SCI PHI Podcast

SCI PHI Podcast

SCI PHI is a weekly philosophy of science podcast featuring interviews with prominent and up-and-coming philosophers of science who engage with scientists in interesting ways.

Episodes

Episode 101: David Thorstad

November 26, 2024
On Episode 101, Nick chats with David Thorstad, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, about his research at the intersection between bounded rationality and inquiry that addresses what rationality requires of bounded agents with limited cognitive abilities, normative and descriptive challenges to longtermism, the ethical view that we should give significant moral weight to positively impacting the fu...
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Episode 100: Nick Zautra

October 31, 2024
In this special 100th episode, guest host Katie Plaisance interviews Nick Zautra, the host and producer of the SCI PHI Podcast, as he reflects on the journey of the podcast and insights gained from interviewing 99 philosophers of science. Nick shares his personal story—from his childhood interests to the spark that ignited his creativity and passion for combining both philosophy and science. Nick delves into what he’s lea...
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Episode 99: Katie Plaisance

September 19, 2024
On Episode 99, Nick chats with Katie Plaisance, Professor in the Department of Knowledge Integration at the University of Waterloo, about her research understanding and developing best practices for collaborating and engaging with scientists, engineers, policy-makers, and a wide range of publics to foster epistemically and ethically responsible scientific research.
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Episode 98: Ali Mirza

September 4, 2024
On Episode 98, Nick chats with Ali Mirza, Fellow and Visiting Lecturer at the Center of Humanistic Inquiry and Department of History at Amherst College, about his interdisciplinary work in the field of Ichnology, the study of how our actions (as animals) affect the future structure of the Earth, in which he challenges our standard accounts of how science functions.
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Episode 97: Mazviita Chirimuuta

August 23, 2024
On Episode 97, Nick chats with Mazviita Chirimuuta, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, about her new book, The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience, in which she argues that due to the brain's complexity, neuroscientific theories have only captured partial truths and that “neurophilosophy” is unlikely to be achieved. Rather than seeking to reform neurosc...
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Episode 96: Charles Pence

August 15, 2024
On Episode 96, Nick chats with Charles Pence, Chargé de cours at the Université catholique de Louvain in Brussels, about his work on the causal structure of natural selection, digital humanities and “taking the pulse” of what biologists are up to, and his book, The Rise of Chance in Evolutionary Theory, which takes a historical look at the development of evolutionary theory and its extensive reliance on a wide array of co...
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Episode 95: Sam Fellowes

August 8, 2024
On Episode 95, Nick chats with Sam Fellowes, Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University, about drawing on his own experience being diagnosed with autism at the age of 24 to motivate his research into methodological issues in psychiatric diagnoses, the challenge of establishing accuracy with self-diagnosis in psychiatry, psychiatric diagnoses as models, neurodiversity, the importance of including what he terms “experts-by-e...
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Episode 94: Eric Scerri

July 25, 2024
On Episode 94, Nick chats with UCLA chemist and authority on the history and philosophy of the periodic table Eric Scerri, about the reduction of chemistry to quantum mechanics, the philosophical nature of the periodic table, and recent developments in quantum chemistry. Timestamps: (0:00) - Introduction (2:03) - Welcoming Eric and recent life at UCLA (4:33) - Eric’s life growing up and early interests (13:13) ...
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Episode 93: Alan Love

July 18, 2024
On Episode 93, Nick chats with Alan Love, Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Philosophy and Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, as well as Director of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, about assembling philosopher, theoretician, and experimentalist research teams for the $14M Templeton Foundation grant project, "Agency, Directionality, and Function,” his work in evolu...
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Episode 92: Prasanta Bandyopadhyay

July 8, 2024
On Episode 92, Nick chats with Prasanta Bandyopadhyay, Professor at Montana State University, about his work developing a Bayesian account of scientific methodology, in which he applies statistical/probabilistic notions to a long-standing conundrum of methodological issues in the sciences. Timestamps: (0:00) - Introduction (1:45) - Prasanta Bandyopadhyay and life in Montana (6:10) - Prasanta’s background, upbrin...
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Episode 91: Holly Andersen

June 28, 2024
On Episode 91, Nick chats with Holly Andersen, Associate Professor at Simon Frasier University, about her cutting edge work on causation: including her research on causal explanations and causal modeling in the biomedical sciences, pattern recognition, causal questions in sports analysis, and problems related to mental causation and to the connections between action and causation. Timestamps: (0:00) - Introduction -...
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Episode 90: Jonathan Fuller

January 3, 2023
On Episode 90, Nick chats with Jonathan Fuller, Assistant Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, about his experience as both a clinician and a philosopher in an MD/PhD training program, philosophy in medicine, and his upcoming book The New Modern Medicine that analyzes distinctive problems in scientific medicine around the turn of the twenty-first century.
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Episode 89: Jamee Elder

December 14, 2022
On Episode 89, Nick chats with Jamee Elder, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) at Harvard University, about the methodology and epistemology of large astrophysical experiments, especially those—including LIGO-Virgo and the EHT—that involve "observing" black holes.
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Episode 88: Eleanor Knox

December 2, 2022
On Episode 88, Nick chats with Eleanor Knox, Reader in Philosophy of Physics at King's College London, about her view she calls Spacetime Functionalism, which she thinks solves problems in classical theories as well as dealing with the challenges to standard accounts raised by emergent spacetime structure in theories of quantum gravity.
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Episode 87: Cameron Buckner

November 23, 2022
On Episode 87, Nick chats with Cameron Buckner, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston, about his work in the philosophy of deep neural networks, a type of machine learning that is currently the most widespread and successful technology in artificial intelligence.
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Episode 86: Sarah Robins

November 15, 2022
On Episode 86, Nick chats with Sarah Robins, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, about her work on the concept of the memory trace, or engram, and the role it plays in both everyday and scientific thinking about remembering.
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Episode 85: Manuela Fernández Pinto

November 6, 2022
On Episode 85, Nick chats with Manuela Fernández Pinto, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Center for Applied Ethics at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), about her work in agnotology—the study of ignorance—and the epistemic and social consequences of commercially-driven scientific research.
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Episode 84: Adrian Currie

November 2, 2022
On Episode 84 Nick chats with Adrian Currie, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Philosophy, and Anthropology at Exeter, about his research on the 'historical' sciences: paleontology, archaeology, geology and so forth, and how both philosophers and methodologically reflective scientists have underestimated the epistemic resources available for uncovering the deep past.
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Episode 83: Sarah Arnaud

October 21, 2022
On Episode 83, Nick chats with Sarah Arnaud, Postdoctoral Associate at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University, about how first person perspectives can provide important and necessary knowledge in psychiatry.
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Episode 82: Philip Kitcher

October 14, 2022
On Episode 82, Nick chats with Philip Kitcher, the John Dewey Professor Emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University, about the the ways in which science interfaces with the world, the new demarcation problem, and scientific progress.
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