Fall 2014

September 25 – Stavroula Glezakos – associate professor/associate chair of Philosophy, Wake Forest University

Paper Title: “Harmful Words”

In this talk, I will argue that, contrary to the well-known saying, words can sometimes hurt us. Moreover, a word can harm even if its user does not intend any harm in using it. My aim will be to explain why this is the case, to show that the class of harmful words is, unfortunately, wider than we perhaps recognize, and to consider what options might be available to those who wish to avoid causing such harm.

October 15 – Christine Swanton – Department of Philosophy, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Paper Title: “Dwelling Love”

What has been called by Julian Young Heidegger’s ‘ethics of dwelling’ has been deployed in the service of environmental ethics. In the analytic tradition environmental ethics is characteristically understood as a species of applied ethics, but Heidegger’s views on dwelling are fundamental to his philosophy as a whole, since for him, the essence of human beings is to dwell. If we do not properly dwell, realize our essence as dwellers, we have a fundamentally wrong orientation or attunement to the world as a whole. This paper explores this attunement: “dwelling love.”

October 30 –  Alison Denham – associate professor, Tulane University

Paper Title: “Representing Ethical Estrangement: Pictures, Poetry & Epistemic Value”

Contemporary meta-ethics has developed under the spectre of moral nihilism: scepticism about the very existence of moral values. However, it has seldom addressed the experience of such scepticism – the first-personal loss of, or estrangement from, our most fundamental evaluative commitments.  That task has typically been left to the arts.  I examine how certain artworks exploit strategies of ‘experiencing-as’ and ‘experience-taking’ to convey the phenemenological dimensions of evaluative thought.  I introduce the phenomenon of ethical estrangement as it is articulated by the essayist and survivor, Jean Amery.  I then turn to a work of visual art by Anselm Kiefer, the installation Chevirat Ha Kelim and a related poem by Paul Celan, Psalm. I argue that the epistemic value of these works turns in part on their use of aesthetic form to reorient the spectator’s first-personal perceptual and affective responses.

December 4 – Rebecca Copenhaver , professor of philosophy, Lewis & Clark College