This season’s seminars are held in a hydrid format, both in-person and online. (The 5 October seminar is online only, due to circumstances.)
5 October 2022
Joel Yalland
Testimony’s Role in Agreement and Disagreement
The epistemologies of testimony and disagreement (or agreement) both seem to roughly address the question of how speakers’ beliefs, attitudes, utterances, or assertions ought to bear on our own. Each domain differs with respect to what specific kinds of speech or belief are considered, with additional domain-exclusive questions (e.g., whether testimony conveys or generates justification or knowledge, and whether disagreement constitutes a kind of higher-order evidence). Nonetheless, there is at least some shared focus that has largely not been discussed within the literature from either domain.
I will argue that testimony at least partially factors into instances of agreement, disagreement, and related exchanges, and that this has crucial implications for agreement and disagreement, and the epistemology thereof. Specifically, if the various pessimistic arguments levelled against the use of testimony hold, then we are licensed in dismissing all forms of testimony including agreement and disagreement.
Taken to the logical extreme, this calls into question the very premise that an epistemology of agreement and disagreement is needed. As such, I will argue that in order to vindicate the latter domain, we must at least be neutral about the weight and use or acknowledgment of testimony, if not optimistic.
9 November 2022
AJ Jato Bravo
Graphic Approaches: An Experimental Theoretical Analysis of Pornographic Creation
Why is it that some pornographic productions are not considered elevated enough to be art while some others are hailed as exactly that?
This question is answered usually by philosophers and lawyers ex post facto, and doesn’t take into account how the artist may feel about their own work, their process or their goals for their work: how can we say that a piece of art has no other intention but the arousal of the audience when the artist’s voice is never taken into account? How can one look at femdom pornography and not feel that it challenges the status quo at the same time that it arouses its intended audience? It may well be that pornography challenges the definition of art as an apolitical, class-free expression of humanity and gets its own status as an art form challenged in return.
Art and pornography have been intertwined for as long as humans have created either of them, but censorship laws didn’t come into play (or were not recorded) until the estate and its governing bodies had some economical power to protect (Berkowitz, 2013, pp. 136–190). Often, censorship laws have been used to quiet artistic movements, so much so that organisations such as Index on Censorship have been launched recently (Something Curated, 2019). At times, the censorship didn’t have to do with the contents of the work, but the way in which it was being distributed and who was accessing said contents (Eaton, 2018). However, oftentimes art has escaped censorship (whilst pornography has not) just because western civilisations in the last few centuries (Powers, 2011, pp. 19–41) tend to consider freedom of speech as basic human right that reaches its fullest expression in artistic work.Has pornography a chance to escape censorship if or when it’s deemed art?
16 November 2022
Mark Garron
The Set Theory of Money
There are two overarching questions that I am working on. First, does the example of money have anything to add to the current time discourse? The second, is money an abnormal set?
In the recent discourse between Huw Price and Tim Maudlin. Price argued that there is a problem with saying that time flows or passes at a rate of one second per second. He claimed that such a statement wasn’t meaningful. It was merely a dimensionless quantity. Mauldin replied that ‘A rate of one second per second is no more a dimensionless number than an exchange rate of one dollar per dollar is free of a specified currency’. This raises an interesting question: do our money practices have anything to say about the ontology of time? One obvious problem is that money isn’t a natural kind but rather a human or social kind. Money is the sort of human kind that is subject to what Ian Hacking referred to as looping effects (Hacking 1999). With social kinds the object of classification itself changes in being classified.
So, what is money? According to Conventional economics, money is supposed to perform certain functions. Money measures value, it is a medium of exchange and money stores and defers value into the future. I intend to challenge this account. I argue that these functions reduce to simply being a measure of value. It is a gauge. The problem is that at every point of measure, the gauge changes as per Hacking’s looping effect. If you think of a pound as all the things that one could buy with that pound one of the things in that set is itself. Does this mean that money is an abnormal set?
There are two economic laws that support this ‘set theory of money’. The first is Gresham’s law. This is a monetary principle states that ‘bad money drives out good’. The second is the law of one price (LOOP). This states that in the absence of trade frictions such as transportation or storage, and where there is competition and price flexibility then identical goods sold in different locations will sell for the same price.
23 November 2022
Hugh Robertson-Ritchie
Is Myalgic Encephelomyopathy (ME) dualistic?
Postponed
30 November 2022
David Matthew
Role ethics and ‘natural goodness’
Role ethicists make three key claims: 1) our social and familial roles determine who we are, at least partially, 2) our social and familial roles determine what we ought to do, 3) our roles can provide us with at least some moral knowledge.
Role ethics is in many ways an attractive theory. Unfortunately, there has been some difficulty in explaining why we must fulfil our roles. My project attempts to address this issue by providing an account of why our roles are ethically normative, within the framework of role ethics.
Philippa Foot’s theory of ‘natural goodness’ can be used to do this. Foot argues that human moral goodness is really a species of the same goodness which we assign to plants and animals and that this ‘natural goodness’ is best understood as a kind of non-defectiveness in relation to the ‘life form’ of a species. We can explain why roles are ethically normative by substituting familial and social roles for natural kinds.
7 December 2022
Elliot Porter
Urgency as (meta)normative phenomenon
That matters are urgent often seems to have bearing on our deliberation and what we should do. However, despite being a normatively charged notion, urgency has received relatively little philosophical analysis. I start by considering a case in which failure to respond to the urgency of a situation seems to invite a distinctive type of criticism. Agents who do the right thing with insufficient urgency invite a different criticism from agents who do the wrong thing or do nothing. I consider two accounts of urgency that are either implicit or explicit in the literature, and demonstrate that they do not predict this distinctive kind of criticism. I then offer an account of urgency as pre-empting further deliberation that predicts this criticism, but which suggests we can find ourselves in stark normative conflicts that we might not think are plausible. I gesture at reasons we should accept such conflicts.
14 December 2022
Vittorio Serra
A Peircean response to ontic structural realism
Steven French – in The Structure of the World and elsewhere – advocates for the position that all there is, is structure, that structure is the only metaphysical primitive. According to C.S. Peirce’s system of categories, which are basic principles of combination and organisation, this seems to amount to a metaphysics that only admits one of the three categories, namely Thirdness. By Peirce’s lights, Thirdness alone cannot account for a world and here I will focus on what goes wrong when one of the other categories, Secondness, is missing and why we should think that French’s account lacks this.