Dear all,
This Thursday (14 Jan) the Serious Metaphysics Group starts again for Lent term. Our first speaker is Louise Hanson, who will be presenting 'The Real Problem with Evolutionary Debunking Arguments' (abstract below). The talk will be at 1.00-2.30pm, at the Philosophy Faculty Board Room. You are welcome to bring along lunch if you are arriving from another talk/lecture beforehand. For the rest of the Lent term card please have a look at the website: http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/SMG Best wishes, Li Li Abstract This paper exposes a fundamental, and hitherto unnoticed, problem with so-called evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism (henceforth 'EDAs'). Such arguments attempt to show that evolutionary considerations pose epistemic problems for moral realism; specifically they try to show that given certain plausible evolutionary explanations for our moral beliefs, moral realists are committed to an unattractive pessimism about the prospects of moral knowledge. Various objections have been made to EDAs, but here I identify a peculiarly fundamental problem that threatens to undermine their central strategy. I argue that such arguments rest on an equivocation between two ways of reading the evolutionary explanation claim: one that is true but epistemically irrelevant, and one that is epistemically relevant but false. -- Li Li Tan PhD (Probationary) in Philosophy St Catharine's College _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
