Philosophy News

'What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know' (St Augustine).

What if time did not really pass or flow? If there was no real difference between the past and the future? If 'now' were just a matter of where you happen to be, just like 'here'? How can we square our day-to-day experience of time with these incredible claims, all of which are made by leading physicists?

In this evening of 'time based arts', performance art, theatre, dance and psychology join forces to explore what it means to exist in a time-bound world. Professor Christoph Hoerl and his colleague Teresa McCormack (Queen's University Belfast) have worked in close collaboration with members of Big Telly Theatre Company (Portstewart), BBeyond Performance Art (Belfast), and Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company (Derry-Londonderry) to bring this performance to the stage of the Warwick Arts Centre Studio for two evenings only, Friday 8 February and Saturday 9 February 2019 (7.45pm). They will join the artists on both evenings to introduce their ideas to the audience. https://www.warwickartscentre.co.uk/whats-on/2019/about-time/

"Because performance artists work with time as a medium, their art can prompt questions about the very nature of time and our experience of time. In our collaboration, we have invited three performing arts groups to respond in their own way to how notions of time are debated across philosophy, psychology and science. The result is this performance evening" - Christoph Hoerl

Professor Cassam featured on a recent edition of the BBC's flagship Radio Four news programme, The World Tonight. Broadcasting live on 24 December 2018, Professor Cassam spoke with the BBC's Reality Check Correspondent about the nature of 'Truth' in politics; the difficulties of interpreting fact from fiction; the essential role in a healthy democracy of 'fact checkers' for correcting political beliefs, and how political facts can be highly contested.

Please see attached link to The World Tonight programme, which includes the interview in full: https://bbc.in/2s7nd83

Keith Ansell-Pearson has been awarded the prestigious Outstanding Academic Titles Award (OAT) 2018 by CHOICE, for his publication, Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition, published by Bloomsbury Academic (2018).

Described by the judges of the Award as 'essential reading', this accolade recognises Professor Ansell-Pearson's outstanding scholarship and his facility to appeal to the general reader. The judges considered this volume to be the best introduction to Henri Bergson (1859-1941) now on the market.

The CHOICE Review observed that 'Ansell-Pearson touches on most of Bergson's major works and clearly articulates the most crucial Bergsonian concepts. Interest in Bergson is suddenly on the rise, and this volume, which is both spirited and rigorous, will more than meet the needs of newcomers to Bergson's corpus. But the book is much more than an introduction. It will offer clarity and support to those already immersed in Bergsonian philosophy. In sum, this book demonstrates that Bergson readily addresses 21st-century questions about the human condition'.

Dr Daniele Lorenzini has been appointed Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department. Daniele, who is currently an Honorary Research Fellow with the Department, will take up his new post in October 2019. Daniele is presently a Marie Curie "Move-in Louvain" Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre Prospéro (University of Saint-Louis - Brussels) and is also a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Contemporary Critical Thought (Columbia University). He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Paris-Est and Sapienza University of Rome. Daniele's research interests extend across 20th Century European philosophy, moral philosophy, and political philosophy to ancient philosophy, ordinary language philosophy, and the relations between philosophy and literature. He has publlished widely, and is the co-editor of 'Foucault and the Making of Subjects' (2016) as well as of several of Foucault's lectures, including 'About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self' (2015) and 'Discourse and Truth' (2019). He is also the editor of the peer-reviewed journal 'Foucault Studies', the book series 'Philosophie du présent' (Vrin) and 'The Chicago Foucault Project' (University of Chicago Press). He has co-edited and contributed to the latest issue of Critical Inquiry.

Lucy Campbell has joined the Department as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow. Lucy completed her PhD in Cambridge in 2015, and has previously held teaching positions in Oxford (2017-18) and in Edinburgh (2015-16) and an Analysis Studentship also based in Oxford (2016-17). Lucy's research interests are in philosophy of mind and action, in epistemology, and - especially - in the intersection of these areas. Her thesis 'Action, Intention, and Knowledge' and subsequent publications develop accounts of our practical and psychological self-knowledge. Lucy's Leverhulme Fellowship at Warwick develops a new approach to understanding propositional knowledge which she calls 'Epistemological Pluralism'. She is also continuing her work in action-theory, especially in relation to Elizabeth Anscombe.