On Episode 90, Nick chats with Jonathan Fuller, Assistant Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, about his experience as both a clinician and a philosopher in an MD/PhD training program, philosophy in medicine, and his upcoming book The New Modern Medicine that analyzes distinctive problems in scientific medicine around the turn of the twenty-first century.
Read MoreOn Episode 89, Nick chats with Jamee Elder, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) at Harvard University, about the methodology and epistemology of large astrophysical experiments, especially those—including LIGO-Virgo and the EHT—that involve "observing" black holes.
Read MoreOn Episode 88, Nick chats with Eleanor Knox, Reader in Philosophy of Physics at King's College London, about her view she calls Spacetime Functionalism, which she thinks solves problems in classical theories as well as dealing with the challenges to standard accounts raised by emergent spacetime structure in theories of quantum gravity.
Read MoreOn Episode 87, Nick chats with Cameron Buckner, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston, about his work in the philosophy of deep neural networks, a type of machine learning that is currently the most widespread and successful technology in artificial intelligence.
Read MoreOn Episode 86, Nick chats with Sarah Robins, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, about her work on the concept of the memory trace, or engram, and the role it plays in both everyday and scientific thinking about remembering.
Read MoreOn Episode 85, Nick chats with Manuela Fernández Pinto, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Center for Applied Ethics at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), about her work in agnotology—the study of ignorance—and the epistemic and social consequences of commercially-driven scientific research.
Read MoreOn Episode 84 Nick chats with Adrian Currie, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Philosophy, and Anthropology at Exeter, about his research on the 'historical' sciences: paleontology, archaeology, geology and so forth, and how both philosophers and methodologically reflective scientists have underestimated the epistemic resources available for uncovering the deep past.
Read MoreOn Episode 83, Nick chats with Sarah Arnaud, Postdoctoral Associate at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University, about how first person perspectives can provide important and necessary knowledge in psychiatry.
Read MoreOn Episode 82, Nick chats with Philip Kitcher, the John Dewey Professor Emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University, about the the ways in which science interfaces with the world, the new demarcation problem, and scientific progress.
Read MoreOn Episode 81, Nick chats with John Norton, Distinguished Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, about the story of his work on Einstein, how probabilistic inferences can lead to fallacies (e.g. thinking we’re living in a computer simulation), how not to do philosophy of science, and his latest book “The Material Theory of Induction” in the new, Open Access Series BSPS Open.
Read MoreOn Episode 80, Nick chats with Kevin Elliot, Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University, about the role of values in science, starting with his own introduction to the field, a brief history of the values in science literature, the four general approaches to working on values in science, and the need for philosophers of science to do more ground work in values in science in socially engaged projects.
Read MoreOn Episode 79, Nick chats with Till Grüne-Yanoff, professor of philosophy at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden, about his early career as a television reporter in Post-Soviet Moscow, preferences in decision theory, “boosting” versus “nudging,” teaching philosophy of science as method choice with exemplars, and making philosophy of science relevant to science.
Read MoreOn Episode 78, Nick chats with Catherine Kendig, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University, about her path to studying classification in scientific practice, non-dichotomous ways of thinking, socially-engaged philosophy of agriculture, and dealing with “demarcationist” tendencies in philosophy of science.
Read MoreOn Episode 77, Nick chats with Deepanwita Dasgupta, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso about why there is no philosophy of science in India, non-Western contexts of scientific practice, and her vision for 21st-century science both as a cognitively diverse and wisdom-producing practice.
Read MoreOn Episode 76, Nick chats with Miriam Solomon, Professor of Philosophy at Temple University, about succeeding in philosophy despite an abusive PhD advisor at Harvard, cognitive biases in scientists thinking and what they mean for the rationality of science, scientific consensus conferences or GOBSATs (Good Old Boys Sitting Around Tables), and her recent Guggenheim fellowship on science and values in the DSM.
Read MoreOn Episode 75, Nick chats with Sarah Richardson, Professor of the History of Science and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University about her interdisciplinary work at Stanford on race and genomics, her approach to studying the social dimensions of science, her current work with Harvard’s GenderSci Lab generating feminist concepts, methods and theories for scientific research on sex and gender, and the importance for philosophers of science to better represent the world.
Read MoreOn Episode 74, Nick chats with Emily Parke, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Auckland, about her first job creating life from the bottom-up at the academic-run synthetic biology company Protolife, challenging the idea that there’s some epistemic privilege experiments have over models, the trade-offs and causual issues of using microbiome-based explanations to explain every element of human health, and how philosophical debates on the origin of life might actually matter to science.
Read MoreOn Episode 73, Nick chats with Dan Hicks, philosopher at University of California Merced about Dan’s science and values research on the aims of science, working in science policy at the AAAS and NSF, and learning to incorporate methods from statistics and data science with a conceptual philosophy of science framework to understand how science operates.
Read MoreOn Episode 72, Nick chats with Karen Kovaka, assistant professor in philosophy at Virginia Tech about the upcoming Philosophy of Science Association conference, philosophical implications of meta-analysis, the presumption against intervention in restoration ecology, and how to advise philosophy of science students to achieve success outside of academia.
Read MoreOn Episode 71, Nick chats with Jennifer Jhun, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, as well as a fellow at the Center for the History of Political Economy, about her historically-informed philosophy of science research on the role idealizations play in science, both in economics and in physics.
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