Fall 2020
September 17 – Professors Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko, University of Notre Dame
“Living a Good Life When Everything is Canceled”
Major changes can make it difficult to feel like we’re living good lives. This is especially true when the changes bring with them uncertainty about the future, or major disruption to our daily routines. On the other hand, there’s a tradition stretching to ancient philosophy that sees such moments as an opportunity to consider what matters most in life, and that provides us with tools and resources to navigate through them. In this talk we’ll look at some of this wisdom (from the stoics, virtue ethics, and others), and relate it to issues that impact us all even today.
This Zoom talk requires preregistration. Please visit the following address to complete this easy process. https://forms.gle/c3qVmxsUmf7a5CC57
October 5 – Brandon Warmke, assistant professor of philosophy, Bowling Green University
“Groundstanding Apart: How Status-Seeking Divides Us”
Moral grandstanding is the use of discussions about morality and politics for self-promotion. In this talk, I’ll explain why people grandstand, what it looks like, and drawing from new psychological research, I’ll argue that one of its negative effects is that it’s pushing Americans apart along ideological lines.
This Zoom talk requires preregistration. Please visit the following address to complete this easy process. https://forms.gle/5KvohLRMA65tdDRX9
October 22 – Emily Austin, associate professor of philosophy, and Bitove Family Faculty Fellow, Wake Forest University
“Pleasure and the Plague: An Epicurean Guide to Pandemic Living”
While Epicurus is not exactly a household name, the key starting points of his ethics need no explanation—pleasure feels good, while anxiety does not. As a committed hedonist, Epicurus thinks the only truly good thing is pleasure, and he thinks freedom from anxiety is itself the greatest pleasure. Our current moment, however, presents a serious threat to the entire Epicurean system, since pandemics are certainly unpleasant and seem to provoke anxiety in their very nature. In this talk, I show why the Epicureans might actually be best equipped to weather the storm of a pandemic and why their account is superior to philosophical systems that reject pleasure as a genuine source of value (e.g., Stoicism).
This Zoom talk requires preregistration. Please visit the following address to complete this easy process. https://forms.gle/r6uDqvD39NgW8Evp9.
November 19 – Jonathan Barker, visiting assistant professor of philosophy, Wake Forest University
“Naturalism and Debunking Arguments”
Debunking argumentsseek to undermine our justification for holding certain beliefs—ex. moral beliefs, religious beliefs, mathematical beliefs, and ordinary perceptual beliefs, among many others—by appealing to facts about their causal-historical origins. I introduce debunking arguments and explain their epistemological significance, using evolutionary debunking arguments in metaethics as a case study. I then argue that, contra the current orthodoxy, naturalists are in no better position to block the debunking threat than their non-naturalist counterparts.
This Zoom talk requires preregistration. Please visit the following address to complete this easy process. https://forms.gle/RyDMgASrmjc3GsbB6