Khan Academy
Khan Academy: Epistemology: Science, Can It Teach Us Everything?
Caspar asks: can science tell us everything there is to know about the world? He tells us about a famous argument that it can't, sometimes called 'the knowledge argument' or 'the Mary argument', due to philosopher Frank Jackson. If the...
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Khan Academy: Epistemology: Reason and Faith
It is common to think that Faith and Reason must be in conflict. Often this view emerges because how we use the term 'believe' is ambiguous. In this video we clarify how this term is used and how Faith and Reason can be properly related.
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Khan Academy: Metaphysics: Ship of Theseus
Jenn introduces us to a puzzle that has bedeviled philosophy since the ancient Greeks: the Ship of Theseus. She tells the Ship of Theseus story, and draws out the more general question behind it: what does it take for an object to...
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Khan Academy: Metaphysics: Emergence
In this Wireless Philosophy video, Paul Humphreys (University of Virginia) introduces the concept of emergence. Emergence occurs when features of the world are not reducible to arrangements of fundamental entities.
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Khan Academy: Language: Meaning and Language
Kate explores the connection between language and meaning. This video introduces two ways in which philosophers have answered the question 'what makes a sound or some marks meaningful?'.
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Khan Academy: Language: Gricean Pragmatics
Karen explores the relationship between language and communication, looking at the question of how it is that people regularly use words to communicate more than their literal meanings. This video introduces us to the most...
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Khan Academy: Language: Conventional Implicature
William introduces us to different aspects of meaning, as studied by linguistics and philosophers. He tells us about the difference between the literal meaning of a sentence someone says, and what they intend to convey by using that...
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Khan Academy: Theory of Knowledge: Intuition
What makes a judgment count as intuitive? How is intuition different from perception and reasoning? In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) examines the nature of intuition and the role played by...
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Khan Academy: Theory of Knowledge: Introduction to Theory of Knowledge
In this video, Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) launches our Theory of Knowledge series. We look at the line between knowing and just believing something, focusing on factors like truth and confidence.
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Khan Academy: Theory of Knowledge: Analyzing Knowledge #4 (Tracking Theories)
Problems for the causal theory of knowledge led epistemologists to propose that knowledge is a matter of tracking the truth. Fred Dretske and Robert Nozick developed this idea using counterfactual conditions. In this Wireless Philosophy...
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Khan Academy: Analyzing Knowledge #2 (No False Lemma and No Defeater Approaches)
If we can't analyze knowledge simply as justified true belief, can we add one more ingredient to produce a successful analysis? In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jennifer Nagel examines two 'extra ingredient' analyses of knowledge:...
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Khan Academy: Race: Racial Ontology #2 (Naturalist Theories of Race)
In the second of a four part series, 'Racial Ontology: A Guide for the Perplexed,' David Miguel Gray (Colgate University) introduces naturalist theories of race. Naturalist theories place questions of race in the domain of biology and...
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Khan Academy: Theory of Knowledge: Virtue Epistemology
In this Wireless Philosophy video, Geoff Pynn (Northern Illinois) introduces virtue epistemology, an approach to epistemology that takes intellectual virtue as the central concept in discussions of theory of knowledge. Along the way, he...
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Khan Academy: Theory of Knowledge: Three Responses to Skepticism
In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) looks at three historically influential responses to the challenge of skepticism. We start with Rene Descartes's efforts to prove that God would not let us be...
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Khan Academy: Theory of Knowledge: The Problem of Skepticism
Is knowledge humanly possible? In this video, Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) looks at skeptical arguments, starting with Ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy, and moving forward into contemporary brain-in-a-vat scenarios. We'll...
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Khan Academy: Theory of Knowledge: Contextualism
In this Wireless Philosophy video, Geoff Pynn (Northern Illinois) explains epistemic contextualism, which says that the word "know" is a context-sensitive term. Geoff describes how contextualists claim to dissolve the problem of radical...
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Khan Academy: Theory of Knowledge: New Responses to Skepticism
How do contemporary philosophers respond to the threat of skepticism? In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) reviews the semantic (or meaning-based) theories of Hilary Putnam and David Chalmers,...
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Khan Academy: Theory of Knowledge: 'Knowledge First' Epistemology
After many failed attempts to construct an analysis of knowledge, some philosophers began to wonder whether knowledge was resistant to analysis, and why that might be so. In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jennifer Nagel (University of...
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Khan Academy: Theory of Knowledge: Analyzing Knowledge #1 (The Gettier Problem)
Is knowledge the same as justified true belief? In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) discusses a Gettier case, a scenario in which someone has justified true belief but not knowledge. We'll look at a...
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Khan Academy: Theory of Knowledge: Analyze Knwl #3 Causal & Reliabilist Theories
Is knowledge a matter of being causally connected to the world in the right way? In this Wireless Philosophy video, Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) examines the causal theory of knowledge proposed by Alvin Goldman in 1967, and...
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Khan Academy: Religion: Pascal's Wager
In this Wireless Philosophy video, Susanna Rinard (Harvard University) explains Pascal's Wager, Blaise Pascal's famous argument for belief in God. Lifting an approach from the gambling hall, Pascal argued that, given the odds and the...
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Khan Academy: Religion: Cosmological Argument, Part 2
Part 2 of a pair. Dr. Tim Yenter moves on to the version of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God called 'the Modal Argument.' The idea is that all the contingent facts about the world need to be explained by some necessary...
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Khan Academy: Religion: Cosmological Argument, Part 1
Part 1 of a pair. Dr. Tim Yenter lays out a classic argument for the existence of God, called 'The Cosmological Argument' -- roughly, the idea that something has to explain why the world is the way it is, and that something is God. He...
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Khan Academy: Religion: Classical Theism, Part 7 (Atheistic Arguments From Evil)
Often it can seem like the existence of evil is incompatible with a good and omnipotent God. This video present an argument for that claim put forward by J.L. Mackie, and it examines the different ways that Classical Theism and Theistic...