Speaker: M.M. McCabe (KCL)

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

Speaker: Michael Hannon (Nottingham)

Title: 'Empathetic Understanding in Politics'

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.

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)

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."

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

Speaker: Richard Moore

Title: Inequality in Times of Crisis

Please contact Giulia Lorenzi for further details

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: 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.

This 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)

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

Speaker: Christoph Hoerl (Warwick)

Title: 'Episodic Memory and Knowledge'

Abstract​: According to Locke, memory is the power of the mind "to revive perceptions which it once had, with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has had them before". I will refer to theories that fit Locke's general description as 'two-factor theories' of memory, and I will assume that they are meant specifically to provide an account of episodic memory. Such two-factories have been very popular historically, and they have seen a resurgence in recent years, because they are seen to be in line with certain empirical findings about the neural structures underpinning episodic memory. I will sketch a number of problems facing two-factor theories of episodic memory, and suggest that they have a common root, which is that the concept of knowledge is absent from the account two factor theories give of episodic memory. An account that instead puts centre stage the idea that episodic memory involves the retention of a certain type of knowledge can avoid the problems that two-factor theories of episodic memory face.

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

Speaker: Carrie Figdor (University of Iowa)

Speaker: Richard Gipps (Oxford)

Title: 'On the Importance of Not Understanding the Patient'

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

Hosted by Tom Crowther and David Bather Woods

Speaker: 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)."​

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

Preparing and publishing publications

Job Application guidance with Lucy Campbell, Andrew Cooper and Daniele Lorenzini

Speaker: 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.

Speaker: Maria Corrado (Warwick)

Title: 'Action, Force, and Auditory Perception'

Abstract​: "In chapter 2 of Individuals, Strawson (1959) explores the case of a purely auditory world, which he considers to be exempt of material things, to test whether there could be a conceptual scheme that accommodates the existence of objective particulars which does not rely on material things. Strawson’s assessment of a purely auditory world raises a question as to whether purely auditory perceptual experience does enable direct cognitive contact with an objective, material world. I pursue the thesis that the purely auditory delivers materiality through the notion of force. My leading reasoning is that (1) insofar as exertion of force is a mark of materiality, and (2) insofar as force is apparent in purely auditory perceptual experience, (3) there is a mark of materiality that is apparent in auditory perceptual experience. On this occasion, I focus on providing motivation for the claim that (2) force is apparent in auditory perceptual experience by defending the thesis that it is possible to directly observe force in things interacting at a distance from one. My strategy is to argue that a cogent explanation of our ability to successfully act or bring about the desired changes in the world requires that we are capable to perceptually observe the force that objects exert at a distance from us. Accepting that force is observable at a distance from one brings us a step closer to the view that force is apparent in auditory perceptual experience of collisions. The plan is to then use this insight as a starting point to defend, at a later stage, the thesis that purely auditory perceptual experience provides us with the material to justify the objectivity of our sensory experience."​​

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