsically social. Instead, the book presents Wittgenstein’s treatment as a cluster of arguments, examples, and reminders whose central target is a picture: the temptation to treat sensations and perceptual experiences as private objects located in a private “phenomenal space,” and to model sensation-words on an “object-and-name” scheme. Hymers frames this as continuous with Wittgenstein’s earlier work (including The Big Typescript) and with his shift away from assumptions carried over from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus about how naming works. Methodologically, the book emphasizes Wittgenstein’s therapeutic/clarificatory aim: dissolving philosophical confusion by giving an overview of our “grammar,” rather than issuing deep theses or scientific-style explanations. A large part of the book (roughly its middle sections) explains why the “private object in phenomenal space” picture is unstable, and why it makes the very idea of a private sensation-language look deceptively natural. Hymers traces Wittgenstein’s doubts to the earlier critique of sense-data and of treating visual or tactile “space” as if it worked like physical space—where measurement, re-identification, and objecthood behave very differently. He then distinguishes “ordinary” privacy (e.g., the mundane fact that pains are my pains in the sense that I’m the one who manifests them) from stronger “superprivacy,” and separates epistemic privacy (who can know) from ontological privacy (what sort of thing a pain is). Against the idea that first-person authority rests on privileged inner access to private objects, Hymers highlights Wittgenstein’s alternative: first-person present-tense psychological utterances (“I am in pain,” etc.) function paradigmatically as expressions or avowals rather than as reports based on observation, so their asymmetry with third-person claims is grammatical, not a deliverance of a private epistemic channel. In the latter half, Hymers organizes the interpretive landscape around several “waves” of reading Wittgenstein’s anti–private-language materials—moving from verification/memory worries, to problems about private ostensive definition, to rule-following, and finally to broader “stage-setting” concerns (what has to be in place for something to count as naming, attending, or grasping a rule at all). Key thought experiments are used to pry us away from the object-and-name model: the “human manometer” shows that even if a diary-sign ‘S’ correlates with a bodily measure, it can become pointless to insist on a hidden inner act of correctly identifying the sensation—suggesting that the “misidentification” knob is ornamental if sensations are treated as detached inner objects. And the “beetle in a box” at PI §293 is presented as the most explicit pressure against thinking that sensation-words get their meaning by privately baptizing inner items: if the term belongs to a shared practice, the private “thing in the box” is not what gives it its role, and treating sensations as if they were objects is precisely the misleading picture doing the damage. The epilogue’s upshot is not behaviorism or the denial of experience, but a diagnostic: the philosophical “problem” is generated by a grammatical fiction that holds us captive, and Wittgenstein’s aim is to restore clarity about how our sensation- and perception-talk actually works. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 01:06 - Overview of element 03:39 - Methodology 09:31 - Interpreting Wittgenstein 13:57 - Private language 18:01 - First wave: skepticism 22:17 - Second wave: definition 27:22 - Third wave: social 34:10 - Wittgenstein on Kripke 37:22 - Fourth wave: stage-setting 49:23 - Pains and sensations 52:52 - Problem for private languages 54:23 - Difference from second wave 56:46 - Objections 1:01:31 - Avoiding behaviorism 1:07:00 - Inverted spectrum 1:14:17 - Infallibility 1:17:07 - Objection 1:21:55 - Upshots 1:25:15 - Value of philosophy 1:26:33 - 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

    1 h 28 min
  7. 143. Kevin Richardson | The End of Binaries

    3 MAR

    143. Kevin Richardson | The End of Binaries

    Are gender and sexuality really two neat boxes, or are they better understood as positions in a multidimensional space where people can differ by degree rather than kind? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Kevin Richardson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, and his work has focused on metaphysics, language, and social reality. Check out his book, "The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees"! https://academic.oup.com/book/61709 https://a.co/d/04PYhWSf 2. Book Summary Kevin Richardson’s The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees argues that many contemporary fights over gender and sexuality are fueled by an overly rigid “binary” picture—one that treats people as cleanly classifiable into just two genders (male/female) and two orientations (straight/gay). The book begins by emphasizing the real-world stakes of this picture—how the gender binary is defended not only by conservatives but also, in some contexts, by “gender critical” feminists, and how those defenses show up in social practices and legislation. Against this background, Richardson proposes a different organizing framework: instead of asking which category someone belongs to, we should think of gender and sexual orientation more like “where you live” in a space—something that can be described coarsely (city/state) or very precisely (GPS coordinates), depending on the conversational purpose. The core metaphysical proposal is the “spatial theory.” On this view, we should distinguish gender itself from gender categories: gender is an underlying space of features, while categories like man, woman, and non-binary are socially recognized regions within that space; likewise for sexual orientation and sexual-orientation categories. Thinking spatially makes it straightforward to explain “in-between” and hard-to-classify cases: indeterminacy arises because people often use the same terms to organize overlapping regions, and scalar variation is fundamental—one can be a man (or gay/straight) to a greater or lesser degree, rather than only “all-or-nothing.” The book also uses this framework to explain why crisp definitions of gender/orientation categories are so elusive: categories are structured around prototypes (central examples) rather than necessary-and-sufficient conditions, and our difficulty in defining them is compared to the difficulty of verbally specifying an exact geometric shape. Building on the same model, Richardson argues that sexual orientation categories are constructed by communities organizing social life around certain regions of sexual-orientation space and “conferring” category-status by resemblance to prototypes; the result is that our standard labels can be much coarser than the underlying reality they’re trying to track. He also connects the metaphysics to language and politics: disputes like “Trans women are women” are treated as negotiations over which gender “perspectives” (bundles of norms) a community will coordinate on, so meaning-talk and social-world-making are tightly linked. In the concluding “Binary Abolition” discussion, the book rejects both (i) simply eliminating all categories and (ii) replacing binaries with hyper-granular “micro-categories,” recommending instead a positive project of spatial abolition: learning to think and talk in ways that reflect the underlying spaces, with more context-sensitive and purpose-sensitive ways of “locating” ourselves socially—just as we do when describing physical location. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:42 - Overview of book 05:01 - Semantics vs. ontology 10:18 - Descriptive vs. prescriptive 14:50 - Gender binaries 20:47 - Biological binaries 25:07 - Gender norms 32:47 - Linguistic constraints 37:15 - Social accounts 47:07 - Haggling usage 53:07 - Spatial theory of gender 59:38 - Simplicity vs. informativeness 1:07:12 - Gender kinds 1:12:53 - Vagueness 1:23:14 - Abolitionism 1:27:15 - Social issues 1:34:47 - Making progress 1:41:01 - Value of philosophy 1:44:50 - 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

    1 h 45 min
  8. 142. Dan Nicholson | What is Life?

    24 FEB

    142. Dan Nicholson | What is Life?

    1. Guest Daniel Nicholson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University, and his work has focused on the philosophy of science, and in particular biology and life sciences. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "What is Life? Revisited"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/what-is-life-revisited/E6B3EA136720CF50C9480ADB8F41A6F4 https://a.co/d/5aBcmau 2. Book Summary Daniel Nicholson’s What Is Life? Revisited reassesses Erwin Schrödinger’s famous 1944 book What Is Life?—a work that’s widely cited but, Nicholson argues, rarely engaged with carefully—and asks how well Schrödinger’s core ideas have held up. Nicholson reconstructs Schrödinger’s main argument, then evaluates it via two extended critiques (of the “order-from-order” and “order-from-disorder” principles), before turning to the book’s historical influence on molecular biology and (using archival sources) Schrödinger’s deeper motivations for writing it. On Nicholson’s reconstruction, Schrödinger’s central move is to contrast the statistical “order-from-disorder” explanations common in physics and chemistry with a distinctively biological “order-from-order” picture: biological regularities, he thinks, depend on microscopic structural order in hereditary material being amplified into macroscopic organismic order. He proposes that genes must be extraordinarily stable because they are solid-state structures—an “aperiodic crystal” whose nonrepetitive organization can encode a “meaningful design” rather than a simple periodic pattern. On this basis, Schrödinger treats the organism as a kind of “clockwork” mechanism and even suggests that biology may involve “other laws of physics” (not a rejection of physics, but new non-statistical principles suited to living matter). He also offers his influential thermodynamics discussion: organisms avoid equilibrium by importing free energy—his famous (if controversial) talk of feeding on “negative entropy.” Nicholson’s bottom line is that Schrödinger’s emphasis on rigidity, specificity, and a gene-centered “order-from-order” program powerfully shaped molecular biology’s self-image—helping to normalize an engineering-style, deterministic picture of the cell (e.g., “molecular machines,” wiring-diagram thinking, and circuit-like pathway depictions). But Nicholson argues that much of this inherited picture is increasingly in tension with experimental work that foregrounds stochasticity, dynamical flexibility, and non-classical self-organizing processes—pushing researchers toward more statistical (rather than purely mechanical) explanatory strategies. Finally, Nicholson contends that to understand Why Schrödinger framed biology this way, we should see What Is Life? as part of Schrödinger’s broader fight against the orthodox (Copenhagen) interpretation of quantum mechanics: his biological proposals were, in effect, entangled with an attempt to defend a more deterministic worldview and to oppose Bohr-inspired extensions of quantum indeterminacy into biology. The payoff of rereading Schrödinger now, Nicholson suggests, isn’t that the book is straightforwardly right, but that it clarifies how we arrived at our current image of the cell—and how that image may be due for revision. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:32 - Background 03:26 - Why did he write it? 08:19 - Biological order 14:08 - Order from disorder 17:37 - Not applicable to life 20:27 - Hereditary substance 22:58 - Gene-centric view 31:35 - Entropy 39:12 - Negative entropy 41:24 - New laws 48:51 - Modern developments 51:26 - Determinism and free will 1:03:09 - Helpful aspects 1:04:42 - Lessons to learn 1:13:11 - Value of philosophy 1:20:20 - 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

    1 h 22 min
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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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