Guest Speaker: David Bather Woods

Title: What is the Good of Public Philosophy?

ABSTRACT:

There has been a boom in public philosophy recently, with philosophers taking full advantage of the range of new media as well as continuing with the old. This session is titled ‘What is the good of public philosophy?’ There have been many answers to this question, including enrichment, guidance, self-improvement, entertainment, and citizenry. But as I research this literature, I find few if any linking public philosophy to the goods of university access and participation. In this session, then, I pose a more specific set of question: Does public philosophy support the good of widening participation? Does widening participation need public philosophy? If so, what kind of public philosophy does it need? At first glance, public philosophy does not look essential to widening participation in university philosophy. On further investigation, however, there is a role for philosophers to play in raising awareness of the discipline of philosophy, encouraging and increasing philosophical literacy, and shaping the environment and image of philosophy.

Speaker: Sameer Bajaj

Title: TBC

Speaker: Simon Wimmer (Warwick)

Title: 'Knowledge, Facts, and why Knowledge might be a Socio-Linguistic Kind'

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.