Elucidations

In this episode, Matt Teichman and Henry Curtis talk to Graham Priest (CUNY Graduate Center) about the philosophical foundations of Buddhism.Buddhism isn't just a religion--it's an entire family of philosophical traditions that took root all over the Asian continent for thousands of years. The historical Buddha articulated views in what we consider to be many different areas of philosophy, including metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy. For this episode, we're focusing on the metaphysics.Metaphysics means different things to different people, but our guest thinks of it as a broad inquiry into the structure of reality at a fundamental level, space and time, what substance is, cause and effect, what makes any given thing the thing it is. And one of many things he finds interesting about Buddhism is that over the years, Buddhists have floated metaphysical views that don't arise in the Western traditions.One cool example he gives is a view associated with Madhyamaka Buddhism that nothing has a nature that makes it independent of its relation to anything else in the world. So take me, Matt. I am what I am not just because of properties that I have in and of myself, but because of the relation I stand in to certain other things. (Though not all other things, as he hastens to point out.) Like for example, I have a special relation to New Jersey: I was born and grew up there. So facts about what Matt is and what he's like is are tangled up with facts about what New Jersey is and what it's like.Graham Priest further observes that this general view leads to skepticism about whether anything is maximally explanatorily basic, which is a view that hasn't been explored by many contemporary philosophers. Like, most contemporary philosophers who work on metaphysics would say that a flagpole is more basic than the shadow it casts, because you could have the flagpole without the shadow, but not the other way around. There wouldn't be anything for the shadow to be a shadow of! Priest thinks that the Madhyamaka view that everything is dependent on something else leads to the further view that no one thing or set of things can be most basic.Join us as our guest walks us through the core metaphysical tenets of Buddhism! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Frithjof Bergmann and David Helmbold make the case for a different approach to working in the modern world. A lot of us experience our day to day work as a 'mild disease'--not terrible, not excruciating, but also not our #1 choice about how to spend weekdays. Instead, they argue, a person's work should be the best part of their life. But making that a possibility for everyone requires not just our social structures to transform--it requires a kind of personal psychological transformation.Check out our blog for more info!https://elucidations.now.sh/posts/episode-122/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Matt Teichman and Julia Liu talk to Aaron Ben Ze'ev (University of Haifa) about lifelong romantic love. What is love? Is it just a private feeling that each individual person experiences, or is it something that crucially involves multiple people? Our guest argues that although it is primarily a feeling, it is also something that emerges out of the interaction between two people. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ever wonder what 'gender non-binary' means? Don't worry--Robin Dembroff (Yale University) is here to walk us through the relevant terminology, along with the everyday moral issues that are tied up with the gender concepts we use. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, our guest argues that in addition to ordinary individual cases of misgendering, in which one person gets another person's gender wrong when they address them, there's a broader sense of the term. In the broader sense, a philosophical account of what gender is can also misgender people. How? The idea is that in signing yourself up for an incorrect philosophical account of gender, you could be committing yourself to the view that certain people are not the gender they (correctly) claim to be. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Tyler Cowen lays out an interesting normative ethical theory according to which we should be utilitarians, but with a twist: we should be utilitarians who care just as much about the humans of the future as we care about people now. Re-emphasizing our commitment to future people, he argues, has the effect of allowing us to embrace utilitarianism wholeheartedly without having to feel like we aren't doing enough. Why? The best way to make life better for future generations is to help bring about economic growth, and we have good reason to think that a lot of what we're already doing is pretty good for economic growth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Brian L. Frye (University of Kentucky) argues that we should think more carefully about our moral reaction to instances of plagiarism. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Tommy Curry argues that if we really want to understand gender-based oppression, we have to look at how black men have been targeted for it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Katherine Ritchie (CUNY Graduate Center, City College) lays out what it means to belong to a social group, and what kind of thing a social group is. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is the nature of a person's political outlook? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.