On this podcast, I interview philosophers and other academics on fascinating philosophical and philosophy-adjacent topics. <br/><br/><a href="https://fric.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">fric.substack.com</a>
Podcast Overview
On this podcast, I interview philosophers and other academics on fascinating philosophical and philosophy-adjacent topics. <br/><br/><a href="https://fric.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">fric.substack.com</a>
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Publishing Since
5/7/2024
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Recent Episodes
June 30, 2026
150. Kristie Miller | Life in Four Dimensions
<p>What if the flow of time is an illusion, and the past, present, and future all exist together right now?</p><p>My links: <a target="_blank" href="https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy">https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy</a>.</p><p><strong>1. Guest</strong></p><p>Kristie Miller is the Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and co-director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Time. Her work has focused on metaphysics, especially as it relates to time, temporal passage, identity, and agency.Check out her recent book, "Life in Four Dimensions: A Defence of the Block Universe Theory"!<a target="_blank" href="https://academic.oup.com/book/62313">https://academic.oup.com/book/62313</a><a target="_blank" href="https://a.co/d/04YERGhM">https://a.co/d/04YERGhM</a></p><p><strong>2. Book Summary</strong></p><p>Life in Four Dimensions: A Defence of the Block Universe Theory argues for the block universe view of time—the thesis that reality is a four-dimensional spacetime block in which all events (past, present, and future) exist, with no objective, non-perspectival fact about which events are “really” present. On this static picture, what exists never changes and nothing has the property of being objectively present; talk of past, present, and future is merely talk about where events sit relative to one’s own location. The author’s central target is not dynamical theories of time themselves (presentism, the growing block, the moving spotlight), but a specific family of arguments against the block view, which he calls the General Inference-to-the-Best-Explanation (IBE) argument: the world seems to us as though time robustly passes, the best explanation for this seeming is that time really does pass, and therefore time passes. Rather than taking the usual “gaps” route—conceding the world seems dynamical but explaining that seeming away—the book defends the bolder “no gaps” approach, contending that we live in a block universe and that it seems to us as though we do.</p><p>What distinguishes the book methodologically is its blend of analytic argument with experimental philosophy: the author reports over forty empirical studies, conducted with collaborators, probing what he terms the “manifest temporal image”—how time actually seems to ordinary people—rather than relying on armchair pronouncements about how things collectively seem. After laying out a precise version of the block view in Chapter 1 (built on two theses, “No Change in Existence” and “No Objective Present,” plus assumptions about spacetime drawn from general relativity), the book works through four variants of the IBE argument. Chapters 2–4 attack the Experiential version, defending “deflationism”—the claim that we do not in fact have experiences as of robust passage—and arguing it better explains people’s reported temporal seemings. Chapter 5 takes on the Conceptual version, presenting evidence that our time-related concepts would not fail to be satisfied in a block world; Chapter 6 addresses the Attitude/Preference version (tensed emotions like relief and dread, and future-biased preferences), arguing what makes such attitudes fitting are perspectival facts that obtain in block worlds too; and Chapter 7 examines the Belief version, marshalling data showing considerable population-level variation in what people actually believe about passage.</p><p>Having dismantled each route from “seemings” to dynamism, Chapter 8 goes on the offensive, offering a positive IBE for the block view—arguing it better explains our asymmetric knowledge of past versus future—and contending that robust temporal passage is explanatorily redundant, doing no genuine work (including no work in explaining the asymmetry of physical processes). Since positing passage explains nothing, the author concludes, we ought not posit it, and should accept the block view. The overall achievement is twofold: a sustained defense of a static, four-dimensional metaphysics of time, and a demonstration—of interest even to those unmoved by the block view—that many influential arguments in the metaphysics of time, all of which lean on claims about how time seems, rest on empirical assumptions that the actual evidence about human temporal experience does not support.</p><p><strong>3. Interview Chapters</strong></p><p>00:00 - Introduction</p><p>01:02 - What is the “block universe”?</p><p>08:57 - Overview of book</p><p>13:26 - Experimental work</p><p>18:42 - Folk intuitions</p><p>23:42 - Methodological concerns</p><p>32:15 - Sampling bias</p><p>45:27 - Is the dispute substantive?</p><p>58:21 - Experiential argument</p><p>1:16:46 - Possible contents</p><p>1:27:52 - Rejoinder</p><p>1:31:45 - Contingency vs. necessity</p><p>1:37:48 - Further response on content</p><p>1:43:01 - Temporal bias</p><p>1:52:13 - My thoughts</p><p>2:00:30 - Skeptical charge</p><p>2:07:09 - Special relativity</p><p>2:13:20 - Balaguer’s approach</p><p>2:16:16 - Parsimony</p><p>2:21:52 - Balaguer on truthmaking</p><p>2:28:01 - Summary</p><p>2:29:36 - Value of philosophy</p><p>2:32:15 - Conclusion</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://fric.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">fric.substack.com/subscribe</a>
May 5, 2026
149. Mark Balaguer | How to Be a Presentist
<p>What if only the present moment exists, and everything you call the past or the future is, strictly speaking, nothing at all?</p><p>My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.</p><p><strong>1. Guest</strong></p><p>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.</p><p>Check out his book, "How to Be a Presentist"!<a target="_blank" href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-to-be-a-presentist-9780197845714">https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-to-be-a-presentist-9780197845714</a><a target="_blank" href="https://a.co/d/009UAUtC">https://a.co/d/009UAUtC</a></p><p><strong>2. Book Summary</strong></p><p>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”).</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p><strong>3. Interview Chapters</strong></p><p>00:00 - Introductio</p><p>00:57 - Overview of book</p><p>02:47 - Substantive dispute</p><p>06:31 - Non-factualism</p><p>09:15 - Substantialese</p><p>13:58 - Understanding the difference</p><p>21:40 - Contingent thesis</p><p>28:35 - A posteriori identities</p><p>41:10 - Scientism</p><p>47:55 - Ontological commitment objection</p><p>53:39 - Relevance of physics</p><p>1:00:25 - FAPP truth</p><p>1:05:03 - Truthmakers objection</p><p>1:08:19 - Potential reply</p><p>1:17:45 - Present truthmakers?</p><p>1:19:43 - Abandon physicalism?</p><p>1:20:54 - Swamp world</p><p>1:22:17 - The actual world and modal realism</p><p>1:36:26 - Nothingism</p><p>1:38:40 - Claims about reality</p><p>1:42:27 - Understanding the claims</p><p>1:53:16 - Counterfactuals</p><p>2:04:09 - Understanding modality</p><p>2:16:53 - Special relativity</p><p>2:26:53 - Avoiding anti-realism and eternalism</p><p>2:39:43 - Lean view</p><p>2:45:19 - What is time?</p><p>2:49:43 - William Lane Craig</p><p>2:52:06 - Summary of view</p><p>2:54:24 - Future work</p><p>2:56:08 - Temporal phenomenology</p><p>3:01:11 - Value of philosophy</p><p>3:03:31 - Conclusion</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://fric.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">fric.substack.com/subscribe</a>
April 21, 2026
148. Matt Duncan | Acquaintance
<p>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?</p><p>My links: <a target="_blank" href="https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy">https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy</a>.</p><p><strong>1. Guest</strong></p><p>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.</p><p>Check out his book, "Present to the Mind: Acquaintance and Its Significance"!</p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://academic.oup.com/book/62315">https://academic.oup.com/book/62315</a></p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://a.co/d/0i7cd8zC">https://a.co/d/0i7cd8zC</a></p><p><strong>2. Book Summary</strong></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p><strong>3. Interview Chapters</strong></p><p>00:00 - Introduction</p><p>00:36 - Overview of book</p><p>03:30 - Bertrand Russell</p><p>07:30 - Directness</p><p>08:57 - Objects of acquaintance</p><p>14:03 - Strong vs. weak acquaintance</p><p>17:24 - Naive realism</p><p>22:34 - Mind</p><p>24:14 - Argument for weak acquaintance</p><p>26:10 - Absolutely strong acquaintance</p><p>27:53 - Doubt test</p><p>30:05 - Fallibility</p><p>31:22 - Certainty</p><p>37:33 - Hallucination</p><p>43:06 - Modal acquaintance</p><p>44:56 - Coextensive?</p><p>47:30 - Essence acquaintance</p><p>50:49 - Properties</p><p>55:02 - Knowledge</p><p>57:00 - Varieties of knowledge</p><p>58:51 - Argument for acquaintance knowledge</p><p>1:00:47 - Semantics</p><p>1:05:24 - Knowledge without belief</p><p>1:11:40 - Other animals</p><p>1:13:09 - Vagueness</p><p>1:18:11 - Theory of knowledge</p><p>1:23:01 - Subconscious acquaintance</p><p>1:27:05 - Foundationalism</p><p>1:34:59 - Moral significance</p><p>1:40:03 - Rationality of perception</p><p>1:42:50 - Summary</p><p>1:44:22 - Value of philosophy</p><p>1:45:31 - Conclusion</p><p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://fric.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">fric.substack.com/subscribe</a>
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