Outline of the conversation: 00:10 What motivated you to write 'Think'? 02:00 What is the role of Philosophy? 04:10 Progress in Philosophy 07:18 Remarks on the notion of Truth 09:27 Deflationism about Truth 14:15 The Correspondence Theory of Truth and problems with Facts 17:40 Is there anything wrong with abstract objects? 19:44 The Liar's Paradox 28:37 The relationship between religion and morality 33:55 Free Will 47:18 Which philosophers influenced you the most? 48:50 What contributions did Hume make to modern thought?
When talking about free will and in particular "will" itself, I wonder what he thinks of Nietzsche who rejected both free and unfree will as things that are only spoken about by people with vested interests and that there we should only be concerned with "strong and weak" will. He had a lot of interesting stuff to say about us getting trapped in our thinking by relying on the subject-> predicate way of thinking, constrained by language. The "I" behind "I am" being all to mysterious for us to comprehend. And yes, he was probably the most notorious attackers of moratily and ethics, a Dionysian who said we should even treat jealousy, greed, more importantly instincts as divine. Also, obviously both the guest here and Nietzsche proclaimed God as dead.
Excellent stuff. I've been trying to find/learn more about this but isn't the Liar's paradox also used in some way in the Goedel's Theorem proof? In your first podcast, maybe you didn't get to touch on more possible (may be reasonable/unreasonable) philosophical implications of Goedel's theorems. I'd like to know (if you ever have the time) what you think about it, it's relation with "truth", "strange loops" etc. or is it just a very specific proof about a very specific set of statements. How might it apply to informal arguments, if at all. So many questions, I'm sure you get the gist. On finishing up the podcast, I'm actually satisfied, you don't need to answer.
I've now seen your edit -- I hope that my next podcast episode will actually be about whether Gödel's Theorem says something about the possibility of the mind being a machine or not (like people such as Lucas or Penrose have argued). So stay tuned! But to answer your initial question about the Liar, people sometimes say that Gödel took the Liar sentence into the setting of sufficiently strong consistent effectively formalised mathematical theories. I can see what they mean, but that is not entirely correct... What Gödel did was to construct a sentence which is holds if and only if it is not formally provable. In a very limited sense, one can describe the arithmetical sentence G as *saying about itself* that it is not formally provable inside the system, but this is ought not to be taken literally, at least without further qualification. In short, the sentence G is about formal proofs (i.e. about a syntactic notion), but the Liar sentence concerns truth (a semantic notion). Actually, arithmetical truth is not arithmetically definable (Tarski's Theorem) and Gödel took this to be the main reason for why truth and proof come apart (but he wrote in a period where the notion of truth was suspicious [for groups such as The Vienna Circle], so his proof couldn't take that route).
