Strong Artificial Intelligence

by Massimo Pigliucci Here is a Scientia Salon video chat between Dan Kaufman and Massimo Pigliucci, this time focusing on the issues surrounding the so-called "strong" program in Artificial Intelligence. Much territory that should be familiar to regular readers is covered, hopefully, however, with enough twists to generate new discussion. We introduce the basic strong AI thesis about …

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Moral realism

by Massimo Pigliucci New Scientia Salon video featuring a discussion between between Massimo and Dan, this time on the issue of moral realism. This is also being published as part of a new initiative by Bloggingheads.tv, called MeaningofLife.tv. Dan and I have our own channel, called, appropriately enough, Sophia. Anyway, in this video we talk about …

Jesse Prinz on concepts, part II

by Dan Tippens This is Part II of an interview with Professor Jesse Prinz of City University of New York. In this video, Dan Tippens first asks Prinz about his Proxytype theory of concepts. Dan then raises an objection to Prinz's view; that Proxytype theory might have a problem satisfying the requirement that concepts be …

Jesse Prinz on concepts, part I

by Dan Tippens This is Part I of an interview with Professor Jesse Prinz of City University of New York. In this video, our assistant editor Dan Tippens asks Professor Prinz about his book "Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and their perceptual basis." First, Dan asks Prinz what the desiderata of a theory of concepts are. …

The varieties of skepticism

by Massimo Pigliucci In this video Dan and I talk about different types of "skepticism." We start by recapping the history of philosophical skepticism, moving on to the (by now) classical question: how do we know that we don't live in the Matrix? We tackle what we call Descartes' "quaint" rationalism and we talk about a …

The Ivory Tower and Main Street

by Massimo Pigliucci Here comes another in our occasional series of videos featuring myself in conversation with Missouri State University philosopher Daniel Kaufman. In this episode Dan and I take up the very mission of Scientia Salon and discuss its implications. We talk about the love/hate relationship that the public seems to have with the …

The nature of the past hypothesis

by David Wallace This is a special video presentation that Scientia Salon is publishing at the request of Barry Loewer, Director of the Rutgers Center for Philosophy and the Sciences [1]. It is part of a series of videos published after that came out from the 2014 conference on the philosophy of cosmology held in Tenerife, Spain …

Stoicism, then and now

by Massimo Pigliucci New Scientia Salon video, featuring another conversation between Dan Kaufman and yours truly. This one covers ground we have treated before [1]: the current revival of Stoicism as a practical philosophy. While the video was initially released (on BloggingHeadsTV) around the occasion of the annual Stoic Week [2], I am publishing it here in part to nudge interested readers …

Science vs Scientism

by Massimo Pigliucci Here comes another Scientia Salon video, a conversation between Dan Kaufman and myself on the difference between science and scientism. We have covered scientism at the magazine before, featuring both pro and con views [1-5], so I promise to let the issue go for a while after this video (well, until a collection …

Neuroscience and the soul

by Stephen Asma This video presentation covers a brief history of the concept of the soul, as well as a discussion of what, if anything, neurobiology and evolutionary biology can tell us about it. Stephen Asma, Tom Greif, and Rami Gabriel, of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture at Columbia College Chicago also talk …