Programme

Thursday 26^th September

10.30 – 12.00

Maria Rosa Antognazza (KCL) ‘Knowledge and the first person’

12.00 – 1.30

Ioannis Evrigenis (Tufts) ‘The Fly on the axletree: Hobbes on self-knowledge and judgment’

2.30 – 4.00

Mark Philp (Warwick) ‘Godwin and Wollstonecraft: deliberation and self-knowledge '

4.30 – 6.00

Ursula Renz (Klagenfurt/Warwick) ‘Rousseau's solution to a Rousseauean problem’

7.15 Dinner (Radcliffe house)

Friday 27^th September

9.00 – 10.30

Mario De Caro (Roma Tre/Tufts) ‘Machiavelli's naturalism’

10.30 – 12.00

Guy Longworth (Warwick) ‘Descartes on how the mind is better known than the body’

12.00 – 1.15

Johannes Roessler (Warwick) ‘Judgement and self-understanding in Montaigne’s Essays’

Expression and Self-knowledge

Warwick University, Friday 4^th October 2019

Humanities H0.03

Programme

11.00 – 12.30
Lucy Campbell (Warwick)
‘Self-knowledge: expression without expressivism’

12.30 – 2.00

Dorit Bar-On (University of Connecticut)
‘No ‘How’ Privileged Self-Knowledge’

3.00 – 4.30

Cristina Borgoni (Bayreuth University)

‘Primitive forms of first-person authority and expressive capacities’

Speaker: Ursula Renz (Klagenfurt)

Title: 'Socratic Self-Knowledge and the Concept of the Human Self: From Phenomenology to Metaphysics and Back Again'

Speaker: Sameer Bajaj (Philosophy, Warwick)

Title: TBC

Speaker: Sonia Sedivy (Toronto)

Title: 'Aesthetic Properties and Philosophy of Perception'

Speaker: Sophia Connell (Birkbeck)

Title: 'Aristotle on Animal Cognition: Contemporary Perspectives'

Wednesday 5 February 2020, 4.15pm-6pm, Room OC1.07, Oculus

Speaker: Chris Janaway (Southampton)

Title: Schopenhauer

Speaker: Sameer Bajaj

Title: TBC

Speaker: Alan Millar (Stirling)

Title: TBC

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.

Speaker: Carrie Figdor (University of Iowa)

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.

Guest Speaker: Michael Hardimon (UC, San Diego)

Title: 'How to Disentangle Race and Racism'

Guest Speaker: Anton Ford (Chicago)

Title: 'The Objectification of Agency'

Guest Speaker: Miriam Schoenfield (Austin, Texas)

Title: 'Can Bayesianism Accommodate Higher Order Defeat?'

Guest Speaker: Andy Hamilton (Durham)

Title: 'Art for Art's Sake: Aestheticising Engaged Art and Philistinism'

Guest Speaker: Jessica Keiser (Leeds)

Title: 'The All Lives Matter' Response: QUD-Shifting as Epistemic Injustice'

Guest Speaker: Christopher Janaway (Southampton)

Title: 'Different Kinds of Willing in Schopenhauer'

Guest Speaker: Paulina Sliwa (Cambridge)

Title: "Hermeneutical Advice”

Sometimes we rely on moral testimony to decide what to do. But we also rely on moral testimony for guidance on what to make of a moral situation: how to make sense of it. Such moral testimony has the power to change both hearts and minds; it can affect not just what its recipient knows but also how she feels about her situation. My aim in this paper is to develop an account of this kind of moral testimony – hermeneutical advice – and draw out its implications for the ethics and epistemology of moral testimony, as well as about the nature of moral expertise.

Guest Speaker: Robert Stern (Sheffield)

Title: "How is human freedom compatible with the authority of the Good?’ Murdoch on moral agency, freedom, and imagination"

This paper deals with the issue of choice and agency in moral action. On the one hand, it seems that the moral agent should use their practical reason to determine what it is right for them to do, and act accordingly; on the other hand, this seems to leave little room for choice in their action, where choice is often said to be a marker of freedom and how the will is exercised. In response to this difficulty, Ruth Chang has argued recently that reasons themselves need to be seen as being created through an act of will. Looking at the work of Iris Murdoch, it is argued that this response is problematic. At the same time, it is also argued that Murdoch can provide a fruitful way of dealing with this problem through her account of imagination, which gives a role to the agent not in choice, but in uncovering the reasons that should guide their actions.

Guest Speaker: M.M. McCabe (KCL)

Title: "Who Knows?"

Platonic epistemology is traditionally dominated by his metaphysics of forms; but in this respect it is in some tension with his account of the value and significance of being the knowing subject: his account of epistemic virtue. I explore his reflections on how we become epistemically virtuous to explain his singular account of knowledge and understanding.

Guest Speaker: Sandra Shapshay (CUNY)

Title: 'Schopenhauer on the Moral Perception'

NB: Note the later start time of 4.15pm for this seminar.

Guest Speaker: Robert Brandom (Pittsburgh)

Title: 'The Fine Structure of Autonomy and Recognition'

Guest Speaker: Kristin Andrews (York/Toronto)

Title: 'Do Animals Have the Mark of the Moral'?

Guest Speaker: Nadine Elzien (Warwick)

Title: 'Time Travel and Failed Assassinations: From Baby Suzy to Fidel Castro'

Speaker: Michael Kremer (Chicago)

Title: 'The Development of Ryle's Conception of Logic'

Abstract: Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that has come under pressure from intellectualists like Jason Stanley, who claim that knowledge-how is simply a species of knowledge-that. Stanley argues that Ryle’s famous regress argument for the distinction shows that Ryle conceives of propositional knowledge as “behaviorally inert,” and that appreciating this shows that Ryle’s regress argument is impotent against “reasonable intellectualism.” However Ryle characterizes knowledge as dispositional in character in The Concept of Mind. This seems to support Stephen Hetherington’s “practicalist” view that knowledge-that is a form of knowledge-how, and puts into question whether Ryle can really rely on the regress argument for his distinction. In this essay I address such questions as: how is the regress argument connected to his distinction? what conception of knowledge-that is implied? does the regress argument survive if we do not think of knowledge-that as involving acts of acknowledging-that, of contemplating propositions and judging them to be true? I approach these questions through examining the development of Ryle’s thinking about knowledge, from his life-long insistence that knowledge and belief are generically distinct, through his early rejection of a dispositional conception of knowledge and belief, his later development of the distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that, including a dispositional characterization of knowledge-how, and his introduction of a distinction among dispositions between capacities and tendencies, with knowledge (both -how and -that) on the capacity side and belief on the tendency side. I argue that his initial formulations of the regress argument and the knowledge-how/knowledge-that distinction come from an earlier stage of his thought before he had drawn the capacity/tendency distinction and located knowledge as a capacity. As a result, his formulation of the regress argument even in The Concept of Mind sits poorly with his view of knowledge and belief there. I conclude by discussing whether the regress argument can be reformulated in a way that fits Ryle’s conception of knowledge as a capacity, and meets Stanley’s objections. Along the way I discuss Ryle’s relationship to a number of other historical figures, including Cook Wilson, Prichard, MacDonald, Ayer, and Vendler, as well as the contemporary philosophers Stanley and Hyman.

Speaker: Professor Mona Simion (Glasgow)

Talk: 'Resistance to Evidence and the Normativity of Inquiry'

Abstract: This talk looks at a puzzle affecting views that take epistemic norms to be zetetic norms - i.e. norms of inquiry: since garden variety epistemic norms and straightforward norms of inquiry often come in conflict, and since it is implausible, for any given normative domain, that it should be such that it is peppered with internal normative conflict, it cannot be that epistemic norms are inquiry norms. I look at three ways to escape the puzzle, I argue that they don't work, and put forth my own account. On this view, one is only the subject of epistemic normativity proper insofar as one is in a position to know. As such, I argue, normative conflicts do not arise in situations in which one is not in a position to know that p in virtue of inquiring into whether q.

Speaker: Dirk Meyer (Oxford)

 Talk: The Dialectics Rule: Chinese Philosophy As Seen From *Mìng xùn

 Abstract: This paper looks at the way a philosophical argument is developed in a recently obtained, fourth century manuscript text from the Tsinghua collection of Chǔ Warring States texts, titled *Mìng xùn. The text has a close counterpart in the received tradition (Yì Zhōushū), which classes it as an utterance in the tradition of Shū (Documents), one of the core classics. I analyse the strategies with which meaning is produced in *Mìng xùn and suggest that the text is articulated in a dialectic manner in which the philosophical premise seeks to test itself continuously to avoid becoming doctrine, and thus philosophically void. My choice of a Shū text as an example of philosophically relevant meaning construction in early China challenges current methodology, which anachronistically considers zǐ-type literature (the Masters) as a disciplinary equivalent to Philosophy in ancient Greece. I argue that since philosophically relevant activities are a non-disciplinary praxis in early China, the articulations of this praxis are also not genre specific but found across the foundational literary texts of China.

Guest Speaker: Rachael Wiseman (Liverpool)

Title: TBC

The first Colloquium will take place at 4:15-6:00pm, Wednesday 12 October in S0.17. The meeting will be in-person, with an online option for those who can't be on campus Note the slightly adjusted start time of 4.15pm for the first Colloquium.

 Speakers: Susana Monsó (UNED) & Eze Paez (Pompeu Fabra)

 Talk: Why death still harms animals who only half get it: Ethical implications of the minimal concept of death (w/ Eze Paez)

 Abstract: In a series of recent works (Monsó 2021; 2022; Monsó & Osuna-Mascaró 2021), I have defended the idea that the concept of death is not circumscribed to the human species, but rather that many animals can understand death, at least to some extent. The core of my argument is the idea that the ‘minimal concept of death’ (‘MCoD’) requires little cognitive complexity and that the cognition required for it is fairly common in the animal kingdom. However, the MCoD refers to the capacity that an animal has to understand what has happened when another has died, but does not indicate that the animal has any notion of her own personal mortality. As such, it is not immediately obvious what ethical implications follow from it. Indeed, accounts of the prudential badness of death that make it dependent on an individual’s concept of death hinge on the ethical importance of having an awareness of one’s own future death (e.g., Cigman 1981; Belshaw 2012, 2015; Rollin 2015), so the presence of an MCoD in animals might not alter the extent to which death is thought to directly harm animals.

In this talk (developed together with Eze Paez), I will show that, contrary to this first impression, the deintellectualised account of the concept of death that I have defended does modify how we ought to think about the badness of death for animals, even in those cases in which animals do not develop a notion of death as something that will inevitably befall them. I will develop this argument in three steps. First, I will summarise my theory regarding the distribution of the MCoD in nature. Second, I will give an overview of different accounts of the badness of death and how they relate to individuals’ understanding of death. Lastly, I will show how the truth of my analysis would entail that, even on the most stringent and demanding accounts, death harms many more animals than is often presupposed.