Speaker: Sonia Sedivy (Toronto)

Title: 'Aesthetic Properties and Philosophy of Perception'

Speaker: Jae Hetterley

Title: 'Heidegger's Kantianism in Being and Time'

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates Heidegger's intellectual development at a specific historical moment: the centrality of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to Heidegger's understanding of ontology in the late 1920s. Why does fundamental ontology become a specifically transcendental philosophy, and how ought we to understand the transcendental thread in relation to the wider systematics of Being and Time? Regarding the first question, I argue that Heidegger's thought undergoes its own 'Copernican Revolution' in response to a methodological aporia Heidegger is confronted with - namely, how can phenomenology address the question of the meaning of being whilst going beyond mere anthropology? The Copernican Revolution, I argue, signals a way out insofar as it demonstrates that intentional conditions coincide with ontological conditions - and with this in place, structures of Dasein are consequently structures of being. Secondly, in filling out Heidegger's transcendental conception of ontology, I draw an analogy between Kantian imagination and Heideggerian disclosedness as the root of their systematic unity - that what both philosophers foundationally recognise ontologically is a structure of ambiguity at the heart of the human subjectivity, between intuition and understanding, existentiality and facticity. Ontological interpretation, in turn, is structually projective for both Kant and Heidegger - which is to say, the formal structures of their respective ontologies cohere. Finally, I consider the question of transcendental idealism in relation to Kant and Heidegger, and set out how the primarily systematic argument that I provide in the thesis can provide the basis for closer readings of Being and Time.

The seminar will be followed by a Q&A session and drinks in The Duck.

Please contact Alex Obrigewitsch for further information (Alex.Obrigewitsch@warwick.ac.uk)

Speaker: Mert Yirmibes

Struggling to finish an essay? Find it too easy to look for excuses?

Join us for a productive morning, stripped away from all distractions in the Cowling Room (S2.77) at 10.00am. Bring a goal with you: what do you want to accomplish in the next two hours? Be ambitious, while keeping it realistic - what can you do if you were in your top state of mind?

Imagine finishing that essay you've been dreading to write, in two hours, on a Monday morning! This is like a Library all-nighter, minus the noisy crisps and feeling of slight disgust.

A continental breakfast will be provided.

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

Speaker: Jeffrey A. Bell (Southeastern Louisiana University)

Title: 'Towards a Deleuzian-Humean Political Theory'

Speaker: Simon Jenkins

Title: 'Reproduction, Surveillance and Discrimination: Potential Effects of Emerging Technologies on Minority Groups'

The Philosophy Department will be running an information session on the opportunities and attractions of postgraduate study in Philosophy on Wednesday 27 November 2019.

The session will provide detailed information on the various postgraduate degrees in Philosophy, or including a Philosophy component, that are available at Warwick, both immediately post-BA, and more advanced (doctoral degrees). In addition to information on the different postgraduate courses, the session will also provide guidance about deadlines, sources of funding (including Departmental scholarships), and the career advantages of postgraduate study in Philosophy.

Speakers will include members of the Philosophy Department involved in running postgraduate degrees, as well as students currently taking graduate degrees in the Department. A representative from the Careers Team will also be in attendance. There will be plenty of opportunity to ask questions. Wine and nibbles will be served. We hope to see many of you there!

Please contact Alex Obrigewitsch for further information (Alex.Obrigewitsch@warwick.ac.uk)

Speaker: Professor David Papineau (KCL and City University of New York Graduate Center)

Title: 'The Statistics and Metaphysics of Causation'

Royal Statistical Society event. Please contact Ian Hamilton: (I.Hamilton@warwick.ac.uk) for further information.

Please note that this event has been postponed and will now take place on 05/12/2019.

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

Speaker: Rachel Bowlby (Department of Comparative Literature, UCL)

Title: 'Unnatural Resources: Changing Arguments and Reproductive Technologies'

Speaker: Zak Stinchcombe

Title: 'This Moral Vision: Martha Nussbaum and the Novel'

ABSTRACT:

This talk is interested in examining the relations that hold between ethical and literary value with a particular focus on whether they are in tension, do not neatly complement one another, perhaps violently disagree, and so on. Initially we will look at two competing accounts of this tension, namely Ethicism (wherein ethical deficiency, or merit, corresponds to literary deficiency or merit) and Aestheticism (there is no real tension to discuss - aesthetic value and ethical value do not occupy the same space, have nothing to do with one another, that ethical considerations are irrelevant to aesthetic judgements, and so on). Neither account is satisfactory, treating the relationship too superficially. Martha Nussbaum's account of the novel, particularly in the Jamesian novel, points to a deeper, more textured account of the relationship. Quite apart from the ethical and literary value covarying. or else standing independently of one another, Nussbaum argues: 1) novels are themselves works of moral philosophy. 2) it is in novels that one finds the most appropriate articulation of the, or this, moral vision. 3) we can find in novels a paradigm of moral activity. I shall assess the plausibility of these claims, taking into consideration some interpretative ambiguities that exist in her account. I will then be in a position to say something of how this might be applied to the tension we began with. Nussbaum says that there exists a 'dynamic tension between two possible irreconcilable visions...' I agree that this tension exists. Moreover, though, I intend to claim something stronger. The dynamic tension is not merely present; it is an essential component of the relationship between ethical and aesthetic value.

Please contact Alex Obrigewitsch for further information (Alex.Obrigewitsch@warwick.ac.uk)

Title: The Statistics and Metaphysics of Causation

ABSTRACT:

For the last 100 years statisticians have been developing techniques to tease causal conclusions of observational correlational data. For the most part, philosophers have simply ignored these developments. Even when they have taken notice, they have done nothing to related the success of these techniques to the metaphysical nature of causation. Curiously, this silence has been encouraged by the attitude of statisticians like Judea Pearl. The talk will reflect on the puzzling situation.

Alison Phipps is a renowned sociologist, focusing on gender studies. She will discuss her research for her upcoming book: Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism.

https://genderate.wordpress.com/books/mny/

For further details on the talk:

https://www.facebook.com/events/419334449015805/

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

Speaker: Kurt Sylvan (Southampton)

Title: 'Knowledge and the Presentation of Reality'

Completing Application Forms and Attending Job Interviews

With Sameer Bajaj, Lucy Campbell and Daniele Lorenzini

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

Speaker: Naomi Waltham-Smith (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, Warwick)

Title: 'Homofaunie: Non-Human Tonalities of Listening in Derrida and Cixous'

Warwick PAIS and Philosophy have organised a roundtable to discuss Martina Tazzioli's new book, The Making of Migration: The Biopolitics of Mobility at Europe's Borders (London: SAGE, 2019). The book addresses the rapid phenomenon that has become one of the most contentious issues in contemporary life: How are migrants governed as individual subjects and as part of groups? What are the modes of control, identification and partitions that migrants are subjected to? Bringing together an ethnographically grounded analysis of migration, and a critical theoretical engagement with the security and humanitarian modes of governing migrants, The Making of Migration pushes us to rethink notions that are central in current political theory such as multiplicity and subjectivity. This is an innovative and sophisticated study, deploying migration as an analytical angle for complicating and reconceptualising the emergence of collective subjects, mechanisms of individualisation, and political invisibility/visibility.

Contributors:

Stuart Elden (PAIS, Warwick)

Daniele Lorenzini (Philosophy, Warwick)

Vicki Squire (PAIS, Warwick)

Maurice Stierl (PAIS, Warwick)

and Martina Tazzioli (Goldsmiths, University of London)

This reading group, or 'communion', focuses on the work of Georges Bataille and his henchmen, including but not limited to Andre Masson, Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris, Pierre Klossoski, Raymond Queneau. Alexandre Kojève and Lev Shestov, as well as literary figures including Colette Peignot, Jacques Vaché, Lautréamont, Marques de Sade, Baudelaire, Catherine of Siena and Meister Eckart.

A few key texts will be analysed:

Le Coupable (1944) Guilty

L'Erotisme (1957) Eroticism

La Haine de la Poésie (1947) The Hatred of Poetry

L'Impossible (1962) The Impossible

La literature et le Mal (1957) Literature and Evil

Open to all.

Speaker: Rachel Fraser (Oxford)

Title: 'Narrative Testimony'

Contributors:

Alison Downham Moore (Western Sydney University)

Lisa Downing (University of Birmingham)

Stuart Elden (PAIS, Warwick)

Daniele Lorenzini (Philosophy, Warwick)

Federico Testa (Institute of Advanced Study, Warwick)

Supported by Centre Michel Foucault, Institute of Advanced Study, Warwick, and The University of Warwick.