John and Ken start the show to applause from the live audience in the Marsh Theater in Berkeley. Ken introduces the week’s topic: Dance, as a way of knowing. John, a consistent skeptic, is immediately dubious: “How can dance be a way of knowing?” he asks. After all, dance isn’t a form of perception, reasoning, or thinking. Ken tells John he needs to get with the times: knowledge means a lot more than “justified true belief” to modern-day philosophers. John still isn’t convinced: dance is dance, and knowing is knowing, he says. But Ken makes a point he agrees with—maybe they should define what dance is before they decide what it’s not. But defining dance turns out to be difficult: sure, it’s done with the body, and often involves music, but there are so many different kinds of dance (and reasons to dance). John wonders if they’ve got the same problem that Wittgenstein ran into when it came to defining the word “game”: no one characteristic describes all games; rather, there is a web of “family resemblances” that they all more or less share. The same is true with dance. No one thing describes dance, but one dance invariably shares “family resemblances” with another kind of dance.

Moving on from definition, Ken makes a deep point: dance is movement that relates you to the world—when you dance, the world becomes present to you. When one moves through a space, it unfolds to them: perhaps in a way, one’s mind expands to the space. John asks how this is a way of knowing, and Ken describes that dance can be thought of as a model for the complex ways human beings perceive the world and draw knowledge from it.

After an interlude for the Roving Philosophical Report, John and Ken welcome their guest Alva Noë, a professor at UC Berkeley. John asks how Professor Noë—an analystic philosopher—became involved with dancers (Noë is a “professor in residence” for a German dance company). Noë thinks dance has something particular and special to teach philosophers: dance questions the inwardness of philosophy, and takes the body as a subject, rather than something external to the mind or individual.

他们三人接着讨论了舞蹈的原始起源，以及舞蹈能告诉我们关于感知的什么。在进行了广泛的对话后，三人欢迎现场观众的提问。一个学舞蹈的学生问，是什么描述了舞蹈的情感体验——情感在舞蹈中的作用是什么?肯以谈论舞蹈的表现力作为回应。一位来自旧金山的编舞专家问道，是什么促使观众“理解”舞蹈，而不是将其视为一种体验。作为回应，Noë描述了观看舞蹈表演的人可以经历的哲学转变，他们从质疑或解释转变为更纯粹的感知形式。三人在节目结束时谈到了舞蹈之美和知识之美是如何相互联系的。

Roving Philosophical Report (seek to 7:00):凯特琳·埃施(Caitlin Esch)去了加州的一家老年中心，那里每周都有一群妇女聚在一起跳草裙舞。但这种舞蹈不仅仅是陪伴——一些女性发现它提高了她们的记忆力。埃施向医学专家询问了这种改善的原因。