SUPSOC

CANCELLED: Dr Peter Connolly: Can mystical experience be a source of knowledge?

Peter — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:00:20 +0000

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED due to a clash with the Undergraduate Philosophy Conference organised by the Sussex Philosophy Department.

Sam Reznek: A Critique of Pure Practical Reason *

Peter — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:00:37 +0000

Kant’s moral philosophy is centered on two main ideas. These are freedom and reason. Morality, for Kant, is the free construction of pure practical reason. In the first part of my paper, I explain how this idea fits into Kant’s overall system and how the system fits into history. In the second part, I launch a critique of pure practical reason—a critique Kant himself thought unnecessary. I argue that when we strip Kant’s system down to its bare essentials and cast out its dogmatic assumptions, it leaves us in a moral vacuum. Completely ungrounded we are struck with vertigo. The enlightenment that pure reason affords merely illuminates the nothingness this vacuum. Sartre’s existentialism is the attempt to live with this predicament. I argue that we need not go so far. The predicament is an historical artifact and can be discarded once we uncover an appropriate sense of impure reason. I argue we can and that this impure reason illuminates the plurality of goods open to free agents rather than vertigo inspiring nothingness.

Sam Reznek is an associate tutor at the University of Sussex who is currently working towards a Dphil on morality.

Seminar Recording

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Dr Kathleen Stock: The structure of imagining in response to literary fiction

Peter — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:00:18 +0000

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 is currently on AHRC-funded research leave pursuing her project ’The nature of imaginative engagement with fiction’. More information regarding her research and publications can be found on her staff profile.

No seminar in Week 7

Peter — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:00:33 +0000

Week 7 is undergraduate essay deadline week so there will be no SUPSOC seminar. If anyone would like to use the SUPSOC room for an essay workshop please contact us on hello@supsoc.org.

Murali Ramachandran: Contingent Identity

Peter — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:00:10 +0000

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.

Peter — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:00:51 +0000

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 and make sense of the following predicament. A person (let us say, a man) does what he realises to be a terrible thing and, pondering it, exclaims “How could I have done that?” The question is more rhetorical than literal for whatever answer is considered, it will fail to satisfy or comfort the questioner. Indeed most available answers convey nothing that is not already known to him, and he is not looking for reasons or excuses. What is really meant by “How could I have done that?” is “It is impossible that I could have done that.” Now it might seem that all we have here is a straightforward contradiction (’I did x’ / ‘I could not have done x’) and one that we would have to treat as a symptom of denial, a refusal, on the part of the agent, to accept the truth of what he did (’I did x’). We are simply dealing with a psychological (or spiritual) predicament, one requiring the appropriate diagnosis and a treatment enabling the agent to admit responsibility. In other words we would treat the “impossibility” in “It is impossible that I could have done that” as purely negative. I will suggest however that there is a subtler and more positive content in play here, something that is arguably not quite captured by ‘regret,’ ‘remorse,’ ‘guilt,’ or ’shame,’ indeed something that is lost as soon as we apply these terms.

Dr Paul Davies is a Reader in philosophy at the University of Sussex. His research areas include Kantian and post-Kantian European Philosophy, Phenomenology, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Literature, Philosophy of Religion. More information about his research and publications can be found on his staff profile.

Jacob Berkson: Moore, Skepticism and Certainty *

Peter — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:00:45 +0000

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. The general strategy is to read Moore as a (proto)-externalist about knowledge who is attempting to apply the insights of externalism to thought about knowledge from the inside. With a bit of luck what emerges is a refutation of scepticism and a vindication of a realist metaphysics.

Jacob Berkson is an associate tutor at the University of Sussex

Seminar Recording

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Chris Allsobrook: Ideological Pitfalls of Immanent Criticism *

Peter — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:00:33 +0000

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 motivates this form of ideology criticism is the hope that people will be unwilling to engage in certain practices or endorse certain ideas that implicate them in domination once they see this inconsistency. The aim here is that one’s interlocutor drops P. Dispelling ideological illusions which obscure domination, it is hoped, clears a path to emancipation. Such immanent ideology criticism does not confront society with a transcendent set of moral injunctions, but shows people how their own ideas either help perpetuate their oppression, or obscure their part in the domination of others.

However such a mode of ideology criticism tends to backfire on the critic. Like a suicide bomber, the immanent critic goes down with her opponent. If I’ve taken your position, in order to refute it, then I too have been refuted. In fact the immanent critic wants her interlocutor to drop P, but all the method demonstrates is inconsistency between P and Q. Why not drop Q? Why not resign oneself to inconsistency in this muddled world? In this paper I examine a series of attempts by some metaphysically ambitious critics such as Plato, Hegel, Marx and Adorno to construct a model of immanent criticism with which one may survive one’s suicide attack. The problem, I argue, is that by refusing to face up to martyrdom like Socrates, they end up producing increasingly sophisticated and effective vehicles of ideology (an ‘immanent criticism’ which is not what it claims to be). The remedy I suggest is to suggest a remedy.

Chris Allsobrook is an assosciate tutor at the University of Sussex who is currently working towards a DPhil on Ideology, Genealogy and Immanent Critique. Further information regarding his research and publications can be found on his staff profile.

Seminar Recording

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Mike Champion: Object-Oriented Philosophy: Weird Realism and aesthetics as first philosophy *

Peter — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:00:23 +0000

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 pitfalls of a ‘metaphysics of presence’ by recognising the withdrawn subterranean being of every real object. From this insight, object-oriented philosophy is able to escape the obsession with language that has characterized the late 20th century’s ‘linguistic turn’ and the need to reduce reality only to base ‘ultimates’. This presentation hopes to introduce object-oriented philosophy to the students as Sussex by focusing upon the claim that aesthetics now becomes first philosophy.

Mike Champion is a graduate of Nottingham Trent University. He is now studying philosophy independently and writing a philosophy blog. He has previously spoken at SUPSOC on Biotechnology and Ethics in China.

Seminar Recording

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Committee changes

Peter — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 11:59:26 +0000

Sadly, Aron Vallinder resigned from the committee at the end of the autumn term, leaving Sussex to return to Sweden.

Peter Hartree and Charles Whitehouse have stated their intention to resign at the end of the spring term. They are delighted to welcome Lee Starkey to the organising committee, who will continue the society after easter.