Spring 2004 (Talks begin at 4:00 pm in 1115 Skinner)

March 3, 2004
Speaker: Thomas Pogge, Columbia University
Title: "On Global Economic Justice"

Abstract: We citizens of the affluent countries tend to discuss our obligations toward the distant needy in terms of donations and transfers, assistance and redistribution: "How much of our wealth, if any, should we give away to the hungry abroad?" This way of conceiving the problem is a serious moral error, and a very costly one for the global poor. It depends on the false belief widespread in the rich countries that the causes of the persistence of severe poverty are indigenous to the countries in which it occurs. There are indeed national and local factors that contribute to persistent poverty in developing countries. But global institutional rules also play an important role in its reproduction, in part by sustaining the national and local factors that affluent Westerners most like to blame for the problem. Since these rules are shaped by our governments, in our name, we bear moral responsibility not merely by assisting the distant poor too little, but also, and more significantly, by harming them too much.

March 17, 2004
Speaker: Dave Truncellito, Arkansas State and George Washington University
Title: "The Janus-faced nature of epistemic justification."

Abstract: The literature is rife with accounts of epistemic justification. Extant accounts tend to fall into one of two camps: externalism and internalism. Unfortunately, the debate between the two sides seems to be at an impasse; some have gone so far as to argue that the two are discussing two different notions of justification rather than disagreeing with each other.

My diagnosis of the situation is that the disagreement is the result of a shared failure to arrive at a proper analysis of the concept of justification prior to offering an account of the conditions under which a belief is justified. In other words, if we want to give a substantive account of justification, an account that specifies the conditions under which a belief is justified, we must first arrive at a correct conceptual analysis. That is, we must understand the concept before we try to give an account of it. We might distinguish the two projects by noting that a conceptual analysis answers the question "What is justification?", while a substantive account answers the question "When is a belief justified?"

Elsewhere, I argue that a conceptual analysis must be completed prior to our attempts to offer a substantive account; further, I argue, a complete and correct analysis of the concept of epistemic justification is not currently available. In this paper, then, I attempt to offer an analysis of the concept of epistemic justification. The analysis begins by noting three essential features of epistemic justification: truth, goal-directedness, and normativity. The correct analysis, then, must capture the relations between these components.

The analysis I ultimately offer is "Janus-faced"; that is, it looks with one face to the practices of the epistemic agent, and with the other face to the world in which she conducts these practices.

April 7, 2004
Speaker: Marc Lange, UNC Chapel Hill
Title: "Laws of Nature: Their Stability, Their Necessity, and the Autonomy of Inexact Sciences"

Abstract: In this talk, I shall examine the natural laws' special (and yet notoriously elusive) relation to counterfactuals. I shall propose a non-circular means of distinguishing the natural laws (and their logical consequences) from the accidental truths. A product of this analysis is an account of the sense in which the laws and their logical consequences (but no accidents) possess a kind of necessity. An analogous account applies to the logical necessities as well. I shall also examine in some detail how this account might apply to laws of a "special" or (I would prefer to say) "inexact" science. Were there such laws, they would possess a distinctive kind of necessity, and therefore would figure in explanations that are irreducible to explanations of the same facts in terms of the fundamental laws of physics.

April 21, 2004
Speaker: Garry Hagberg, Bard College
Title: "In a New Light: Wittgenstein, Aspect Perception, and Retrospective Change in Self-Understanding"

Abstract: Iris Murdoch wrote in her diary "Re-thinking one's past is a constant responsibility", and after some reflection she arrived at what she called an "unfrozen" sense of our engagement with our past. Precisely how this active relation to one's past might be more fully explicated, and its position vis-a-vis a fashionable narrative constructionism on one side and a fact-based self-reportage on the other, calls for careful disentangling. Wittgenstein's remarks on aspect-perception, on "seeing-as", can cast some light on this problem, and -- taken one way -- they show some of the deep parallels between imagination-assisted visual experience and autobiographical "looking back".

May 5, 2004
Speaker: Nancy Sherman, Georgetown University
Title: "The Look and Feel of Virtue."