11 results found
October 28, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Minding Emotions: music edition
- The emotional shift between minor and major chords
- Examining tonal dissonance in Western music
- When melodies become "pregnant with meaning"
- Why we find beauty in disharmony
- Rami: Social class and culture imbue music with meaning, too
- Is music hardwired in humans?
- How practicing art and music hones the eye and the ear
February 17, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Ann Hulbert
The Wright Show
- Ann's new book on child prodigies, Off the Charts
- Will a child prodigy become an adult non-prodigy?
- The cautionary tale of Bobby Fischer
- The prodigy's "adolescent crisis"
- How people misunderstood Amy Chua, the "Tiger Mom"
- The insanity of the college admissions gauntlet
- Child prodigies inspire sympathy. Their parents? Not so much.
June 29, 2019 —
Daniel Kaufman & Nathan Eckstrand
Sophia
- Nathan's recent essay, "Is it Time for the Humanities to Strike?"
- The attack on the humanities goes international
- Are non-college graduates deficient voters?
- Why the educated elite aren't the most ethical people
- Could a strike re-engage the public with the humanities?
- How to win over those who most thoroughly reject the humanities
December 28, 2019 —
Daniel Kaufman & Joseph Biehl
Sophia
- Why Joe left academia
- Bemoaning the apathy of today's college students
- Joe's nonprofit, the Gotham Philosophical Society
- How can philosophers help improve a place like New York City?
- Should philosophy be parochial or universalist?
- Philosophical anti-realism and parochialism
- Neighborhood pride in the cosmopolitan city
April 10, 2020 —
Daniel Kaufman & Massimo Pigliucci
Sophia
- Will the pandemic forever change college education?
- Laying out the "hard problem" of consciousness
- Why panpsychism is not a solution to the problem
- The battle between radicals and conservatives in physics
- Physicalism vs. idealism
- Massimo explains "scientific metaphysics"
- Why illusionism is not a solution to the problem
- Misrepresentations vs. useful representations
September 08, 2017 —
Robert Wright & Alison Gopnik
The Wright Show
- How a personal crisis brought Alison back to David Hume
- Hume's (likely) chance encounter with Buddhism
- Lessons learned from 23-year-old Hume's nervous breakdown
- Which ideas might Hume have borrowed from Buddhism?
- How meditation disrupts the 'autopilot' of adulthood
- Is introspection as valuable as neuroscience?
January 23, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Stephen Batchelor
The Wright Show
- Striking parallels between Buddhism's Mara and Christianity's Satan
- How Stephen's opera Mara came to fruition
- Bob and Stephen argue about the true meaning(s) of "enlightenment"
- How much authority should a secular Buddhist ascribe to the Buddha?
- The perils of clinging to the dharma
- Stephen's unusual place in the Buddhist world
April 24, 2020 —
Epidemiological Modeling, Policy, and Covid-19 (Daniel Kaufman, Eric Winsberg, & John Symons)
Sophia
- How to model an epidemic
- The costs and benefits of cost-benefit analysis
- Turning coronavirus models into coronavirus policy
- Eric: Your intuitions about the virus's spread are "useless"
- The use and abuse of epidemiological models
- Pandemic models and failures of political leadership
- Our scandalous lack of infection-rate data
- Why suppressing the virus "is a marathon, not a sprint"
August 01, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Brian Leiter
Sophia
- To understand Marx, start with Hegel's dialectics
- Why Marx emphasized economic production over Hegelian idealism
- Dan: Was Marx's concept of labor too narrow?
- What will happen if technology eliminates most jobs?
- Marxism post-WWII: More than college activism and Jefferson Airplane?
- Brian: Marx's predictions were right, but his predicted timeframe was all wrong
- Why "diversity blather" is a capitalist wolf in Marxist clothing
May 30, 2019 —
Daniel Kaufman & Robert Gressis
Sophia
- Robert: Is it permissible to remain a philosophy professor?
- Why Dan opposes the "morality everywhere" approach to life
- Can professors really leave a lasting impact on students?
- "First world problems" and moral obligation in the classroom
- What is the "White Paper" of philosophy, and does it have any authority?
- Rethinking the role of the academy in society
- Dan: Philosophy as a life guide is, well, misguided