Past Events
Dr Kathleen Stock: The structure of imagining in response to literary fiction
In this talk I will offer a definition of the sort of imagining typically had in response to literary fiction, and use it to solve the problem of ‘imaginative resistance’. I will also argue that such imagining is not an action.
Dr Kathleen Stock is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sussex. She [...]
Murali Ramachandran: Contingent Identity
The notion of contingent identity is generally taken to be demonstrably incoherent. I am going to defend its coherence against three influential arguments, and then show how a number of puzzles can be resolved by maintaining contingent identities.
Dr Paul Davies: How Could I Have Done That? A Case of Moral Impossibility.
The talk offers a short exercise in moral phenomenology. It is prompted in part by some cryptic remarks of Simone Weil and, elsewhere, will be developed as a means of challenging or complicating Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical critique of ‘interiority’. But for the purposes of this talk, I want simply to consider how best to describe [...]
Jacob Berkson: Moore, Skepticism and Certainty *
G.E. Moore claimed not only to be able to know many propositions about how things were independently of the way they seemed to him but to be able to know them with certainty. I defend his claims and at the same time try to give a diagnosis of why people are suspicious of Moore’s achievements. [...]
Chris Allsobrook: Ideological Pitfalls of Immanent Criticism *
Ideology criticism since Marx has usually been characterised as a dialectical form of ‘immanent’ or internal criticism which demonstrates inconsistency, between P: an agent’s beliefs, ideals, principles, practices etc, whereby certain practical conditions (C) appear legitimate, and Q: ideas/practices etc an agent acknowledges/engages in, whereby C appears illegitimate. What [...]
Mike Champion: Object-Oriented Philosophy: Weird Realism and aesthetics as first philosophy *
Object-oriented is a new philosophy that isn’t shy to engage in full blown metaphysical speculation. This philosophy of objects denounces the centrality of the subject as having privileged access to the world and endorses what approaches a panpsychist understanding of reality. Object-oriented philosophy forms a robust realist ontology of independently existing objects that avoids the [...]
Dr Mike Beaton on Qualia and Introspection *
Most people endorse a perceptual or quasi-perceptual account of introspection: introspection is achieved via the detection of internal states of the brain. Imagine the case of pain; it is widely supposed that what I know when I introspect pain is that pain feel like ‘this’, where ‘this’ refers to some internal state of my nervous [...]
Anna Dumitriu & Blay Whitby: Discussion on the relationship between art and science
Anna Dumitriu is a visual artist whose highly experimental work is involved with the nature of trans-disciplinary practice-based research. She has collaborated with scientists on at least 10 major projects over the past eleven years and often tends to go very deeply into her chosen area of research, taking on, or attempting to take on, [...]
Dr Gordon Finlayson: What is so good about Immanent Criticism?
Immanent criticism or immanent critique is a term now widespread and firmly entrenched in many areas of academic discourse. It is now very closely associated with the Hegelian-Marxist tradition of social criticism, and with the tradition of ideology critique, and with Frankfurt school critical theory.
It can be found throughout the humanities, the social sciences and [...]
Simon Bowes on Mind, Body and Supervening Causes
Most people no longer believe in immaterial souls, but that doesn’t mean the mind/body problem has been solved. These days it’s called the problem of mental causation: if all physical effects have sufficient physical causes, what room is there for anything like a ‘mental’ cause to do any work? Either what we call mental causes [...]
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