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’

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

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’

Reading: Soteriou, M. 'Cartesian Reflections on the Autonomy of the Mental'. [pdf]

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

Readings:

Week 2: Soteriou, M. 'Cartesian Reflections on the Autonomy of the Mental'. [ pdf]

Week 3: Eilan, N. 'On the Paradox of Gestalt Switches: Wittgenstein’s Response to Kohler'. [ pdf]

Week 5: Roessler, J. 'The Silence of Self-Knowledge'. [pdf]

Week 7: Campbell, J. 'Sense, Reference and Selective Attention' [pdf]

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

Simon Critchley (New School for Social Research): Tragedy, the Greeks and Us

Response by Andrew Cooper (Warwick) and David Fearn (Warwick)

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

Round Table Discussion on Inclusivity and Diversity in Philosophy at Warwick

Speaker: Adam Neal

Title: 'Social Poverty'

Respondent: Simon Gansinger

ABSTRACT:

The paper explores the relationship between material deprivation, and our needs as social beings. It argues that those who suffer at that intersection do so in two distinct but sometimes overlapping ways: 1) their needs for friendship, human contact and intimacy; and 2) status driven harms. The paper then conceptualises these harms as social poverty and argues that any complete account of poverty should include the impact on our social needs and our social position. The paper explores the ways in which each aspect of social poverty can lead to a worsening of material conditions. These include the social capital we gain from our social relationships, the impact of social poverty on our ability to participate in the job market and the impact on our ability to make and sustain social connections. The paper contextualises social poverty by discussing studies on the residents of Chicago who died during the 1995 Heatwave, poverty in inner city areas and low-income pensioners. After assessing different accounts of poverty, the paper shows that assessing poverty using income fails to do justice to the many factors which determine the extent of one's deprivation, including people's environments, social situation, social norms, friends and family, unemployment and life expectancy. This leads to an assessment of poverty as capability deprivation which, the paper argues, is more effective in assessing deprivation in respect of our nature as social beings. However, the paper argues that capability deprivation goes too far from our ordinary understanding of poverty. Instead, the paper outlines a conception of social poverty and argues that should be prominent in our thinking about deprivation.

Readings:

Week 2: Soteriou, M. 'Cartesian Reflections on the Autonomy of the Mental'. [ pdf]

Week 3: Eilan, N. 'On the Paradox of Gestalt Switches: Wittgenstein’s Response to Kohler'. [ pdf]

Week 5: Roessler, J. 'The Silence of Self-Knowledge'. [pdf]

Week 7: Campbell, J. 'Sense, Reference and Selective Attention' [pdf]

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

Speaker: Stephen Houlgate (Warwick)

Title: Kant and Hegel on the Antinomies of Reason

Readings:

Week 2: Soteriou, M. 'Cartesian Reflections on the Autonomy of the Mental'. [ pdf]

Week 3: Eilan, N. 'On the Paradox of Gestalt Switches: Wittgenstein’s Response to Kohler'. [ pdf]

Week 5: Roessler, J. 'The Silence of Self-Knowledge'. [pdf]

Week 7: Campbell, J. 'Sense, Reference and Selective Attention' [pdf]

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

Speaker: Sameer Bajaj

Title: 'Protesting Injustice: Fairness, Sacrifice and Civility'

Abstract:

Recent democratic movements worldwide have put pressure on traditional views of the permissible ways of protesting injustice in democratic societies. These movements raise the following questions: Must principled disobedience of the law be civil as opposed to uncivil? Is rioting ever a permissible method of protesting injustice? What is the proper place of anger in protest movements? Can counterproductive forms of protest - forms of protest that predictably lead political majorities to respond with greater injustices - ever be justified? In this session, we will discuss these and related questions.

CANCELLED due to severe weather notice

Speakers: Maria Corrado and Matthew Nudds

Abstract:

Philosophical theories of perception tend to be modelled on vision, but how do we need to expand or revise them to accommodate other senses? In this session, we consider the case of hearing and we focus on the objects of auditory perceptual experience. While we commonly report that we hear ordinary objects and the event in which they participate, such as the dog barking, according to some, we only indirectly hear them in virtue of being directly presented with the sounds that these events produce. In these two short talks, we aim to accommodate a sense in which environmental elements other than sounds, including events in which ordinary objects participate, are present in auditory perceptual experience. In the first talk, Maria Corrado will spell out a particular version of the indirect view and argue that it fails to accommodate a phenomenally manifest difference between two cases of hearing. In the second talk, Matthew Nudds will offer a sense in which events other than sounds are phenomenally present in auditory perceptual experience.

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

Speaker: Beatrice Han-Pile (Essex)

Title: 'The Doing Is Everything': A Middle-Voiced Reading of Agency in Nietzsche

Speaker: Jae Hetterley

Title: 'Heidegger's Kantianism in Being and Time'

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates Heidegger's intellectual development at a specific historical moment: the centrality of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to Heidegger's understanding of ontology in the late 1920s. Why does fundamental ontology become a specifically transcendental philosophy, and how ought we to understand the transcendental thread in relation to the wider systematics of Being and Time? Regarding the first question, I argue that Heidegger's thought undergoes its own 'Copernican Revolution' in response to a methodological aporia Heidegger is confronted with - namely, how can phenomenology address the question of the meaning of being whilst going beyond mere anthropology? The Copernican Revolution, I argue, signals a way out insofar as it demonstrates that intentional conditions coincide with ontological conditions - and with this in place, structures of Dasein are consequently structures of being. Secondly, in filling out Heidegger's transcendental conception of ontology, I draw an analogy between Kantian imagination and Heideggerian disclosedness as the root of their systematic unity - that what both philosophers foundationally recognise ontologically is a structure of ambiguity at the heart of the human subjectivity, between intuition and understanding, existentiality and facticity. Ontological interpretation, in turn, is structually projective for both Kant and Heidegger - which is to say, the formal structures of their respective ontologies cohere. Finally, I consider the question of transcendental idealism in relation to Kant and Heidegger, and set out how the primarily systematic argument that I provide in the thesis can provide the basis for closer readings of Being and Time.

The seminar will be followed by a Q&A session and drinks in The Duck.

Speaker: Mert Yirmibes

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

Speaker: Jeffrey A. Bell (Southeastern Louisiana University)

Title: 'Towards a Deleuzian-Humean Political Theory'

Speaker: Simon Jenkins

Title: 'Reproduction, Surveillance and Discrimination: Potential Effects of Emerging Technologies on Minority Groups'

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

Speaker: Zak Stinchcombe

Title: 'This Moral Vision: Martha Nussbaum and the Novel'

ABSTRACT:

This talk is interested in examining the relations that hold between ethical and literary value with a particular focus on whether they are in tension, do not neatly complement one another, perhaps violently disagree, and so on. Initially we will look at two competing accounts of this tension, namely Ethicism (wherein ethical deficiency, or merit, corresponds to literary deficiency or merit) and Aestheticism (there is no real tension to discuss - aesthetic value and ethical value do not occupy the same space, have nothing to do with one another, that ethical considerations are irrelevant to aesthetic judgements, and so on). Neither account is satisfactory, treating the relationship too superficially. Martha Nussbaum's account of the novel, particularly in the Jamesian novel, points to a deeper, more textured account of the relationship. Quite apart from the ethical and literary value covarying. or else standing independently of one another, Nussbaum argues: 1) novels are themselves works of moral philosophy. 2) it is in novels that one finds the most appropriate articulation of the, or this, moral vision. 3) we can find in novels a paradigm of moral activity. I shall assess the plausibility of these claims, taking into consideration some interpretative ambiguities that exist in her account. I will then be in a position to say something of how this might be applied to the tension we began with. Nussbaum says that there exists a 'dynamic tension between two possible irreconcilable visions...' I agree that this tension exists. Moreover, though, I intend to claim something stronger. The dynamic tension is not merely present; it is an essential component of the relationship between ethical and aesthetic value.

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