Robinson's Podcast

Robinson’s Podcast #76 - Nora Boyd, Siska de Baerdemaeker, & Vera Matarese: The Philosophy of Astrophysics Nora Boyd is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Siena College. Siska de Baerdemaeker is a Researcher at Stockholm University. Vera Matarese is Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Science at the University of Perugia. Both Nora and Siska received their PhDs in History and Philosophy of...

Jody Azzouni is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. While Jody is best known for his nominalist stance in the philosophy of mathematics, he is also an author of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Robinson and Jody discuss one of Jody’s poems in detail before moving on to the philosophy of mathematics and logic. They go over the distinction between natural and formal languages, the roles an...

Stephen Darwall is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. He is a world-renowned moral philosopher who has worked broadly across the ethical landscape, making important contributions to Kant scholarship, legal philosophy, deontology, and countless other areas. In this episode, Robinso...

Craig Callender is Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Institute for Practical Ethics at UC San Diego. Craig works across the philosophy of science, and has published research on the philosophy of physics, applied ethics, the metaphysics of time, and other related areas. In this episode, Craig and Robinson discuss the content of a course he’s been teaching called Science vs Pseudoscienc...

Eric Trexler received his PhD in Human Movement Science from the medical school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is a professional body builder and a sports nutrition researcher, and the co-owner of Stronger By Science, MASS Research Review, and the MacroFactor nutrition app, as well as the co-host of the terrific Stronger By Science podcast. Robinson and Eric discuss some phil...

Peter Adamson is Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at King's College London. He’s also the host of the podcast History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps and the author of the book series by the same name. Robinson and Peter talk about Neoplatonism—a philosophical movement in late antiquity...

Elisabeth Camp is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers, where she works on the philosophy of language, mind, and aesthetics. As she puts it, her research “focuses on thoughts and utterances that don’t fit standard propositional models.” Liz and Robinson spend the first third of their conversation discussing the poetry of Emily Dickinson and its connections to philosophy. They then move on to the sub...

Frank Jackson is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University. He is best known for the knowledge argument and Mary’s Room—its accompanying thought experiment—but has published widely in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. Frank and Robinson discuss conceptual analysis—or the philosophical technique of examining the meaning, content, or de...

Simon Blackburn was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Though he has worked in many areas of philosophy, he is best known for his contributions to metaethics and the philosophy of language. Simon and Robinson discuss the distinction between ethics and metaethics before prim...

David Albert is the Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he directs the Philosophical Foundations of Physics program. Tim Maudlin is Professor of Philosophy at NYU. Both David and Tim are renowned as leading philosophers of physics, though their work extends beyond that to the philosophy of science and metaphysics. David is a prior guest (episodes 23 and 30...

Noam Chomsky is Professor of Linguistics Emeritus at MIT and Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. He not only counts as among the most influential linguists of all time, but he has played a major role in the development of twentieth and twenty-first century philosophy, cognitive science, and political theory. Noam and Robinson talk about some of the major topics in moder...

Tania Lombrozo is Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, where she directs the Concepts & Cognition Lab. Before that, she did her undergraduate work at Stanford University (!), her graduate work at Harvard University, and then taught at the University of California, Berkeley. Robinson and Tania discuss her work on explanation. Among other things, they touch on our...

Sarah Moss is the William Wilhartz Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law by courtesy at the University of Michigan. She works primarily in epistemology and the philosophy of language, though in the case of this conversation her work has an important bearing on legal philosophy. Robinson and Sarah talk about her book Probabilistic Knowledge, which argues that you can know something that you...

Thomas Ryckman is Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, where he works on the philosophy of physics. Mark Wilson is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where he works at the intersection of the philosophy of math and physics on the one side and metaphysics and the philosophy of language on the other. Tom, Mark, and Robinson discuss the present state of...

David Papineau is Professor of Philosophy of Science at King’s College London. He also teaches at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and before that he lectured in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge. Robinson and David speak broadly about the philosophy of science. Some topics they touch on include the distinction between realism and antirealism, the rol...

Keith Frankish is an Honorary Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sheffield, a Visiting Research Fellow with the Open University, an Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Program at the University of Crete, and editor of the Cambridge University Press series Elements in Philosophy of Mind. He is best known for his “two-level” view of the human mind, covered in his book...

Joel David Hamkins is the O’Hara Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame, where he recently moved from the University of Oxford. Joel is one of the world’s leading set theorists and philosophers of mathematics. Graham Priest is a Distinguished Professor in the philosophy department at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is one of the most influential philosophers of the pa...

Tamar Schapiro is Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Her work centers on value theory, the history of ethics, and how this relates to human agency and reasoning. Robinson and Tamar’s discussion center around her latest book, Feeling Like It: A Theory of Inclination and Will, which explores the relationship between the two in a Kantian framework. They also talk about her experience teaching ethics at...

Huw Price is the former Bertrand Russell Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and was before that Challis Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, and then—even before that—was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh. Huw is an expert across a wide variety of subdomains within the family of...

Richard Kimberly Heck has been a professor of philosophy at Brown University since 2005, at which time they left their post at Harvard, where they had taught for over a decade. On the way to receiving their PhD in philosophy and linguistics at MIT, they studied at Duke and Oxford. Riki has also been a guest on three prior episodes of Robinson’s Podcast—5, 17, and 41—that covered the philosophy of...

Kevin Heng is Chair Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics of Extrasolar Planets at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Before that, he was the director of the Center for Space and Habitability at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Robinson and Kevin discuss the search for planets outside our solar system and the importance of—as well as some problems surrounding—our investigations into...

Alison Fernandes is a professor of philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. Prior to that, she did her graduate work at Columbia University, where she studied with two other denizens of the Robinson’s Podcast universe, David Albert and Achille Varzi. Alison is the author of the upcoming book with Cambridge University Press, The Temporal Asymmetry of Causation, some of the contents of which are the su...

Luvell Anderson is a professor of philosophy at Syracuse University, where he’s also an affiliate faculty member of Women’s and Gender Studies and African American Studies. He is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race and the soon-to-be-released Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language. He is also currently working on a book about the philosophy of humor—The Et...

Christina Van Dyke is an emerita professor of philosophy at Calvin College and a visiting professor of philosophy at Barnard College, where she specializes in the medieval period. She is the author of A Hidden Wisdom: Medieval Contemplatives on Self-Knowledge, Reason, Love, Persons, and Immortality. Christina and Robinson discuss the philosophy of food and eating—its gendered aspects, its religiou...

Gabriel Greenberg is a professor of philosophy at the University of California Los Angeles, and currently a visiting professor at Stanford University. He works widely across the philosophy of mind, but in particular studies iconic representation, modality, and computation. Gabe and Robinson talk about the rough divide between representation and consciousness studies in the philosophy of mind befor...