21 | Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, History, and Theory of Mind

21 | Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, History, and Theory of Mind

We humans love to tell ourselves stories about why things happened the way they did; if the stories are sufficiently serious, we label this activity "history." Part of getting history right is simply an accurate recounting of the facts, but part of it is generally taken to be some kind of explanation about why. How much should we trust these explanations? This is a question with philosophical implications as well as historical ones, and philosopher Alex Rosenberg's new book How History Gets Things Wrong claims that we should basically not trust them at all. It's not that we get the facts wrong, it's that we have wrong ideas about causality and how the human mind works, and we can't help but import these wrong ideas to our beliefs about history. Alex and I dig into how this claim arises naturally from a certain way that naturalists should think about the world. Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, with secondary appointments in biology and political science. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Lakatos Award for the best book in the philosophy of science. Rosenberg is the author of numerous books and articles on philosophical aspects of various subjects, including biology, cognitive science, economics, history, causation, and atheism. He has also written two novels, The Girl from Krakow and Autumn in Oxford. Web site Duke home page Wikipedia page Amazon author page Interview at 3:AM Interview at What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

Jaksot(415)

AMA | July 2025

AMA | July 2025

Welcome to the July 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreo...

7 Heinä 20254h 3min

320 | Solo: Complexity and the Universe

320 | Solo: Complexity and the Universe

Our universe started out looking very simple: hot, dense, smooth, rapidly expanding. According to our best current model, it will end up looking simple once again: cold, dark, empty. It's in between -...

30 Kesä 20252h 14min

319 | Bryan Van Norden on Philosophy From the Rest of the World

319 | Bryan Van Norden on Philosophy From the Rest of the World

It is common to refer to philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato." But in the original quote, Alfred North Whitehead was more careful: he limited his characterization to "the European philosophi...

23 Kesä 20251h 12min

318 | Edward Miguel on the Developing Practice of Development Economics

318 | Edward Miguel on the Developing Practice of Development Economics

Economics is seeing an upsurge in the importance of controlled, reproducible empirical studies. One area where this has had a great impact is on development economics, which studies the economies of l...

16 Kesä 20251h 20min

317 | Nicole Rust on Why Neuroscience Hasn't Solved Brain Disorders

317 | Nicole Rust on Why Neuroscience Hasn't Solved Brain Disorders

The human brain is extremely complicated, but decades of careful neuroscientific research have revealed quite a bit about how it works, including how certain genes affect particular brain behaviors. N...

9 Kesä 20251h 14min

AMA | June 2025

AMA | June 2025

Welcome to the June 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreo...

2 Kesä 20253h 23min

316 | Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper

316 | Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper

Einstein's general theory of relativity, plus some reasonable assumptions about the universe and what it's made of, has a remarkable implication: that as we trace cosmic evolution into the far past, w...

26 Touko 20251h 28min

315 | Branden Fitelson on the Logic and Use of Probability

315 | Branden Fitelson on the Logic and Use of Probability

Every time you see an apple spontaneously break away from a tree, it falls downward. You therefore claim that there is a law of physics: apples fall downward from trees. But how can you really know? A...

19 Touko 20251h 28min

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