Speaker: Will Gildea

Title: 'Grounding Our Equality Amid Inequality: Towards a View of Moral Status'

Papers are circulated prior to the seminar. Please contact Tom Parr (T.Parr@warwick.ac.uk) for further information.

Speaker: James MacDowell (Department of Film and TV, Warwick)

Title: 'Regarding YouTube as Art'

Speaker: Alan Millar (Stirling)

Title: TBC

Speaker: Stephen Houlgate

Title: Idealism in the Thought of Berkeley, Kant and Hegel

Speaker: M.M. McCabe (KCL)

Title: 'Knowing, Saying and the Value of Understanding: Plato's Account of Epistemic Virtue'

Speaker: Toby Ord, Senior Research Fellow at Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford.

Hosted by the Department of Philosophy and Effective Altruism Warwick.

TBC

A one day conference at the Institute of Philosophy, Room 349, Third Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Papers are circulated prior to the seminar. Please contact Tom Parr (T.Parr@warwick.ac.uk) for further information.

Speaker: Michael Hannon (Nottingham)

Title: 'Empathetic Understanding in Politics'

Papers are circulated prior to the seminar. Please contact Tom Parr (T.Parr@warwick.ac.uk) for further information.

Guest Speakers:

Kate Soper (Philosophy, University of Brighton/London Metropolitan University)

Title: 'The Dialectics of Progress: Towards a Post-Growth Aesthetic and Politics of Prosperity'

James MacDowell (Department of Film and TV, Warwick)

Title: 'Regarding YouTube as Art'

Speaker: Naomi Eilan (Warwick)

Title: 'Knowing and Understanding Other People'

These two hour Zoom-based seminars focus on the publication 'Truth and Truthfulness' by Bernard Williams, (Princeton University Press, 2002).

Organised by Thomas Crowther and Guy Longworth.

Papers are circulated prior the seminar. Please contact Tom Parr (T.Parr@warwick.ac.uk) for further information.

Please contact Irene Dal Poz for further information.

Speaker: David Bather Woods (Warwick)

Title: 'The World as One: Learning from Solitude with Schopenhauer'

Abstract

Schopenhauer praises solitude and derides sociability. An active mind requires solitude, and tolerance of solitude requires an active mind, thus a capacity for solitude is an intellectual virtue, he reasons. The need for sociability, a sign of an inactive mind, is solitude’s opposite vice. Time has not been kind to this view. It is now widely accepted, and has scarcely been more apparent, that human beings are ineluctably social creatures, and better off that way. Worse still, Schopenhauer’s praise of solitude jars with his praise of worldliness as another intellectual virtue. Thinkers should learn from experience of the world, he believes; but can thinkers be both worldly and solitary? How can they know more about the world by getting out in it less? I propose a reading of Schopenhauer’s praise of the intellectual virtue of solitude which is neither insensitive to the patent human need for sociability, nor inconsistent with the intellectual virtue of worldliness.

Text: 'Truth and Truthfulness' by Bernard Williams (2002)

Further details to follow.

Please contact Johannes Roessler for further information.

Speaker: Richard Moore

The Communicative Foundations of Propositional Attitude Psychology

Abstract:

According to a widely held dogma, a developed propositional attitude psychology is a prerequisite of attributing communicative intent, and so a developmental prerequisite of natural language acquisition. This view is difficult to reconcile with developmental evidence, which shows not only that children do not develop propositional attitudes until they are four years old (e.g. Rakoczy 2017), but also that this development is parasitic upon natural language acquisition (de Villiers & de Villers 2000; Lohmann & Tomasello 2003; Low 2010), and that it recruits brain regions that do not exist in infancy (Grosse-Wiesmann et al. 2017). Against the received view, and building on my work on minimally Gricean communication (Moore 2017a), I sketch a developmental trajectory to show how propositional attitude psychology could be both invented and learned through communicative interaction. I finish by considering the conditions in which cultural tools for mental state representation might first have been developed in human history; and the extent to which our early human ancestors might have lacked propositional attitudes. The goal of the paper will not be to show that strong nativism about human mindreading must be false, but that there is no reason to take it for granted in considering the origins of the modern human mind.

Tom Crowther and David Bather Woods will share a bit of their experience of how they have been managing under the lockdown conditions, and how they have been trying to change their working habits so that they can stay remotely productive. It would be really good to hear from students too and to hear about how you have been getting on; whether you have been finding things pretty straightforward, or finding things tough going. Everyone is welcome, and Tom and David want to hear from you all.

Speaker: Eileen John (Warwick)

Title: 'Learning from Artistic Disagreement'

Abstract​: "When we disagree about the meaning and value of works of art, we do not always bother to argue about it, but sometimes we do. Arguments about art can be pursued seriously, and such disagreements can mark somehow important faultlines between people. What are these disagreements about, why are they difficult to resolve, and what can be learned from them? Stanley Cavell says that ‘the familiar lack of conclusiveness in aesthetic argument, rather than showing up an irrationality, shows the kind of rationality it has, and needs’ (MWMWWS, 86). Responding to Cavell and to some work by Fabian Dorsch, both of whom defend the unusual rationality of aesthetic judgement and argument, I will resist some of the ‘particularising’ accounts of the difficulty of these practices. I will also make some not-well-defended claims about the role of reasons in the context of artistic evaluation."