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: 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

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.

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: 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: 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: Richard Gipps (Oxford)

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

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

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

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