We will be presenting a mixture of online and in-person seminars.
Read about Olaf Stapledon here.
For any organisational queries, contact Dr Vid Simoniti
Semester 1
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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. |
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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. |
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31-Oct-24 |
Jorge Dias (Universidade Atlântica) |
Title and abstract TBC |
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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. |
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28-Nov-24 |
Nikk Effingham (Birmingham) |
Title and abstract TBC |
Semester 2
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20-Feb-25 |
Ben Davies (Sheffield) |
Title and abstract TBC |
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06-Mar-25 |
Karen Ng (Vanderbilt) (online talk) |
Title and abstract TBC |
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20-Mar-25 |
James Edwards (Oxford) |
Title and abstract TBC |
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03-Apr-25 |
Helen Frowe (Stockholm) |
Title and abstract TBC |
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08-May-25 |
Mark Wynn (Oxford) (The Forwood-Bequest Lecture) |
Title and abstract TBC |
Past events
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