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Fall 2007(All talks are on Wednesdays in 1115 Skinner Hall at 4:00 unless noted otherwise, followed by a reception in the philosophy department lounge) September 12, 2007 Abstract:
In a pair of papers, Guy Rohrbaugh and Louis deRosset argue that tables
have their material origins essentially. Familiar arguments for this
necessity-of-origin claim start from general modal principles, including
the principle that material origins have their tables essentially. Two
things are distinctive about Rohrbaugh and deRosset's new route. First,
it doesn't start from a sufficiency-of-origin claim. Second, their new
route doesn't start from other general modal principles either; instead,
it starts from particular worldly phenomena: hunks, tables, and the
actual causal-historical paths leading from the former to the latter. We
are sympathetic both to the necessity-of-origin claim and to Rohrbaugh
and deRosset's new kind of route. But we don't think their new route is
entirely successful. We present a requirement that Rohrbaugh and
deRosset's new route relies on and explore various ways of grounding
that requirement; none of them, we think, succeeds. We conclude by
suggesting that essential dependencies create a problem for Rohrbaugh
and deRosset's new route. The problem with the new route, according to
this suggestion, isn't that there are no necessary connections; rather,
it's that there are too many of them. (This paper is co-authored with
David Sanson.)
October 17, 2007
Abstract: The Sorites paradoxes seem to show that vague predicates, or predicates that admit of borderline cases, are somehow incoherent. This is an especially disturbing conclusion since almost all the predicates used in everyday speech and thought are vague. I will offer an account of the normative rules governing the use of vague predicates that explains the appeal of the paradoxical reasoning, but also shows how the predicates unproblematically function in most situations. One consequence of the account is rejection of a form of local supervenience, and the consequent rejection of the idea that the predicates denote intrinsic properties of objects.
October 24, 2007 Abstract:
Most ancient philosophers held views on the psychology and social uses
of laughter, but Aristotle is the only one who elaborated a principled
account of how laughter could be the basis of an ethical virtue. This
paper will offer a fresh analysis of his concept of eutrapelia, or
playful wittiness, in Nicomachean Ethics 4.8 [4.14], probing some of the
tensions at work in it, finding hints of a model of joking as a kind of
'fiction', and bringing the passage into relationship with a selection
of other Aristotelian observations on laughter, including its
connections with physiology, irony, aggression, and comic theatre.
November 14, 2007 Abstract:
Ordinary morality judges agents blameworthy for negligently produced harms.
In this talk I offer two main reasons for thinking that explaining just how negligent
agents are responsible for the harms they produce is more problematic than one might think.
First, I show that negligent conduct is characterized by the lack of conscious control over the harm,
which conflicts with the ordinary view that responsibility for something requires at least some
conscious control over it. Second, I argue that negligence is relevantly indistinguishable from inadvertence,
which is ordinarily thought to excuse agents from responsibility. I conclude by presenting an alternative
model for thinking about negligence, one which not only explains but justifies our core reactions to such cases,
while only giving up the claim that negligent agents are responsible for the harms they bring about.
November 28, 2007 Abstract:
Sentimentalism is receiving a lot of attention recently, particularly in
light of empirical research which purports to support sentimentalist
approaches to morality in contrast to rationalist approaches. This
paper tries to explore a particular sentimentalist thesis that maintains
that morality is based on sentiment in that the truth conditions for
moral claims are provided by the idealized responses of social beings.
However, the main portion of the paper tries to focus on and deal with a
major objection to this approach: the contingency problem.
Sentimentalism runs against moral phenomenology in that it seems to
jettison the necessity we intuitively attach to moral claims we take to
be true.
December 5, 2007 Abstract:
In the third chapter of Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman began a tradition of tying philosophical accounts of forgery to distinctions between the respective ontologies of art-kinds. Introducing the "allographic/autographic" distinction, Goodman contends that certain art-kinds simply do not admit of multiple instantiation-that it would be, for example, incoherent to speak of there being two or more "genuine" instances of the Mona Lisa (where speaking of two or more instances of Dickens' Hard Times is unproblematic), and that, as such, any item purporting to be another instance of da Vinci's masterpiece will be a forgery. Goodman's position was picked up and refined by Jerrold Levinson, who contends that whether an art-kind allows for forgery depends on how genuineness is determined with regard to that art-kind.
In this paper, pace Goodman and Levinson, I defend the view that paintings, carved sculptures, and other such 'singular' art-kinds do on principle admit of multiple instantiation. To this end, I outline what I take to be a reasonable and intuitive ontology of art creation and instantiation, under which there seems no principled reason for excluding any art-kinds as being only singularly instantiable. As such, I contend that issues of forgery are discontinuous with any distinction in the ontologies of art-kinds.
December 7, 2007 Abstract:
Methodologically pluralist theses of varying degree and extent have been recently advanced by Margaret Morrison (2000), Nancy Cartwright (1999), and Robert Batterman (2002, 2004) in the philosophy of physics. Robert Batterman (2002) argues that his presumably novel species of "asymptotic explanations" reveal that explanation and reduction are fundamentally distinct activities, often acting at cross purposes. More recently Batterman (2004) has extended his claims by arguing that singular phenomena-specifically in the case of droplet formation-reveal that ontologically and epistemically fundamental explanatory strategies are likewise distinct and often act at cross purposes.
Morrison, Cartwright, and Batterman have also been met with broadly critical responses from Belot (2003), Bishop (2004), Cohnitz (2003), Hoefer (2002), Teller (2002), etc. However, I argue that none of the critical responses have incorporated the issue of reformulation of the physical theories discussed by Morrison, Batterman, and Cartwright in terms of geometric (or Clifford) algebra. I argue that this burgeoning research tradition dedicated towards the reformulation of physical theories via geometric algebra evinces a species of methodological fundamentalism, which subsumes the methodological distinctions posed by Batterman. My argument is an instance of a more general claim advanced by John Burgess (1992), who demonstrates that foundational work in the philosophy of mathematics can be useful for the philosophy of science precisely when one applies a methodological analysis of a scientific theory T characterized by two (or more) different kinds of mathematical and meta-mathematical formulations.
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