...with Philosophy (Ep. 73)

What on Earth is Going on?

What is consciousness? Where does the mind reside? Can we create artificial intelligence that can fake intelligence, or maybe just have it? What happened in 17th century Europe that led to such a fascinating time for deep thinkers? And are we going through a similar period of churn today?

Ben has a fascinating and wide-ranging chat about these big questions with University of Alberta professor of philosophy Amy Schmitter.

About the Guest

Besides her position as Professor of Philosophy, Amy is an Executive Editor and Board Secretary for the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.She is also involved in the project “New Narratives in the History of Philosophy,” supported by a Partnership Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In April 2016, she was a Visiting Professor in the Facultad de Filosof Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, where she lectured and held several seminar sessions. Before coming to the University of Alberta, Amy taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Hamilton College in New York, and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and at New York University, and during 2002-03, held a Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University. She has received several awards for Summer Institutes and Seminars from the National Endowment for the Humanities (U.S.A.) and two Standard Research Grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She also serves on various committees, including the Religious Studies Advisory Council for the U of A, the Program Committee for the Pacific Northwest-Western Canada Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, and review committees for several grant organizations. Amy's main areas of research and writing are the history of early modern philosophy and philosophy of art. But those are broad and eclectic areas that (necessarily) take her into many different topics, historical periods and approaches to philosophy. Her teaching interests and educational history cover yet further fields. The result is that she knows a little bit about many different things.

Mentioned in this Episode

• Here are the thinkers we mentioned in this episode: Hume, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Russell, Marx, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and Poulain de la Barre. Check them out!
• A History of Western Philosophy, a book by philosopher Bertrand Russell
• Crash Course on Aesthetic Appreciation, a video that mentions the example of a chained cat statue (is the chain part of the art?)
• The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History, a book by Stephen J. Gould
• The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle and the Struggles for the Soul of Western Civilization, a book by Arthur Herman
• Discourse on Method, a 1637 work of philosophy by René Descartes
• Physics, a 4th century BC work of philosophy by Aristotle

The Quote of the Week

"One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another."

- René Descartes