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PG Work in Progress Seminar

About the WiP

The Postgraduate Work in Progress (WiP) Seminar is a student-organised session intended to provide all philosophy graduate students, and occasionally graduate students undertaking philosophy projects in other departments, with the platform to present and discuss their ongoing research.

All philosophy PGs, whether MA, MPhil, or PhD, are encouraged to attend, and faculty members and visitors to the department are very welcome. No extensive knowledge of the week’s topic is necessary.

The seminar offers an invaluable opportunity for graduates to present their work in a friendly, supportive, unassessed setting, and receive vital peer-review feedback and tips, allowing them to improve and practise defence of their work, as well as to get to know and socialise with fellow students and members of the wider department.

Seminars normally take place on Thursdays, from 5:00pm until 6:15pm in S2.77, and can also be attended online on via Teams. The title and abstract for each talk along with a Teams link is circulated to all PG students on a Monday.

The format will consist of a roughly 30-minute presentation of a paper, followed by a roughly 30-minute open discussion and Q&A. A trip to the pub reliably follows each seminar.

Current term schedule

A list of seminars occurring in the current academic term can be found below.

Term 1 (2024-2025) Schedule

Thursday 3rd October - Oscar North-Concar - 'The Meaning of Moral Terms: Is Wiggins' View Circular?'
Thursday 10th October - John Hundley
Thursday 17th October - TBC
Thursday 24th October - TBC
Thursday 31st October - TBC
Thursday 7th November - TBC
Thursday 14th November - TBC
Thursday 21st November - TBC
Thursday 28th November -
Thursday 5th December -

Notes for presenters

There is no strict minimum or maximum limit on paper length, and you may present an entire paper, a chapter of a thesis, an article, or outline the scope of a project, etc. The general recommendation is 3000-5000 words, as your work should be amenable to summation within 30 minutes.

Please provide your title and abstract to the WiP organisers by the end of the Sunday on the week you are presenting.

Please keep in mind that the seminar is best used to gather valuable suggestions with which to improve to your work, and to gain experience in presenting your work. As such, your work does not need to be a watertight, polished piece, but may be a draft or substantial set of notes. You are welcome to share work at all stages of the writing process.

Contact the organisers

If you would like to present at the WiP or have any questions about it, please email Chris Hall (Chris.Hall.1@warwick.ac.uk).


 

Next talk:

Thursday 3rd October 2024, 5pm, S2.77
Oscar North-Concar, 'The Meaning of Moral Terms: Is Wiggins' View Circular?'

WiP Organisers 24/25:

Chris Hall (Chris.Hall.1@warwick.ac.uk)

We're recruiting new WiP Organisers to take over organisation of the seminars. Please contact Chris if you are interested.

   

 

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Postgraduate Work in Progress Seminar

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Location: Room S2.77, The Cowling Room

Traditionally, philosophers of perception have focused their attention nearly exclusively on vision. The traditional debate on perception in philosophy is based on the paradigmatic case of sight. Recently, however, the scientific and philosophical interest in studying other sensory modalities and their interaction has grown. In particular, auditory perception has become an important field of research (O’Callaghan 2007, Nudds & O’Callaghan 2009).

In this context, listening to music is usually presented as one variety of auditory perception (O’Callaghan 2016). Nevertheless, at the moment, there is no satisfactory explanation for this classification. While the philosophy of music has generated a vast literature, the perception of music has remained largely unexplored.

DeBellis’ (1995) work on music stands as an exception in the context of the perceptual studies on audition. Indeed, he provides a representational account of musical hearing in which conceptualisation plays a central role. DeBellis’ aims are: 1) to expand on Peacocke’s view of non-conceptual content of mental states 2) to furnish a definition of the difference between levels of musical hearing in conceptual terms.

In this paper, I will try to demonstrate that DeBellis’ work does not provide a consistent argument especially for the second goal outlined above. To do so, focusing on DeBellis’ notion of “weakly non-conceptual hearing”, I will provide both philosophical reasons and motives based on musical practice. Finally, I will present some unsolved questions that arise by this discussion and which represent the starting point of my research.

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