Sep 20, 2019
What is consciousness? Where does the mind reside? Can we create artificial intelligence that can fake intelligence, or maybe just have it? What happened in 17th century Europe that led to such a fascinating time for deep thinkers? And are we going through a similar period of churn today?
Ben has a fascinating and wide-ranging chat about these big questions with University of Alberta professor of philosophy Amy Schmitter.
About the Guest
Besides her position as Professor of
Philosophy, Amy is an Executive Editor and Board Secretary for
the Canadian Journal of
Philosophy.She is also
involved in the project “New Narratives in the
History of Philosophy,” supported by a Partnership Development
Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada. In April 2016, she was a Visiting Professor in the Facultad
de Filosof Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, where she
lectured and held several seminar sessions. Before coming to the
University of Alberta, Amy taught at the University of Pittsburgh,
Hamilton College in New York, and the University of New Mexico in
Albuquerque. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the University
of California at Berkeley and at New York University, and during
2002-03, held a Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center,
Stanford University. She has received several awards for Summer
Institutes and Seminars from the National Endowment for the
Humanities (U.S.A.) and two Standard Research Grants from the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She also
serves on various committees, including the Religious Studies
Advisory Council for the U of A, the Program Committee for the
Pacific Northwest-Western Canada Seminar in Early Modern
Philosophy, and review committees for several grant
organizations.
Amy's main areas of research and
writing are the history of early modern philosophy and philosophy
of art. But those are broad and eclectic areas that (necessarily)
take her into many different topics, historical periods and
approaches to philosophy. Her teaching interests and educational
history cover yet further fields. The result is that she knows a
little bit about many different things.
Mentioned in this Episode
The Quote of the Week
"One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another."
- René Descartes