Royal Institute of Philosophy Stapledon Colloquium 2024-25

03-Oct-24 

Nancy Cartwright (San Diego, Durham) 

Reliability Trumps Truth

Philosophers are preoccupied with truth. This includes philosopher of science: witness the centrality of the realism debate about whether science is (or can be) achieving truth or at least coming close to doing so. I think this is a mistake. Instead we should focus on reliability, especially in the context of science, and not just reliability of claims or whatever else is deemed truth-apt but on the reliability of all the products of science, like models, measures, technological devices, concept validation, and experiments. In part because these are required to underwrite the reliability of our scientific claims but also because we independently need these products to do what we expect of them.

That may be easy to agree to for other kinds of products. But for claims? Why reliability over truth? Because, as with the other products of science, reliability requires filling in: reliable to do what? reliable for what purpose? Reliability forces us to be explicit about what we are allowed to do with a claim once it is deemed ‘well established’. Thinking in terms of truth invites the assumption that (as Sharon Crasnow puts it) a claim can be detached from the evidence base and background context that give it meaning and warrant. The assumption seems to be that what has been established is a claim stating a specific  fact (or facts) about the way the world is and that this claim can thereafter be used as a premise asserting that fact in further inferences. This talk will explain how that gets us into trouble.  I will argue that what you can do with a scientific claim cannot be detached from the tangle of work that has developed, refined and tested it, illustrating with examples from medicine, education and economics.

17-Oct-24 

Alex Gregory (Southampton) 

Take In Your Hen: Fittingness and Hedonic Adaptation

Humans have a strong tendency to hedonically adapt to their circumstances, so that something that once brought joy eventually brings only indifference. Does this tendency guarantee a kind of failure on our part? Happiness, like other emotions, seems subject to evaluation in terms of its fittingness. But it’s not clear how hedonic adaptation could possibly maintain fittingness: it involves changing one’s level of happiness in a way that doesn’t track the absolute goodness of one’s circumstances. This paper mounts a defence of hedonic adaptation against this concern. It does so by articulating a key difference between the scale of happiness and the scale of goodness, and shows how that difference guarantees an inability to track absolute levels of goodness with our levels of happiness. Given this background constraint, hedonic adaptation may be the most appropriate way for our happiness to change over time, even if we thereby fall short of some more perfect ideal.

31-Oct-24 

Jorge Humberto Dias (Universidade Atlântica, Portugal) 

Understanding the Philosophy of Organizations and its alignment with a Culture of Happiness

Dias & Pita (2023) conducted one of the first empirical studies on philosophical consultation with individual clients, applying the PROJECT@ method developed by Dias in 2006. This method has been frequently used in Dias’ work and was presented to a European doctoral jury in 2013. Rosa (2018) further explored it in the International Journal of Applied Philosophy. The study found positive outcomes in personal consultations, prompting the authors to investigate its application in corporate settings. They noted a distinction between corporate philosophy, philosophy teaching in organizations, and the role of philosophers as consultants. Marinoff (2002) explored the functions of corporate philosophers, including ethics and leadership, while Lima (2002) studied a public organization’s business philosophy in Brazil. Ciappei (2015) proposed integrating philosophy with management education, and Bazanini (2017) highlighted philosophical skills essential for administrators, such as ethics, problem-solving, and creativity. The importance of these skills can justify Bazanini's idea of ​​considering a company as a social system.

14-Nov-24 

Mark Textor (King’s College London) 

Don’t stare, compare! Attention as the Relating Activity

Nineteenth century treatments of attention often argued that analysis (attention singles out an object) and synthesis (attention unifies some objects) are inseparable aspects of attention. In contrast, recent philosophical work on attention concentrated on the analytic aspect and exploited William James’s characterisation of attention as focussing on one object among others. In my talk I want to examine and defend the idea that attention is fundamentally a synthetic activity. I will mainly engage with Hermann Lotze’s (1817-1881) work. According to him, attention is constituted by comparing. I will motivate Lotze’s main thesis and expound his supporting argument. The talk will also draw on George Dawes Hicks’s development of Lotze’s view and assess Francis H. Bradley’s criticism.

28-Nov-24 

Nikk Effingham (Birmingham) 

The Wisdom-Potter-Perrett Argument for Reincarnation

Abstract: This paper discusses the largely overlooked Wisdom-Potter-Perrett argument for reincarnation. It has two stages. First stage: To intentionally perform an action, one must have already attempted that action. Since attempting to act is itself an action, this leads to an infinite regress. Therefore, to do anything at all, you must have existed at every prior moment. Second stage: Since you do not recall existing at every prior moment, reincarnation is the best explanation for the first stage’s (sub-)conclusion.

I contend that the first stage of this argument is more robust than it initially seems. However, in the second stage, it is less clear that traditional reincarnation provides the best explanation for our perpetual existence. I argue that adopting a 'Gnostic reincarnation theory'—akin to those in Gnosticism, theosophy, or Lurianic Kabbalah—is, at the very least, a better proposition. I further examine competing non-reincarnation theories. One is mysticism i.e. that we are all identical to God. Another is a theory aimed at the more traditional theist: a variant substance dualist theory incorporating the existence of ‘hypertime.’

20-Feb-25 

Ben Davies (Sheffield) 

Distributive responsibility 

The idea of individual responsibility playing a part in healthcare allocation is controversial, and subject to a long list of objections (Sharkey and Gillam 2010). This talk focuses on one objection in particular: holding patients responsible for their health-affecting behaviours is unacceptably moralising. Call this The Moralisation Objection (MO). 

The standard version of MO rests on an error about responsibility. MO presumes that to hold someone responsible is necessarily to regard them as blameworthy – examples of such reasoning can be found in several recent publications arguing against the relevance of responsibility in healthcare. But this isn't the conception of responsibility typically at play in arguments in favour of responsibility-sensitive health allocation. Rather, what is typically appealed to is a conception of what I call distributive responsibility. 

Distributive responsibility is familiar from political philosophy but neglected in medical ethics. It is a form of responsibility: it links one’s obligations to bear costs, and rights to enjoy benefits, to one’s intentional actions under certain circumstances. However, it is non-moral. Indeed, more broadly, it has no necessary relation to any ideas of praise or blame, including non-moral ones: one’s distributive responsibility is not essentially affected by the prudential or epistemic quality of one’s choices any more than by their moral quality. Thus, I suggest that an important strand of applied ethics has neglected a central insight from political philosophy, at significant cost to the coherence of the debate about responsibility-sensitive allocation.  

06-Mar-25 

Karen Ng (Vanderbilt) 

(online talk) 

What is the Gattungsprozess? Social Freedom and Social Reproduction in Hegel and Marx 

In this paper, I analyze the key features of what Hegel calls the Gattungsprozess — the process of species-life — and defend its importance for an account of social freedom. Specifically, I argue that we can view the Gattungsprozess as providing the basis for a broadly historical materialist approach to social freedom in which this depends upon and is articulated through two processes: first, the metabolic exchange with an environment that has both natural and social characteristics; and second, social reproduction. In developing this Hegelian-Marxian account of social freedom, I argue against existing accounts that focus exclusively on institutional recognition. Instead, I show that social freedom is the historical and self-conscious realization of a concrete Gattungsprozess, the central aim of which is the production and reproduction of free individuals. One of the key contributions of Hegel and Marx is thus to provide an account of free individuality as possible and historically realizable only within the context of species-life and its ongoing reproduction. 

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03-Apr-25 

Helen Frowe (Stockholm) 

Systematically Deceptive Relationships and the Law 

The revelation that undercover police officers engaged in long-term intimate relationships has met with widespread outcry, triggering a public inquiry and substantial compensation payments from the Metropolitan Police. But whilst the involvement of state actors might make these cases especially egregious, such systematically deceptive relationships are far from the exclusive domain of ‘spy cops’. In this talk, I develop an account of the moral wrongness of systematically deceptive relationships. I argue that when the harms of deceptive relationships pass a threshold, there is pro tanto reason to criminalise their infliction. I then consider whether such legislation can avoid overcriminalisation of deception in intimate relationships.  

08-May-25 

Mark Wynn (Oxford) 

(The Forwood-Bequest Lecture) 

Philosophy and spiritual practice: the case of Ignatian discernment

We are all of us familiar with thoughts that occur unbidden, and sometimes a question arises about whether such a thought is to be trusted as a guide to action. In his Rules for Discernment, Ignatius of Loyola proposes a variety of phenomenological and other criteria that can be applied in such cases. Hereby he depicts a kind of religious experience that is different in structure from those that are standardly discussed in the philosophy of religion, one that suggests the possibility of a strongly corporate form of mental life. In this lecture, I examine some philosophical questions posed by this account, and consider the potential fruitfulness of spiritual practices as a topic for philosophical reflection.