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’

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

Speaker: Andrew Patrizio (History of Art, Edinburgh College of Art)

Title: 'The Ecological Eye: Setting Agendas Across Art History, Theory and Politics'

Respondents: Olga Smith (IAS/Art History), Jonathan Skinner (ECLS), Nick Lawrence, Diarmuid Costello (Philosophy)

Co-sponsored by Warwick Environmental Humanities Network)

Followed by Drinks Reception at 7.30pm

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)

Speaker: Ursula Renz (Klagenfurt)

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

Programme:

2.00pm - Literature Search Skills and Tools (Kate Courage, Academic Support Librarian)

Group A (MA students and first year MPhil students): Room S2.77

2.30pm - Time Management/Deadlines/Mitigating Circumstances/Extensions (Johannes Roessler)

3.00pm - Writing MA/MPhil Essays (Tom Crowther)

3.45pm - Tea and Coffee (Cowling Room)

4.00pm - Planning your MA/Phil (Johannes Roessler)

Group B (PhD students and second year MPhil students): Room S2.79

2.30pm - Graduate Progress Committees, Teaching, Submitting Papers to Conferences, Conference Funding (Peter Poellner)

3.00pm - Writing an MA/MPhil Thesis (Johannes Roessler)

3.45pm - Tea and Coffee

4.00pm - Planning your PhD/MPhil (Peter Poellner)

Both Groups (Cowling Room, S2.77)

4.15pm - Appling for PhD Programmes and Scholarships (Peter Poellner)

5.00pm - Drinks in The Dirty Duck

Departmental Undergraduate events will be taking place throughout the day.

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

Speaker: Serge Trottein (CNRS/École Normale Supérieure/PSL Research University)

Title: 'Kant and Postmodern Aesthetics'

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.

Tutors:

David Bather Woods

Mat Coakley

Lucy Campbell

Speaker: Carlos Soto Román's Experiments in Poetry

An evening of poetic reading and discussion with the Poet.

How does poetry defend itself in the court of philosophy? Does it have any say in the matter; or does someone, or something, speak on its behalf? Does philosophy, in a perverse inversion, ever get tried in the court of poetry? This reading group places itself in the thick of these trials, tracing the debates they wage and the judgements they provoke. Readings will include 21st century texts that have taken the challenging entanglement of poetics and philosophy forward. These texts will be read beside the poems they discuss or the poems that suggest themselves through the text. We invite students and Faculty members from Departments across the University to join us!

Session 1: The Affect of Poetry

Rei Terada, 'Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction', Kant to Adorno (p.35-73)

Adrienne Rich: 'What is Found There'

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 'Constancy to an Ideal Object'

Vinod Kumar Shukla: 'I Toss a Bunch of Keys'

Guest Discussant: Dr Stacey McDowell

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

'Find Your Philosophy'

Speaker: Sameer Bajaj (Philosophy, Warwick)

Title: TBC

Please contact Alex Obrigewitsch for further information (Alex.Obrigewitsch@warwick.ac.uk)

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

Speaker: Joanna Zylinska (Department of New Media and Communications, Goldsmiths)

Title: 'Artificial Intelligence, Anthropocene Stupidity'

ABSTRACT

'My talk will engage with two defining apocalyptic narratives of our times: the Anthropocene and AI (Artificial Intelligence). Both of these narratives, in their multiple articulations, predict the end of the human and of the world as we (humans) know it, while also hinting at the possibility of salvation. Looking askew at the conceptual and aesthetic tropes shaping them, and at their socio-political contexts, I will be particularly interested in the way in which these two stories about planetary-level threats come together, and in the reasons for their uncanny proximity. Concurring with Marshall McLuhan that art works as a 'Distant Early Warning system' for all kinds of apocalypse, I will suggest that it can also serve as a testing ground for the making and unmaking of such apocalyptic scenarios. And it is in art that I will seek the possibility of envisaging a better and more prudent relationship with technology - and with the world - from within the Anthropocene-AI nexus. The talk will include a presentation of some visual work from my own art practice'.

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.

Speaker: Emily Bassett

Title: 'Responsibility for Sexual Desire'

ABSTRACT

Sexual desire is a rich topic dominated by conflicting intuitions - the uncontrollable nature of sexual desire and the indisputable existence of sexual repression often go hand in hand in literary works from the Aeneid to Anna Karenina. Questions of responsibility for sexual desire in particular are muddied by these warring opinions on the nature of sexual desire.

In this paper, I will draw on one account of sexual desire offered by Shaffer. Shaffer rejects what he calls 'propositional theories' of sexual desire - which appear more amenable to questions of responsibility - in favour of an account of sexual desire that is emotion-like, which I begin by outlining. Following this, I move to Shaffer's argument that his account is not parallel to emotions in one key way: sexual desires, unlike emotions, are not appropriately subject to reasons. In exploring whether this argument holds, I touch upon correlative concerns about opening sexual desires up to questions of responsibility, and draw to the conclusion that it is at least intuitively possible to talk about responsibility for sexual desire. However, I also hold this conclusion would be best served with a clear delineation of what it means for something to appropriately be subject to reasons.

Please contact Alex Obrigewitsch for further information (Alex.Obrigwitsch@warwick.ac.uk)

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.