Branches of Philosophy Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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Branches of Philosophy Podcast

Philosophy Cognitive Science

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/2d. Total Eps: 212

Ai Generated. Human edited. Introductions and summaries of important books in philosophy and the interdisciplinary cognitive sciences. Modified and curated to improve listening experience. This channel not eligible for monetization due to YouTube's "reused content" policy. If you'd like to help support us on Patreon.

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[217] The puzzle of Experience By J.J. Valberg

Episode 217

Friday, November 7, 2025 • Duration 39:22

Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "The puzzle of Experience” By J. J. Valberg 1992

If we reason in a certain way about our experience, we are driven to the conclusion that what is present to us - the object of our experience - is something that exists only in so far as it is present, hence that it is not part of the world. If, on the other hand, we simply open up to our experience, all we find is the world. This book sets out both to explain why we are entangled in this puzzle and to consider ways of solving it. In examining the puzzle, and possible solutions to the puzzle, Dr Valberg discusses relevant views of Hume, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Strawson, as well as ideas from the recent philosophy of perception. Finally, he describes and analyses a manifestation of the puzzle outside philosophy, in everyday life. Scholars and students of philosophy will find much to challenge and stimulate them in this original and clearly argued work.

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[216] The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One By Riccardo Manzotti

Episode 216

Tuesday, October 14, 2025 • Duration 44:21

Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One" By Riccardo Manzotti 2021

Once we came out of the jungle and found time to think of something besides food, sex, and shelter, we confronted the fundamental questions: what are we? Who are we? Is a person a body, a soul? How do we access the external world if we are nothing but brains encased in bodies?

As neuroscientists map the most detailed aspects of the human brain and its interplay with the rest of the body, they remain baffled by what is essentially human: our selves. In most of the existing scientific literature, information processing has taken the place of the soul. Yet thus far, no convincing account has been presented of exactly where and how consciousness is stored in our bodies.

In The Spread Mind, Riccardo Manzotti convincingly argues that our bodies do not contain subjective experience. Yet consciousness is real, and, like any other real phenomenon, is physical. Where is it, then? Manzotti's radical hypothesis is that consciousness is one and the same as the physical world surrounding us.

Drawing on Einstein's theories of relativity, evidence about dreams and hallucination, and the geometry of light in perception, and using vivid, real-world examples to illustrate his ideas, Manzotti argues that consciousness is not a ''movie in the head.'' Experience is not in our head: it is the actual world we move in.

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[215] If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All E. Yudkowsky N. Soares

Episode 215

Friday, September 26, 2025 • Duration 59:44

Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All" By Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares 2025

In 2023, hundreds of AI luminaries signed an open letter warning that artificial intelligence poses a serious risk of human extinction. Since then, the AI race has only intensified. Companies and countries are rushing to build machines that will be smarter than any person. And the world is devastatingly unprepared for what would come next. For decades, two signatories of that letter—Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares—have studied how smarter-than-human intelligences will think, behave, and pursue their objectives. Their research says that sufficiently smart AIs will develop goals of their own that put them in conflict with us—and that if it comes to conflict, an artificial superintelligence would crush us. The contest wouldn’t even be close. How could a machine superintelligence wipe out our entire species? Why would it want to? Would it want anything at all? In this urgent book, Yudkowsky and Soares walk through the theory and the evidence, present one possible extinction scenario, and explain what it would take for humanity to survive. The world is racing to build something truly new under the sun. And if anyone builds it, everyone dies.

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[214] Self-knowledge for Humans By Quassim Cassam

Episode 214

Thursday, September 18, 2025 • Duration 01:02:09

Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "Self-knowledge for Humans" By Quassim Cassam 2014

Human beings are not model epistemic citizens. Our reasoning can be careless and uncritical, and our beliefs, desires, and other attitudes aren't always as they ought rationally to be. Our beliefs can be eccentric, our desires irrational and our hopes hopelessly unrealistic. Our attitudes are influenced by a wide range of non-epistemic or non-rational factors, including our character, our emotions and powerful unconscious biases. Yet we are rarely conscious of such influences. Self-ignorance is not something to which human beings are immune.

In this book Quassim Cassam develops an account of self-knowledge which tries to do justice to these and other respects in which humans aren't model epistemic citizens. He rejects rationalist and other mainstream philosophical accounts of self-knowledge on the grounds that, in more than one sense, they aren't accounts of self-knowledge for humans. Instead he defends the view that inferences from behavioural and psychological evidence are a basic source of human self-knowledge. On this account, self-knowledge is a genuine cognitive achievement and self-ignorance is almost always on the cards.

As well as explaining knowledge of our own states of mind, Cassam also accounts for what he calls 'substantial' self-knowledge, including knowledge of our values, emotions, and character. He criticizes philosophical accounts of self-knowledge for neglecting substantial self-knowledge, and concludes with a discussion of the value of self-knowledge.

This book tries to do for philosophy what behavioural economics tries to do for economics. Just as behavioural economics is the economics of homo sapiens, as distinct from the economics of an ideally rational and self homo economics, so Cassam argues that philosophy should focus on the human predicament rather on the reasoning and self-knowledge of an idealized homo philosophicus.

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[213] Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding By Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Episode 213

Wednesday, September 3, 2025 • Duration 49:39

Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding"By Sarah Blaffer Hrdy 2009

Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution.Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. If the young were to survive in a world of scarce food, they needed to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends—and, with any luck, grandmothers. Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, Sarah Hrdy argues, came the human capacity for understanding others. Mothers and others teach us who will care, and who will not.From its opening vision of “apes on a plane”; to descriptions of baby care among marmosets, chimpanzees, wolves, and lions; to explanations about why men in hunter-gatherer societies hunt together, Mothers and Others is compellingly readable. But it is also an intricately knit argument that ever since the Pleistocene, it has taken a village to raise children—and how that gave our ancient ancestors the first push on the path toward becoming emotionally modern human beings.

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[212] The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality By Angela A. Mendelovici

Episode 212

Monday, August 25, 2025 • Duration 42:45

Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality" By Angela A. Mendelovici 2018

Intentionality is the mind's ability to be "of," "about," or "directed" at things, or to "say" something. For example, a thought might "say" that grass is green or that Santa Claus is jolly, and a visual experience might be "of" a blue cup. While the existence of the phenomenon of intentionality is manifestly obvious, how exactly the mind gets to be "directed" at things, which may not even exist, is deeply mysterious and controversial.It has been long assumed that the best way to explain intentionality is in terms of tracking relations, information, functional roles, and similar notions. This book breaks from this tradition, arguing that the only empirically adequate and in principle viable theory of intentionality is one in terms of phenomenal consciousness, the felt, subjective, or qualitative feature of mental life. According to the theory advanced by Mendelovici, the phenomenal intentionality theory, there is a central kind of intentionality, phenomenal intentionality, that arises from phenomenal consciousness alone, and any other kind of intentionality derives from it.The phenomenal intentionality theory faces important challenges in accounting for the rich and sophisticated contents of thoughts, broad and object-involving contents, and nonconscious states. Mendelovici proposes a novel and particularly strong version of the theory that can meet these challenges. The end result is a radically internalistic picture of the mind, on which all phenomenally represented contents are literally in our heads, and any non-phenomenal contents we in some sense represent are expressly singled out by us.

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[211] Materialist Phenomenology: A Philosophy of Perception By Manuel DeLanda

Episode 211

Sunday, August 10, 2025 • Duration 01:02:38

Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "Materialist Phenomenology: A Philosophy of Perception" By Manuel DeLanda 2021Bringing together phenomenology and materialism, two perspectives seemingly at odds with each other, leading international theorist, Manuel DeLanda, has created an entirely new theory of visual perception. Engaging the scientific (biology, ecological psychology, neuroscience and robotics), the philosophical (idea of 'the embodied mind') and the mathematical (dynamic systems theory) to form a synthesis of how to see in the 21st century. An interdisciplinary and rigorous analysis of how vision shapes what matters.

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[210] A Theory of Sentience By Austen Clark

Saturday, August 2, 2025 • Duration 53:49

Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "A Theory of Sentience" By Austen Clark 2000

'A Theory of Sentience is as valuable for the questions it opens up as for the positive theory it puts forward. Austen Clark has brought to our attention a way of thinking about the details of sensory experience which opens up possibilities for fruitful interaction between philosophy, pscychophysics and the neurosciences. It is refreshing to read an exploration of sensory experience which fixes the terrain of investigation firmly within the actual world and which works hard to define tractable problems based around the basic, but often neglected, truth that sensory experience is sensory experience of a three-dimensional environment.' -Mind'There is much of interest to cognitive scientists working on the intentionality of sensation.' -Barbara Montero, Times Literary SupplementAusten Clark presents a ground-breaking philosophical theory of sentience, drawing on and illuminating an abundance of scientific work on this subject. Sensation is one of the fundamental elements of consciousness, but has generally been assigned a lowly place in the mental hierarchy; Clark's rich, lucid, and original study restores it to its due prominence. A Theory of Sentience will be compelling reading for all who work on the interaction of mind and world.

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[209] Becoming Human: From Pointing Gestures to Syntax By Teresa Bejarano

Episode 209

Saturday, July 26, 2025 • Duration 33:18

Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "Becoming Human: From Pointing Gestures to Syntax" By Teresa Bejarano 2011

What do the pointing gesture, the imitation of new complex motor patterns, the evocation of absent objects and the grasping of others’ false beliefs all have in common? Apart from being (one way or other) involved in the language, they all would share a demanding requirement – a second mental centre within the subject. This redefinition of the simulationism is extended in the present book in two directions. Firstly, mirror-neurons and, likewise, animal abilities connected with the visual field of their fellows, although they certainly constitute important landmarks, would not require this second mental centre. Secondly, others’ beliefs would have given rise not only to predicative communicative function but also to pre-grammatical syntax. The inquiry about the evolutionary-historic origin of language focuses on the cognitive requirements on it as a faculty (but not to the indirect causes such as environmental changes or greater co-operation), pays attention to children, and covers other human peculiarities as well, e.g., symbolic play, protodeclaratives, self-conscious emotions, and interactional or four-hand tasks.

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[208] The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding By Dan Sperber & Hugo Mercier

Episode 208

Sunday, July 20, 2025 • Duration 22:39

Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding" By Dan Sperber & Hugo Mercier 2017

Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. But, if reason is so useful, why didn't it also evolve in other animals? If it is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense?In their ground-breaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out to solve this double enigma, taking us on a journey from desert ants to modern scientists, and from Aristotle to Daniel Kahneman. Reason, they argue with a compelling mix of real-life and experimental evidence, is not geared to solitary use, to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own. What reason does, rather, is help us justify our beliefs and actions to others, convince them through argumentation, and evaluate the justifications and arguments that they address to us.In other words, reason has evolved to help humans better exploit their uniquely rich social environment. This illuminating interpretation of reason makes sense of strengths and weaknesses that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists - why reason is biased in favour of what we already believe, why it may lead to terrible ideas and yet is indispensable to spreading good ones. Ambitious, provocative, and entertaining, The Enigma of Reason will spark debate among psychologists and philosophers, and make many reasonable people rethink their own thinking.

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