Robert May

speaker

328 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2015 last heard Jun 2015

Robert May’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Elucidations · Episode 72: Robert May discusses pejorative expressions · 25 Jun 2015 podcast

It's the false belief that there are such things as kikes.

And niggers and so on.

And given that that's a false belief, we have a certain way of understanding those people who use such words who have such false beliefs, and a certain understanding of what the sort of the pathology is.

Part of the way we want to combat racism is therapeutically.

We need to change people's attitudes.

And part of that is trying to understand therapeutically what do you do with people who have racist views.

So if we take it to be the case that they hold false beliefs about the nature of the world, we can try and approach therapeutically why that is.

I think that it goes beyond.

I mean, I think that clearly there are lots of legal issues that are going to be based on what we think these words mean.

Issues within obviously philosophy of law, within the the law itself, all sorts of issues about First Amendment rights, whether it's protected speech or not.

There's all sorts of issues I think that tie in.

And I think actually one of the things why pejoratives are so interesting is because you start with particular dispute within narrowly within the philosophy of language about you know literal meaning versus speech act meaning.

And you go from there.

To issues about, well, what kind of attitude philosophy of mind, what kind of attitudes are reflected by people who use these words to issues in the philosophy of law and into the law itself, and hence issues that actually affect people in their everyday lives.

So I think that, yeah, I think this is one case where sort of philosophy really does what you might think philosophy ought to do.

We can turn technical disputes and claims

within philosophy that it turned on very arcane

internal to philosophy issues that really you can see a clear road to how they impact uh, you know, people in their everyday lives and how they interact with people's attitudes.

So yeah, I think this is one of these great areas of philosophy.

And that is getting a lot of attention now, I think, is great, because I think we are getting a great articulation of this.

Showing 301–320 of 328 · page 16 of 17