Research Seminar in Post-Kantian European Philosophy, 2019/2020
Unless otherwise stated, Post-Kantian European Philosophy Research Group seminars take place on Tuesdays, 5:30–7:30pm in Room S0.11 (ground floor of Social Studies). All welcome. For further information, please contact tbc
Tue 18 Feb, '20- |
Post-Kantian European Philosophy SeminarRoom S0.11, Social Sciences BuildingSpeaker: Simone Kotva (Cambridge) Title: 'An Enquiry Concerning Non-Human Understanding: Philosophy, Ecstasy and Ecological Thinking' |
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Thu 20 Feb, '20- |
Reading Group: Communion de BatailleRoom H4.22, Humanities Building |
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Thu 27 Feb, '20- |
Reading Group: Communion de BatailleRoom H4.22, Humanities Building |
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Tue 3 Mar, '20- |
CANCELLED: Women in Philosophy EventRoom S0.21, Social Sciences BuildingThis is a unique opportunity to hear from fantastic female talent writing in many fields of philosophy. Whether you are considering postgraduate study or simply pursuing an interest in philosophy, there will be something to engage you. We are pleased to welcome staff from The University of Warwick for a Q&A panel as well as two guest speakers: Helen Steward (University of Leeds) is the Deputy Head of The School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science. She is President of the Aristotelian Society, as well as being one of the leading philosophers in the country pioneering work in philosophy of action, free will and philosophy of the mind. Fabienne Peter (University of Warwick) is the Head of the Department of Philosophy. Before coming to Warwick in 2004, she taught at the University of Basel and was Postdoc at the Harvard School of Public Health. |
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Tue 3 Mar, '20- |
CANCELLED: Post-Kantian European Philosophy SeminarBergson on Time and Freedom With Keith Ansell-Pearson (Warwick), Emily Herring (Leeds) and Mark Sinclair (Roehampton) |
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Thu 5 Mar, '20- |
Reading Group: Communion de BatailleRoom H4.22, Humanities Building |
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Wed 11 Mar, '20- |
Philosophy Society Event: Lecture by Stephen HoulgateRoom S0.21, Social Sciences BuildingSpeaker: Stephen Houlgate Title: Idealism in the Thought of Berkeley, Kant and Hegel |
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Thu 12 Mar, '20- |
Reading Group: Communion de BatailleRoom H4.22, Humanities Building |
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Fri 1 May, '20- |
Truth and Truthfulness Webinar: Chapter 1: The ProblemBy ZoomThese 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.
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Fri 8 May, '20- |
Truth and Truthfulness Webinar: Chapter 2: Geneology - All Students WelcomeBy ZoomText: 'Truth and Truthfulness' by Bernard Williams (2002) |
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Wed 13 May, '20- |
Philosophy Department Colloquium: Richard Moore: 'The Communicative Foundations of Propositional Attitude Psychology'By ZoomSpeaker: Richard Moore The Communicative Foundations of Propositional Attitude Psychology |
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Thu 14 May, '20- |
'Working in Lockdown'MS TeamsTom 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. |
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Thu 14 May, '20- |
Knowledge and Understanding SeminarBy ZoomSpeaker: 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." |
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Fri 15 May, '20- |
Preparing for Alternative Assessments (Take-Home Exams and Essays)MS TeamsWHAT: Preparing for Alternative Assessments (Take-Home Exams and Essays)
WHO: David Bather Woods
WHEN: 10.00-11.00 Friday 15th May
WHERE: via Teams
WHAT: David Bather Woods will give a presentation via Microsoft Teams with tips on how to prepare for your alternative assessments. It will include advice on how to make the most of adapting to take-home exams and essays. Attenders are welcome to ask questions in real time, but the presentation material will also be circulated afterwards for the benefit of anyone unable to attend the presentation. A link to join the Teams meeting will be sent by email to all students registered to modules with take-home exams or essays as alternative assessment. Please contact David Bather Woods (d.woods@warwick.ac.uk) with any questions.
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Fri 15 May, '20- |
Truth and Truthfulness Webinar: Chapter 3: The State of Nature - A Rough GuideBy ZoomText: 'Truth and Truthfulness' by Bernard Williams (2002) |
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Wed 20 May, '20- |
MAP SeminarBy ZoomSpeaker: Richard Moore Title: Inequality in Times of Crisis Please contact Giulia Lorenzi for further details |
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Thu 21 May, '20- |
'Working in Lockdown'MS TeamsTom 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. |
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Thu 21 May, '20- |
Knowledge and Understanding SeminarBy ZoomSpeaker: Simon Wimmer (TU Dortmund) Title: 'What if Knowledge and Belief Took Different Objects?' Abstract: Suppose one knows and believes that it is raining. What relation do one’s knowledge state and one’s belief state bear to each other? The aim of this paper is to explore what constraints on answering this question follow if knowledge is an attitude to a fact, whilst belief is not. |
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Fri 22 May, '20- |
Seminar by Zoom: 'The Unity of Knowledge' with Professor Katalin Farkas (CEU)By ZoomThis is to announce that the seminar with Katalin Farkas (CEU) which was originally scheduled for April 16th has been **rescheduled** as a Zoom meeting. Title: 'The Unity of Knowledge' Speaker: Professor Katalin Farkas (CEU) Abstract:
"English uses the same word, “know”, for knowing things, knowing that something is the case, and knowing how to do things. Many other languages distinguish among two or three of these types. Is the English word simply polysemous, or is there an insight here - is there a conception of knowledge that covers all three cases? One option has been to claim that the first and the third are in fact reducible to the second: all knowledge is knowledge of truth, and this gives knowledge a unity. This talks surveys alternative proposals for a unified conception of knowledge. On these proposals, objectual or practical knowledge is not reducible to factual knowledge, yet there is a broader conception of knowledge that covers both, or all three. For example, Linda Zagzebski claims that knowledge is cognitive contact with reality that arises from the exercise of an intellectual virtue. The contact can be direct contact with an object, or mediated contact with a fact through the awareness of a proposition. Other ideas about finding a common essence for objectual, factual and practical knowledge will be considered."
Format: Professor Farkas will give a talk, followed by a short break and then a Q&A. No previous reading is required. Please contact Lucy Campbell if you would like to register to join this event.
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Fri 22 May, '20- |
Truth and Truthfulness Webinar: Chapter 4: Truth, Assertion and BeliefBy ZoomText: 'Truth and Truthfulness' by Bernard Williams (2002) |
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Fri 29 May, '20- |
Truth and Truthfulness Webinar: Chapter 5: Sincerity: Lying and Other Styles of DeceitBy ZoomText: 'Truth and Truthfulness' by Bernard Williams (2002) |
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Wed 3 Jun, '20- |
Philosophy Department Colloquium: Carrie Figdor (University of Iowa)By ZoomSpeaker: Carrie Figdor (University of Iowa) Title: What could cognition be, if not human cognition?
Abstract: We have long thought about cognition from an anthropocentric perspective, where human cognition is treated as the standard for full-fledged capacities throughout the biological world. This makes no evolutionary sense. I will discuss the theoretical and methodological shifts away from this perspective in comparative research — shifts that lie behind recent discoveries of advanced cognition in many non-humans — and how these changes bear on the debate between those who see human and non-human cognition as continuous (a difference in degree) vs. those who see them as discontinuous (a difference in kind).
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Thu 4 Jun, '20- |
Knowledge and Understanding SeminarBy ZoomSpeaker: Richard Gipps (Oxford) Title: 'On the Importance of Not Understanding the Patient' Abstract: "One kind of everyday understanding that we seek has to do with making sense of what someone’s getting at or on about with her initially opaque words or actions. The retrieval of such meaning is a mainstay of everyday life and an ambition that psychology often brings with it to the clinical setting – even when the thought there under consideration is psychotic. It’s also presupposed by such efforts at understanding, causally, why the patient thinks as she does as invoke the notion of a mistake or illusion: we can’t understand why someone makes a particular mistake unless we already understand something of its content. (The understanding here is captured by suggestions like: ‘Were I in her cognitive/perceptual/somatosensory/existential/environmental predicament, I’d come to that conclusion too’).
In this paper I suggest that certain theories of thought disorder, passivity experience and delusion – theories which hope to understand the patient by retrieving his speaker’s meaning – radically fail. They do so because they trade on an alienated conception of ordinary mental life which is itself only sustained by illusions of sense; they attempt to reduce delusion to illusion; and they fail the patient by evading the fact of, rather than meeting him in the midst of, his brokenness. Despite the impossibility of retrieving speaker’s meaning from truly psychotic discourse, this does not render unavailable other forms of understanding (symbolic/motivational, neurological, situational etc.) of the psychotic subject. Even so, if we’re to achieve, with the psychotic subject, that (moral) form of understanding which can be said to be shown someone, we must first learn to avoid the temptation of attributing speaker’s or agent’s meaning to his psychotic words and acts. To this end this paper outlines what I’ll call an ‘apophatic’ (as opposed to a ‘cataphatic’) psychopathology. This ‘apophatic’ approach aims at understanding the patient not through positively understanding her words’ meaning but instead through understanding just why some of the things we’re most tempted to say of her fail her." |
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Fri 5 Jun, '20- |
Truth and Truthfulness Webinar: Chapter 6: Accuracy: A Sense of RealityBy ZoomText: 'Truth and Truthfulness' by Bernard Williams (2002) |
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Thu 11 Jun, '20- |
'Still Working in Lockdown'MS TeamsHosted by Tom Crowther and David Bather Woods |
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Thu 11 Jun, '20- |
Knowledge and Understanding SeminarBy ZoomSpeaker: Johannes Roessler (Warwick) Title: 'Self-Understanding' Abstract: "Intentional agents seem to have a distinctive ‘first-personal’ way of knowing what they are doing (Anscombe’s ‘practical knowledge’) as well as, connectedly, a distinctive ‘first-personal’ way of understanding why they are doing it, in terms of their practical reasons. In this talk I consider a puzzle generated by two further plausible suggestions: traits of character play an essential (if perhaps implicit) role in reason-giving explanations of intentional actions; but we have no first-person knowledge of our character. I won’t try to solve the puzzle, merely to get a better understanding of it (drawing on work by Hursthouse, Kant, and Montaigne)." |
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Fri 12 Jun, '20- |
Truth and Truthfulness Webinar: Chapter 7: What Was Wrong with Minos?By ZoomText: 'Truth and Truthfulness' by Bernard Williams (2002) |
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Wed 17 Jun, '20- |
Philosophy Department ColloquiumBy ZoomSpeaker: Sameer Bajaj (Warwick) Title: "Democratic Mandates and the Ethics of Representation." Democratic Mandates and the Ethics of Representation A day after the Tories achieved a decisive victory in the December 2019 British general election, Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared that he had received a “huge great stonking mandate” to get Brexit done and implement his domestic policy agenda. Whether or not what Johnson received is appropriately described as huge, great, or stonking, his statement reflects a more general idea that has wide currency in conventional democratic thought—namely, that larger electoral victories give representatives greater mandates to govern. Despite its important role in the practice of democratic politics, democratic theorists have paid little attention to the questions of whether larger electoral victories actually give representatives greater mandates to govern and, if so, what the moral implications of having a greater or lesser mandate are. My aim in this essay is to answer these questions and, in doing so, lay the groundwork for a normative theory of democratic mandates. I suggest that the key to answering the questions lies in understanding the relationship between two functions of democratic votes. Votes have a metaphysical function: they authorise representatives to govern. And votes have an expressive function: they express attitudes about the representatives they authorise. I defend what I call the dependence thesis: the content, size, and moral implications of a representative’s mandate depend on the attitudes expressed by the votes that generate the mandate. I then argue that, given certain ineliminable features of large-scale democratic politics, real-world democratic representatives are rarely in a position to justifiably claim greater mandates based on the size of their electoral victories. |
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Fri 19 Jun, '20- |
Truth and Truthfulness Webinar: Chapter 8: From Sincerity to AuthenticityBy ZoomText: 'Truth and Truthfulness' by Bernard Williams (2002) |
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Wed 24 Jun, '20- |
MAP SeminarBy ZoomGuest Speaker: Dr Irene Dal Poz (Warwick) Title: 'Women in Philosophy in a Time of Crisis' Please contact Giulia Lorenzo for details on how to join. |