This session will feature a paper from PhD student Carline Klijnman, who will be interviewed by Benjamin Ferguson. The abstract for Carline’s paper is below. We look forward to seeing you there! 

Epistemic Injustice and Expertise

A fundamental characterization of modern societies is epistemic dependence. We rely on (expert-)testimony of others to inform ourselves on complex, politically relevant matters. Especially in the online epistemic environment, the increasing spread of misinformation and the disintermediation of traditional epistemic gatekeepers (a combination I call Epistemic Pollution) have made it harder for citizens to determine the credibility of different information sources.  

Take for example the vaccination debate. In anti-vaccination echo-chambers, the testimony of health-care experts is persistently undermined, whilst the anecdotal stories of concerned parents claiming their child’s disease was caused by vaccination are believed without evidence. These mechanisms of distrust seem to echo Miranda Fricker’s account of ‘testimonial injustice’, wherein the speaker “receives a credibility deficit owing to identity prejudice in the hearer”. However, unlike Fricker’s central cases of systematic testimonial injustice, prejudice against healthcare experts is not rooted in social injustice. Still, as I will argue, the severity of testimonial injustice shouldn’t be measured only by its impact on the individual speaker. Structural prejudice, even if not rooted in social injustice (e.g. against healthcare experts) can undermine epistemically fair conditions of public discourse (in this case re. vaccination debate). This is both epistemically and ethically problematic. 

Please contact Johan Heemskerk for further information (j.heemskerk@warwick.ac.uk)

This session will feature a paper from MPhil student Thaddee Chantry-Gellens, who will be interviewed by David Bather Woods. The abstract for Thaddee’s paper is below. We look forward to seeing you there!

Primitivist Violence? An alternative to Sarkissian’s argument on the darker side of Daoist Primitivism

Violence is a historical fact. It has permeated the development of human history for millennia, sometimes bringing it to the brink of the abyss, other times leading it to the highest peaks. Violence of the oppressor on the oppressed, violence of the oppressed on the oppressor, forcing one’s will on others through aggressive means is multi-faceted and should not be understood as a monolithic phenomenon. Violence can be liberating, and it can be repressive. China has known political violence throughout many of the periods and forms of its long existence. The moment in time this essay focuses on is a transitory one: the shift between the aptly-named Warring States period and the first unification of China under the Qin Dynasty. It will try to depict some of the arguments made in the Primitivist section of the Zhuangzi anthology. This will be done in the context of Hagop Sarkissian’s (2010) article on the “darker side” of Daoist primitivism.

Please contact Johan Heemskerk for further information (j.heemskerk@warwick.ac.uk)

This session marks the last WiP seminar of Term 2. We will be looking at a paper from PhD student Jonathan Clarke-West. The abstract for Jonathan’s paper is below. We look forward to seeing you there!

 Imagination in Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. 

 This paper introduces my thesis before staging the first chapter. It addresses the requirement to study the role of imagination in Recherche before drawing out examples of its operation from Recherche. It outlines three categories by which I understand imagination to operate within the novel: firstly, its operation as a faculty; secondly, its role in the context of artistic production; finally, its articulation in the presentation of society. It then moves to consider the presentation of imagination as a faculty in the novel – the imagination. It looks at the positions held by different commentators – who mostly centre upon the ampliative powers acquired once imagination and sense conspire. It elects to focus upon the operation of imagination articulated by the phenomena of Proustian sensation and involuntary memory. Deleuze’s reading of Kant’s Sublime grants a point of entry to this operation. The similarities enable the claim to be made that Proust articulates a literary analytic of the encounter in these phenomena.

Please contact Johan Heemskerk for further information (j.heemskerk@warwick.ac.uk)

We are very pleased to be discussing a paper by MPhil student Sailee Khurjekar. The abstract for Sailee’s paper is below, and the paper itself is attached for those who wish to read it ahead of time. We look forward to engaging with such a vital topic.

Establishing the Place of Race: A Critical Evaluation of Cultural Constructionism 

The metaphysics of race has presented competing theories about the definition and role of human races, alongside debates surrounding the existence of races. Social constructionists on race are concerned with the nature of race and the way that it latches on to our social reality. There are two strands of social constructionism on race: political constructionism and cultural constructionism. This paper is a critical evaluation of Chike Jeffers’ cultural constructionist account of race. I will posit three criticisms of Jeffers’ position, all pertaining to his claim that races ought to be preserved in a post-racist world. The form of my criticisms is as follows:

(1) Criticism 1: Single and Unified Culture by Race

A single and unified culture by race does not exist after the end of racism.

(2) Criticism 2: Racial Difference

Racial difference cannot be celebrated in a utopian world because such difference ceases to exist.

(3) Criticism 3: White Supremacism

The preservation of racialised people worryingly blurs the line between White pride and White supremacism.

I hope that the thesis will show: The significance of the social construction of race; the benefits of adopting Jeffers’ cultural constructionist account of race; and the drawbacks of preserving racial groups after the end of racism.

This week, Samuel Honsbeek and Johan Heemskerk will be discussing Samuel's paper "The Intellect is a Mere Tool: Nietzsche, Kant and Is a Critical Philosophy Possible at All?"

 Abstract:

As is well known, Kant’s first Critique seeks to identify the limits of all possible knowledge by way of the conditions of possibility of cognition. In this paper I reconstruct a Nietzschean argument against this project. It can hardly be disputed that Nietzsche’s assessment of the Critique of Pure Reason is absolutely scathing. It is less clear, however, why he felt compelled to this assessment in the first place. In this paper I aim to show that his reaction to the critical project is in fact a considered one. I argue that Nietzsche’s dispute with Kant over the possibility of a critical philosophy is motivated by a disagreement over the proper way of grounding intellectual norms: Kant thinks that these can be grounded in the uninhibited activity of the human mind, whereas Nietzsche denies that, given Kant’s critical ambitions, there is an adequate way of grounding them at all. I conclude by showing that Nietzsche has a compelling argument for this view.

This session will focus on Will Gildea's paper "The Moral Status of Humans and Animals: Towards a New View".

Abstract

All views of the moral status of humans and animals face serious objections. They are either insufficiently egalitarian, insufficiently hierarchical, or insufficiently theoretically robust. I propose the seed of a new view of moral status, called the Engagement View, which is well-placed to avoid these key problems. On this view, moral status is grounded primarily by sentience and certain emotional capacities as they figure in engagement with the world. The Engagement View enables us to account for the equal moral status of humans with severe cognitive impairments. It also supports a form of hierarchy in the moral status of beings, but is highly revisionary about which beings may occupy the upper reaches of moral status.

This week, the seminar will discuss Giulia Lorenzi's paper How to Make Sense of Different Musical Perceptual Experiences: a New Philosophical Proposal. Guilia will be interviewed by Johannes Roessler

 Abstract:

The common-sense intuitive idea that a musician with extended musical knowledge can perceive music in a different way than a naïve listener seems both appealing and problematic. Indeed, given the standard understanding of perception in the philosophical realm as the theory-neutral apprehension of information, it is not clear how musical knowledge can inform and enhance perception of music. In this paper, I suggest that we need to rethink how we characterise auditory perception to make sense of different musical perceptual experiences. Following O’Shaughnessy (2000) and Crowther (2009), I introduce the distinction between listening and hearing. I then show how considering listening as an action makes possible to explain two different components at play in musical training and music perception: a mere perceptual one and a theoretic-perceptual other. I finally show, how the attempts previously made in philosophy to characterise this experience fails to explain some crucial aspects of this case.

There will be a discussion of a paper by Neşe Aksoy, who will be interviewed by Dino Jakusic.

Neşe's Abstract:

Spinoza’s Conatus: A Teleological Reading of its Ethical Dimension

 In this article I examine how the teleological reading of Spinoza’s conatus shapes the ethical trajectory of his philosophy. I first introduce the Spinozistic criticism of teleology and argue contra many critics that Spinoza has a mild approach to human teleology. On the basis of this idea, I develop the claim that conatus is a teleological element pertaining to human nature. From the teleological reading of conatus, I draw the conclusion that Spinozian ethics has objective, humanistic and essentialist elements. In this sense, this paper emerges to be a challenge against the anti-teleological reading of conatus that is directly related to the subjectivistic, anti-humanistic and non-essentialist interpretation of Spinoza’s ethics. It mainly situates Spinoza in a traditionally teleological context where the human conatus is seen as an act of pursuing objective and essential moral ends that is distinctive to human nature.

This week the seminar group will be discussing a paper by Johan Heemskerk. The abstract is below:

Seeking the source: metacognition, introspection and abstract concepts

Abstract

This paper explores a puzzle which arises if one holds any kind of neo-empiricist doctrine of concept acquisition but is sensitive to evidence and arguments against direct-access accounts of metacognition. Specifically, I consider Carruthers’ argument against introspection for propositional attitudes. I argue that while we can grant much to Carruthers, his arguments do not, despite the prima facie challenge they present, disrupt the neo-empiricist project. In particular, Carruthers successfully argues against attributive metacognitive access to propositional attitudes but leaves open the possibility of evaluative metacognitive access. This is sufficient to ground propositional attitude concepts and hence serve as components in abstract concepts.

Please contact Johan Heemskerk for further information about joining the seminar.

Speaker to be confirmed.

Sailee Khurjekar.

Sailee will present her paper, In Art We Trust: An Exploration into the Problem of Perfect Forgeries, in room S0.08. The session will be hybrid, so you can either join via Teams or attend in person. If the latter, please show your interest in advance by sending an email to our brand new email address (pgphil.wips@warwick.ac.uk), so we are sure to have enough space for everybody.

 Here is the abstract of Sailee’s talk:

This presentation focuses on referential forgeries and examines the loss of trust and abuse of power that occurs when an artwork is forged. I contextualise the problem of perfect forgeries in contemporary debates, comparing Sherrie Levine’s photographs of Walker Evans’ photography with art forger Yves Chaudron’s copies of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. I explain why I think that Levine is not a forger, while Chaudron certainly is. I raise some broader implications of this position for aesthetics as a discipline: The first concerns the role of lying in art and why it is problematic; and the second concerns the false understanding of culture when an artist appropriates a work from another culture and/or race. And so, I try to show how forgeries corrupt the observer’s understanding of a given artwork.

Camilla Pitton: ‘Re-examining Irigaray’s Feminist Philosophy of Nature: Problems with the ‘Duality’ Interpretation’

Abstract: This paper examines Luce Irigaray’s theory of matter and nature, as elaborated in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1999), in order to reconsider the criteria under which any such theory can be of use to a feminist project. Specifically, I aim to demonstrate, by looking at the strengths and shortcomings of Irigaray’s work, that presenting a theory of nature as originally dual (composed by a feminine and a masculine part) is not simply, and quite obviously, antithetical to a feminism that wants to be non-essentialist; more fundamentally, speaking of a feminine and a masculine part of nature, understood doubly in the generality of matter not subjected to human production and in the specificity of natural bodies, will be shown to be philosophically flawed. This investigation will, consequently, diffractively provide some parameters under which the articulation of a philosophy of nature can (i) aid a project interested in theorising the freeing of feminised bodies from objectification, and (ii) be philosophically rigorous.

Jonny Clarke-West, ‘Memory and Imagination: The Production of the Absolute in Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu’

This week we will host the talk with a hybrid format. As usual, the room is S0.08 and on MS Teams.

Abstract:

In this paper I interrogate the roles of imagination and memory at what I take to be the culmination of Proust’s project in the Recherche – where he develops a moment of pure literature. Proust writes the Recherche in order to bring into being a truth that he first discovers (but cannot articulate) in the prologue to Contre Sainte Beuve. In and through the production of the Recherche, Proust is able to realise what previously eludes him. The truth that Proust seeks is resistant to philosophy and the powers of the intellect – it requires the powers of the imagination and the production of literature. The root of literature – the production of truth – is therefore connected to the formation (or Bildung) of Marcel in whom, over the course of the novel, Proust develops the requisite sort of imaginative being. The deep connection between these projects of the novel crystallises at what I take to be its zenith when, in Le Temps Retrouvé, Marcel receives an ultimate revelation following a series of involuntary memories. It is at this juncture that the Absolute of the Recherche can be understood to be brought into being.

I examine the deep connection that Proust develops between involuntary memory and imagination in the production of the Absolute of his novel. Critical to this connection are two intertwined sets of conditions by which the unlived side of life – that time which always accompanies us but that we have not lived as such – can be brought to life in literature: firstly, a chance encounter hosted by the present; secondly, the production of an imaginary space into which the unlived can form as memory. What emerges from this is that the present as we know it is shown by Proust to be only a region of time. There is more that can be discovered, and this is what Proust accesses for literature. For literature to obtain a purchase upon this excess, Proust has to expand the field of the imagination. At the zenith of the novel, imagination becomes the site of certainty. The experience of literature – the production of truth – is the experience of the unfolding of the imaginary. The common distinction between truth and creatures of the imagination is dissolved. As Proust develops a moment of pure literature, the unimaginable – that which in the prologue to Contre Sainte-Beuve he could not articulate – transforms into the product of imagination.

Please contact Raffaele Grandoni for further information.

Mostyn Taylor Crocket’s ‘Towards a Genealogy of Modernity: Time and History in Althusser, Balibar and Foucault’.

Abstract

In this paper I investigate the possibility of a genealogical study of modernity. Foucauldian genealogy is an important historical approach but is one that has, I argue, been unable to properly analyse what I call combinatory phenomena (e.g. modernity or capitalism). I suggest that this inability stems from genealogy’s rejection of totalization. I claim that turning to Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar’s contributions to Reading Capital can provide us with a way of understanding ‘combinatory phenomena’ which does not lapse into a totalization. I show how their critique of traditional historical periodization and their theory of ‘heterogenous temporalities’ allows us to understand the social formation as constructed out of multiple times and histories. Finally, I show how this can serve as the theoretical basis of a method which investigates the connections between genealogies in producing ‘combinatory phenomena’, taking Foucault’s genealogies as my examples.

Simon Gransinger and Bernardo Ferro will present their papers on 'Hegel on the hierarchy of rights: Civil society and the state in modern political life’, at the PG Work in Progress Seminar. Please, find the abstract below. 

This session will build on a dialogical presentation of two papers. In order to give enough time to both of the speakers and have some time for a Q&A, the seminar will last until 6.30pm. After that, there is a table waiting for us at the Dirty Duck!

Be aware that the WiPS will now take place in the room S2.77 (next to the common kitchen on the second floor). For those of you who wish to attend online, here is the link to the call.

 Abstract:

In the Philosophy of Right, GWF Hegel encourages us to think of society as a hierarchical order: the family, the market, civic associations, property-rights—all of this is normatively subordinate to the state. If we follow Hegel's mature political theory (and if we oppose some of its liberal interpretations), the political whole takes absolute precedence over the various interests of civil society.

Against this background, Bernardo focusses on the Philosophy of Right’s economic dimension. He argues that Hegel’s views on modern political economy can only be fully grasped in light of the speculative logic that animates his work as a whole, and which most economic interpreters tend to ignore.

Simon examines the implications for a theory of law. For Hegel, the enforcement of legal rights is conditional on their minimal compatibility with the interests of the state. Thus understood, courts do not articulate the law in a political vacuum. Legal reasoning is a species of political reasoning.

Johan will present his paper, Which Measure of Information?, in room S2.77. The session will be hybrid, so you can either join via Teams or attend in person. If the latter, please show your interest in advance by sending an email to (pgphil.wips@warwick.ac.uk), so we are sure to have enough space for everybody.

Here is the abstract of Johan’s talk:

 Abstract

Teleosemantics is a discipline which aims to explain how meaning arises from natural processes. According to informational teleosemantics, the content of a mental representation is constrained by the information available to the representing system. Authors who adopt an informational version of teleosemantics, such as Martínez (2013) and Shea (2018) develop statistical formulae which capture, for any given environmental item, whether some representational state carries information about that item. Content is then restricted to only those items that the representational state carries information about. In this paper I argue that we should concern ourselves with how much information a representational state carries about some environmental item, rather than merely whether information is carried. A natural tool for this purpose is Claude Shannon's measure of mutual information. I argue that calculating mutual information allows for a novel solution to one variety of the indeterminacy problem for mental content, the so-called “specificity problem”. Armed with a measure for the quantity of mutual information, one can further constrain mental content according to which item maximises mutual information. 

Sailee Khurjekar will present her paper Defining Obscenity: Awkward Art and Perverse Pleasures.

 Abstract:

The idea of the obscene is capacious, encompassing a range of emotions that pertain to one’s disgust, repugnance, shock, allure, and offense towards its objects. Obscenity refers to art, behaviour, or language that have the power to trigger or prompt these emotions. Obscenity appears to unite a claim about the qualities of an object and a range of appropriate felt responses. When we say an object is obscene, we tend to mean it has debased qualities that merit offense, repugnance, and disgust. I want to tease out the most perspicuous way to set out what makes something obscene and how it maps onto artworks. The first step of the philosophical project examines paradigm cases of obscenity to show what features are markers of the obscene; and the second step of the philosophical project examines the phenomenology of the obscene. I centre my discussion around two artworks: Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814) and Rick Gibson’s Foetus Earrings (1987).

 Trigger Warning: The themes and the content of the artworks that are discussed are unusual, sensitive, and often downright perverse. The material concerns bestiality, sexual violence, paedophilia, symphorophilia, and people’s attraction to the representations of these things. I have tried to handle these issues as sensitively as possible.

Raffaele Grandoni: “Vital dialogues: Georges Canguilhem on the history of science”

This week Raffaele Grandoni will present his paper 'Vital Dialogue: Georges Canguilhem on the history of science'.

Abstract:

The main feature of the post-Foucauldian historical epistemology (e.g. Hacking, A. Davidson) lies in retracing how the social, cultural and political context determines the emergence of scientific concepts and, in turn, how science plays a role in the government of populations and individuals. However, this tradition fails to provide a normative standpoint from which to judge how relations between science and non-scientific activities affects our lives. A solution, I claim, can be found in one of the sources of these authors: the French philosopher and historian of life sciences Georges Canguilhem.

With my talk, I will address how in grounding it on a vitalist philosophy, Canguilhem turns the history of science into a tool for ethically evaluating political uses of scientific concepts, without introducing any normative criteria from the outside. I will show that Canguilhem’s history of science shares the main feature of post-Foucauldian historical epistemology – i.e. revealing the role of socio-political values in the formation of scientific concepts and retracing the process through which they acquired their autonomy – while also providing the tools for an inherent ethical critique concerning processes of normalisation legitimised by science. My idea is that by defining life as the living being’s unconscious creation of better ways to relate to its environment, Canguilhem developed a critical approach to all attempts (including scientific ones) to uniform human subjectivities under strict norms. From this, I claim that this vitalist background does not only enable Canguilhem’s history of science to evaluate socio-cultural-political influences on scientific concepts, but it also entrusts it with the ethical aim of opposing (from an objective standpoint and without undermining science’s validity) science-led policies that constrain human beings’ capacity to autonomously create their own norms.

This week Ke Xia will present her paper ' Dependence, self-sufficiency, and solidarity: Rethinking Rousseau’s critique of the division of labour'.

Abstract:

In the Second Discourse, Rousseau views the emergence of the division of labour as a decisive moment in human history that puts an end to the equal and free natural state. Before Marx, Rousseau is regarded as one of the most famous critics of the division of labour for increasing economic inequality and creating interpersonal dependence. This paper tries to provide a novel reading of Rousseau’s understanding of the division of labour. I argue that Rousseau’s criticism of the modern way of living does not prevent him from endorsing the division of labour as a necessary institution in modern society. The division of labour is necessary both in the private realm and public realm of a Rousseauian state. A well-running society requires a sense of solidarity and codependence generated through the division of labour which links each citizen together.

Chris Earley, 'Adrian Piper's Epistemic Activism'.

 Abstract

Political art often engages in epistemic activism, attempting to change its audiences’ cognitive standing on a topic of political import. In this presentation, I will focus on one instance of epistemic activism in art: Adrian Piper’s installationFour Intruders plus Alarm Systems (1980). Piper’s work is both an exemplary work of epistemic activism, but also reveals the tensions between the epistemic exceptions artists experiment with and the normative demands placed on productive political activity. In Piper’s case, this tension led to an inability to change some of her audience’s cognitive standing. I propose two ways to respond to such tension: conciliation, which proposes that activist artists have distinct reasons to fit their work to their audience’s normative expectations, and steadfastness, which proposes that activist artists have distinct reasons to challenge and provoke their audiences, even if they open themselves up to failure. I claim that steadfastness better captures political art’s humility regarding success and allows us to more clearly account for the riskiness that is necessary for productive experimentation in political life.

This week Michi Nanayakkara will present her paper 'Colonial Regimes of Truth: Idealising and Assimilating to the Coloniser’s world'.

 Abstract:

Physical violence, imperialism (epistemic domination), economical exploitation, slavery, and racial discrimination are among the many devasting events comprising Colonisation. Despite these horrific tragedies, colonisation can have the effect of creating a peculiar relationship between the coloniser and the colonised in postcolonial worlds; wherein the colonised subject begins to idealise their coloniser and desire assimilation into the coloniser’s world. This peculiarity can be elucidated in reference to Foucault’s Regimes of Truth which capture the phenomenon where subjects of power relations exhibit the ‘truth’ of those powers through their subjectivity.

To explain how we arrive at a situation like a Colonial Regime of Truth, I will be critically engaging with Berlin’s contentious evaluations of ‘Positive liberty’ which, according to Berlin, arises namely from Rousseau’s attempt to reconcile the absolute value of personal freedom with authorities (although Berlin also says that positive liberty is perhaps the oldest conception of freedom in Western Philosophy). By moreover using Charles Mills’ Racial Contract to construct a postcolonial critique of positive liberty, I will argue that it is internally consistent for a positive theorist to justify acts of imperialism in the name of freedom. Furthermore, by referring to past and present case studies of imperialism, I hope to convey the illiberalism underwriting positive liberty which is used to create and justify Colonial Regimes of Truth. In other words, I hope to explain how we get to Foucault without the Foucauldian terminology (ideal for those who dislike Foucault for whatever (wrong) reason 😊)

Speaker: Michi Nanayakkara (MA Continental Philosophy)

Title: The Status of Systematic & Metaphysical Ideas in Modernity 

 Abstract:

Following the influence of Nietzsche, Marx and much of 20^th-century Continental philosophy, some say that the 21st century will go down in history as a sceptical and/or critical one (Ferrara, 1995). One could argue that the most important transformation undergone by Philosophy is the discovery of the Contextuality of knowledge. Although this might not affect all disciplines of Philosophy in the same way, the fields of Social, Political and Moral philosophy are arguably most affected. In this seminar session I’d like to consider some of the objections posed by Isiah Berlin to Political Philosophy as a discipline. Berlin asks us to rethink the way we do Political Philosophy and separate it from other forms of philosophical inquiry – especially from Moral Philosophy (1969). Simply put, Political Philosophy shouldn’t be ‘applied’ Moral Philosophy. I will discuss some of the reasons for this by critiquing ‘New Universalism’ (attempts to evaluate Universals in the light of irreducible plurality)

Moreover, I’ll discuss the status of Systematic & Metaphysical ideas that undercut the contemporary Decolonial project. What is perhaps most troubling is how these metaphysical Theses/Ideas can have socio-political and normative implications, but political critiques that target this sinister side are often dismissed. This is a problem Berlin takes on by referencing the German Poet Heine’s warnings to the French people; Do not underestimate the Power of Ideas; “When this great metaphysical rage explodes over the world, the French revolution will seem to be mere child’s play…the power of philosophical or metaphysical ideas is very great” (1969; 1976). By adopting the method Nietzsche uses to critique Western-Idealist Philosophy, I’ll attempt to pose two main objections that target Western metaphysics itself (at least I hope to do so). In turn, I’ll attempt to make the case that it is very probable that Imperialism is not a moral problem for Western-moral philosophy given its monistic and timeless presuppositions of ‘Truth’.

Ben Campion (PhD)

Title: “The New Theory of Photography and the Dilemma of Videogame Imagery”

 Abstract:

Indicative of a growing interest among artists and theorists in the relationship between photography and videogames, a recent major exhibition at The Photographer’s Gallery, London, includes works which are produced utilising videogame graphics. The production of these images by photographers and their display in a gallery dedicated to photography raises a pertinent question: are these images photographic images? In this talk, I will argue that this question poses a dilemma to a group of contemporary philosophical views on photography called the ‘new theory’. One of the goals of new theory is to provide a theoretical basis for accepting a greater amount of work by photographers as photography than previous theories had allowed. I will suggest that considering videogame images a form of photography threatens this goal, as one can either accept that they are photographs—a claim which I argue threatens the theoretical foundations of new theory—or deny that they are photographs, thereby threatening new theory’s ability to account for photographic practice.

This week’s speaker will be Johan Heemskerk (PhD)

Title: is "Gloss or Theory? A Worry for Science Based Theories of Content".

 Abstract:

Many philosophers working on mental content pursue a particular methodology. This involves consulting cognitive science literature and attempting to extract a naturalistic theory of mental content. Such a theory should allow us to specify, for any given representation, how its content is determined. There is a sense, as Tyler Burge puts it, that cognitive science has discovered "without being fully aware of its own accomplishment" (Burge, 2010) an implicit theory of content determination. It is the job of the philosopher to make the implicit theory explicit, maybe with some details filled in. In this paper I attempt to motivate a worry for the philosopher inclined to follow such a methodology. Using an argument from Frances Egan, I raise the concern that cognitive scientists do not have an implicit theory of content. Rather, they assign content based on purely heuristic concerns, for instance a concern for communicating the theory to the reader. Content would then be a "gloss", without theoretical underpinnings. I do not attempt to answer this concern, but I do explore some ways we might begin to respond.

Speaker: Bruna Picas-I-Prats (PhD)

Title: Title: Architectonic Systematics and Cartographic Systematics: Kant and Hegel on Meta-systematic Accounts

Thursday 10 November 2022

5pm in S2.77 and on MS Teams

Abstract:

There is an open discussion on whether there is a concern for systematicity in Kantian philosophy and whether Kant intended to build up a system of philosophy. There is an approach in this discussion that highlights that two different possibilities for systematic organization can be found in the Critique of Pure Reason (KrV). On the one hand, an architectonic notion of ordination (AS) corresponds to the notion of systems developed in the Architectonic of Pure Reason. In it, by system, Kant understands the unity of the manifold cognitions under one idea. The type of relationship that the idea provides is a linkage of articulatio, in the function of which each part hangs together in an inner mutual bearing. The metaphor that Kant deploys to illustrate this notion is an analogy of a living organism, whose growth and development do not depend on adding parts according to quantitative criteria, but with a view to improving the functions of its parts in relation to the whole (See, KrV, A832/B61). On the other hand, a cartographic notion of system (CS) can also be found in the First Critique, represented by the image of a map, the function of which is to order a diversity of places and regions of space to allow us to orient ourselves in them. Hence, CS is formed by a horizontal juxtaposition of parts which allows qualitatively differentiated zones (seas, continents, islands, etc.) to be gathered, and at the same time the “heterogeneity” with respect to their possible foundation to be maintained. Taking these two notions of system into account, the aim here is to try to state that they both coexist in Hegel’s systematicity and that this coexistence is structured by dialectical progression and speculative awareness. 

Speaker: Toby Tricks (MPhil)

Title: Modelling the Mind: A Fictionalist Reading of Nietzsche’s Drive Psychology

 Abstract:

Nietzche’s account of the drives is increasingly being recognised as central to his philosophical psychology; it is a problem, then, that it appears confused. A particularly prominent issue concerns Nietzsche’s characterisation of how the drives interact with one another: he often uses agential language which many take to commit him to the homunculus fallacy. I argue that this view is mistaken, because Nietzsche’s agential characterisations of the drives are fictions: as they aren’t meant to be true, he is able to sidestep fallacious homuncularism. We might worry that if many of the claims in Nietzsche’s drive psychology are fictional, then it can’t teach us much. That need not be the case, however: drawing on Catherine Elgin’s work in the epistemology of science, I argue that despite being fictional, Nietzsche’s account of the drives can still provide epistemic value and facilitate genuine cognitive achievement, in just the same way that scientific models do despite being idealised and distorted representations of reality. Acknowledging the fictional nature of much of Nietzsche’s drive talk I’ll further argue has an added bonus: it allows us to more fully appreciate the subtlety and power of his account of human psychology.