Videos

In the first of a four part series, “Racial Ontology: A Guide for the Perplexed,” David Miguel Gray (Colgate University) introduces general problems philosophers face when they ask the question “What kind of thing is Race?”. In particular, what fields of inquiry should study race, if there can be racial ‘experts’, and what an account of race should look like if it is to capture the issues we care about.

Chris Surprenant (University of New Orleans) discusses the account of human well-being and the good life presented by Friedrich Nietzsche in his moral, political, and religious writings. He explains why Neitzsche believes that living a full human life requires rational reflection and taking a cautious attitude toward conventional moral categories. JP Messina (UC San Diego) assisted in the production of content for this video.

In this video, Elizabeth Brake (Arizona State University) considers the question "Should marriage law be minimal?" This is part 2 of a series on Government and Marriage.

Joseph Wu (University of Cambridge) explains the fallacy of equivocation, the fallacy that occurs when the same term is used with different meanings in an argument. Along the way, he discusses whether Miley Cyrus is an exploding ball of gas.

People often say that God is good, and that God is just. But in what sense is God good and just? This video presents an argument from Classical Theism that God’s goodness and justice do not, as Theistic Personalists, think, count as *moral* goodness; rather, they follow from seeing God as the fullness of being.

Both Classical Theists and Theistic Personalists agree that God created the world. But they disagree about how we should understand God’s causality. Does God cause things in the same sense in which we humans cause things, or is God’s causality fundamentally different from any causality we exercise?

In this video, Sinan Dogramaci (The University of Texas at Austin) explains the puzzle of grue. He discusses how this puzzle undercut the attempt to formally develop inductive logic, the logic of probabilistic support.

In this video, Professor Jonathan Anomaly (Duke and UNC – Chapel Hill) discusses public goods, which are goods that are jointly consumed, so that they are available to everyone if they are available to anyone. Public goods often lead to unexploited gains from trade, and are frequently invoked to justify why we have a state to perform basic functions like defense, property adjudication, and the regulation of pollution.

The psychologist Laurie Santos (Yale University) explains the phenomenon of mental accounting: why we don't always assume that money is fungible. She explores why we set up different accounts for different purchases and how we can use our mental accounting biases to be happier about our financial decisions.