Videos

Chris Surprenant (University of New Orleans) discusses the account of human well-being and the good life presented by Immanuel Kant in the his moral, political, and religious writings. He explains why Kant believes that the highest good for a human being is the conjunction of happiness and complete virtue and how it is possible for an individual to attain these two things at the same time.

Chris Surprenant (UNO) discusses the account of human well-being and the good life presented by Socrates in Plato's dialogues. He explains why Socrates closely connects his account of the good life with justice, a concept understood not just as a political arrangement but also as a state of a well-ordered individual's soul.

In this video, Eduardo Mendieta (Penn State University) asks "What are the consequences of race thinking and the institutional and legal forms of segregation if race is not real? Why do we categorize race as a real thing based on visual perception and how is such a category anti-democratic?"

In this video, Professor Jonathan Anomaly (Duke and UNC – Chapel Hill) discusses collective action problems, which include any situation in which there is a conflict between individual rationality and social welfare, so that individuals working in isolation produce a worse outcome than they might if they could find a way to coordinate.

In this video, Dr. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (UNC-Chapel Hill) explains the prisoner's dilemma. The prisoner's dilemma is a scenario where all parties making rational choices ensures a less desired result for each than if each actor had chosen individually less-preferred options.

Victor Kumar (Michigan) introduces the problem of moral luck and surveys potential solutions. We see how the problem arises out of a clash between intuitive reactions to cases and an abstract principle of moral responsibility.

Why do people see mass incarceration as a racial problem? What does race have to do with incarceration and what does either have to do with philosophy?

In this video, Elmar Kremer (University of Toronto) introduces two theories of the nature of God: classical theism and theistic personalism. In part 2, he considers several arguments for and against classical theism.

In this video, Geoff Pynn (Northern Illinois University) follows up on his introduction to critical thinking by exploring how abductive arguments give us reason to believe their conclusions. Good abductive arguments don't guarantee their conclusions, but give us very good reasons to believe their conclusions. This sort of inference is called "inference to the best explanation."