Spring 2017

February 16 Michelle Mason, Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy, Brown University and Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Minnesota
(Note: This talk will begin at 5:30 p.m.)

Resenting a colleague’s unfair treatment of you, experiencing contempt for another’s egregious cruelty, or shame at one’s own – these attitudes respond to the wrong and the bad in human action and character. They are joined by a more attractive group attentive to the right and the good: gratitude for a friend’s loyalty and pride in remaining steadfast in the face of temptation, for example. Arguably, all of these attitudes belong to the class that P. F. Strawson famously dubbed the ‘reactive attitudes.’ The most prominent contemporary interpretations, however, restrict the class of moral reactive attitudes to resentment, indignation, and guilt as modes of holding persons accountable to each other for meeting distinctively moral obligations (e.g., Wallace 1996, Darwall 2006).

In this talk, I argue that the modality of the reactive attitudes is not invariably deontic nor is their mood invariably imperative. In contrast, I investigate what I dub the “aretaic, appellative” nature of reactive shame, contempt, love, and pride as modes of regarding persons as responsible for flouting, complying with, or exceeding normative expectations pertaining to certain non-jural ideals of character.

This event will be held in Tribble Hall DeTamble Auditorium
March 17 –  John Betz, Associate Professor of Theology at University of Notre Dame
Paper Title: “Analogy and Theo-Foundational Epistemology:  The Problem, Possibility, and Reality of Theological Knowledge”

In his recent book Theology’s Epistemological Dilemma (2014), Kevin Diller addresses epistemic problems in theology and the philosophy of religion by constructively uniting Karl Barth’s theology of revelation with Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology of Christian belief.  In this paper it is argued that, in uniting a theologian who vehemently rejected natural theology (Barth) with a philosopher of religion who is positively disposed toward it (Plantinga), Diller not only opens lines of communication between Reformed theology and contemporary analytic philosophy, but also opens the door to a new and potentially fruitful ecumenical synthesis of Catholic and Protestant views of theological knowledge.  The aim of this paper is to show that just as Barth’s theology of revelation need not exclude Plantinga’s epistemology of warranted belief, neither need it exclude the analogical metaphysics of his chief Catholic interlocutor, Erich Przywara; indeed, once misunderstandings are cleared up, it is to show that they go together, and that a proper account of the way to theological knowledge needs both.

March 30 – Roger Ariew, Professor of Philosophy at University of South Florida
Paper Title: “What Descartes Read: His Intellectual Contents”

I argue that Descartes’ knowledge of his predecessors and contemporaries is not like ours. He cannot just pull a book off the shelf or download a file from a computer. In a sense, almost anything contemporary or prior to him is part of his context and, at the same time, few specific things can be affirmed with certainty as constituting his context. We can assume that Descartes has read and considered much of the works of his predecessors and contemporaries, but we cannot assume that he knows it in great detail, that he has access to it in the way we do. With these provisos in mind I examine more specifically what Descartes himself reveals directly or indirectly to be the intellectual settings of his primary works: the Discourse on Method, Meditations on First Philosophy, and Principles of Philosophy.

April 20 – Rusty Jones, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Harvard
Paper Title: “The Real Challenge of Plato’s Republic”

At the beginning of Book 2 of Plato’s Republic, Glaucon and Adeimantus challenge Socrates’ conviction that the just person is always happier than the unjust.  They argue for the opposite extreme: Injustice is always good, at least for the person who has really mastered it.  Socrates’ task in the rest of the Republic is thus to defend the thesis that justice is always good, in much the same way that Glaucon and Adeimantus defend injustice.  This is not the way the passage is ordinarily read, for reasons I describe.  But once this reading is in view, quite a few puzzling features of the Republic begin to fall into place.

April 25 – Christian Miller, A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy, Wake Forest University
Paper Title: “The Neglected Virtue of Honesty: Is Anyone Honest These Days, and What Does ‘Honesty’ Even Mean?”
Tribble Hall DeTamble Auditorium at 4:00 p.m. with reception in Tribble Hall B316

Honesty and dishonesty are clearly big topics today, with stories about politicians from both parties lying to the media, students cheating on exams, and athletes using banned substances. But what is honesty? And how honest are people in general? In the first half of the presentation, we will focus on the philosophical question of what makes someone an honest person. In the second half, we will turn to the latest studies in psychology on cheating. The emerging picture calls into question whether most people are indeed honest. But it also, surprisingly, suggests that dishonesty is rare too. For most of us, we are somewhere in the middle.