9.30 - 10.30 Teaching philosophy seminars and giving feedback (for new STAs)

11-12 Online teaching (David Bather Woods) (the session will be recorded)

2-3pm Round table discussion: ideas for teaching philosophy seminars (all STAs)

3.00 - 3.45 Training session with Susie Cleverly from Report and Support

10.00am-11.30am: Postgraduate Morning Induction (all new postgraduate students)

1.00pm-2.15pm: MA and MPhil Induction

1pm-2.15pm: PhD Induction

Balloon Debate. A hot-air balloon carrying an array of philosophical folk is sinking, and needs to drop weight – who will stay and who will go? We’ll hear cases from Tom on Aristotle, Max on Zhuangzi, Andrew on Émilie du Châtelet, Stephen H on Immanuel Kant, Eileen on Jane Austen, and Daniele on Frantz Fanon.

If you would like to attend this event as a spectator, please email d.woods@warwick.ac.uk to be added to the invite. You are welcome to join for as much as you like.

Programme:

9.30am-10.30am:

Speaker: Will Gildea

Title: 'Misfortune, Modality and Moral Status'

Respondent: Sameer Bajaj

11.00am-12.00pm

Speaker: Beatrice Pagliarone

Title: 'On Thought Insertion'

Respondent: Chenwei Nie

1.30pm-2.30pm

Speaker: Irene Dal Poz

Title: 'Security Between Normality and Exceptionality'

Respondent: Miguel de Beistegui

3.00pm-4.00pm

Speaker: Chris Earley

Title: 'Hypothesis Generators: Insight and Autonomy in Contemporary Art'

Respondent: Eileen John

Guest Speaker: David Boonin (Colorado Boulder)

Briefing Session with James Roscoe

Guest Speaker: John Hyman (UCL)

Title: 'Knowledge and Belief'

Getting the Most out of Your Degree

Led by David Bather Woods

Guest Speaker: Jennifer Morton (UNC)

Please contact Stephen Houlgate for further information.

Introduction: Biopolitics After Foucault

Led by Daniele Lorenzini

Guest Speaker: Eva Rafetseder (Stirling)

Title: TBC

Taking Effective Notes

Led by David Bather Woods

Guest Speaker: Tommie Shelby (Harvard)

Speaker: Robert C Miner (Baylor University)

Title: 'In the South: Nietzsche and the Homines Religiosi in The Gay Science V'

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.

Understanding the Marking Criteria

Led by David Bather Woods

Guest Speaker: Japa Pallikkathayil (Pittsburgh)

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.