Dino Jakušić Christian Wolff and the Invention of Ontology Respondent: Samuel Honsbeek

Simon Wimmer Williamson on belief: How (not) to go knowledge-first about belief

While knowledge-first accounts of a variety of phenomena, for instance the norm of assertion and justified belief, have received much attention, knowledge-first accounts of belief have received very little. This paper aims to remedy this situation. It discusses two knowledge-first accounts of belief, based on Williamson (2000, pp.46-47)’s tentative suggestion that to believe p is “to treat p as if one knew p”. Here is the plan. In §§2-4 I introduce the two accounts I focus on. Then (§5), I argue that they are subject to counterexample: given some orthodox assumptions, both imply that one believes many propositions that are metaphysically impossible to know, which we would not expect one to believe. By way of conclusion, §6 then introduces an amendment to the accounts, which helps one of them avoid the counterexample.

Michele Giavazzi will present a paper titled 'A Civic Arguement for Epistocracy', followed by discussion and drinks at The Dirty Duck. The seminar will take place at 4pm on Wednesday in S0.17. All students and staff are welcome.

Abstract:
Most political philosophers converge on the idea that an equal right to vote is a requirement of democratic political legitimacy. The purpose of this talk, on the contrary, will be to defend the claim that it can be legitimate to disenfranchise some citizens, namely those who are politically incompetent.
The structure of the argument is the following. (1) I start with outlining a generic civic that all members of a political community should comply with. (2) Subsequently, I argue that voting is to be conceived as an institutional practice that serves to identify and pursue what represents the common interest of the polity. As such, the civic duty’s demands apply to whomever takes part in a procedure of voting. (3) Among these demands, epistemic responsibility has a crucial place. If the argument is correct, then incompetent voters fail to honour a commitment implicit in their institutional role, violating a duty that they have towards institutions and fellow citizens as well.
Given that violations of this kind usually justify some form of reproach, their power of voting can be justifiably removed or reduced.

Johan Heemskerk Appearance and Discrimination in Concept Acquisition

Title: 'Illumination and Colour Appearance' by Giulia Martina

Response from Johan Heemskert, followed by drinks at The Dirty Duck

Speaker: Tina Röck (Dundee). Title: 'Husserl's Reply to Meillassoux. A Phenomenological Way Into Speculative Realism'

Basil Dufallo, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan, is the author of The Ghosts of the Past: Latin Literature, the Dead, and Rome’s Transition to a Principate (Ohio, 2007) and The Captor’s Image: Greek Culture in Roman Ecphrasis (Oxford, 2013) and has edited, with Peggy McCracken, Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe (Michigan, 2006). Current projects, to be explored during the Warwick Fellowship, include a book - Founding Error: Wandering and Roman Expansion in Republican Latin Poetry - and an edited volume, Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Problem of Rome’s Flaws, forthcoming in the Classical Presences series at OUP (February, 2018). These twin volumes investigate the processes of disorientation or getting lost in Roman Republican texts, and consider how these processes express ambivalent attitudes toward Rome’s rapid imperial expansion in the 3rd-1st centuries BCE.

The event 'Ancient Worlds Uncovered' is taking place at Nuneaton Library on Saturday 3rd March, as part of the nationwide calendar of events in honour of the BBC Civilisations season. Several staff and Postgraduates from the Classics and Ancient History Department are headlining at this all-day family festival.

For more information see:

 https://warwick.ac.uk/about/community/publicengagement/events/nuneaton-library/

Abstract:

There is still surprisingly little agreement about what exactly joint attention is. Part of the problem is that joint attention is not a single process, but rather it includes a cluster of different cognitive skills. First, Barbora Siposova outlines a typology of joint attention levels (from followed to common, mutual, and shared attention), along with corresponding levels of common knowledge. A key distinction she makes in all of this is second-personal vs. third-personal relations. She argues that it is useful to distinguish these levesl because they have different consequences in terms of what kinds of interactions they support.

Secondly, she introduces two empirical studies with children that investigated the role of sharing attention in promoting co-operation. During the decision-making phase, children's partners made either ostenstive, communicative eye contact or looked non-communicatively at them. In Study 1, the results showed that communicative looks produced an expectation of collaboration. In Study 2, children normatively protested when their partner did not co-operate, thus showing an understanding of the communicative looks as a commitment to co-operate. This is the first experimental evidence, in adults or children, that in the right context, communicative but not non-communicative looks can signal not only an expectation but also a commitment.

Alex's aim in this paper is to present some of the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari as useful pragmatic interventions into political problems, introducing a methodological shift that will shed new light on the problem of how Liberalism should be defined. After explaining the dangers faced by any definition of Liberalism according to content or historical period, Alex explores the possibility of tracing the various problems central to Liberal Theory in search of shared pre-suppositions regarding the nature of reason and the thinking subject.

The talk will be followed by a response, discussion and drinks at The Dirty Duck. All students and staff are welcome.

Abstract:

This paper aims to motivate a new approach to Heidegger's discussion of death in Being and Time. Beginning from the two standard interpretations, which argue Heidegger is either explicating the phenomenology of death in some literal sense, or otherwise Heidegger uses the term 'death' metaphorically in relation to angst, this paper contends both interpretations ultimately fail to do justice to Heidegger's claim that he is searching for the 'ontologically adequate' conception of death. Instead, Jae argues that Heidegger's relevant conception of death is metaphorical, but this is rather a metaphor concerning the finitude of Dasein's understanding. With this, we can better understand Heidegger's overarching question of the chapter - Dasein's being-a-whole - as making the transcendental point that this finitude is that which unifies the care structure explicated in Division 1. But this finitude is the central connecting point of the book: insofar as the principle of the unity of care is the finitude of Dasein's understanding, and temporality is the structure through which Dasein interprets and understands being, this foundational connection in death has been missed out of such prior interpretations.

The talk will be followed by a response from Dino Jakusic; discussion and drinks at The Dirty Duck. All students and staff are welcome.

Abstract:

There is wide consensus amongst philosophers on the specialness of self-ascriptions as particularly authoritative, i.e. as usually taken by the audience to be true and non-evidentially justified to the point that questioning them would equate to charge the speaker of irrationality, granted his/her sincerity. However, it is still far from being as widely agreed what can elucidate the phenomenon. In particular, it is unclear whether we should prefer an epistemic or non-epistemic explanation of it, i.e. whether one is authoritative in that one knows one's own attitudes in a privileged way or for some other reason. After briefly presenting the two alternatives, the present paper considers Moran's account, whose attractiveness depends on the fact that both epistemic and non-epistemic (agential) elements are involved. Hence, it emerges that an adequate explanation should make reference to both. However, it is not straightforward how this combination could look like. The last part of the paper puts forth a weaker and a stronger reading: we can consider Moran as giving an epistemic, yet non-theoretical explanation of FPA, or as rejecting the dichotomy altogether by means of a hybrid explanation.

The talk will be followed by a response from Tristan Kreetz; discussion and drinks at The Dirty Duck.

Tristan offers a defence of a suggestion made by Gilbert Ryle about seeing and knowing in The Concept of Mind and elsewhere. Seeing and knowing are, Ryle argues, to be understood as special sorts of occurrences that Ryle calls 'achievements'. Many philosophers, most prominently Zeno Vendler, have found Ryle's claims about seeing and knowing puzzling, and it is now orthodoxy to hold that both seeing and knowing are types of state rather than occurrence, and fill time by obtaining rather than by unfolding or happening. The suggestion Tristan develops is that Ryle's critics have, by and large, not only failed to appreciate Ryle's category of achievements and the Aristotelian background to Ryle's suggestion that seeing and knowing belong in that category, but that there are significant and tangible philosophical benefits to thinking about seeing and knowing as Rylean achievements - a point Tristan draws out by looking at some remarks made by Austin about whether or not the verb 'to see' is ambiguous.

The talk will be followed by discussion and drinks at The Dirty Duck.

Metaphors can be recognised as offering an indirect way to achieve understanding of phenomena we find hard to comprehend or cannot express directly. However, claims about what is involved in the process of creating and interpreting metaphor, and the nature of what is produced, vary widely between different metaphor theories and linguistic traditions. According to traditional models, metaphorical meaning is conceived simply as a transformation of antecedent literal meaning in relation to an already present object. This way of understanding metaphor takes it to be an embellishment of discourse, but one that is unable to cover truth. But there are a number of theories that challenge this conception and attribute creative capacity to metaphor, claiming that it is possible that the use of metaphor can result in an instance of something that did not previously exist.

If it is the case that metaphor is able to exceed the boundaries of what is in an objective sense, reaching beyond facts and objects to redefine the world as a whole, whether it does this re-constituting the world, in the sense of introducing something wholly new, or by shedding new light on antecedently existing, but unavailable elements, is a matter for debate. It is the more radical, creative theories that Lucy will investigate, in order to establish whether certain kinds of metaphors can in fact be considered as, in some way, genuinely productive of meaning, and, if so, what kind of innovation this implies. And it will be seen that in the theories under consideration, the dichotomy between world constitution and world disclosure does not maintain; if a metaphor is to be truly innovative it will, in an important sense, both disclose and constitute reality.

The talk will be followed by discussion and drinks at The Dirty Duck. All are welcome.