Spring 2019

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.