Friction

149. Mark Balaguer | How to Be a Presentist

What if only the present moment exists, and everything you call the past or the future is, strictly speaking, nothing at all? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Mark Balaguer is professor of philosophy at Cal State LA, and his research has covered a wide range of topics, including metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, free will, and metaethics. Check out his book, "How to Be a Presentist"!https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-to-be-a-presentist-9780197845714 [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-to-be-a-presentist-9780197845714]https://a.co/d/009UAUtC [https://a.co/d/009UAUtC] 2. Book Summary Balaguer’s book sets out to develop and defend an original version of presentism — the view in the philosophy of time that only present objects exist, with no past or future objects in the inventory of reality. Crucially, Balaguer is not arguing that presentism is true; his project is the more modest one of showing that presentism is a live, defensible position and that, if there is a fact of the matter at all, the question of its truth is an open empirical one rather than something settleable by armchair metaphysics. The book is organized around three classical objections to presentism: the ontological-commitment objection (that true sentences like “Obama admires Gandhi” seem to require past objects to exist), the truthmaking objection (that truths about the past need something in reality to make them true), and the special-relativity objection (that physics rules out a privileged “now”). The first part of the book lays metaphilosophical groundwork, arguing against trivialism, against necessitarianism about metaphysics, and in favor of an “anti-metaphysicalist” stance on which presentism, if factual, is a contingent empirical hypothesis rather than something knowable a priori. Part II then mounts the defense proper. Against the ontological-commitment objection, Balaguer endorses a sweeping “FAPP-ist” error theory: the relevant ordinary and scientific sentences about past or future objects are, strictly speaking, false, but they function fine “for all practical purposes.” Against the truthmaking objection, he develops a position he calls nothingism, on which past-tense sentences that presentists count as true don’t have truthmakers because they aren’t really making claims about reality at all. Against special relativity, he constructs a relativized presentism compatible with the relativity of simultaneity, avoiding any appeal to a privileged frame. He also takes on subsidiary worries about time travel and change. The book’s most distinctive move comes in Part III, where Balaguer pushes presentism toward what he calls metaphysically minimal or timeless presentism. Here he argues — surprisingly, given the near-universal assumption that presentists must endorse the A-theory — that presentists should reject the existence of time itself, of times (including the present time), of temporal passage, and of metaphysically substantive A-facts (facts about something being past, present, or future). On the resulting picture, talk of time is best treated as a useful fiction layered over a more fundamental notion of intrinsic change, yielding a presentism that is ontologically lean, empirically respectable, and stripped of the heavy metaphysical machinery usually thought to come with the view. The overall result is a defense of presentism that is at once more concessive (presentism is not proven, just shielded from refutation) and more radical (presentism without time) than standard treatments in the literature. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introductio 00:57 - Overview of book 02:47 - Substantive dispute 06:31 - Non-factualism 09:15 - Substantialese 13:58 - Understanding the difference 21:40 - Contingent thesis 28:35 - A posteriori identities 41:10 - Scientism 47:55 - Ontological commitment objection 53:39 - Relevance of physics 1:00:25 - FAPP truth 1:05:03 - Truthmakers objection 1:08:19 - Potential reply 1:17:45 - Present truthmakers? 1:19:43 - Abandon physicalism? 1:20:54 - Swamp world 1:22:17 - The actual world and modal realism 1:36:26 - Nothingism 1:38:40 - Claims about reality 1:42:27 - Understanding the claims 1:53:16 - Counterfactuals 2:04:09 - Understanding modality 2:16:53 - Special relativity 2:26:53 - Avoiding anti-realism and eternalism 2:39:43 - Lean view 2:45:19 - What is time? 2:49:43 - William Lane Craig 2:52:06 - Summary of view 2:54:24 - Future work 2:56:08 - Temporal phenomenology 3:01:11 - Value of philosophy 3:03:31 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe [https://fric.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

148. Matt Duncan | Acquaintance

What if simply having something consciously present to mind already counts as a form of knowledge, and helps explain not just perception, but beauty, emotion, and moral life? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy [https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy]. 1. Guest Matt Duncan is Professor of Philosophy at Rhode Island College, and his work has focused on metaphysics, epistemology, and mind, including the nature of experience and experiential knowledge. Check out his book, "Present to the Mind: Acquaintance and Its Significance"! https://academic.oup.com/book/62315 [https://academic.oup.com/book/62315] https://a.co/d/0i7cd8zC [https://a.co/d/0i7cd8zC] 2. Book Summary In Present to the Mind, Matt Duncan develops and defends a Russellian-style notion of ‘acquaintance’: an especially direct form of conscious awareness we bear to things present in experience, such as colors, sounds, pains, smells, and other phenomenal features. The book begins from a striking question about when your ‘epistemic day’ starts. Against the orthodox view that perceptual knowledge arrives only after experience gives rise to belief, Duncan argues that conscious awareness itself already puts us in touch with reality in a knowledge-involving way. The book is organized around three main claims: acquaintance exists, acquaintance is a form of knowledge, and acquaintance is deeply significant in human life. The middle of the book argues first that several forms of acquaintance are real, and then that acquaintance is not just epistemically useful but itself a distinctive kind of knowledge. Duncan’s core idea is that some knowledge of things is constituted by conscious awareness rather than by belief: in perception, you do not first see, then believe, then know; rather, you can see and thereby know. From there he develops an account of ‘knowledge of things’ that is meant to work across different theories of experience, and he argues that acquaintance plays a foundational epistemic role by helping justify beliefs and underpinning much empirical knowledge, even if it is non-propositional. The final chapters broaden the project beyond epistemology. Duncan argues that acquaintance is aesthetically significant because genuine aesthetic appreciation depends on conscious awareness of aesthetically relevant features; emotionally significant because acquaintance with affective experience helps us know and appreciate the value of people; and morally significant because what we are able to notice and know is intertwined with moral character, producing a reciprocal moral-epistemic relationship. So the book’s overall message is not just that acquaintance is a defensible theoretical posit in philosophy of mind and epistemology, but that it is a basic feature of how we encounter beauty, respond to others, and live morally. Duncan’s concluding thought is that acquaintance matters every day, from ordinary perception all the way to our deepest forms of appreciation and care. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:36 - Overview of book 03:30 - Bertrand Russell 07:30 - Directness 08:57 - Objects of acquaintance 14:03 - Strong vs. weak acquaintance 17:24 - Naive realism 22:34 - Mind 24:14 - Argument for weak acquaintance 26:10 - Absolutely strong acquaintance 27:53 - Doubt test 30:05 - Fallibility 31:22 - Certainty 37:33 - Hallucination 43:06 - Modal acquaintance 44:56 - Coextensive? 47:30 - Essence acquaintance 50:49 - Properties 55:02 - Knowledge 57:00 - Varieties of knowledge 58:51 - Argument for acquaintance knowledge 1:00:47 - Semantics 1:05:24 - Knowledge without belief 1:11:40 - Other animals 1:13:09 - Vagueness 1:18:11 - Theory of knowledge 1:23:01 - Subconscious acquaintance 1:27:05 - Foundationalism 1:34:59 - Moral significance 1:40:03 - Rationality of perception 1:42:50 - Summary 1:44:22 - Value of philosophy 1:45:31 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe [https://fric.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

147. Rivka Weinberg | The Meaning of it All

If life as a whole has no ultimate point, what kind of meaning can still make it worth living? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy [https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy]. 1. Guest Rivka Weinberg is Professor of Philosophy and Mary W. and J. Stanley Johnson Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College. Her work has focused on metaphysics and ethics, especially on meaning/purpose and bioethics. Check out her book, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-meaning-of-it-all-9780197758021 [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-meaning-of-it-all-9780197758021] https://a.co/d/0gsQDkWN [https://a.co/d/0gsQDkWN] 2. Book Summary In The Meaning of It All, Rivka Weinberg argues that many disputes about life’s meaning stay confused because they fail to distinguish different senses of ‘meaning’. She separates three kinds: ‘Ultimate Meaning’, ‘Everyday Meaning’, and ‘Cosmic Meaning’, and also distinguishes several aspects of meaning, such as value, significance, impact, explanation, purpose, and point. Her boldest claim is that ‘Ultimate Meaning’—the point of living a life as a whole—is impossible for beings like us. A point, she argues, is a valued end external to the activity it justifies; but since a human life contains all of one’s projects, values, and aims, there is nothing outside the enterprise of living one’s life that could serve as its final point. So life as a whole is, in that specific sense, pointless, even though many things within life are not. That bleak conclusion does not, however, lead Weinberg to nihilism. The second major part of the book argues that ‘Everyday Meaning’ is real, abundant, and objective rather than merely subjective: love, truth, beauty, morality, achievement, and worthwhile engagement can genuinely make a life meaningful, and people can be mistaken both about what matters and about whether their lives are well spent. She also argues that ‘Cosmic Meaning’ is often overrated. Even if there were God, miracles, an afterlife, or some grand cosmic purpose, that would not solve the problem of ‘Ultimate Meaning’, and it might not add nearly as much significance as people hope. Cosmic purpose, eternal bliss, or communion with the divine may sound impressive, but Weinberg thinks they do less philosophical work than many assume. The final movement of the book shifts from meaning in general to death and time. Weinberg argues, against a common view, that death is not the main thing that either gives life meaning or takes it away. Rather, time is the real double-edged condition of meaningful life: it is what makes narrative shape, risk, effort, achievement, and change possible, but it is also what erodes all of these things. Hence her ‘time-meaning conundrum’: we need time for meaning, yet time steadily wears meaning down. Her concluding outlook is tragic but not hopeless. We cannot escape this condition, and ‘living in the moment’ is not a real solution; instead, the best response is to engage deeply in everyday goods, attend properly to past, present, and future, and accept suffering and loss as part of what a meaningful human life inevitably involves. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:44 - Overview of book 03:52 - Meaning of ‘meaning’ 05:59 - Ultimate meaning 10:14 - God 13:24 - Skeptical worries 16:47 - Religious practice 20:14 - Everyday meaning 22:38 - Sources of meaning 27:18 - Subjective response 28:29 - Cosmic meaning 34:04 - Scale 39:49 - Transience 45:54 - Death 51:09 - Eternity 55:28 - Practical significance 59:00 - Value of philosophy 1:01:28 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe [https://fric.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

146. Jay Garfield | Norms and Nature

Where do norms come from: from transcendent reason, or from the customs, practices, and forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy [https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy]. 1. Guest Jay Garfield is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Smith College and Harvard Divinity School, and Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University. He work has focused on Buddhist philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, cross-cultural work, and more. Check out his book, "Norms and Nature: A Humean Account of the Sources of Normativity"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/norms-and-nature-9780197839768 [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/norms-and-nature-9780197839768] https://a.co/d/05nsMQRP [https://a.co/d/05nsMQRP] 2. Book Summary In Norms and Nature, Jay Garfield argues that the central philosophical question is where normativity comes from: whether norms are grounded in something transcendent, as in broadly Kantian approaches, or instead arise immanently out of human life itself. He frames this through the Euthyphro problem and then broadens it by drawing on Daoist and Buddhist traditions, using them to ask not just whether norms are discovered or made, but also whether they come from “above” in the form of principles or from “below” in patterns of human practice. Garfield’s overall answer is resolutely neo-Humean: norms are real and authoritative, but their source lies in custom, convention, and the natural and social forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures. The book’s middle argument is that this Humean naturalism does a better job than neo-Kantian transcendentalism of explaining both the origin and the authority of norms. Garfield insists that the normative domain is unified across ethics, epistemology, language, politics, and related practices, even if those domains differ in content. He then develops an account of custom as both biological and social, tracing its evolution phylogenetically and ontogenetically: human beings are not simply rule-followers by abstract reason, but animals whose hypersociality, trust, language, and inherited practices generate the normative space they inhabit. In that sense, normativity is neither an illusion nor a mysterious extra ingredient added to nature; it is a natural, emergent feature of human life. In the final part, Garfield applies this framework to particular domains—especially language, knowledge, ethics, and politics—and then turns to personhood itself. His picture is that to be a person is to be formed within a web of shared meanings, customs, and mutually reinforcing social practices that both shape us and are sustained by us. The result is a conception of human beings as thoroughly natural creatures whose normative lives are nonetheless fully real and binding. So the book is not just an argument about Hume versus Kant; it is a broader attempt to explain what it is to be human as a socially constituted, norm-governed being without collapsing into nihilism or crude relativism. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:49 - Overview of book 04:51 - Unity of norms 09:08 - Further source? 14:11 - Transcendent views 19:38 - Why listen to God? 22:28 - Religious communities 25:58 - David Hume 33:23 - Language and norms 34:33 - Other animals 37:16 - Authority of norms 43:04 - Worry 44:53 - Moral intuitions 50:52 - Moderate relativism 54:37 - Open question argument 57:41 - Political norms 1:03:53 - Normative skepticism 1:09:30 - Cross-cultural work 1:10:46 - Trust 1:14:16 - What is a norm? 1:15:04 - Value of philosophy 1:15:59 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe [https://fric.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

145. Marc Moffett | The Indispensability of Intuitions

What are intuitions, and are they indispensable to our knowledge? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy [https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy]. 1. Guest Marc Moffett is associate professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, and his work has focused on epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "The Indispensability of Intuitions"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/indispensability-of-intuitions/6F7C18793C39B08507716DD934E4C6A2 [https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/indispensability-of-intuitions/6F7C18793C39B08507716DD934E4C6A2] https://a.co/d/0bsB4MX1 [https://a.co/d/0bsB4MX1] 2. Book Summary Marc A. Moffett’s The Indispensability of Intuitions argues that rational intuitions are not mystical or mysterious, but rather a ubiquitous and essential feature of human cognition. Defending a stance called “moderate dogmatism,” Moffett contends that intuitions serve as basic sources of evidence alongside perception and introspection. He posits that rejecting the role of intuitions would undermine our knowledge on a massive scale, rendering them epistemically indispensable for almost all knowledge, whether a priori or a posteriori. A central part of Moffett’s argument involves rejecting the prevalent idea that the epistemic weight of intuitions (and other “seemings”) relies on a specific “presentational phenomenology” or conscious “feel”. Through thought experiments involving “Cartesian zombies,” he demonstrates that phenomenological properties are not what confer epistemic justification. Instead, he introduces the Attitudinal Theory of Presentationality (ATP), which characterizes presentational states by a unique cognitive posture—specifically, an involuntary “apprehending-as-actual” of certain contents. This non-phenomenological approach successfully addresses skepticism, such as Timothy Williamson’s “Absent Intuition Challenge,” by showing that intuitions can rationally guide our doxastic inclinations without requiring a distinct, introspectively obvious phenomenology. Building on this non-phenomenological foundation, Moffett demonstrates the widespread payoff of his theory by linking intuitions directly to concept application. He explains that philosophical thought experiments, such as the famous Gettier cases, rely on these concept-application intuitions to guide our judgments. Furthermore, Moffett expands his scope to argue that acts of explicit inference, as well as the higher-level presentational contents of normal perceptual experiences, fundamentally rely on the application of concepts, and therefore on intuitions. Consequently, intuitions are not just tools for abstract philosophy, but are intimately integrated into nearly all of our everyday cognitive functioning. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:54 - What are intuitions? 03:06 - Absent intuition worry 06:55 - John Bengson 08:22 - Terminological dispute 12:20 - Methodological worry 14:53 - Moderate dogmatism 18:38 - Foundationalism 23:10 - Internalism 26:39 - Blindsight 30:10 - Zombie argument 36:52 - Rejoinder 43:09 - Non-phenomenal presentational dogmatism 45:48 - Upshot 47:47 - Another rejoinder 51:48 - Indispensability 55:46 - Are intuitions needed? 59:47 - Intuitions as content-determining 1:02:07 - Animal concepts 1:06:10 - Inferences1:08:39 - Inference without reckoning 1:10:59 - Philosophy without intuitions? 1:14:14 - Ethics 1:17:29 - Perceptual experience 1:23:54 - Value of philosophy 1:27:32 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe [https://fric.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]