Departmental Colloquium, 2024/2025
Colloquia take place from 4.00pm to 5:45pm in S0.18 unless otherwise indicated. For further information, please contact Andrew Cooper (Andrew.Cooper@warwick.ac.uk) or Gemma Basterfield (Gemma.Basterfield@warwick.ac.uk). Details of previous years’ colloquia can be found here.
Wed 15 Oct, '25- |
Departmental Colloquium - Adrian Alsmith (KCL)S0.18 |
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Wed 26 Nov, '25- |
Departmental Colloquium - Jennifer Marušić (Edinburgh)S0.18 |
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Wed 21 Jan, '26- |
Departmental Colloquium Daisy Dixon (Cardiff)S0.18 |
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Wed 4 Mar, '26- |
Departmental Colloquium - Lidal Dror (Princeton)S0.18What’s Wrong with ‘Conceptual Amelioration’? Conceptual amelioration aims to make the world a more just place by ameliorating our concepts. I offer three arguments against this enterprise as currently practiced, to show how social philosophy aimed at producing social change can be better practiced. First, ameliorators often fail to provide plausible stories to vindicate their claims about how conceptual amelioration will unfold in our non-ideal world. Second, ameliorators’ focus on postulating meanings of ‘concepts’ risks distracting from important normative theorizing about justice. Third, ameliorators tend to overstate the importance of conceptual change for social change. The upshot is that, since such projects tend to be done poorly on their own terms and to evince excessively idealistic views of social change, we should reconsider how to engage in such projects. Drawing on these criticisms, I argue that conceptual amelioration should be conducted in service of ideology critique.
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