Friction

What if the point of punitive damages isn’t just to punish wrongdoers, but to tell victims their dignity actually counts? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest María Guadalupe Martínez Alles is Associate Professor of Law at Sturm College of Law, and her work has focused on the philosophy of law. Check out her recent book, "Torts and Retribution: The Case for Punitive Damages"!...

What if the flow of time is an illusion, and the past, present, and future all exist together right now? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Kristie Miller is the Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and co-director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Time. Her work has focused on metaphysics, especially as it relates to time, temporal passage, identity...

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,...

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...

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...

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 philo...

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.camb...

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, Can...

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 E...

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...

What is error, and what is scientific error? Douglas Allchin explores the various types of scientific errors, how to identify them, and how to do science in light of them. My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Author Douglas Allchin is an AAAS Fellow and Resident Fellow at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, and his work has primarily focused on the history and philos...

What is discrimination, and what makes it wrongful? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Author Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen is professor in political theory at University of Aarhus, Denmark. His work has focused primarily on applied and normative ethical issues. Check out his Cambridge Element, “Wrongful Discrimination”! https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/wrongful-discrimination/6...

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-consciou...

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.cambrid...

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, "Sav...

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,...

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 focu...

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 an...

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 tw...

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...

If causation is not fundamental, what keeps reality from turning into chaos with things randomly popping into existence, and does the kalām’s claim that whatever begins to exist has a cause really explain the order we see? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Dan Linford is lecturer at Old Dominion University, Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies. His work focuses on p...

What, if anything, happened before the Big Bang, which origin story is right, and what future observations could finally decide between them? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guests Phil is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Socieity, science popularizer, and runs the excellent YouTube channel "Phil Halper", aka Skydivephil. Niayesh Afshordi is professor of physics and astronomy...

What happens to our laws about pregnancy, parenthood, and abortion when “gestation” can be shared, transferred, or even moved outside the human body by new biotechnology? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Elizabeth Chloe Romanis is Associate Professor in Biolaw in the Durham Law School as well as in the Durham Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences, and her work foc...

What if the most important thing about acting together is not that our individual intentions line up, but that it can genuinely change how the world shows up to us through a first-person plural perspective? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Dan Zahavi is professor of philosophy and the director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen and is e...

What are laws of nature, do they govern the universe or merely summarize it, and what do those answers imply about induction, chance, and time’s arrow? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Barry Loewer is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and the director of the Rutgers Center for Philosophy and the Sciences. In this interview, we explore philosophica...