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Spring 2005(All talks are on Wednesdays in 1115 Skinner Hall at 4:00 unless noted otherwise, followed by a reception in the philosophy department lounge) February 9, 2005 Abstract: In this paper I will defend an 'aesthetic' definition of poetry and a Carroll-style content-oriented notion of aesthetic experience. I will first argue for three interrelated claims: (1) that repetition is a central source of aesthetic pleasure in poetry; (2) that, in spite of the enormous variety of poetry around the world, and in spite of the dramatic changes poetry, and Western poetry in particular, has undergone since the 19th century, repetition remains the characteristic that distinguishes poetry from prose; and (3) that (1) is the reason behind (2). I will then show how my aesthetic definition of poetry, insofar as it distinguishes our experience of poetry on the basis of some of its characteristic features, supports a content-oriented notion of aesthetic experience. March 2, 2005 Abstract: I will present a non-technical outline of a certain approach to solving the semantic paradoxes (which works also for the paradoxes of naive property theory), and compare it briefly to some more familiar proposals. I will argue that this approach, unlike others, allows the notion of truth to fully serve its generally-recognized purpose; moreover, that this one can avoid the "revenge paradoxes" that cripple many other approaches. March 30, 2005 Abstract: Some problems for the expressivist program of explaining moral talk and thought turn on the question of how expressivists can understand negation, especially those negations of sentences that seem to correspond to the negation of an 'attitude' rather than the expression of an attitude toward something negated. I explain how several issues (completeness of a plan, duality of permission and requirement, the existence of 'mere permissions', supererogation) are all connected by this negation problem. Then I suggest that the problems can be solved if, but only if, there is some expressivistically respectable way to distinguish between indifference and indecision, two distinct ways that someone might lack a preference. Finally I offer what seems to me the best prospect for distinguishing those two states. April 13, 2005 Abstract: Philosophy of mind has drawn upon the deductive-nomological model of explanation to its serious detriment. Psychologists and other cognitive scientists typically do not appeal to laws in their explanations, but to mechanisms. Biologists likewise frequently appeal to mechanisms, and in the past decade philosophers of biology have offered accounts of what mechanisms and mechanistic explanations are. I will adapt the account I have offered to psychological mechanisms and identify ways in which it restructures issues in philosophy of mind. For example, it refocuses the target of psychological explanation on actual psychological phenomena (often depicted, as in psychophysics, in terms of relations between variables), it recasts the relation between psychological and systems neuroscience explanations as offering complementary functional and structural decompositions of a mechanism, and it provides a vehicle for providing both reductive explanations and autonomy for higher levels of organization. April 20, 2005 April 27, 2005 May 5 (Thursday), 2005 May 25, 2005 I will suggest an (non-reductive) account of qualia according to which they are the representing properties of phenomenal experience. Given this account, many of the meta-properties qualia are typically taken to have - e.g. that they are intrinsic, not conceptually reducible to functional kinds etc - can be shown to follow simply from the fact that they are representing properties. Certain putatively problematic features of qualia can also be derived in a similar way. Hence, I argue, these problems should not motivate eliminativism when we are not willing to take the same stance towards the ordinary representing properties found in everyday representations. |
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