Research Seminars

Philosophy research seminars are on Wednesdays from 4pm to 6pm. All are welcome. Follow this link for a campus map and city map. For more information, please contact Prof Julian Dodd (julian.dodd@manchester.ac.uk).

Semester 2, 2012-13

Wed 20th Feb

Steinvör Thöll Árnadóttir (Stirling): Making things up: How (not) to answer the Special Composition Question

Venue: 2nd floor boardroom in the Arthur Lewis Building (room 2.016/2.017)

Wed 6th March

Barry Dainton (Liverpool): Some further thoughts on phenomenal selves

Venue: 2nd floor boardroom in the Arthur Lewis Building (room 2.016/2.017)

Abstract I won’t be presenting a single sustained line of argument, but will be discussing a number of issues relating to the account of the self I developed inThe Phenomenal Self (2008). (1) This account is rooted in the thesis that our ordinary streams consciousness are continuous in a distinctive and strong way, a thesis which is disputed by some contemporary philosophers (e.g. Galen Strawson). This issue is by means new: it divided Brentano, Husserl and Stern a century ago, and this earlier debate may well have implications for the contemporary one – or so I will argue. (2) In his discussion of the self inThe Unity of Consciousness(2011) Tim Bayne argues that the approach adopted inThe Phenomenal Selfis fatally flawed; I will put forward some reasons for thinking otherwise. (3) If time permits, I will say something about Mark Johnston’s recent suggestion that we are ‘protean’ beings who can determine their own survival conditions.

Wed 24th April

Louise Richardson (York), 'Perceptual activity in bodily awareness and sense-perception'

Venue: 2nd floor boardroom in the Arthur Lewis Building (room 2.016/2.017)

Abstract: There is good reason to think that bodily awareness (including proprioception and bodily sensation) is a kind of perceptual awareness. Yet, it differs from perception in the five familiar modalities (or 'sense-perception) in numerous ways. Some of these differences are (broadly speaking) representational: they are a matter of what we perceive. In the bodily mode, one perceives only one’s own body, plausibly. Other differences are phenomenological—a matter of what the relevant experiences are like. For instance, one is aware of one’s body ‘from the inside’, in a way that one is aware of no object in sense-perception. I will argue that bodily awareness differs from perception in the five familiar senses in a third way, that we might call agential. That is to say, there is a difference in what we do in sense perception and bodily awareness. Specifically, I will argue that in sense-perception, and not in bodily awareness, we actively maintain the perceptual relation we stand in to things. I will discuss the significance of this agential difference and its relationship to more familiar representational and phenomenological differences between bodily awareness and sense-perception.

Wed 8th May

Miranda Fricker (Sheffield), 'Generating epistemic responsibility for implicit prejudice'

Venue: 2nd floor boardroom in the Arthur Lewis Building (room 2.016/2.017)

Wed 15 May

Jani Haikkarainen (Tampere, Finland) & Markku Keinanen (Turku, Finland), 'A trope nominalist theory of natural kinds'

Venue: University Place, 3.210

Past research seminars

Semester 1, 2012-13

Wed 10th October

James Maclaurin (Otago) The Experienced Watchmaker

Venue: 2nd floor boardroom in the Arthur Lewis Building (room 2.016/2.017)

Abstract: Natural selection rests on variation, inheritance and differential fitness. It is often suggested that human culture cannot be subject to natural selection because cultural variation is fundamentally different from biological variation. Unlike biological variation which is driven by random mutations, cultural variation is the product of human foresight. This paper examines the function of foresight in cultural change and presents a new solution to the foresight problem.

Wed 24th October

Tom Smith (Manchester) On a Remark in Ryle's The Concept of Mind

Venue: G35/36 in the Arthur Lewis Building

Abstract: Ryle says, 'Dispositional statements are neither reports of observed or observable states of affairs, nor yet reports of unobserved or unobservable states of affairs'. The remark seems to entail a claim standardly attributed to Ryle, namely that dispositional statements are not reports of states of affairs. I argue that the remark does not carry this implication, that Ryle knew this, that there are insufficient grounds for the standard attribution, and that reflection on the actual implications of his remark illuminates Ryle's project and advances some recent debates.

Wed 14th November

Christian List (LSE) Free Will, Determinism, and the Possibility of Doing Otherwise

Venue: G35/36 in the Arthur Lewis Building

Abstract: I argue that free will and determinism are compatible, even when we take free will to require the ability to do otherwise and even when we interpret that ability modally, as the possibility of doing otherwise, and not just conditionally or dispositionally. My argument draws on a distinction between physical and agential possibility. Although in a deterministic world only one future sequence of events is physically possible for each state of the world, the more coarsely defined state of an agent and his or her environment can be consistent with more than one such sequence, and thus different actions can be "agentially possible". The agential perspective is supported by our best theories of human behaviour, and so we should take it at face value when we refer to what an agent can and cannot do. On the picture I defend, free will is not a physical phenomenon, but a higher-level one on a par with other higher-level phenomena such as agency and intentionality.

The paper is on Christian's website

Wed 5th December

Josh Parsons (Oxford) An extensionalist's guide to non-extensional mereology

Venue: 2nd floor boardroom in the Arthur Lewis Building (room 2.016/2.017)

Abstract: In the paper I attempt to describe a metaphysically neutral minimal mereology, SPO (for supplementary pre-ordering). I explore some of the formal features of this system, show that it has axiomatic bases with both “part” and “overlap” as primitives, and relate it to existing literature on the topic.

Semester 1, 2012-13

Wed 10th October

James Maclaurin (Otago) The Experienced Watchmaker

Wed 24th October

Tom Smith (Manchester) On a Remark in Ryle's The Concept of Mind

Wed 14th November

Christian List (LSE) Free Will, Determinism, and the Possibility of Doing Otherwise

The paper is on Christian's website

Wed 5th December

Josh Parsons (Oxford) An extensionalist's guide to non-extensional mereology

Semester 1 2011-12

October 12: Chris Woodard (Nottingham), The Common Structure of Kantianism and Act Utilitarianism

Abstract: This paper proposes a way of understanding Kantianism, Act Utilitarianism, and some other important ethical theories according to which they are all versions of the same theory. This is a teleological theory of pattern-based reasons, or reasons to play one’s part in valuable patterns of action. Any teleological theory of pattern-based reasons must contain the following features: an axiology, an account of eligibility (specifying which patterns of action generate reasons, and why), and an account of the interaction of reasons. These are the three dimensions along which teleological theories of pattern-based reasons differ from each other. I show that this is a profitable way to understand Act Utilitarianism, Kantianism, and the other theories discussed. Understanding them in this way sheds light on the differences between these theories, and emphasises the common ground between them. It also provides a recipe for generating new ethical theories worth studying: take a well-known ethical theory, and depart from it along one or more of these dimensions in ways which are plausible and which do not simply yield another well-known theory. The paper briefly discusses the relationship between these ideas and some other recent proposals which emphasise the common ground between Kantianism and versions of Consequentialism.

October 19: Graham Stevens (Manchester), Ambiguous Logical Forms

Abstract: Is it possible for a logical form to be ambiguous? Traditionally, ambiguity is treated as either a lexical or structural feature of a sentence. The pre-semantic preparation of a sentence for semantic evaluation which makes explicit its logical form and lexical constituents is intended to remove all ambiguity. But proponents of contextualism in the philosophy of language maintain that some sentences are semantically underdetermined – only contextually mandated pragmatic processes can determine a content for them, it is alleged. I argue that most of these examples do not challenge the hypothesis that logical forms are unambiguous, so long as one holds to a Chomskyian conception of language as idiolect. However, I suggest other examples which are more problematic. I argue that pragmatics will not help disambiguate them and suggest they can be best dealt with by adopting a descriptive analysis of certain possessive noun phrases, and note that this proposal (which is independently motivated) challenges the traditional distinction between lexical and syntactic ambiguities, and thus the level of syntactic representation at which disambiguation occurs.

October 26: Michael Morris (Sussex), Thought and Language

Abstract: My aim is to tackle the following question:

(Q) How is it possible to use words, contained within attitude sentences, to convey someone’s state of mind?

That is, how can words be the kind of thing to convey a state of mind (or states of mind the kind of thing to be conveyed in words)?

There is an obvious answer:

(A) To be in a state of mind (at least of the sort described by attitude sentences) is, at the most fundamental level, to stand in some relation to something which has at least a counterpart to linguistic structure.

Unfortunately, I think (A) is false. The aim of the paper is to provide an alternative answer to (Q). The hope is that this should show something about the relation between thought and language.

November 9: Douglas Edwards (Aberdeen), Properties as the Shadows of Predicates

Abstract: The view that properties are merely the ‘shadows’ of predicates occupies an interesting place in contemporary work. On the one hand, the view is frequently dismissed in work in metaphysics as perhaps the worst theory of properties on offer, and not taken seriously at all. On the other hand, the view has proved quite popular in recent work in the philosophy of language. This paper aims to get to the bottom of this situation. I begin by outlining the main formulations of the view, before considering the standard objections to it. I will suggest that the view can successfully respond to the objections, but only within the framework of a ‘pluralistic’ conception of properties. I go on to consider the relation of the property pluralism suggested to pluralist theories of truth, and discuss some concerns about the ontological status of properties on this view.

November 16: Edward Harcourt (Oxford), Love, Reason and Respect

Abstract: David Velleman has argued for a tight connection between the concepts of love, reason and respect. Adapting some material both from Aristotle and from psychoanalysis and attachment theory, I propose an improved way of making the connection.

Intimate relations need to be conceived as an Aristotelian ‘field’ within which a virtue and corresponding vices can be discerned, analogously to liberality, prodigality and meanness in the ‘field’ of the giving and taking of money. Moreover, instantiating the virtue rather than the vices in a given field is a matter of practical wisdom, that is, of the exercise of rationality. The relevant vices are well described by case material from psychoanalysis and attachment theory, while love between adults at its best is analogous to an Aristotelian virtue: as long as reason plays its proper role in shaping (or acknowledging) one’s own and other’s ends and in acting on (or responding to) them, that is, in regulating relations between people in such a way that each party to the love-relation sees both themselves and other as an end, a maximum of intimacy is compatible both with respect for oneself and respect for the other.

The account proposed improves on Velleman’s in two respects. First, whereas on Velleman’s account love is a response to rationality, on this account rationality plays a normative rather than a definitional role, reflected in the phenomenology of love-relations: to the extent that love isn’t properly regulated by rationality, we may (for example) experience ourselves as passive victims of it. Secondly, the present theory makes room for love for immature human beings, by deploying a psychoanalytically informed notion of autonomy (and respect for it) of which rational autonomy can be seen as a special case.

November 23: Boris Kment (Princeton), Are All Fundamental Facts Qualitative?

Abstract: Some philosophers, the 'anti-individualists,' believe that all fundamental facts are purely qualitative. They could in principle be stated without mentioning any specific individual by name. Other philosophers, the 'individualists,' believe that the fundamental facts also include facts about which individuals exist and how the qualitative properties and relations are distributed over them. Anti-individualists are committed to the idea that all facts supervene on the qualitative facts. I argue that that thesis yields implausible consequences in the theory of chance and counterfactuals. Ultimately, individualism carries the day.

November 30: There will be no research seminar on this day. The talk by Aaron Meskin that had been planned has been rescheduled for 1 February 2012.

December 7: Neil Sinclair (Nottingham), Expressivism and the Authority of Moral Reasons

Abstract: Moral reasons are often thought to be authoritative, not in the sense that they are necessarily overriding, but in the sense that they are categorical or unavoidable, that is, they do not fail to apply in the absence of a motive that would be served by complying with them. It is this feature of morality that has led Richard Joyce to adopt an error theory of morality. In this paper I argue that the categorical force of moral reasons can be accommodated on an expressivist understanding of morality, once that account is re-orientated to speak of moral reasons (rather than goodness or rightness). This undermines Joyce's case for moral error theory.

December 14: Joel Smith (Manchester), Mindreading and Visual Presence

Abstract: I discuss perceptual accounts of mindreading, according to which some of our knowledge of others' mental states is perceptual knowledge. I argue that views such as that set out by Dretske and Cassam cannot respect a plausible phenomenological constraint on such accounts. I suggest that we need to pursue a view that incorporates certain claims about the way people look. The view proposed relies on a distinction between basic and non-basic looks.

Semester 2 2011-12

February 1: Aaron Meskin (Leeds) The Trouble with Aesthetics: The Unreliability of Aesthetic Judgment and Aesthetic Testimony

Abstract: Is it possible to gain aesthetic knowledge by means of others' testimony? In two earlier articles I argued that we can gain aesthetic knowledge by such means, but also that testimony frequently fails to provide us with warrant since forming judgment on the basis of aesthetic testimony is often unreliable. This paper responds to recent criticism of the unreliability view by Brian Laetz and Rob Hopkins. Laetz argues that we have no good reason to believe in aesthetic unreliability or incompetence, but I argue that empirical evidence supports the unreliability hypothesis. Hopkins objects that the unreliability explanation of the epistemic weakness of aesthetic testimony leads to aesthetic agnosticism. In the second part of the paper, I explore both empirical and philosophical reasons to think that there is a distinct problem with testimony (that is, as opposed merely to judgment) about aesthetic matters. If this is right, the unreliability account does not, in fact, lead to agnosticism.

February 8: Anthony Everett (Bristol) Dining with the King of France: Presupposition Failure and Seeming Truth Values

Abstract: Infamously, many ordinary speakers judge utterances of “The present king of France is bald” to lack a truth value. Or, more cautiously, many ordinary speakers feel squeamish about assigning such utterances a truth value. This is generally attributed to presupposition failure, the sentence or speaker presupposes that there is a present king of France although, of course, there is not. However, in other cases that seem to involve exactly the same sort of presupposition failure, such as utterances of “The King of France dined with me last night,” speakers judge the utterance to be false. How are we to explain this difference? Recently, Kai von Fintel and Stephen Yablo have both offered accounts that aim to do just this (Yablo further suggests that his account can explain why arithmetical statements might strike us as true, even if there are no numbers). I raise a number of problems for these accounts and suggest an alternative explanation of our intuitions about these sorts of cases.

February 15: Colin Johnston (Stirling) A Version of the Identity Theory of Truth

Abstract: The correspondence theorist of truth conceives of thought as separate from reality and of truth as consisting in a match between the two. The identity theorist disagrees: thought is answerable to reality for its truth – if a thought is true, this is because of the content of reality – but there is not the gap here that the correspondence theorist imagines. This disagreement has taken the shape of a disagreement over facts. According to a traditional correspondence theory, facts are those elements of external reality against which thoughts are measured: for a thought to be true is for it to correspond to a fact. The identity theory agrees that facts are elements of reality but denies that they are external to thought. Rather, a fact is a possible object of thought; it is something a subject may think, and thoughts – that is, thinkings – contain their objects. The identity theorist’s conception of facts as thinkables can be elaborated in more than one way. In this paper I shall consider two elaborations, one offered by Jennifer Hornsby and a second deriving from the Tractarian Wittgenstein and Ramsey. Hornsby’s conception of a thinkable, and so of a fact, is informed by her adoption of the dual relation theory of judgment. As a result, I shall argue, she faces two significant problems regarding thought’s answerability to reality. On the one hand a difficulty arises of how the content of reality is to be such that a thought could answer to it, and on the other there is a problem of how answerability can be possible without relapsing into the correspondence theory. The Ramseyan version of the identity theory recommended in this paper involves, by contrast, a rejection of the dual relation theory of judgment. In consequence, neither of the difficulties faced by Hornsby takes a grip.

February 22: Stephan Leuenberger (Glasgow) Grounds without Supplements

Abstract: Not all facts are fundamental. Some are grounded in, or obtain in virtue of others. In recent years, philosophers have started to systematically investigate the relevant notion of a fact being grounded in other facts. In these investigations, a certain principle about the relationship between partially grounding and fully grounding – called supplementation principle – is almost universally accepted. Roughly speaking, the supplementation principle says that if a fact partially grounds another fact, then there are other facts together with which the former fully grounds the latter. I shall question this principle, and argue that abandoning it has far-reaching consequences in metaphysics.

February 29: Ephraim Glick (St Andrews) Practical Modes of Presentation

Abstract: It seems that some know-how is a distinctively practical sort of knowledge. The traditional view accommodates this idea by saying that, e.g., knowledge how to swim is (or at least requires) the ability to swim. A more recent alternative proposal has been that knowledge how to swim is knowledge of a proposition under a practical mode of presentation. I will explain what this alternative is supposed to amount to and provide several reasons for preferring the traditional view.

March 7: Uri Leibowitz (Nottingham) Moral Arguments and Ad Hominem Fallacies

Abstract: Many of us read Peter Singer's work on our obligations to those in desperate need with our students. Famously, Singer argues that we have a moral obligation to give a significant portion of our assets to famine relief. If my own experience is not atypical, it is quite common for students, upon grasping the implications of Singer's argument, to ask whether (and how much) Singer gives to famine relief. One natural response to questions like this is to remind our students of the (so called) ad hominem fallacy - the fallacy of attacking the person advancing an argument rather than the argument itself. How could biographical facts about Singer, we may ask our students, possibly be relevant to the assessment of the argument under discussion? Interestingly, I find that this response rarely achieves the desired outcome of curbing my students' interest in Singer's personal finances. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether students might be right to insist that these facts are relevant and what our answer to this question tells us about moral theorising.

March 14: David Davies (McGill) Fictionality, Fictive Utterance, and the Assertive Author

Abstract: Fictive utterance theories of fictionality hold that a text that includes a narrative is the vehicle for a fiction only if it is the product of an act of fictive utterance, a kind of speech act that invites the receiver to make-believe rather than believe what is narrated. In the version of the fictive utterance theory that I have defended (e.g. in Aesthetics and Literature (Continuum, 2007), chapter 3), fictionality also requires that the overriding motivation of the author in constructing a narrative be some story-telling objective other than the desire to relate what is true. In a number of recent books and articles, however, critics have charged that fictive utterance theories cannot account for the place of non-fictive utterances in the generation of fictional works. (See, for example, John Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter 5; Stacie Friend, ‘Imagining Fact and Fiction’, in Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thompson-Jones, New Waves in Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 150-169.) I argue that such objections only undermine infelicitous formulations of the fictive utterance theory – among which I count my own earlier position – that fail to take proper account of the way in which fictional narratives in general are supposed to work. Closer attention to the latter will allow us to specify more accurately how fictive utterance enters into the narrative process. In particular, we need to take account of the attitudes prescribed by the author of a fictional narrative to the setting of a fiction and to the fiction itself. I draw here on some other work by Friend on ‘connected names’ in fictions (‘Real people in unreal contexts’, in Anthony Everett and Thomas Hofweber, eds., Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzle of Non-Existence (CSLI Publications, 2000), 183-203). I also insist upon a distinction - not properly respected by either proponents or critics of fictive utterance theories - between (a) considerations bearing upon the fictionality of a narrative, and (b) considerations bearing upon the fictionality of a work. I offer a revised ‘fictive utterance’ account of the former and reflect upon the significance of fictive utterance for the latter.

March 21: Dom Lopes (UBC) Feckless Reason

This talk is a public lecture sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust. It will take place in lecture theatre A of the Roscoe Building (number 53 on the map linked to above) from 3 to 5 pm, after which there will be a drinks reception sponsored by the Trust. Poster

Abstract: Empirical research on aesthetic response poses two challenges to philosophy. The more familiar challenge is that scientific explanations of aesthetic responses debunk what we take to be our reasons for those responses. One reaction to this challenge is an accommodation strategy that seeks to reconcile the scientific findings with an improved understanding of our normative reasons. This paper presents a more fundamental challenge: some empirical research challenges the role of reasoning in aesthetic response. This challenges the accommodation strategy and suggests that philosophy should adopt a more radical naturalism about aesthetic response.

April 18: Tom Porter (Manchester) Towards a Humean Non-Cosmopolitanism

Abstract: In this paper I explore the connection between cosmopolitanism and a Humean account of the foundations of justice, as elaborated and extended by David Wiggins.The Humean account, I argue, supports a non-cosmopolitan view about the boundaries of social justice that can survive the many objections that trouble other such views. Two central features of the account are its emphasis on the idea that the point of justice is to secure the social conditions for the pursuit of the social good and the absence of any moralised ‘grounding relation’ that is supposed to trigger duties of social justice. These features, which the account does not share with any of its competitors, are the basis for its superiority as a basis for non-cosmopolitanism.

April 25: Dominic Gregory (Sheffield) Sensory Memories and Imagistic Content

Abstract: Sensory memories are ones featuring sensory mental images which seem to us to show how things once looked or sounded or otherwise stood sensorily. When we have sensory memories, though, do we merely seem to recall how the world once was or do we seem to recall how things once stood for us in the course of sensory episodes? Numerous writers have argued for the latter position. The paper argues instead that, while some sensory memories involve the apparent recall of sensory episodes, others merely involve the apparent recall of what the world was once like.

May 2: Chris Ovenden (Manchester) Abilities in Context

Abstract: Recently, compatibilists such as Fara, Vihvelin and Smith have proposed revised conditional analyses of abilities such that, roughly, S is able to A just in case if S tries to A then they will be disposed to A. Whilst I am sympathetic to this approach, the analyses of dispositions that these accounts rely upon leave them unable to escape some old objections to simple conditional analyses of abilities and, as Whittle has argued, fail to rise to the challenge posed by Frankfurt cases of showing that an ability to do otherwise is relevant to moral responsibility. I propose an account of abilities in a similar vein, but built upon a modified version of Manley and Wasserman's recently proposed analysis of dispositions. According to my proposal, S is able to A just in case A would S in some suitable proportion of context relevant counter-factual cases. I first pose a problem for Manley and Wasserman's analysis of dispositions that motivates the change to my modified version and then develop that modified analysis into an account of abilities. Finally I apply my proposed account to supposed problem cases to see how it deals with them and assess the plausibility of the ability ascriptions it provides.

May 9: Michael Scott (Manchester) and Phil Brown (Manchester) Ethical Antirealism without Revision

Abstract: Over the past few decades ethical antirealists have attempted to provide accounts of ethical discourse that are non-revisionary, but do not burden ordinary speakers with commitments to metaphysically contentious entities. However, current varieties of non-revisionary ethical antirealism (NEA) such as expressivism and hermeneutic fictionalism face serious and unresolved objections and their non-revisionary credentials seem dubious to many. This paper builds on pragmatic theory in the philosophy of language to defend a new form of NEA that we call pragmatic antirealism. We argue that realists require accounts of ethical objectivity that are implausibly strong if considered as part of what speakers ordinarily intend to convey when they engage in moral discourse. We then show how the truth-conditions requisite for ethical realism may be stripped away by pragmatic processes in most contexts. This allows us to develop a theory that preserves the benefits of an antirealist approach to ethical discourse while avoiding the pitfalls of other varieties of NEA. We conclude by defending pragmatic antirealism against objections.

May 16: Jennifer Saul (Sheffield) Lying, Misleading and What is Said

Abstract: The term ‘what is said’, and other related terms, are currently being used in a huge variety of ways in philosophy of language. They are the subject of many complicated, passionate, and seemingly endless debates. One of the subjects of debate is how, and whether, our use of these terms relates to that of ordinary speakers. Are these debates merely a matter of theoreticians arguing about their theoretical vocabulary? Is anything at stake here that ordinary speakers do, or should, care about? The answers to these questions (and many others) seem at this point to be far from clear. Not all the terms philosophers discuss are like this. Take, for example, terms like ‘lie’ and ‘mislead’. The distinction between lying and misleading is an immensely natural one. It is clearly not a mere philosophers’ distinction, unfamiliar to ordinary life and of dubious significance. It is a distinction that ordinary speakers draw extremely readily, and generally care about, and a distinction recognised and accorded great significance in some areas of the law. Interestingly, it is also a distinction that turns on the notion of saying: you cannot lie unless you deliberately say something false (or at least something you believe to be false). This paper examines the relationship between theoreticians’ notions of saying (and the like) and the ordinary, intuitive distinction between lying and misleading. We will see that, despite the huge proliferation of conceptions of saying (and related notions) in the literature, none of these notions can capture the intuitions that we have about the lying/misleading distinction. The main conclusion of this paper, then, is that there is a problem to be solved.

Seminars in 2010-11

06 October 2010

Chris Daly (Manchester), Inferring, explaining and believing

Abstract: Why believe in any of the kinds of things that philosophers say that there are? This talk investigates two answers. The 'twin track' strategy takes metaphysics to say what various kinds of things are, whilst nominating a discipline other than philosophy to provide reason to believe there are such things. The 'explanationist' strategy takes the explanatory power of a philosophical hypothesis to provide reason to believe in the things it talks about. The two components of the twin track strategy are shown to conflict, not to complement one another. The explanationist strategy faces an objection when there is
no justification independent of explanatory power to believe philosophical claims. An extended response to this objection is offered.

13 October 2010

Ross Cameron (Leeds), Why Lewis's analysis of modality succeeds in its reductive ambitions

Abstract: Some argue that Lewisian realism fails as a reduction of modality because in order to meet some criterion of success the account needs to invoke primitive modality. I defend Lewisian realism against this charge; in the process, I hope to shed some light on the conditions of success for a reduction. In §1 I detail the resources the Lewisian modal realist needs. In §2 I argue against Lycan and Shalkowski's charge that Lewis needs a modal notion of 'world' to ensure that worlds correspond to possibilities. In §3 I respond to Divers and Melia's objection that Lewis needs to invoke primitive modality to give a complete account of what worlds there are. In §4 I ask what it is for a notion to 'involve' modality. I conclude that the question is either in bad standing or at best offers little traction on the debate, and propose a different way of assessing when materials are appropriately included in a reductive base.

20 October 2010

Greg Currie (Nottingham), How not to learn anything from fiction (about the mind)

Abstract: I argue that, for a variety of reasons, narrative fiction is a very compromised source of insight into the thought, feeling and decision. It is best that we should understand engagement with fiction as a "learning-like" experience (in Richard Miller’s phrase), rather than a process of genuine learning.

27 October 2010

Rowland Stout (University College Dublin), Fighting back

Abstract: I argue that fighting generates norms of behaviour according to which violence is non-instrumentally justified. In particular, if you are attacked and cannot successfully resist the harm that is being forced on you you may take yourself to be in a fight. Once you take yourself to be in a fight then fighting back becomes reasonable, and not because it achieves any further goals. Philosophical and political discussions of the justification of violence focus exclusively on instrumental justifications thus ignoring what is the central point of the concept of violence. Violence is not just forceful harming; it is harming through an assault or an act of fighting. Now it may turn out that you should never take yourself to be in a fight however much violent harm has been done to you. But even if that is the case we cannot understand violence without understanding the norms of fighting.

10 November 2010

Aaron Ridley (Southampton), tba

17 November 2010

Ian Rumfitt (Birkbeck, London), Determinacy and bivalence

Abstract: In the Metaphysics, Aristotle gives what appears to be a classically valid demonstration that every statement is either true or false. I scrutinize Aristotle's argument as it applies to two statements that many philosophers resist deeming to be either true or false: the Continuum Hypothesis in set theory; and a statement in which a vague property is attributed to a borderline case of that property. I assess whether someone who wishes to maintain such resistance is compelled to deviate from classical logic.

24 November 2010

Steve de Wijze (Manchester) and Simon Beck (KwaZulu-Natal), 'Interrogating the ‘ticking bomb scenario’: thought experiments and their purposes'

Abstract:The ticking bomb thought experiment used by Walzer and others is the subject of much heated debate. Luban, Brecher, Rejali and others argue that it should have no place in discussions about the legitimacy or otherwise of torture. We argue that this view misunderstands the way in which thought experiments in general and this one in particular are supposed to work in philosophical inquiry.

01 December 2010

CANCELLED

Neil Sinclair (Nottingham), Expressivism and the authority of moral reasons

Abstract: Moral reasons are often thought to be authoritative, not in the sense that they are necessarily overriding, but in the sense that they are categorical or unavoidable, that is, they do not fail to apply in the absence of a motive that would be served by complying with them. It is this feature of morality that has led Richard Joyce to adopt an error theory of morality. In this paper I argue that the categorical force of moral reasons can be accommodated on an expressivist understanding of morality, once that account is re-orientated to speak of moral reasons (rather than goodness or rightness). This undermines Joyce’s case for moral error theory.

26 January 2011

Luke Russell (Sydney), Evil, thick and thin

Abstract: Over the past ten years philosophers have offered a variety of accounts of evil action. Following Arendt, some claim that evil action is a psychologically thin concept, i.e. that evil actions can be the product of a very broad range of motives. Others claim that evil action is a psychologically thick concept, i.e. that evil actions must be malicious, or sadistic, or defiant. Is there any reason to think that one of these accounts gets at the real concept of evil? Is one account a better fit with folk linguistic practice? Are some conceptions of evil more natural or more useful than others? Are some conceptions of evil more dangerous than others? What should philosophers do if we conclude that several of the existing accounts of evil action are equally good?

09 February 2011

CANCELLED

Tom Porter (Manchester), The cosmic accident argument

Abstract: Jonathan Dancy has said that the central plank of his defence of ethical particularism is the ‘cosmic accident’ argument. According to this argument, it would be a cosmic accident if ethical particularism turned out not to be true given holism about reasons. The argument isn’t very clear, and a number of critics, notably Joseph Raz and Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge, have given it short shrift. In this paper I try to clarify exactly what the cosmic accident is supposed to be, and argue that there is more to the it than the critics suppose.

16 February 2011

Sarah Sawyer (Sussex), Cogntivism: A new theory of singular thought?

Abstract: In a series of recent articles, Robin Jeshion has developed a theory of singular thought which she calls 'cognitivism'. According to Jeshion, cognitivism offers a middle path between acquaintance theories of singular thought-which she takes to impose too strong a requirement on singular thought, and semantic instrumentalism-which she takes to impose too weak a requirement. In this paper, I raise a series of concerns about Jeshion's theory, and suggest that the relevant data can be accommodated by a version of acquaintance theory once it is correctly understood.

23 February 2011

Alex Oliver (Cambridge), Plurals, predicates, properties

Abstract: There are three parts. In the first, I promote the ideas of plural term, plural predicate, plural predication and plural property. In the second, I criticise predicative analyses of plurality which seek to reduce first-level plural predication to second-level singular predication. In effect, predicative analyses find hidden commitment to singular properties in the use of plurals. In the final part, as a case study, I consider Frege's treatment of plurals and show how he fails to do justice to mathematical practice.

02 March 2011

David Papineau (KCL), Another problem for mental causation

Abstract: The standard argument against non-reduced mental causes is that more specific material realizers always eclipse their less specific realizees as causes. This is a bad argument, as considerations from physics itself can show. But there remain further requirements for the less specific facts to qualify as causes, and it is doubtful that non-reduced mental facts can satisfy them.

09 March 2011

Nikk Effingham (Birmingham), The location of properties

ABSTRACT: Some believe that properties are located in spacetime. Of those, some (such as the immanent realists) believe that the properties are multiply located, whilst others (such as the mereological nominalist and some class nominalists) say that they are located at but one region. This paper argues that everyone who believes properties are located should believe that properties are located at a single region. My argument is that this is the default position we should endorse in lieu of arguments to the contrary, and that there are no such arguments. The bulk of the paper concentrates on the latter claim, undermining the main reasons for thinking properties are multiply located rather than singularly located. I examine arguments that multiple location is entailed by (i) properties being constituents of their instances; (ii) thinking instantiation and exact location of properties are coextensive; and (iii) by endorsing one of the horns of Plato’s Sailcloth Dilemma. I conclude two things: that, of course, properties are not multiply located and that the case for the coherence of multiple location has got that bit harder.

16 March 2011

John O'Neill (Manchester), Should egalitarians discount the future?

23 March 2011

Bill Child (University College, Oxford), Knowing from one's own case

Abstract: What is the role of one’s own possession of experiences and mental states in one’s grasp of concepts of experiences and mental states?

One idea is that the first-person case plays a specially basic role in our grasp of mental concepts. So, for example, each of us knows what is it to be in pain from our own experience of pain. We understand what it is for someone else to be in pain by extension from the first-person case. That idea was famously rejected by Wittgenstein. It has recently been defended by Christopher Peacocke, who offers an account that endorses ‘the intuitive claim that one knows from one’s own case what it is for someone else to be in pain’ and that ‘one knows from one’s own case what it is to be a subject’ (Peacocke, Truly Understood, OUP, 2008,180).

I discuss Peacocke’s proposal. And I consider whether Wittgenstein might in fact be sympathetic to the idea that there is a way of thinking of pain that is available only to those who know what it is like to feel pain.

30 March 2011

Michael Clark (Manchester), The metaphysics of grounding

04 May 2011

Bill Brewer (Warwick), What is the role of one’s own possession of experiences and mental states in one’s grasp of concepts of experiences and mental states?

01 June 2011

David Schweikard (Münster), Coordination and identity

Abstract: There are primarily two (sets of) issues about social ontology that come up in the philosophical analysis of phenomena of collective action: one is whether talk of group agents is to be taken seriously in the sense that analyzing certain types of action requires postulating the existence of irreducible collective entities; another concerns the kind of relation that holds between jointly acting agents and the significance of these relations for the agents’ sociality. This paper is focused on the latter issue. The question that will be at the centre here is how exactly the fact that individual agents often coordinate their activities with others matters to their identity.

Previous Speakers

Stefano Predelli (Nottingham), Eve Garrard (Manchester), Victor Durà Vilà (Durham), Simon Beck (KwaZulu-Natal), Graham Stevens (Manchester), Phil Brown (Manchester), David Owens (Sheffield), Matthew Kieran (Leeds), A. W. Moore (St. Hugh's, Oxford), Thomas Uebel (Manchester), Gabriel Uzquiano (Pembroke, Oxford), Jane Heal (St. John's, Cambridge), Michael Scott (Manchester), Keith Allen (York), Alan Weir (Glasgow), Pekka Väyrynen (Leeds), Maria Alvarez (Southampton), David Liggins (Manchester), Peter Sullivan (Stirling), Matthew Soteriou (Warwick), Robyn Carston (University College London), Michael Ridge (Edinburgh), Ofra Magidor (Balliol College, Oxford) , Peter Goldie (Manchester) , Helen Steward (Leeds), Jonathan Schaffer (Australian National University)

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