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)

Guest 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.

Speaker: Ellisif Wasmuth (Essex)

Title: "What the many know and teach: Plato on the knowledge of language users"

Abstract. "Plato is known for his low opinion of the epistemic achievements of the many. He usually grants knowledge (epistēmē or technē) only to the expert or master dialectician, but in the First Alcibiades Socrates seems to agree with Alcibiades that even the many have some knowledge – they know Greek (111c3). In this paper I ask what, if anything, the many actually know in knowing Greek. What kind of grasp of reality must they have, according to Plato, in order to be competent users of language, and can knowledge of language be had independently of knowledge of the world? 
I argue that Plato structures the First Alcibiades so as to draw a parallel between playing games and using language, suggesting a continuum between basic language mastery and philosophical inquiry or dialectic. According to this view, gaining knowledge of a language, and learning or inquiring about the things talked about are – at least within virtuous linguistic communities – two sides of the same coin. I argue that this role of language is illustrated in the famous questioning of the slave in the Meno, before looking at the puzzling discussion of names, and the understanding embedded in them, in the Cratylus."

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

Please contact Giulia Lorenzi for further information

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

Please contact Giulia Lorenzi for further information

Guest Speaker: David Jenkins (Tel Aviv)

Title: 'Reasoning and Its Limits'

Reasoning and its limits

It is often argued that the extent to which it is not up to us how our reasoning unfolds undermines the natural idea that reasoning is a kind of action. I argue that the extent to which it is not up to us how our reasoning unfolds in fact fails to cast doubt on the idea that reasoning is a kind of action and instead reflects the kind of agential exercise which reasoning is. The limits to the extent to which it is up to us how our reasoning unfolds can in fact be explained via appeal to reasoning’s status as a kind of aim-directed action. This in turn paves the way for an explanation of how reasoning is a way for us to be active with respect to our attitudes.

Please contact Giulia Lorenzi for further information

Guest Speaker: Nishi Shah (Amherst College)

Title: 'John Stuart Mill's Neglected Argument for Free Speech'

Guest Speaker: David Horst (Porto Alegre)

Title: Virtue, Skill and Epistemic Competence'

Abstract: Many virtue epistemologists conceive of epistemic competence on the model of skill—such as archery, playing baseball or chess­. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake: epistemic competences and skills are crucially and relevantly different kinds of capacities. This, I suggest, undermines the popular attempt to understand epistemic normativity as a mere special case of the sort of normativity familiar from skillful action. In fact, as I argue further, epistemic competences resemble virtues, rather than skills—a claim that is based on an important, but largely overlooked, distinction between virtue and skill, one that Aristotle highlights in the Nicomachean Ethics. The upshot is that virtue epistemology should indeed be based on virtue, not on skill.

Guest Speaker: Barnaby Walker (Warwick)

Title: Knowledge and the State of Nature

In Knowledge and the State of Nature Edward Craig presents a genealogy of the concept of knowledge. In this paper I argue that no genealogy of the concept of knowledge that starts from our need for true beliefs, like Craig’s, can succeed. This is for a reason identified by Williamson in a footnote of Knowledge and its Limits: namely, that there is no reason to regard the need for true belief as being more basic than the need for knowledge. I buttress the argument of Williamson’s footnote and show that contemporary defenders of genealogy have failed to grasp its significance for the prospects of genealogy. I conclude with some thoughts about the larger idea, exemplified by Craig’s genealogy, that reflection on the position of the enquirer is crucial for gaining a philosophical understanding of knowledge.

Guest Speaker: Simon Wimmer (TU Dortmund)

Title: 'Cook Wilson's Inquiry Argument for the Indefinability of Knowledge'

Guest Speaker: Alex Geddes (Southampton)

Title: 'Suspending Judgement: A Corrective'

Rescheduled from 10 August:

Guest Speaker: Simon Wimmer (TU Dortmund)

Title: 'Cook Wilson's Inquiry Argument for the Indefinability of Knowledge'

Guest Speaker: John Hyman (UCL)

Title: 'Knowledge and Belief'

Introduction: Biopolitics After Foucault

Led by Daniele Lorenzini

Guest Speaker: Eva Rafetseder (Stirling)

Title: TBC

Biopolitics and the Corona Virus: Tim Christiaens (Ku Leuven)

Guest Speaker: Simon Wimmer (TU Dortmund)

Title: 'Lessons from Ryle?'

Programme

2.00 – 2.30 Literature search skills and tools (Kate Courage, Academic Support Librarian)

2.30 – 3.00 Planning your MA (Johannes Roessler)

3.15 – 3.45 Planning your PhD/MPhil (Johannes Roessler)

3.45 – 4.15 Applying for PhD programmes and scholarships (Peter Poellner)

The first session is for everyone, the second session is for MA students only, the third session for PhD and MPhil students only, the fourth session is for anyone who is contemplating a scholarship application (not just MA students but also, potentially, first-year MPhil or PhD students).

 Later in the term there will be another meeting specifically on writing essays and theses. Please contact Johannes Roessler for further information.

Guest Speaker: Michael Hardimon (UC, San Diego)

Title: 'How to Disentangle Race and Racism'

Guest Speaker: Eylem Õzaltun (Koç University)

Title: 'What is the Moral of Davidson's Carbon Copier? Towards an Anscombean Account of Practical Knowledge'

‘Pragmatics-First’ Approaches to Animal Communication and the Evolution of Language

Dorit Bar-On, University of Connecticut;

Director, Expression, Communication, and Origins of MeaningResearch Group (ECOM)

Recent discussions of animal communication and the evolution of language have advocated a ‘pragmatics-first’ approach to the subject. Seyfarth & Cheney (2017), for example, propose that “animal communication constitutes a rich pragmatic system” and that “the ubiquity of pragmatics, … suggest[s] that, as language evolved, semantics and syntax were built upon a foundation of sophisticated pragmatic inference”. I begin by distinguishing two different notions of pragmatics advocates of the ‘pragmatics-first’ approach have implicitly relied on (cf. Bar-On and Moore, 2018). On the first, Carnapian notion, pragmatic phenomena are those that involve context-dependent determination of the content or significance of an utterance or signal. On the second, Gricean notion, pragmatic phenomena involve reliance on speakers’ communicative intentions and their decipherment by their hearers. I use the distinction, first, to evaluate a recent formal linguistic analysis of monkey calls, due to Schlenker et al. (e.g. 2014, 2016a,b), which explains the derivation of call meanings through a form of pragmatic enrichment. And, second, I use the distinction to motivate the need for an ‘intermediary pragmatics’ that, I argue, applies only to a subset of animal communicative behaviors, and would allow us to reconceive the significance of animal communication for our understanding of the evolution of language.

Please contact Richard Moore for further information.

Guest Speakers: Benjamin Ferguson (Warwick) and Simon May (KCL)

Title: 'On Love'

Death in Biopolitics: Ege Selin Islekel (Fordham University)