All of these seminars were held online using zoom.
28 October 2020
Elliot Porter
Futility Thinking
Agents are beings who act-for-reasons. For an agent to sincerely endorse the claim that something is valuable, or that they care about something, is typically understood to highlight a reason for the agent to act. A wealth of literature addresses the formal puzzle found in accidie; where evaluations that usually portend motivation fail to produce any. The literature has elided over cases where motivation collapses without offering a formal puzzle. This paper proposes a novel species of marginal agency, termed Futility Thinking, which seems to lie on the far side of accidie. Crucially, the agent is still able to own, or be the originator of their (in)action in states of Futility Thinking, in a way that troubles conventional Hierarchical models of agency. Examining this failure, this paper offers a Divided Labour view of agency, that allows us to make sense of Futility Thinking, Accidie, and more conventional agency effectively than Hierarchical models do.
11 November 2020
Joe Jones
The History and Future of Work (and Labour)
Campaigns for, and academic discussion of, reductions to the working week have grown in recent years, and a shorter working week is being considered in response to the social and economic challenges of COVID-19. However, across current literature is an implicit and often unacknowledged tension between two distinct modes of activity: labour and work. Calls for the reduction of one often use the language of the other, and so an accurate and effective model for reducing the workweek requires a clarification of both terms and how they interact with one another.
In this presentation I will first define the distinct modes of labour and work, noting some key academic scholarship on each. I will then sketch a brief history of working time in the UK, and the various social and political campaigns to reduce it, before highlighting the centrality of labour in this historical narrative. I will then compare this to current calls for working time reduction, and outline the shift within these calls towards a concern for work, rather than labour. I will present a number of examples and detail the tension at play in the implicit distinctions between labour and work remaining unacknowledged. In highlighting the misuse of the two distinct terms, I hope to demonstrate a clearer approach to reducing the working week.
25 November 2020
Gavin Thomson
Mathematical Expressivism
In this paper I outline an expressivist approach to the meanings and uses of mathematical language. I begin with a discussion of the general idea and strategies of expressivism, and I contrast these with a form of representationalism which is prevalent in the philosophy of mathematics. In the second half of the paper I describe Brandom’s proposal of logical expressivism (Brandom 1994, 2000, 2018). I explain the sense in which this is to be understood as an expressivist thesis, and I suggest how it could be extended to mathematical expressivism. I do not attempt to develop an expressivist semantics here, but I discuss the purpose of such a semantic theory and the form that it plausibly may take. I conclude with some brief remarks on the broader theoretical commitments and consequences of the mathematical expressivism that has been sketched – how it might accommodate the objectivity and applicability of mathematics, and how it bears on some more specific questions such as the demarcation of logical language, mathematical pluralism as described by Friend (2014), and the debate between methodological and metaphysical structuralists.
9 December 2020
Jonathan Reiser
Transcendental Arguments in Analytic Philosophy
In this presentation I will introduce a specific kind of argument, namely so called weak or Stroudian transcendental arguments, and motivate why these could be interesting for analytical philosophy. In order to do so I will start with a short overview of the historical context in which Barry Stroud developed his form of transcendental arguments to emphasize the main challenge he faces: how is it possible to do transcendental philosophy without falling back into either idealism or verificationism. I will then represent the general form of his weak version of transcendental arguments, which seek for invulnerable concepts, where p is invulnerable if and only if it is not possible not to believe that p because p is a necessary condition for the possibility of the conceptual framework in which a skepticism about p could be formulated. I will give an example of how such an argument can look like in application and end my presentation with a speculation why Stroudian transcendental arguments could help to solve some of the problems in the current analytical debate.