Speaker Series
Everyone is welcome to attend our talks. The talks are roughly 50 minutes in length followed by roughly 30 minutes of Q & A. Unless otherwise specified, talks are held at 5:00 pm and take place in Alumni Hall 264. Please contact Abby Nichols at 336-758-5359 or if you need special accommodations or have any questions.
Fall 2026
November 5 – Catharine Saint-Croix, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
“The Epistemology of Slop”
The emergence of increasingly sophisticated AI slop online—alongside its real-world reflections in slop literature, arts, and scholarship—undermines the decentralized, unacquainted forms of knowledge acquisition that drive much of our modern lives. Without being able to rely on these practices, we must rethink both our individual and systemic epistemic practices.
Past Talks
September 17 – Claude V. Roebuck Lecture in Philosophy
Alumni Hall Room 289
C. Thi Nguyen, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Utah
“Mechanical Values and The Bureaucratized Self”
Bureaucracy changes us; it changes our actions, values, and our concepts. I argue that bureaucratic norms have already significantly changed many of our basic moral concepts: about personhood, agency, and responsibility. These concepts have been re-contoured for ease-of-use in large-scale institutional contexts. Lorraine Daston gives us a powerful diagnostic tool here: she suggests that contemporary institutions prefer “mechanical rules,” which are rules designed to be executed exactly and unthinkingly, without judgment or discretion. For Daston, mechanical rules serve a very specific function: they eliminate the need for highly sensitive experts, and make workers more fungible. Much of our key concepts, I suggest, have been transformed to have “mechanical edges” – that is, to have application criteria that can be readily applied by fungible workers. Our concepts have been crisped up in a way that makes them work better for bureaucratic operations — but worse for much of human life. As a warm-up, I offer a case study in art concepts. Institutional demands for clear intellectual property copyright assignments have shaped our idea of creativity and originality, and generated an artificially clarified picture of artistic responsibility. I then offer a case study in the concept of “moral responsibility.” We have suppressed the complex, messy, sociological tangle of responsibility in favor of a conception of agency that permits clean assignments of fault to well-bounded entities, such that they can be fined and jailed.
September 18 Emotions & Society Lab Fellows Workshop
4:00-5:30 PM
Alumni Hall Room 264
Dr. Abdul Ansari, postdoctoral fellow, University of Notre Dame
“Against the Aestheticization of Ethics”
I aim to tease out and reject the influential idea that valuing is analogous to aesthetic contemplation. According to the picture, we appropriately value things just by appreciating the reasons why they are admirable and otherwise good in some deeply significant way, much as we value beautiful objects by appreciating the reasons why they are beautiful. In this talk, I start to sketch an alternative approach, motivated by two ideas about valuing the people we love. First, that valuing the beloved as we should depends on our history and relationship with them, and, second, that a contemplative notion of valuing undermines the value of how we relate to the beloved.
September 10 – Claude V. Roebuck Lecture in Philosophy
David Shoemaker, Professor in Ethics and Public Life, Cornell University Sage School of Philosophy
“Finding More Funny: On Obstructions to Comic Vision and How (and Why!) to Overcome Them”
Sometimes we are prevented from seeing all of the humor in our lives, typically because of our political or moral commitments. Having these commitments is of course good: they give us reason to get up in the morning! But sometimes we should try harder than we do to move aside these obstructing commitments in favor of seeing what’s funny about them, as well as what’s funny about us and the human condition generally. There is great value in doing so. The aim of this talk is to explain these ideas and to urge how and why we ought to find more funny in our lives.
March 5 – Charlie Kurth, Professor of Philosophy, Clemson University
“Guilt and Responsibility: A Revisionary Picture”
It’s widely held that guilt is the emotion we should feel when we believe we’ve done something morally wrong. But drawing on a range of examples—survivor guilt, caregiver guilt, and the guilt experiences on non-Western cultures—I argue that this standard thinking is mistaken. Properly understood, guilt is less about the wrongs we’ve done, and more about the misfortunes that befall the people and things we take ownership of. The upshot is a better understanding of the nature and value of this emotion.
March 26 – Rebecca Stangl, Professor of Philosophy, University of Virginia
“Imposter Syndrome as Recalcitrant Emotion”
Confessions of suffering from Imposter Syndrome have become commonplace. But what exactly is Imposter Syndrome? While differing in important respects, recent philosophical analyses nonetheless agree that it is an essentially doxastic phenomenon. Sufferers falsely believe they are incompetent – or at least lack a true belief in their competence – even in the face of seemingly compelling evidence to the contrary. In this essay, I challenge this emerging consensus. I argue that unfitting shame, rather than false (or lacking) belief, is at the heart of at least some varieties of Imposter Syndrome. Such an analysis solves a puzzle arising from the fact that Imposter Syndrome is almost always self-diagnosed, a puzzle which has so far been unappreciated in the literature and whose solution is incompatible with a doxastic account.
April 16 – Will Conner, Teaching Assistant Professor, UNC Chapel Hill
“Stewarding the Epistemic Commons: Collective Action and the Ethics of Belief”
When we form and share our beliefs, we draw on and contribute to the epistemic commons: the shared body of evidence available to members of a community. Forming our beliefs negligently degrades the epistemic commons in ways that predictably harm others. Drawing on work on the ethics of collective action, according to which we have a moral obligation to preserve valuable shared resources for others, I argue that each of us has a moral obligation to be epistemically responsible, forming our beliefs with due care for our evidence even when it is in our selfish, short-term interest to be negligent instead.
September 19 – Myisha Cherry, Associate Professor of Philosophy, UC Riverside
“Taking Love Public: On James Baldwin and Love’s Political Possibilities”
The idea that love has a place in public life has been criticized for being impractical, impossible, and dangerous. In this talk, I argue that these criticisms are mistaken due to our limited conception of love, where we often reduce love to how we feel. By offering an action-oriented account of love and using the life of writer and activist James Baldwin as an example, I demonstrate how we can take love public in practical and productive ways rather than abstract and destructive ones. The actions I suggest are often seen as irrelevant or antithetical to love, but I’ll show how they are examples of lovenonetheless. Ultimately, I hope to convince audiences that because love is ‘politically possible,’ we have a responsibility to get to the task of making the world better via love.
October 2 – 2025 Guy T. and Clara Carswell Philosophy Lecture
David Bradshaw, Professor of Philosophy, University of Kentucky
“God and the Essence-Energies Distinction”
The essence-energies distinction is an idea developed by the Christian Church Fathers of the 4th-7th centuries that has been widely neglected in modern philosophy of religion. This talk will explain the idea and show how it can be applied to central issues in the philosophy of religion such as divine simplicity, divine freedom, and the action of God in history.
November 13 – Collis Tahzib, Associate Professor of Philosophy, USC
“What’s the Point of Moral Duty to Self?”
Recently, there has been a thriving programme of impressive work defending the idea of moral duty to oneself. This paper contends that this programme is largely pointless since there is little, if anything, that intrapersonal morality implies that would not otherwise be implied by mere prudence. After setting out this pointlessness challenge, I consider and reject various possible attempts to meet it—namely, by arguing that intrapersonal morality has implications for practical deliberation given the strictness of moral duties, for self-directed reactive attitudes like self-blame, for self-apology, for paternalistic law and public policy, and for the “bipolar” structure of duty.
March 20 – Iain Thomson, Professor of Philosophy, University of New Mexico,
“Heidegger on Technology’s Danger and Promise in the Age of AI”
How exactly is technology transforming us and our worlds, and what (if anything) can and should we do about it? Heidegger already felt this philosophical question concerning technology pressing in on him in 1951, and his thought-full and deliberately provocative response is still worth pondering today. What light does his thinking cast not just on the nuclear technology of the atomic age but also on more contemporary technologies like the latest advances in information technology, so-called generative AIs like ChatGPT? These are some of the questions this talk will address, situating the latest controversial technologies in the light of Heidegger’s influential understanding of technology as an historical mode of ontological disclosure. In this way, we seek to take the measure of Heidegger’s ontological understanding of technology as a constellation of intelligibility with an important philosophical heritage and a dangerous but still promising future.
October 24 – Jack Kwong, professor of philosophy and religion, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC
“The Nature of Despair”
The Problem of Despair has received much attention in the philosophy of hope. According to this problem, the Standard Account of hope, which claims that hoping for an outcome is a matter of desiring it and believing that its obtainment is possible, is flawed because its definition fails to rule out instances of despair: People who despair, the objection runs, also desire outcomes that they believe are obtainable. While there has been significant debate in the literature over how to define hope so as to distinguish it from despair, surprisingly little work by comparison has been done to shed light on the nature of despair. This paper will attempt to remedy this neglect. In particular, I will argue that the problem of despair rests on a confusion about the nature of hope and of despair. Once this confusion is clarified, we will see that the problem has an easy and elegant solution. We will also end up with a rather robust account of despair, which I argue satisfies a recently proposed list of desiderata of an adequate account of despair. I conclude by discussing some surprising implications of this account of despair.
November 21 – Samuel Reis-Dennis, assistant professor of philosophy, Rice University, Houston, TX
“Satisfaction”
Anger’s opponents tend to hold that anger responds to slights and aims at vengeful, leveling “payback.” It is “rationally resolved” when the wrongdoer suffers a sufficiently debasing amount of pain. Anger’s proponents, on the other hand, tend to moralize anger and its resolution. For these theorists, fitting anger responds to lack of respect or proper regard. It is resolved when we receive moral acknowledgment—not only of our status as moral equals, but of the pain and suffering the wrongdoer’s behavior caused. I argue that both of these dominant interpretations of anger are misguided. To make the case, I attempt to illuminate the range of methods by which anger can be rationally resolved. I focus especially on dueling and sex, two modes of anger-resolution that the standard views cannot explain and that implicate a notion of satisfaction. I argue that the satisfaction victims get from offenders in dueling and sex is a feeling of assurance that they need not feel the shame of lowliness and submission. I conclude that anger construes its subject as possessing a (violated) right against such shame, and any turn of events that makes the shame inappropriate can rationally resolve it.
January 29 – Michael Gadomski, visiting assistant professor of philosophy, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA
“Open Borders and the Egalitarian Project”
Despite its theoretical appeal, the egalitarian case for open borders faces an important worry: that in practice, open borders would make the least advantaged worse off, thus exacerbating inequality. In this talk, I offer a response to this concern. For one, it’s not clear that it is empirically well-supported. More importantly, though, it fails to attend to the larger political and economic forces that create and maintain inequality in the first place. The first lesson, then, is that egalitarians need not give up on the idea of open borders. However, and this is the second lesson, these conflicts do challenge egalitarians to rethink the nature of the egalitarian project. In the final part of the talk, I offer some suggestions for what this might look like.
March 21 – Claude V. Roebuck Lecture in Philosophy: Jennifer Lackey, Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University
Title: TBA
April 24 – Guy T. and Clara Carswell Lecture in Philosophy: Yujin Nagasawa, H.G. Wood Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, Co-Director, Birmingham Centre for the Philosophy of Religion, University of Birmingham
Title: TBA
September 28 – Luc Bovens – professor of philosophy, politics and economics, UNC Chapel Hill
“What is This Thing Called Love?”
What accounts for the constancy of love? What explains the pangs of love lost? How might one overcome the pangs of love lost? I try to offer answers to these question within feature-based, feature-free, and connection-based models of love and distinguish between reflectively endorsable and irreverent variants of these models. The talk builds on the material in Chapter 3 on Love in my book Coping: A Philosophical Guide (OpenBook Publishers, 2021).
October 19 – Sabeen Ahmed – assistant professor of philosophy and peace & conflict studies, Swarthmore College
“Empire of White Supremacy”
Given its resurgence in public discourse, the inconsistency of its deployment, and, most importantly, its status as the defining existential problem of modernity, the current ubiquity of the discourse of ‘white supremacy’ renders the term an especially urgent subject for philosophical interrogation. In lieu of liberal frameworks which would reduce white supremacism to a species of racism, however, I develop and deploy the lens of empire to reveal white supremacy as a historically-specific, racialized configuration of power.
November 9 – Carlos Sanchez – professor of philosophy, San Jose State University
“Accidentality, from Mexican Philosophy to the Aztecs and Back Again”
Central to Aztec/Nahuatl teaching is the reminder that “the earth is slippery.” This means to convey the notion that regardless of how stable you think you are, your stability depends on the earth itself–the earth on which you stand and which moves about the universe. If the earth is slick, slippery, shaky, and slipping about the darkness of space, then everything you know rests on an insecure foundation. The Aztecs insist that if the earth can fall from its orbit, so can you. This idea of an irremediable precariousness makes its way into Mexican existentialism, or Mexistentialism, 400 years later. Emilio Uranga calls it “accidentality.” This talk is primarily about accidentality and what it means for Uranga—how he thinks it defines the Mexican existential condition. In a secondary sense, the talk is also about existentialism and Mexistentialism, how they’re the same and how they are different. I make a point about decolonization, as well, although I will not insist on it.
January 19 – Matthew Shields – assistant professor of philosophy, Wake Forest University
“Rationality, Bad Beliefs, and the Ends of Interpretation”
How can people hold beliefs that seem to fly in the face of the evidence? Two camps have emerged for answering this question: those who emphasize the flaws endemic to human cognition and those who treat these beliefs as products of our inevitable epistemic dependence, making them more rational than we might think. I argue that both camps have overlooked that we must often decide how we will interpret the agents we encounter who hold bad beliefs and that this recognition of our own interpretive agency can resolve much of the tension between the two camps and point to new directions for research.
Monday, February 13 – Jennifer Morton, Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania
“Redefining Poverty: An Agential Theory”
Poverty has traditionally been conceived of as a state of deprivation. To be poor is to lack something essential to human flourishing. How that something is conceived—in terms of welfare, resources, or capabilities—and how it is measured—in absolute terms or relative to a social standard—has been the subject of much debate within development circles. In this paper, I put forward a theory of poverty rooted in the philosophy of action. I argue that to be poor is to be in a context in which an agent’s capacity for long-term deliberation and planning is systemically undermined by rational pressure to engage in efficient short-term deliberation. In other words, to be poor is to constantly turn one’s mind to the immediate satisfaction of current needs and desires at the expense of deliberating about the pursuit of long-term projects and ends one deeply values.
March 23 – Dr. Stephen Angle, Wesleyan University
Annenberg Forum (Carswell 111) at 6:00 p.m.
Wake Forest University Co-sponsors – Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, The Program for Leadership and Character, and Department of Philosophy
“A Confucian Guide to the Good Life”
Dr. Angle has studied Confucius for more than three decades and realized that Confucian insights and values made sense of his life, here and now. At its core, Confucianism describes a way for us to live and grow together in our world—a way characterized at its best by joy, beauty, and harmony. By drawing on the greats of the Confucian tradition as well as various modern thinkers, Dr. Angle will explain what Confucianism is and make a case that it is worth trying out today.
March 24 – 2nd Annual Braswell Philosophy Conference
Supported by the Wake Forest University Kevin H. Braswell Philosophy Society and the Department of Philosophy
Location: Wake Forest University Benson Center 401, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm
This event is open to the public.
The Braswell Philosophy Society and Department of Philosophy at Wake Forest University is holding their 2nd Annual Braswell Philosophy Conference.
The paper submission deadline is February 25 and the acceptance notification will be no later than March 13. Any paper pertaining to philosophy across a variety of disciplines including social and political issues, ethics, religion, metaphysics, legal or epistemology are welcome for submission. This paper can be a piece specifically created for this conference, or a paper you have already written and feel proud of.
If you’d like to know more about the conference and paper submission, please contact .
March 30 – Leslie Francis, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Alfred C. Emery Endowed Professor of Law, and Adjunct Professor in Political Science and in Medicine at the University of Utah
James Steintrager Lecture in Political Philosophy and Jurisprudence
Location: Wake Forest University Tribble Hall DeTamble Auditorium A110
Supported by the Wake Forest University Department of Philosophy
Co-sponsors: Wake Forest University Center for Bioethics, Health and Society, the Wake Forest University Department of Politics and Politics and International Affairs, and the Wake Forest University Center School of Law Health Law and Policy Program
“States of Health: Federalism and Bioethics”
Far from settling the issues it raised, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs to withdraw federal constitutional protection for reproductive liberty has intensified conflicts about federalism. States opposed to abortion rights are seeking to govern what their residents do out of state or what others can bring or send into the state. Abortion opponents are going to court to erect nationwide barriers to the most common method of early abortion, medication abortion. On the other side, states are enacting statutes to protect providers who offer abortion care and the patients they treat. Theories of federalism offer justifications for policy variations among states, including experimentation, political and cultural differences, and the benefits of locating decisions closer to the people they will affect. In this talk, I will argue that none of these justifications support the failures of some states to recognize rights that are appearing in the wake of Dobbs. Moreover, under non-ideal circumstances protection of the right to travel assumes critical importance.
April 20 – Alva Noë, Professor of Philosophy, Chair, University of California, Berkeley
Claude V. Roebuck Lecture in Philosophy
“Perception as a Relationship”
In this talk I will explore the idea that to perceive something is to enter into a relationship with it. Perception is a caring attitude, and love itself, an epistemic emotion, or so I will argue.
September 22 – Amie Thomasson – Daniel P. Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, Dartmouth College
“What Can Philosophy Do?”
Philosophy has traditionally been presented as aiming to discover deep facts about what exists, or about what the world is really like. But today, those seem like projects better pursued by the natural sciences. So what (if anything) is left for philosophy to do? I will argue that we can do better by thinking of philosophy as addressing questions about what we should do, including how we should think or talk. On this way of reconceiving philosophy, the work of philosophy remains deep, interesting, and important–and capable of reshaping how we think and how we live.
October 6 – Alejandro Hortal -visiting assistant professor of philosophy, Wake Forest University
“Virtue Nudges: Using Choice Architecture to Form Virtuous Citizens”
Nudges are policy interventions intended to change people’s behaviors and habits by organizing the choice environment. Nudges are used to boost vaccinations, increase contributions to retirement accounts, or improve healthy habits in citizens without limiting their choices (freedom). Due to their low cost and efficiency, many governments are implementing them. I argue that nudges also have the potential to form virtuous citizens in an Aristotelian sense. They do so by inculcating habits in people, respecting their freedom to choose while guaranteeing deliberation. Considering their affordability, potential effectiveness, and libertarian approach, governmental agencies and institutions should seek ways to use them in conjunction with educational interventions.
October 27 – Mark Murphy – Robert L. McDevitt, K.S.G., K.C.H.S. and Catherine H. McDevitt L.C.H.S. – Georgetown University
Guy T. and Clara Carswell Philosophy Lecture
“Why Does God Do What God Does?”
Many important arguments for or against theism assume that we can explain and predict God’s action – that we can know why God does what God does. How is this possible? A couple of popular answers appeal to God’s being morally perfect and God’s being maximally loving. I will reject these answers, offering instead a view of divine action based on God’s holiness.
November 10 – Cynthia Tessien – professor of practice, Dept. of Accountancy, Wake Forest University Undergraduate Program
Supported by the Braswell Philosophy Society
“Accounting, Business, and YOU”
What makes a business successful? Cash? Culture? Employees? Though these are good answers, none of these matter unless a business aligns with underlying moral values. Because of this, executives of a business need to make the right decisions and uphold the organizational and ethical values as well as theirs when it comes to hiring, firing, applying accounting treatments, etc. Only in this manner, can all customers, investors, vendors, employees be satisfied with the operation of a business.
November 17 (Talk at 5:15) – Amanda Corris – assistant professor of philosophy, Wake Forest University
“Perceiving Wildness”
Experiencing the wildness of nature can be exhilarating, awe-inspiring, or even terrifying. But how might we characterize our perceptual experiences of wildness? How do the ways in which we perceive wildness shape our cognitive, psychological, and emotional states, and in virtue of what do we perceive wildness in these ways? In this talk, I argue that a key aspect of these experiences is perceiving wildness as being self-sustaining, conveying a sense of autonomy, relationality, and perhaps even selfhood.
February 16 – Meghan Sullivan, Wilsey Family Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
Location: Wake Forest University Benson Center 401B
“Love and Arbitrariness”
Should we have reasons for our preferences about other people? This talk will argue that we should, and then will do the heavy lifting of trying to identify what such reasons could be and how we might respond to them. The talk develops a specific kind of arbitrariness problem for love and friendship. Then it looks at four prominent theories of love and reasons and shows how they fail to adequately address the arbitrariness problem. The final part will introduce you to a new theory, agapism, and sketch its main commitments. I will suggest how it solves the arbitrariness problem.
March 24 – Win-chiat Lee, professor of philosophy and Tatum Family Faculty Fellow, Wake Forest University
Location: Wake Forest University Benson Center 410
“Human Rights and Nationality as the Right to Have Rights”
Human rights are rights we can claim as human beings, regardless of nationality. Hannah Arendt is skeptical of such rights. In her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she famously coins the term “the right to have rights” to refer to what is lost by racial and ethnic minorities when they become stateless as the result of racial or ethnic purity nationality laws, exposing them to perils such as persecution, slavery, and even extermination. Can human rights be claimed only when humanity becomes a state-like political community?
March 31 – Herman Rapaport, Reynolds Professor of English, Literature, Wake Forest University, will speak on his new book on Derrida (co-sponsored talk)
Location: Wake Forest University Tribble Hall DeTamble Auditorium (A110)
April 14 – Massimo Renzo, Yeoh Professor of Politics, Philosophy & Law, Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London
Location: Wake Forest University Benson 401A
“Breaking Bad. Autonomy, Wrongdoing and Meaning in Life”
Can there be value in autonomously choosing to pursue a life of wrongdoing? Most philosophers reject this view. I will try to defend it. I will also argue that adopting this view does not have any of the counterintuitive implications one might be tempted to associate with it.
April 24 – Braswell Philosophy Conference
Location: Wake Forest University Tribble Hall DeTamble Auditorium (A110) – Cancelled
The Braswell Philosophy Society and Philosophy Department at Wake Forest University is holding their 2nd Annual Moral and Political Philosophy Conference Sunday, April 24, 2022. This event is open to the public.
The submission deadline has been pushed back to Saturday April 2nd! Any paper pertaining to philosophy across a variety of disciplines including social and political issues, ethics, religion, metaphysics, or epistemology are welcome for submission. This paper can be a piece specifically created for this conference, or a paper you have already written and feel proud of.
If you’d like to know more, all of the information about the conference and paper submissions can be found on the flyer attached below, or you can email the Braswell Vice President Kylie Yorke at .
September 16 – Nicholas Baima, assistant professor of philosophy, Florida Atlantic University
Location: Wake Forest University Benson 409
“Plato and the Impossibility of Divine Deception”
A common theological perspective holds that God does not deceive because lying is morally wrong. While Plato denies the possibility of divine deception in the Republic, his explanation does not appeal to the wrongness of lying. Indeed, Plato famously recommends the careful use of lies as a means of promoting justice. Given his endorsement of occasional lying, as well as his claim that humans should strive to emulate the gods, Plato’s suggestion that the gods never have reason to lie is puzzling. This talk will explain why I believe Platonic gods do not lie and what this says about our relationship with them and our fellow humans.
October 14 – Jonathan Dixon, visiting assistant professor of philosophy, Wake Forest University
Location: Wake Forest University Benson 409
“DIsmissing Skepticism”
The Cartesian arguments for external world skepticism are usually considered to be significant for at least two reasons: they seem to present genuine paradoxes and that providing an adequate response to these arguments would reveal something epistemically important about knowledge, justification, and/or our epistemic position to the world. In this paper I show that these arguments are not significant in either of these ways because these arguments lead to a previously unrecognized self-undermining dilemma: they either lead to a reductio ad absurdum, or to avoid this reductio the skeptic must accept that these arguments are epistemically idle – they do not provide any support for external world skepticism. Either way, these Cartesian arguments provide no epistemic support for external world skepticism and they cannot legitimately threaten or even call into question our beliefs about the external world.
November 11 – Colleen Murphy, Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law, Professor of Philosophy & Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Location: Z. Smith Reynolds Library, 4th Floor Auditorium
“Wild Transitional Justice”
Transitional justice refers to the process of dealing with widespread wrongdoing in order to transform political relationships between citizens and the state and to do justice to victims and perpetrators. Wild transitional justice refers to processes that are initiated and conducted by a variety of non-state actors including civil society, corporations, individuals, and possibly rebel groups. People’s tribunals and corporate reparations for slavery are two examples. This paper discusses (1) the features that distinguish such processes as transitional justice efforts and not vigilante justice or cancel culture; and (2) the distinctive questions of legitimate authority and efficacy such processes face.
November 18 – Tobias Flattery, part-time assistant professor of philosophy, Wake Forest University
Location: Wake Forest University Benson Center 401C
“Do Robots Deserve Moral Rights? Even if Not, Should We Act Like They Do?”
Could robots deserve moral rights? That is, could robots ever be the kinds of things that morally matter? Technology ethicists are divided over this question. Some argue that robots just aren’t the kinds of things that could ever truly deserve moral rights. Others disagree, thinking robots do, or soon will, deserve moral rights. But a third group thinks we can ignore the debate about robots deserving moral rights, and yet, they think, we still ought to treat robots as if they deserve moral rights! I’ll explain why we should resist this third group’s argument, and why reflection on their argument has implications for moral education and robot design.
February 18 – Francisco Gallegos, assistant professor of philosophy, Wake Forest University
“Affective Injustice and Fundamental Affective Goods”
Affective injustice” has been defined as injustice suffered in one’s capacity as an affective (or emotional) being. In this talk, I examine several accounts of affective injustice that have been proposed by other theorists, and I diagnose a common source of problems faced by these accounts-namely, they avoid taking a stance on what it means for our emotional lives to go well or poorly. I then advocate for a new approach to understanding affective injustice that begins by determining which “affective goods” are fundamental.
March 11 – Nicholas Colgrove, teacher-scholar post-doctoral fellow of bioethics and philosophy, Wake Forest University
“Conscientious Objection and Epistemic Humility: Humility as a Reason for Compromise?”
Conscientious objectors include medical professionals who object on moral grounds to providing some service(s) to competent patients even when those services are legal, sought-after, and deemed to be medically appropriate. Whether or not conscientious objection should be permitted is widely debated, though in these debates, the virtue (and role) of epistemic humility is often misunderstood. Contrary to what others have said, I will argue that epistemic humility provides good reason for objectors and their critics to seek compromise, where objectors are permitted to refrain from providing objectionable services, though not in an unrestricted sense.
March 25 – Dana Howard, assistant professor, Ohio State University
“Putting Parents on a Pedestal: Testimony, Admiration, and Epistemic Justice”
Parents of children with disabilities often share their stories to attest to the positive impact parenting such a child has had on their lives. It is important to give due respect to such testimony, but what does due respect entail? This presentation critically examines one particular stance towards such parental testimony which I call the ‘Pedestal Perspective’: audiences may be tempted to interpret these positive views not as an adaptive preference, but rather as an outgrowth of the parents’ extraordinary virtuous character. That is, on the basis of this admiration, audiences may disregard the lessons that parents try to impart to others.
April 8 – Stavroula Glezakos, associate professor and associate chair in philosophy, Wake Forest University and Julie Tannenbaum, associate professor in philosophy, Pomona College
“Consenting to Sex”
This talk is drawn from our book project, which examines the phenomenon of women who do not want to have sex, but who, without threat or coercion, nevertheless willingly go along with a man’s request for, or initiation of, sex. There is ample evidence that this type of encounter is common among both college and post-college aged women. According to some accounts of sexual consent, these are cases of sexual wrongdoing, because the man did not secure the woman’s consent for doing sexual activity X, either because she was not enthusiastic or because her agreement was not explicit or sufficiently unambiguous. The fact that women themselves describe these encounters as consensual has led us to take a closer look at these accounts of sexual consent, and to raise some concerns about them.
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
January 30 – R. J. Snell, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program, Eastern University
“The Terrible Covenant of Sloth: Acedia and the Hatred of Being”
Can acedia, often translated as sloth, be understood not simply as a personal vice but as deeply informing our cultural moment? Sloth is a lack of magnanimity, a failure to desire and will the fullness of our good, a perverted humility which rejects the good as making too many claims on our freedom. Rather than being magnanimous or great-souled, we’d rather be free. Oddly, sloth is less about laziness than we might think, and even our addiction to work reveals our sloth, our impatience with limits, our odd lust for power, and our addiction to autonomy and freedom.
February 20 – Christopher Shields, George N. Shuster Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
“Good Bad Better Worse”
Here is a choice for you, supremely, multiply gifted student that you are. You might choose one of two careers: given your remarkable musical talents and your love of music, you might become a concertizing cellist; but given your shrewd legal mind and your passionate commitment to justice, you might become an eminent jurist. You realize that as a practical matter, you cannot do both at the level at which you might wish to do either; and you do not wish to do both sub-optimally. Your goal in life is to maximize value overall. Which do you choose? You reasonably see your choice as enhancing one of two values: you can augment the world’s beauty or you can augment the world’s justice. We will pursue two questions about this choice: First question: is justice worth more or less than beauty? Second question: does this first question make any sense?
March 3 – Lee Braver, professor of philosophy, University of South Florida
“How to Say the Same Thing: Heidegger’s Missing Language of Being”
Heidegger argues that language contains an interpretation that leads us to think inappropriately about reality and ourselves. He creates new terms and new ways of writing in order to express his views which conflict with this traditional interpretation. One of these ways is polysemy, the simultaneous use of multiple senses of a word or phrase. This feature of language is usually condemned by philosophers as a cause of confusion, but Heidegger uses it to express phenomena that elude normal ways of using language. Being has many ways to be which are simultaneously profoundly unified, a relationship he calls “the same.” Statements that hold multiple meanings within the same words can express this (and even embody it) in a way that clear-cut statements cannot. This has important ramifications, for Heidegger uses polysemy both to express obscure ideas, and as evidence and inspiration for some of these new ways to think about language, poetry, subjectivity, history, thinking, and technology. Understanding polysemy both helps us comprehend his difficult writing and illuminates some of the phenomena his writing addresses.
March 26 – Rescheduled for September – Meghan Sullivan, Rev. John A. O’Brien Collegiate Chair and professor of philosophy, University of Notre Dame
“The Love Imperative: A Defense”
We naturally think of love as discriminatory — you love your partner more than strangers, your friends more than your adversaries. Universal love, if we can even understand it, seems only like an option for saints or hippies…not a realistic ethical framework for most of us and not a normative ideal to evaluate our preferences against. I think this partiality assumption is unmotivated, and we should take more seriously the view that we ought (morally, rationally) to love everyone with dignity. In this paper, I’ll develop a secular case for the Love Imperative based on a long-standing arbitrariness problem for our preferences over people. I will defend it from some difficult objections, indicate how it stands as a viable alternative to other prominent normative accounts of love and friendship, and discuss the practical consequences of adopting the imperative.
April 2 – Rescheduled date TBA – Leslie Francis, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Alfred C. Emery Endowed Professor of Law, University of Utah
James Steintrager Lecture in Political Philosophy and Jurisprudence
“States of Health: Federalism and Bioethics”
April 16 – Rescheduled for November – Colleen Murphy, Professor in the College of Law and the Department of Philosophy and Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
October 3 – Julian Young, Honorary Research Associate, University of Auckland and Kenan Professor of Humanities Emeritus, Wake Forest University
“Scheler, Nietzsche, Christian Love and Ressentiment”
Christian morality, according to Nietzsche, is ‘slave morality’, the product of the ‘ressentiment’ of the slaves of the Roman Empire against their oppressive masters. The Catholic phenomenologist Max Scheler, argues that while Nietzsche is wrong about the morality of ‘Christian love’ he is right about something into which Christian morality can easily degenerate which he calls ‘modern morality’. I argue that while Scheler is not entirely right about modern morality, he is not entirely wrong either.
November 7 – Michelle Maiese, professor of philosophy, Emmanuel College
“Are Psychopaths Autonomous Agents?”
Two central conditions for autonomous agency that are highlighted by many existing accounts include (1) reasons-responsivity, and (2) authenticity. However, available evidence indicates that psychopaths are inadequately responsive to reasons, and also seem to lack a set of enduring concerns that might reveal which desires and attitudes are truly theirs. This renders them impulsive and also leads them to disregard the interests and concerns of others. Drawing from the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind, I will argue that both their prudential deficits and apparent moral failings result from a disruption to autonomous agency, and that this disruption is rooted, at a deeper level, in a lack of well-developed affective framing patterns.
November 20 – Eric Schwitzgebel, professor of philosophy, University of California, Riverside
“Aiming for Moral Mediocrity”
Most people aim to be about as morally good as their peers—not especially better, not especially worse. We do not aim to be good, or non-bad, or to act permissibly rather than impermissibly, by fixed moral standards. Rather, we notice the typical behavior of our peers, then calibrate toward so-so. This is a somewhat bad way to be, but it’s not a terribly bad way to be. We are somewhat morally criticizable for having low moral ambitions. Typical arguments defending the moral acceptability of low moral ambitions—the So-What-If-I’m-Not-a-Saint Excuse, the Fairness Objection, the Happy Coincidence Defense, and the claim that you’re already in The-Most-You-Can-Do Sweet Spot—do not survive critical scrutiny.
February 14 – Heather Battaly, professor of philosophy, University of Connecticut
“Can Closed-mindedness be an Intellectual Virtue?”
What is closed-mindedness? Is it always an intellectual vice? Could it be an intellectual virtue? This paper adopts a working analysis of closed-mindedness as an unwillingness or inability to engage seriously with relevant intellectual options. It argues that closed-mindedness is often an intellectual vice. But, in epistemically hostile environments, closed-mindedness will be an intellectual virtue.
March 21 – Sam Scheffler, professor of philosophy, New York University
“Temporal Neutrality and the Bias toward the Future”
Many philosophers have held that rationality requires one to have an equal concern for all parts of one’s life. In the view of these philosophers, temporal neutrality is a requirement of rationality. Yet Derek Parfit has argued that most of us are not, in fact, temporally neutral. We exhibit a robust bias toward the future. Parfit maintains that this bias is bad for us, and that our lives would go better if we were temporally neutral. Like other neutralists, he also believes that the bias is irrational, however widespread and robust it may be. My lecture will assess these criticisms and offer a qualified defense of the bias toward the future.
April 11 – Alexander Rosenberg, R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy, Duke University
“Neuroscience and the Theory of Mind”
I argue that recent work in neuroscience shows that belief/desire psychology is completely groundless. It’s easy to see why our commitment to folk psychology (aka the theory of mind, TOM) is an evolutionary adaptation that is hard wired in human infants. Its explanatory and predictive weakness is equally easy to see. The explanation of why it is so weak is that the brain is not organized in anything like the way that the TOM requires. This is what Nobel Prize winning neuroscience reveals. I’ll sketch the details.
December 6 – Jessica Gordon-Roth, assistant professor of philosophy, University of Minnesota
“Recovering Early Modern Women Writers: Some Tensions”
Feminist work in the history of philosophy has been going on for several decades. Some scholars have focused on the ways philosophical concepts are themselves gendered. Others have recovered women writers who were well known in their own time but forgotten in ours, while still others have firmly placed into a philosophical context the works of women writers long celebrated within other disciplines in the humanities. The recovery of women writers has challenged the myth that there are no women in the history of philosophy, but it has not eradicated it. What, we may ask, is impeding our progress? In this talk, I argue that so often we treat early modern women philosophers’ texts in ways that are different from, or inconsistent with, the explicit commitments of analytic philosophy, and in so doing, we may be setting up our audiences to reject these women as philosophers, and their texts as philosophical. Moreover, this is the case despite our intention to achieve precisely the opposite effect.
September 20 – Erin Tarver, associate professor, Oxford College of Emory University
“The Moral Equivalent of Football”
There are ample reasons to be morally concerned about football. Yet from a pragmatic perspective, the declaration that football is morally indefensible is less than helpful. If we want to actually do something about it, we need a different ethical approach. In this paper, I argue that the problem Americans currently face with football is comparable to the problem that the pragmatist William James faced when attempting to advance the cause of pacifism against the intractable problem of war—and that we have much to learn from James’s response. James was prudent, I argue, to search for a “moral equivalent of war”: an alternative venue through which the virtues people associate with war can be cultivated without bloodshed. Yet, the sexism inherent in James’s specific approach to that “moral equivalent” was precisely what gave rise to football culture in America in the first place. If we are to find a moral equivalent of football, I will argue, we must remain open to the possibility that its virtues might be different in kind than the ones advocated by James or by his football-enthusiast contemporaries.
October 25 – Sonia Sikka, professor of philosophy, University of Ottawa
“Heidegger and the Question of Moral Relativism”
Heidegger’s affirmation of the historically situated character of all human thought, combined with his apparent rejection of universal or objective values, has occasioned the charge that his philosophy inevitably leads to moral relativism, offering no sure guidelines for ethical judgement and action. Such a charge is naturally made more urgent by Heidegger’s support for Nazism in the early 1930’s. I examine Heidegger’s position on this topic as a way of exploring the idea of “moral relativism” and the universalist alternatives against which it is usually defined. Agreeing with the interpretations of Julian Young and Frank Schalow, I argue that Heidegger is actually a kind of moral realist (for lack of a better term) who rejects the fact/value distinction, and I suggest that he offers a promising model for pursuing moral truth in a historically flexible and open-ended manner. Against defenders of moral universalism, moreover, I propose that no good purpose is served by insisting on timeless principles. I offer as an example the Kantian notion of persons as ends in themselves.
November 15 – Sara Protasi, assistant professor, University of Puget Sounda
“Class Envy or Righteous Indignation? Emotional Responses to Socioeconomic Inequality”
The accusation of being motivated by “class envy” is often hurled at defenders of egalitarian ideals, in both everyday politics and academic discussions. Yet, envy is still a neglected topic in political philosophy, notwithstanding the contemporary revival of political emotions. In this talk, I review the historical debate between egalitarians and conservatives: conservatives accuse egalitarians of being motivated by envy, while egalitarians deny the charge and further argue that their principles of justice can be justified on independent grounds. Both sides seem to agree that being motivated by envy is bad, and that envy can never be rationally or morally appropriate. Some recent contributions have advanced more nuanced views, such as that envy can play a legitimate motivating role to fight inequality, or can even be rationally appropriate in contexts of systemic injustice. While on the right track, these approaches rely mostly on philosophical sources and frameworks. An empirically-informed moral psychology can shed light on the nature of envy as a political emotion: I argue that certain varieties of envy can be productive and ethical reactions to inequality, but I also show that other emotions, such as resentment, indignation and admiration, might be more appropriate political tools in certain situations.
December 6 – Jessica Gordon-Roth, University of Minnesota
February 8 – Rachel Cristy, Princeton University
“Commanders and Scientific Laborers: Nietzsche on the Relationship Between Philosophy and Science”
Nietzsche’s attitude toward science in his later works is ambivalent: he makes approving remarks about its findings, rigorous methodology, and spirit of adventurousness and intellectual integrity; but he also points out its limitations, criticizes his contemporaries’ overvaluation of science, and rebukes scientists for encroaching onto the territory of philosophers. This raises the question: what does Nietzsche think the proper role of science is, and how should it interact with philosophy? I argue that, according to Nietzsche, philosophy is supposed to set goals for science. The distinctive task of philosophers is to “create values,” which involves two steps: (1) envisioning the ideals that human society should realize, and (2) turning those ideals into prescriptions for behavior and the organization of society. Philosophers need the help of scientists to proceed from step (1) to step (2), because scientists (social as well as natural) can tell them how various value systems affect the psychology and cultural achievements of their adherents. With a certain ideal for human life in mind, philosophers should delegate scientists to investigate what moral rules and social arrangements were in place when this ideal was most fully realized in the past, or to test hypotheses as to what ways of life might realize it in the future.
February 15 – Dimitris Apostolopoulos, University of Notre Dame
“From Kant to Hegel: Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenological Explanation”
It is often thought that phenomenology offers an explanation of the conditions for the possibility of conscious experience. While some commentators have stressed Merleau-Ponty’s transcendental commitments, a closer look at his view of phenomenology’s explanatory work shows that he rejects two key transcendental claims: that explanations should aim for completeness; and that they have a regressive structure. His hesitations about explanatory completeness are motivated by his sensitivity to the idealizing and transformative effects of phenomenological description. This bears directly on the philosophical adequacy of regressive models. If phenomenology is to make good on its philosophical goals, models that move from phenomena to their conditions of possibility are insufficient: explanation is better understood as a continuing critical reevaluation of the meaning of experience, and a willingness to reinvent the categories used to explain it. These commitments suggest that instead of Kant or Husserl, Merleau-Ponty is more proximate to Hegel’s view of philosophical methodology. This offers us an opportunity to rethink phenomenology’s conceptual lineage to German Idealism, and suggests the possibility of developing Merleau-Ponty’s incipient account into a systematic phenomenological alternative to existing models of explanation.
February 22 – Francisco Gallegos, Georgetown University
“Heidegger’s Hidden Theory of Moods: Overlooked insights in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics”
What lessons regarding the nature of affectivity can we extract from Heidegger’s analysis of boredom in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics? In this talk, I argue that scholars have overlooked one of the most groundbreaking insights in this text: Heidegger’s analysis of boredom articulates the framework for a general account of moods as distinct from emotions, dispositions, and other affective phenomena. According to this account, moods disclose the situational context of our ongoing experience, thereby altering our experience of time, the “emotional accessibility” of the things we encounter, and the “normative grip” of our evaluative thoughts and perceptions.
March 15 – Jonathan Jacobs, associate professor of philosophy, Saint Louis University
“Those Who Heard Said it Thundered: A Silent God or a Silenced God?”
Many people find God to be absent or hidden from them. Philosophers have used this fact as an argument for the claim that God does not exist: If God were to exist, he would want us to know that he exists and to relate to Him and so he would give us sufficient evidence for His existence and love for us. But many people fail to see any evidence of God’s existence, through no fault of their own. But I will argue that the ways in which our social environments are structured might make it difficult to hear God. As a result, it is possible that God is not silent, but rather has been silenced.
March 22 – Carol Hay, associate professor of philosophy, UMass-Lowell
“Solidarity, Intersectionality, & Resisting Oppression”
Most of us are familiar with the idea that we should respect ourselves. I’ve argued that this duty of self-respect means that people who are oppressed have a duty to resist their oppression. But what happens when this duty of self-respecting resistance comes into conflict with other duties you have—say, the duty to cultivate solidarity with other members of your oppressed group? I’ll argue that in addition to its more familiar harms, oppression can harm you by imposing certain kinds of moral dilemmas, placing its victims in unfair situations where it’s impossible to fulfill their multiple competing commitments. Oppression has been famously described as like being caught in a birdcage, as being trapped, constrained, closed in on all sides. What I want to suggest is that in some cases oppression is better thought of as akin to a rack—a torture device that rips its victims apart by pulling their limbs in opposite directions.
April 12 – Alex Madva, assistant professor, Cal Poly Pomona
“Social Psychology, Social Experience, and the Nature of Contemporary Racial Bias”
Social psychologists often describe “implicit” racial biases as entirely unconscious. However, empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, albeit in partial, inarticulate, or even distorted ways. This evidence also demonstrates that different ways of interpreting implicit biases have radically different effects on how individuals think, feel, and act. This talk sketches how context, individual differences, and structural power relations influence the interpretation and effects of implicit bias, and explores our individual and collective responsibility for interpreting our biases as justly and accurately as possible. Along the way, I’ll also address questions about the cognitive structure of implicit biases and recent criticisms about popular ways of measuring them.
Hubert Dreyfus Memorial Conference – Sept. 22-24
All sessions will be held in Tribble Hall DeTamble Auditorium and open to the public.
Friday, Sept. 22
5:00-7:00 p.m. – Wayne Martin (Essex): ‘Fake News? Why is Dan Dennett Telling the Media that He Refuted Bert Dreyfus on AI?’ (Co-authored with Dylan Williams) Commentator: Taylor Carman (Barnard) Chair: Julian Young (Wake Forest)
In an interview with the BBC, broadcast on 4 April, 2017, Daniel Dennett told BBC reporter Jim Al-Khalili that he had, in his very first published paper, refuted Hubert Dreyfus’s claims about the limits of Artificial Intelligence, and that his refutation was subsequently vindicated by, inter alia, the 1997 victory of Deep Blue over Gary Kasparov. It was not the first time that Dennett had made such a claim. He also made it in a joint interview with Dreyfus on The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour in 1997, following the historic match. At that time, Bert insisted that Dennett was flatly misrepresenting his position. I propose to review the record to try to determine who was right—or if perhaps they were both wrong. What was the logical form of Bert’s argument in What Computers Can’t Do, and in his earlier paper on “Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence”? What was Dennett’s refutation in that early paper? And what did Dreyfus actually say about chess?
Saturday, Sept. 23
8:30-10:00 a.m. – David Cerbone (West Virginia) ‘Ground, Background, and Rough Ground: Dreyfus, Wittgenstein, and Phenomenology’ Commentator: Joseph Schear (Oxford) Chair: B Scot Rousse (Pluralistic Networks/Berkeley)
This paper critically examines Dreyfus’s preliminary and fundamental claims about our background understanding of being. Dreyfus ascribes to the background an explanatory role in our ability to make sense of things, while also characterizing it as largely inaccessible to reflective comprehension. Drawing primarily on some of Wittgenstein’s ideas about explanation and understanding, I offer a more deflationary conception of the background whose residual sense of mystery is largely an artefact of philosophically problematic ways of thinking about meaning.
10:15-11:45 a.m. – Eric Kaplan (CBS/The Big Bang Theory) ‘Faith and Existential Humorism as Contrasting Approaches to Life’ Commentator: B Scot Rousse (Pluralistic Networks/Berkeley) Chair: Edward Pile (Essex)
In this paper I look at Kierkegaard’s approach to comedy and faith as ways of living life as he presents them in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Taking Dreyfus’s account of Religiousness B as a starting out point, I look at Kierkegaard’s somewhat puzzling accounts of what he calls “existential humorism”. In a move that has attracted little notice Kierkegaard claims that existential humorism is the highest sphere of human existence except for Religiousness B. After contrasting Kierkegaard’s view of humor and irony with that of Jonathan Lear who, incorrectly in my view, takes Kierkegaard as an ally, I discuss Kierkegaard’s view of the “warrant” of comedy. I then lay out his argument for why existential humorism is the penultimate sphere of existence — that is, why it gets as close to faith as it is possible to go, but ultimately doesn’t succeed. This discussion turns out to be important to understanding what exactly Religiousness B is, how it works, and whether is possible to express it.
2:15 – 3:45 p.m. – Charles Spinosa (Vision Consulting) ‘Coping with Time in Organizations: Insights from Heidegger’ Commentator: Bill Blattner (Georgetown) Chair: Iain Thomson (New Mexico)
Conceptions of time and practices for managing time play an important role in both popular management literature and process organization studies. In popular literature, managers have too little time. In organization studies, managers have multiple time-reckoning practices and experiences of time. In response, we explicate and defend Heidegger’s account of primordial time to show the inauthenticity of living with either too little time or many alternative temporal structurings. People are true to primordial (kairotic) time when they face their existential death—the emerging practices that will make their lives meaningless—accept the past emotions that well up on that account and adjust themselves to accept the past and avoid existential death. They then do what is essential. Alternatively, taking over other temporal structurings amounts to living as another kind of self-interpreting being—an organization or a tribe—and is inauthentic. An episode from Steve Jobs’s career illustrates authentic Heideggerian time management.
4:00 – 5:30 p.m. – Iain Thomson (New Mexico) ‘Heidegger on Death’
Commentator: Stephan Käufer (Franklin and Marshall) Chair: Charles Taylor (McGill)
I present a stream-lined and simplified version of the view I developed in “Death and Demise” for Wrathall’s Cambridge Companion to Being and Time. Explaining Heidegger’s phenomenology of death, I both distinguish it from and connect it to ordinary demise, and say a bit about how the view developed in Heidegger’s thinking.
5:45 – 7:15 p.m. – Mark Wrathall (Oxford) and Patrick Londen (Riverside) ‘Maximal Grip: Dreyfusian Phenomenology and the Space of Motivations’ Chair: David Cerbone (West Virginia)
We want to talk about how Bert Dreyfus shaped the development of a existential phenomenology in the English-speaking world, and we will focus on his appropriation of the idea of a maximal grip in Merleau-Ponty into a central insight into the structure of human existence.
Sunday Sept. 24
8:30 – 10:00 a.m. – Julian Young (Wake Forest) ‘Heidegger, Critical Theory, and the Critique of Technology’ Chair: John Richardson (NYU)
Superficially, there is a strong similarity between the critique of technology provided by Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas, on the one hand, and Heidegger on the other. The problem of technology, these critical theorists argue, is that the social technology of industrialized modernity has become so all-embracing as to imprison us in, as Weber called it, an ‘iron cage.’ This has reversed the master-slave relation between human being and machine. We are compelled to serve the interests of the economic machine rather than the machine serving ours. The task, then, is to re-establish human freedom by reversing the reversal.
Similarly, it seems, Heidegger argues that the effect of modern technology is to reduce us to ‘human resource’ and thereby deprive us of freedom. Whereas, however, the critical theorists’ ‘freedom’ is clearly ‘freedom of the will,’ Heidegger insists that the important freedom that we have lost has nothing to do with the will. It is, rather, freedom from the one-dimensionality of our technological disclosure of reality, freedom to stand in ‘the free.’ To become fully free in this sense is to become ‘open’ to the ‘wonder that a world worlds, that there is something rather than nothing, that there are things, and we are in their midst.’ To stand in the light of such wonder is, says Heidegger, to become the ‘guardian’ of all natural beings. Critical theory, by contrast, only cares about human beings. It is no accident that no environmental ethics has arisen from either Marxist or neo-Marxist thought.
10:15 – 11:45 a.m. – Taylor Carman (Barnard) ‘Husserl’s Internalism’ Commentator: Charles Siewert (Rice) Chair: Mark Wrathall (Oxford)
According to many scholars, especially those in the tradition of Hubert Dreyfus (myself included), Husserl was a Cartesian thinker committed to (a kind of) internalism, while Heidegger endorsed (a kind of) externalism. Steven Crowell, A. D. Smith, and Dan Zahavi have recently argued, on the contrary, that Husserl was no more an internalist than Heidegger and that Being and Time is best read as an extension or expansion rather than a wholesale repudiation of Husserl’s phenomenological project. Crowell, Smith, and Zahavi can argue as they do only by ignoring glaring textual evidence against their readings of Husserl, misunderstanding basic principles of Husserl’s phenomenology, and finally missing what is even at issue in characterizing Husserl’s theory as (a kind of) internalism. Not surprisingly, they fail to see what is innovative and important in Heidegger’s critique of Husserl.
October 26 – John Bowlin, Robert L. Stuart Professor of Philosophy and Christian Ethics, Princeton Theological Seminary
“Human Dignity and Freedom from Domination: a Thomistic Sketch”
Among Christian theologians and ethicists, human rights and human dignity have fallen on hard times. Talk of human rights, they say, encourages unwarranted self-regard. Talk of human dignity tends to be either too abstract and thus morally unhelpful or too determinate and thus exclusionary.
In this paper, I address these worries by considering Aquinas’s account of the natural law, of our status as persons subject to divine rule, of the fact that we are citizens to a sovereign not slaves to master. It’s this status—citizens of a divine commonwealth—that, for Thomas, accounts for our shared human dignity and gives it normative punch. By virtue of this political status, this dignity, we have a basic right not to be dominated, a right not to be subject to the arbitrary power of another. I conclude by highlighting the relevance of Thomas’s account for contemporary discourses of human dignity and human rights, both religious and secular.
November 2 – Angela Potochnik, associate professor, University of Cincinnati
“Idealization and the Aims of Science”
Idealizations are assumptions employed without regard to whether they are true and often with full knowledge that they are false. In this talk, I will outline the views set forth in my brand new book of the same name. I first motivate a strong view of idealizations’ centrality to science and diagnose the reason for that centrality. Then I reconsider the aims of science in light of idealization’s centrality. On the account I develop, science does not pursue truth directly, but instead aims to support human cognitive and practical ends. This has implications for philosophical accounts of scientific explanation, how we should think about the relationships among different fields of science, how social and political values influence science, and the nature of scientific knowledge.
November 30 – Anja Jauernig, associate professor of Philosophy, New York University
“Levels of Reality or How to be an Idealist and a Realist at the Same Time ”
Kant calls his ontological theory ‘transcendental idealism’, and presents as one of its central tenets that empirical objects, such as tables and cats, are not things in themselves but mere appearances. But he also expresses his allegiance to what he calls ‘empirical realism’, and asserts that empirical objects are empirically real. Some readers take this to show that by classifying empirical objects as transcendentally ideal Kant cannot mean that they are fully mind-dependent, or that their existence is mind-dependent, in a way comparable to Berkeley’s view. Rather, Kant’s idealism must be weaker, and should be understood as concerning only certain properties of empirical objects, which are otherwise mind-independent. On my view, this ‘tame’ reading of Kant is untenable; he is committed to a strong form of idealism, according to which empirical objects are mind-dependent with respect to all of their properties as well as their existence. The project for this talk is to explain how it is possible for Kant to be both an idealist in this strong sense and an empirical realist at the same time. The key to solving this puzzle lies in recognizing that he is committed to a tiered ontology that comprises different levels of reality.
Hubert Dreyfus Memorial Conference – Sept. 22-24
All sessions will be held in Tribble Hall DeTamble Auditorium and open to the public.
Friday, Sept. 22
5:00-7:00 p.m. – Wayne Martin (Essex): ‘Fake News? Why is Dan Dennett Telling the Media that He Refuted Bert Dreyfus on AI?’ (Co-authored with Dylan Williams) Commentator: Taylor Carman (Barnard) Chair: Julian Young (Wake Forest)
In an interview with the BBC, broadcast on 4 April, 2017, Daniel Dennett told BBC reporter Jim Al-Khalili that he had, in his very first published paper, refuted Hubert Dreyfus’s claims about the limits of Artificial Intelligence, and that his refutation was subsequently vindicated by, inter alia, the 1997 victory of Deep Blue over Gary Kasparov. It was not the first time that Dennett had made such a claim. He also made it in a joint interview with Dreyfus on The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour in 1997, following the historic match. At that time, Bert insisted that Dennett was flatly misrepresenting his position. I propose to review the record to try to determine who was right—or if perhaps they were both wrong. What was the logical form of Bert’s argument in What Computers Can’t Do, and in his earlier paper on “Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence”? What was Dennett’s refutation in that early paper? And what did Dreyfus actually say about chess?
Saturday, Sept. 23
8:30-10:00 a.m. – David Cerbone (West Virginia) ‘Ground, Background, and Rough Ground: Dreyfus, Wittgenstein, and Phenomenology’ Commentator: Joseph Schear (Oxford) Chair: B Scot Rousse (Pluralistic Networks/Berkeley)
This paper critically examines Dreyfus’s preliminary and fundamental claims about our background understanding of being. Dreyfus ascribes to the background an explanatory role in our ability to make sense of things, while also characterizing it as largely inaccessible to reflective comprehension. Drawing primarily on some of Wittgenstein’s ideas about explanation and understanding, I offer a more deflationary conception of the background whose residual sense of mystery is largely an artefact of philosophically problematic ways of thinking about meaning.
10:15-11:45 a.m. – Eric Kaplan (CBS/The Big Bang Theory) ‘Faith and Existential Humorism as Contrasting Approaches to Life’ Commentator: B Scot Rousse (Pluralistic Networks/Berkeley) Chair: Edward Pile (Essex)
In this paper I look at Kierkegaard’s approach to comedy and faith as ways of living life as he presents them in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Taking Dreyfus’s account of Religiousness B as a starting out point, I look at Kierkegaard’s somewhat puzzling accounts of what he calls “existential humorism”. In a move that has attracted little notice Kierkegaard claims that existential humorism is the highest sphere of human existence except for Religiousness B. After contrasting Kierkegaard’s view of humor and irony with that of Jonathan Lear who, incorrectly in my view, takes Kierkegaard as an ally, I discuss Kierkegaard’s view of the “warrant” of comedy. I then lay out his argument for why existential humorism is the penultimate sphere of existence — that is, why it gets as close to faith as it is possible to go, but ultimately doesn’t succeed. This discussion turns out to be important to understanding what exactly Religiousness B is, how it works, and whether is possible to express it.
2:15 – 3:45 p.m. – Charles Spinosa (Vision Consulting) ‘Coping with Time in Organizations: Insights from Heidegger’ Commentator: Bill Blattner (Georgetown) Chair: Iain Thomson (New Mexico)
Conceptions of time and practices for managing time play an important role in both popular management literature and process organization studies. In popular literature, managers have too little time. In organization studies, managers have multiple time-reckoning practices and experiences of time. In response, we explicate and defend Heidegger’s account of primordial time to show the inauthenticity of living with either too little time or many alternative temporal structurings. People are true to primordial (kairotic) time when they face their existential death—the emerging practices that will make their lives meaningless—accept the past emotions that well up on that account and adjust themselves to accept the past and avoid existential death. They then do what is essential. Alternatively, taking over other temporal structurings amounts to living as another kind of self-interpreting being—an organization or a tribe—and is inauthentic. An episode from Steve Jobs’s career illustrates authentic Heideggerian time management.
4:00 – 5:30 p.m. – Iain Thomson (New Mexico) ‘Heidegger on Death’
Commentator: Stephan Käufer (Franklin and Marshall) Chair: Charles Taylor (McGill)
I present a stream-lined and simplified version of the view I developed in “Death and Demise” for Wrathall’s Cambridge Companion to Being and Time. Explaining Heidegger’s phenomenology of death, I both distinguish it from and connect it to ordinary demise, and say a bit about how the view developed in Heidegger’s thinking.
5:45 – 7:15 p.m. – Mark Wrathall (Oxford) and Patrick Londen (Riverside) ‘Maximal Grip: Dreyfusian Phenomenology and the Space of Motivations’ Chair: David Cerbone (West Virginia)
We want to talk about how Bert Dreyfus shaped the development of a existential phenomenology in the English-speaking world, and we will focus on his appropriation of the idea of a maximal grip in Merleau-Ponty into a central insight into the structure of human existence.
Sunday Sept. 24
8:30 – 10:00 a.m. – Julian Young (Wake Forest) ‘Heidegger, Critical Theory, and the Critique of Technology’ Chair: John Richardson (NYU)
Superficially, there is a strong similarity between the critique of technology provided by Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas, on the one hand, and Heidegger on the other. The problem of technology, these critical theorists argue, is that the social technology of industrialized modernity has become so all-embracing as to imprison us in, as Weber called it, an ‘iron cage.’ This has reversed the master-slave relation between human being and machine. We are compelled to serve the interests of the economic machine rather than the machine serving ours. The task, then, is to re-establish human freedom by reversing the reversal.
Similarly, it seems, Heidegger argues that the effect of modern technology is to reduce us to ‘human resource’ and thereby deprive us of freedom. Whereas, however, the critical theorists’ ‘freedom’ is clearly ‘freedom of the will,’ Heidegger insists that the important freedom that we have lost has nothing to do with the will. It is, rather, freedom from the one-dimensionality of our technological disclosure of reality, freedom to stand in ‘the free.’ To become fully free in this sense is to become ‘open’ to the ‘wonder that a world worlds, that there is something rather than nothing, that there are things, and we are in their midst.’ To stand in the light of such wonder is, says Heidegger, to become the ‘guardian’ of all natural beings. Critical theory, by contrast, only cares about human beings. It is no accident that no environmental ethics has arisen from either Marxist or neo-Marxist thought.
10:15 – 11:45 a.m. – Taylor Carman (Barnard) ‘Husserl’s Internalism’ Commentator: Charles Siewert (Rice) Chair: Mark Wrathall (Oxford)
According to many scholars, especially those in the tradition of Hubert Dreyfus (myself included), Husserl was a Cartesian thinker committed to (a kind of) internalism, while Heidegger endorsed (a kind of) externalism. Steven Crowell, A. D. Smith, and Dan Zahavi have recently argued, on the contrary, that Husserl was no more an internalist than Heidegger and that Being and Time is best read as an extension or expansion rather than a wholesale repudiation of Husserl’s phenomenological project. Crowell, Smith, and Zahavi can argue as they do only by ignoring glaring textual evidence against their readings of Husserl, misunderstanding basic principles of Husserl’s phenomenology, and finally missing what is even at issue in characterizing Husserl’s theory as (a kind of) internalism. Not surprisingly, they fail to see what is innovative and important in Heidegger’s critique of Husserl.
October 26 – John Bowlin, Robert L. Stuart Professor of Philosophy and Christian Ethics, Princeton Theological Seminary
“Human Dignity and Freedom from Domination: a Thomistic Sketch”
Among Christian theologians and ethicists, human rights and human dignity have fallen on hard times. Talk of human rights, they say, encourages unwarranted self-regard. Talk of human dignity tends to be either too abstract and thus morally unhelpful or too determinate and thus exclusionary.
In this paper, I address these worries by considering Aquinas’s account of the natural law, of our status as persons subject to divine rule, of the fact that we are citizens to a sovereign not slaves to master. It’s this status—citizens of a divine commonwealth—that, for Thomas, accounts for our shared human dignity and gives it normative punch. By virtue of this political status, this dignity, we have a basic right not to be dominated, a right not to be subject to the arbitrary power of another. I conclude by highlighting the relevance of Thomas’s account for contemporary discourses of human dignity and human rights, both religious and secular.
November 2 – Angela Potochnik, associate professor, University of Cincinnati
“Idealization and the Aims of Science”
Idealizations are assumptions employed without regard to whether they are true and often with full knowledge that they are false. In this talk, I will outline the views set forth in my brand new book of the same name. I first motivate a strong view of idealizations’ centrality to science and diagnose the reason for that centrality. Then I reconsider the aims of science in light of idealization’s centrality. On the account I develop, science does not pursue truth directly, but instead aims to support human cognitive and practical ends. This has implications for philosophical accounts of scientific explanation, how we should think about the relationships among different fields of science, how social and political values influence science, and the nature of scientific knowledge.
November 30 – Anja Jauernig, associate professor of Philosophy, New York University
“Levels of Reality or How to be an Idealist and a Realist at the Same Time ”
Kant calls his ontological theory ‘transcendental idealism’, and presents as one of its central tenets that empirical objects, such as tables and cats, are not things in themselves but mere appearances. But he also expresses his allegiance to what he calls ‘empirical realism’, and asserts that empirical objects are empirically real. Some readers take this to show that by classifying empirical objects as transcendentally ideal Kant cannot mean that they are fully mind-dependent, or that their existence is mind-dependent, in a way comparable to Berkeley’s view. Rather, Kant’s idealism must be weaker, and should be understood as concerning only certain properties of empirical objects, which are otherwise mind-independent. On my view, this ‘tame’ reading of Kant is untenable; he is committed to a strong form of idealism, according to which empirical objects are mind-dependent with respect to all of their properties as well as their existence. The project for this talk is to explain how it is possible for Kant to be both an idealist in this strong sense and an empirical realist at the same time. The key to solving this puzzle lies in recognizing that he is committed to a tiered ontology that comprises different levels of reality.
October 13 – Marija Jankovic, Assistant Professor of Davidson College
Paper Title: “Knowledge and Linguistic Communication”
Here is common view about communication. For a speaker and an audience to successfully communicate, it is not enough for the audience to have a true belief about what the speaker means. For example, if Berit says in German “Ich bin eine Krankenschwester”, and I simply guess (without knowing any German) that she said that she is a female nurse, though I do get things right, I do not understand Berit. Understanding requires something more than just guessing what people mean. This additional element is sometimes thought to be common knowledge of what the speaker means (and, therefore, of her intentions). But a view that postulates such strong knowledge requirements seems to quickly run into trouble. For it may seem implausible that we should need to know of subtle internal states of speakers in order to successfully communicate with them.
My goal in this paper is to argue against a strong knowledge requirement on communicative success. I agree that something more than just getting things right is required for successful communication. But I claim that this additional element is not to be found in the domain of belief or knowledge. Instead, we should look for it in the domain of intention. I propose that communication is a collective intentional action type — a type of action that, like dancing the tango or playing basketball, has to be performed by a group of agents acting together intentionally. For that to happen, intentions of the agents have to be connected in the right way. This interlocking, I will suggest, is what is required for success in communication in addition to getting the correct message across.
October 15 – “North Carolina House Bill 2: Privacy or Discrimination?” Public Forum
1:45-3:15 p.m. in Carswell 111 Annenberg Forum
AMINTAPHIL (American Section of the International Association of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy) will host a public forum. Panelists are: Leslie Francis (Philosophy and Law, University of Utah and AMINTAPHIL), Kristina Gupta (WGS, Wake Forest), Harold Lloyd (Law, Wake Forest), and Win-chiat Lee (Philosophy, Wake Forest, and AMINTAPHIL).
This event is co-sponsored by Wake Forest University Department of Philosophy, Department of Woman, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and School of Law.
October 27 – Samuel Freeman, Avalon Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Philosophy and Law, University of Pennsylvania
Paper Title: “Three Liberalisms: Classical Liberalism, Libertarianism & the High Liberal Tradition”
Liberalism is the reigning political philosophy of Western democratic societies. Freedom and equality are the fundamental liberal values. The major political parties and their members, including conservatives, endorse freedom and equality, and the institutions that support them: constitutional rights and liberties, equality of opportunity, private property, a free market economy, and government’s role in providing public goods. But political parties interpret these values and institutions differently. This colloquium compares the three different traditions of liberal thought that inform our understanding of basic liberal values and institutions.
November 10 – Gary Rosenkrantz, Professor and Department Head of Philosophy at University of North Carolina – Greensboro
According to our folk-ontology, natural beings like carbon-based living organisms and compound solids are substantial individuals. Some philosophers deny the reality of compound substances other than living organisms on the ground that they lack the requisite compositional unity. I defend the ontological thesis that compound solids, liquids, gases, and plasmas are substantial individuals. As part of this defense, I elucidate the relations that unite the parts of compound particulars of the foregoing sorts. In my view, the relations in question are causal or lawful in nature.
February 11 – Kate Withy, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University
“The Self-Concealing of Being”
Martin Heidegger says a lot of mysterious things about being – and in particular about being’s mysteriousness. Readers of his work tend to stick with Heidegger’s own vocabulary, saying that being is intrinsically self-concealing, but they do not generally try to say what this really means or why it should be so. I will remedy this by explaining what it means to say that being conceals itself, and I will offer a reason for thinking that being does indeed conceal itself.
February 25 – L. A. Paul, Professor of Philosophy at UNC-Chapel Hill
Paper Title: “Preference Capture”
Big life decisions are naturally framed using the first personal point of view, where we mentally model or imaginatively project different future lived experiences. Such decisions are often understood as depending on judgments about what these subjective futures will be like for us and for those around us. I will explore the way that making transformative decisions from this perspective can put us in the position of regarding our future selves as irrational, or at least, as epistemically and psychologically alien to our current perspective.
March 3 – Marc Lange, Theda Perdue Distinguished Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill
Paper Title: “What is Explanation in Mathematics?”
There has long appeared to be a distinction in mathematical practice between proofs that explain why some theorem holds and proofs that merely prove some theorem without giving any reason why it holds. No one really understands the grounds of this (apparent) distinction! I will offer some examples and try to make some progress toward understanding it. No background (mathematical, philosophical, or otherwise) will be presupposed; the talk will give us an opportunity to brainstorm together. Topics that will arise include unification in mathematics, simplicity, mathematically natural properties, and mathematical coincidences.
March 24 – Kwong-Loi Shun, Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Berkeley
Paper Title: “Ethics without Forgiveness”
In the Confucian ethical tradition, there is no concept of forgiveness, understood as a process of overcoming resentment or other forms of first personal anger through active efforts directed to altering the way one views and feels about the offender, the agent of wrongful injury of which one is the victim. What is it like to have an ethical view that does not work with a concept of forgiveness, and what are the grounds for such an ethical view?
The paper begins by arguing against ethical views that idealize forgiveness in the sense of regarding the readiness to forgive, in general or only under certain conditions, as a virtue. It then presents an ethical view that does not idealize forgiveness and that is grounded in certain ideas central to Confucian thought. On this ethical view, the virtuous person is above resentment and has no need to forgive; for someone less than virtuous and subject to sentiments of resentment, such sentiments are more appropriately addressed through a process of psychological inner-management than through forgiveness. While the main body of the discussion will be based primarily on philosophical considerations, the paper will conclude with a discussion of the Confucian roots of its main ideas.
April 7 – T.M. Scanlon, Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity at Harvard University
Paper Title: “Tolerance and Immigration”
Professor T. M. Scanlon is the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is one of the most important contemporary philosophers working in the areas of moral and political philosophy. In additional to the contractualist moral theory expounded in his major work, What We Owe to Each Other, Professor Scanlon is also well-known for his work in a wide range of topics including freedom of expression, the nature of rights, conceptions of welfare, theories of justice, tolerance, contract, responsibility and realism about reasons. Professor Scanlon has lectured at many universities all over the world. He delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 2010. In 1993 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (popularly known as “the Genius Grant”).
April 19 – Robert Audi, John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy, Notre Dame University
“Toward a Theory of Deep Disagreement: Structure, Elements, and Paths to Resolution”
Disagreement is not necessarily a bad thing, but in the contemporary world it is frequently bitter and too often has bad consequences. Political and religious disagreements—though not the only important kinds—are pervasive and often violent. The kind of disagreement we most often find is more than a manifestation of pluralism. Some of the deep disagreements found in the contemporary world often bespeak not just difference in outlook and commitment but also fragmentation. What might philosophical reflection contribute to finding a way to reduce disagreement where it threatens civic harmony? This paper attempts to make such a contribution, particularly for cases in which disagreement concerns religion in relation to law-making. It does this by clarifying the nature of disagreement itself, identifying the main elements determining depth of disagreement, presenting a sharable moral framework as potential common ground in disagreements, and articulating a principle of tolerance for cases in which disagreement cannot be resolved.
October 8 – Win-chiat Lee, Professor of Philosophy and Chair, Wake Forest University
“Anarchy, World State and International Criminal Law”
International criminal law (ICL) is enforced through the exercise of jurisdiction that lacks political authority. In that sense it is anarchic. However, it does not follow that ICL is illegitimate. The legitimacy of the universal jurisdiction exercised in ICL is based on the legitimacy of vigilantism where there is no relevant legitimate political authority to address problems of impunity. Nor is ICL necessarily anarchic in the sense of being disorderly. Legitimate vigilantism is subject to ethical constraints that explain certain orderly features of international criminal law. Vigilantism, even when practiced within ethical bounds, still creates problems of injustice. That is what justifies the existence of the state and its exercise of political authority to begin with. However, we cannot overcome the problems of possible injustice associated with ICL by entering into a world state that has political authority over all of the states and all of humanity.
October 22 – Agnes Callard, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago
“Can You Choose Who To Be?”
How do we acquire our deepest commitments, values, and ideals? On the one hand, it seems we cannot rationally choose our new values. For what could be the basis for such a choice? If the answer is that we had a prior commitment to a value entailing the new one, then the question simply gets pushed back: how did we acquire that commitment? If the choice has no rational basis, then it does not seem that the acquisition of the value is truly an expression of our agency. And this is equivalent to saying that our values are something that happen to us rather than the products of anything that we do. In this talk, I defend the view that we do indeed have a hand in answering the question as to what things in the world are important to us; and that our answers need not be, and typically are not, arbitrary or random. I will show this can be done without inviting a regress as to how we arrived at the materials for generating the answers we give.
November 5 – Amie Thomasson, Professor of Philosophy and Cooper Fellow at the University of Miami
“What Can We Do, When We Do Metaphysics?”
November 12 – Sharon Street, Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University
“Constructivism in Ethics and the Problem of Attachment and Loss”
February 12 – Ann Cudd, University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Kansas
“What is Equality in Higher Education?” — CANCELLED
March 26 – Jon Garthoff, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Tennessee
“Animal Punishment”
An account of punishment must confront the fact that we punish creatures, such as dogs and one-year-old children, who lack the capacities of reflection and critical reason. These are ordinary instances of punishment, not deviant cases or mere metaphors. In this essay I distinguish three categories of animals by their respective mental capacities and I discuss the different types of punishment appropriate for animals of each category.
This exercise has multiple purposes. One is to illuminate the punishment of animals, a neglected domain of ethics. A second purpose is to illuminate each type of punishment through comparison and contrast with the others. This forestalls the over intellectualization of punishment in general due to viewing humans as the only paradigm and forestalls the under intellectualization of human punishment due to making no essential reference to their critically rational capacities. A third purpose is to argue that these observations support a unified account of human punishment, an account where the three traditional justifications for punishment – retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation – are united by a single overarching purpose.
April 9 – Susanna Siegel, Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University (Cancelled)
“Salience Norms”
We evaluate newspapers according to two dimensions: whether their stories are well-researched and accurate (did the reporter check their facts?), and which stories they choose to print in the first place (are the stories relevant to the public? newsworthy? important?). Could an analogous distinction apply to the representational states in an individual’s mind? We use epistemic norms to evaluate beliefs according to whether they are true and well-founded.
But discussions of which thoughts should populate the mind in the first place are far less common in epistemology. I discuss whether there are norms of salience that apply to the mind, and if so, what kinds of norms these might be.
April 23 – Nicholas Smith, Instructor in Philosophy, Wake Forest University
Paper Title: “Rightness as Overall Virtuousness”
The target-centered account of right action, a creation of Christine Swanton, is, for at least three reasons, a highly promising candidate for the most plausible virtue-ethical account of right action. The target-centered account claims that an action is right just in case it is overall virtuous and that an action’s hitting the target of a virtue contributes to its being overall virtuous while an action’s missing the target of a virtue contributes to its being non-overall-virtuous. In this paper, I focus on the target-centered account’s claim that an action is right just in case it is overall virtuous – the claim that makes the target-centered account a virtue-ethical account of right action but that can be consistently denied by virtue ethicists. I argue that this claim is attractive by showing both that it is well-motivated and that it can be successfully defended from important objections.
January 23 – Our first talk of the semester, “An Argument for Open Borders,” will be presented by Professor Chris Freiman of William and Mary. Professor Freiman will be a guest of our Philosophy Club, who chose him as their speaker of the year. An event not to be missed!
Abstract: I argue that, all else equal, immigration restriction and deportation are prima facie wrongs of the same magnitude and for the same reason. Consequently, there is an equal presumption against both. I then argue that many of the principles invoked to defeat this presumption and thus to justify immigration restriction also justify the deportation of at least some citizens and nationals. Given that deporting these citizens and nationals on the basis of the proposed principles is intuitively impermissible, we should reject the principles and, in turn, immigration restriction.
February 6 – Rebecca Kukla, Georgetown University. “Medicalization, ‘Normal Function’, and the Definition of Health”
Abstract: The concept of health is surprisingly difficult to define in a rigorous and satisfying way. I argue that biologically based ‘normal function’ accounts and thoroughgoing social constructionist accounts of health are both deeply unsatisfying, particularly if we want the concept of health to play a substantial role in policy and social justice projects. I propose what I call an ‘institutional’ definition of health, and argue that it retains the objectivity that is appealing in biological accounts, along with the social constructionists’ important insight that health and disease are partially constituted by social context and by contingent, historical processes of medicalization.
February 20 – Steve Nadler, University of Wisconsin. “Why Was Spinoza Excommunicated?”
Abstract: In July of 1656, the twenty-three year old Baruch de Spinoza received the harshest writ of herem (excommunication) ever issued by the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish congregation. Full of vitriol and curses, the ban was final; Spinoza never reconciled with his community. But why was Spinoza punished with such extreme prejudice? The ban document mentions only his “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds”, without telling us what exactly they are. Spinoza had not yet published anything. So there is a bit of a mystery here. On the other hand, for anyone familiar with his mature philosophical treatises, there really can be no mystery as to why one of history’s most original and radical thinkers was ostracized by Amsterdam’s rabbis and the Jewish community’s lay leaders. In this talk, we will look at some of the main theses of Spinoza’s philosophy, in order to get a better sense of what so troubled his contemporaries.
March 20 – Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame. “Aesthetics as a Foil for Ethics: Generality and Justification in Moral and Aesthetic Judgment”
Abstract: Moral properties such as being wrong or being obligatory are not brute; they are based on other kinds of properties, such as (for acts) being a lie or being promised. Aesthetic properties such as being graceful or being beautiful are similar to moral properties in being based on other kinds of properties, but they are different in that, for aesthetic cases, it may be impossible to specify just what these grounding properties are. Does any single property ground poetic beauty in the way promising to do something grounds obligation to do it?
If aesthetic properties do differ from moral properties in this way, may we conclude that, although ethics is like aesthetics in being a realm of intuitive and perceptual knowledge–or at least intuitive and perceptual sensitivity–it is unlike aesthetics in being a realm of rules and guiding principles that connect grounding properties with aesthetic properties? Are there any such generalities in aesthetics, or even aesthetic generalities connecting aesthetic properties with other aesthetic properties? If there are, how much like or unlike rules and principles in ethics are they?
This presentation will explore all these questions in the light of examples from the arts, with poetry as the main case study.
March 27 – Kieran Setiya, University of Pittsburgh. “Does Moral Theory Corrupt Youth?”
Abstract: Moral theory corrupts the youth. The epistemic assumptions of moral theory deprive us of resources needed to resist the challenge of moral disagreement, which its practice at the same time makes vivid. The talk concludes by sketching a kind of epistemology that could respond to disagreement without skepticism: one in which the fundamental standards of justification for moral belief are biased towards the truth.
April 3 – Steve Grimm, Fordham University. “What Is Wisdom?”
Abstract: What is it that makes someone wise, or one person wiser than another? I try to explain what it is that the wise person knows in a way that sheds light on these questions. I also try to explain why contemporary philosophers have had so little to say about wisdom, in contrast to their ancient and medieval predecessors.
April 10 – Edward Knippers, http://www.edwardknippers.com
Description: Knippers is a well known representational artist who often paints Biblical scenes. His work has sometimes been controversial because these scenes regularly depict the biblical characters in the nude. Indeed, his work has been called sacrilegious by some religious observers. On the other hand, many critics find the depiction of traditional Christian themes outdated or otherwise objectionable. In this discussion, we will talk with Mr. Knippers about art, sacrilege, modernism, interpretation, and other ideas central to both art and philosophy.
April 25 – The talk by Professor Verity Harte of Yale University, has been canceled.
January 23 – Our first talk of the semester, “An Argument for Open Borders,” will be presented by Professor Chris Freiman of William and Mary. Professor Freiman will be a guest of our Philosophy Club, who chose him as their speaker of the year. An event not to be missed!
Abstract: I argue that, all else equal, immigration restriction and deportation are prima facie wrongs of the same magnitude and for the same reason. Consequently, there is an equal presumption against both. I then argue that many of the principles invoked to defeat this presumption and thus to justify immigration restriction also justify the deportation of at least some citizens and nationals. Given that deporting these citizens and nationals on the basis of the proposed principles is intuitively impermissible, we should reject the principles and, in turn, immigration restriction.
February 6 – Rebecca Kukla, Georgetown University. “Medicalization, ‘Normal Function’, and the Definition of Health”
Abstract: The concept of health is surprisingly difficult to define in a rigorous and satisfying way. I argue that biologically based ‘normal function’ accounts and thoroughgoing social constructionist accounts of health are both deeply unsatisfying, particularly if we want the concept of health to play a substantial role in policy and social justice projects. I propose what I call an ‘institutional’ definition of health, and argue that it retains the objectivity that is appealing in biological accounts, along with the social constructionists’ important insight that health and disease are partially constituted by social context and by contingent, historical processes of medicalization.
February 20 – Steve Nadler, University of Wisconsin. “Why Was Spinoza Excommunicated?”
Abstract: In July of 1656, the twenty-three year old Baruch de Spinoza received the harshest writ of herem (excommunication) ever issued by the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish congregation. Full of vitriol and curses, the ban was final; Spinoza never reconciled with his community. But why was Spinoza punished with such extreme prejudice? The ban document mentions only his “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds”, without telling us what exactly they are. Spinoza had not yet published anything. So there is a bit of a mystery here. On the other hand, for anyone familiar with his mature philosophical treatises, there really can be no mystery as to why one of history’s most original and radical thinkers was ostracized by Amsterdam’s rabbis and the Jewish community’s lay leaders. In this talk, we will look at some of the main theses of Spinoza’s philosophy, in order to get a better sense of what so troubled his contemporaries.
March 20 – Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame. “Aesthetics as a Foil for Ethics: Generality and Justification in Moral and Aesthetic Judgment”
Abstract: Moral properties such as being wrong or being obligatory are not brute; they are based on other kinds of properties, such as (for acts) being a lie or being promised. Aesthetic properties such as being graceful or being beautiful are similar to moral properties in being based on other kinds of properties, but they are different in that, for aesthetic cases, it may be impossible to specify just what these grounding properties are. Does any single property ground poetic beauty in the way promising to do something grounds obligation to do it?
If aesthetic properties do differ from moral properties in this way, may we conclude that, although ethics is like aesthetics in being a realm of intuitive and perceptual knowledge–or at least intuitive and perceptual sensitivity–it is unlike aesthetics in being a realm of rules and guiding principles that connect grounding properties with aesthetic properties? Are there any such generalities in aesthetics, or even aesthetic generalities connecting aesthetic properties with other aesthetic properties? If there are, how much like or unlike rules and principles in ethics are they?
This presentation will explore all these questions in the light of examples from the arts, with poetry as the main case study.
March 27 – Kieran Setiya, University of Pittsburgh. “Does Moral Theory Corrupt Youth?”
Abstract: Moral theory corrupts the youth. The epistemic assumptions of moral theory deprive us of resources needed to resist the challenge of moral disagreement, which its practice at the same time makes vivid. The talk concludes by sketching a kind of epistemology that could respond to disagreement without skepticism: one in which the fundamental standards of justification for moral belief are biased towards the truth.
April 3 – Steve Grimm, Fordham University. “What Is Wisdom?”
Abstract: What is it that makes someone wise, or one person wiser than another? I try to explain what it is that the wise person knows in a way that sheds light on these questions. I also try to explain why contemporary philosophers have had so little to say about wisdom, in contrast to their ancient and medieval predecessors.
April 10 – Edward Knippers, http://www.edwardknippers.com
Description: Knippers is a well known representational artist who often paints Biblical scenes. His work has sometimes been controversial because these scenes regularly depict the biblical characters in the nude. Indeed, his work has been called sacrilegious by some religious observers. On the other hand, many critics find the depiction of traditional Christian themes outdated or otherwise objectionable. In this discussion, we will talk with Mr. Knippers about art, sacrilege, modernism, interpretation, and other ideas central to both art and philosophy.
April 25 – The talk by Professor Verity Harte of Yale University, has been canceled.