Re: [CamPhilEvents] MSC Speaker Recommendations 2021-2022
Dear all, A quick reminder to complete the form below by the end of *11th June (this Friday) *to recommend speakers for next year's MSC programme: https://forms.gle/c49kUmRgvfY83FF6A Best wishes, -- Alex Fisher, Paula Keller, and Ronja Griep Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc On Wed, 2 Jun 2021 at 13:29, Moral Sciences Club wrote: > Dear all, > > We are writing to invite you to recommend speakers for next year’s Moral > Sciences Club talks. You can do so by completing the following form, but if > you have difficulty in doing so please do get in touch with us by email > instead: > > https://forms.gle/c49kUmRgvfY83FF6A > > Please complete the form by the end of *11th June* if you would like your > suggestion to be noted > > If you wish to put forward more than one speaker, please rank your > preferences in descending order (highest-preference first). > > We would like to invite a diverse range of people to give talks, so do > bear this in mind. > > We look forward to hearing from you, and we hope that you are all well. > > Best wishes, > -- > Alex Fisher, Paula Keller, and Ronja Griep > Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club > Faculty of Philosophy > University of Cambridge > msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk > http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc > > > _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] MSC Speaker Recommendations 2021-2022
Dear all, We are writing to invite you to recommend speakers for next year’s Moral Sciences Club talks. You can do so by completing the following form, but if you have difficulty in doing so please do get in touch with us by email instead: https://forms.gle/c49kUmRgvfY83FF6A Please complete the form by the end of *11th June* if you would like your suggestion to be noted If you wish to put forward more than one speaker, please rank your preferences in descending order (highest-preference first). We would like to invite a diverse range of people to give talks, so do bear this in mind. We look forward to hearing from you, and we hope that you are all well. Best wishes, -- Alex Fisher, Paula Keller, and Ronja Griep Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] MSC Annual General Meeting
Dear all, We cordially invite all members of the MSC to attend the Annual General Meeting (AGM), which will take place during (or right after) the MSC's next session, this Tuesday, 25th May, from 2:30-4:15pm. As you will know from the other emails, we meet via Zoom https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/95544943588 (Meeting ID: 955 4494 3588). The AGM shall approve Minutes of the last General Meeting and the Society’s Accounts for the preceding year, elect the Executive Committee for the year ahead and conduct such other business as is necessary; Candidates for election to office shall be proposed and seconded by two other members. During this year’s AGM, we are especially going to discuss and vote on Matthew Kramer's motion *to keep the MSC online indefinitely*. If you are a member of the MSC and you have views on that matter, we encourage you to attend tomorrow's session of the MSC (which will also be the last session during the academic year 2020/21). Best wishes, Chris, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Nancy Cartwright at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held this Tuesday, 25th May, from 2:30-4:15pm. We will be meeting over Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/95544943588 (Meeting ID: 955 4494 3588). We are delighted to welcome *Nancy Cartwright* (Durham, San Diego) who will be presenting on *“**Causal models, causal principles and evidence for singular causation”*. The abstract follows below. *This talk begins with a catalogue of 'tried and true' kinds of evidence normally adduced for singular causal claims and offers a poison example in illustration. It then presents a type of model – a SCEM (Singular Causal Equations Model) – that defends WHY these are evidence. Despite the equations, the model is not technically difficult to understand: it is just a generalisation to multi-valued variables of JL Mackie's theory that causes are INUS conditions (insufficient but necessary parts of unnecessary but sufficient conditions). I close with a discussion of Donald Davidson's demand that singular causation be grounded in causal principles and a query about the role middle-level principles might play here.* Best wishes, Chris, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Nancy Cartwright at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday, 25th May, from 2:30-4:15pm. We will be meeting over Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/95544943588 (Meeting ID: 955 4494 3588). We are delighted to welcome *Nancy Cartwright* (Durham, San Diego) who will be presenting on *“**Causal models, causal principles and evidence for singular causation”*. The handout is attached to this email; the abstract follows below. *This talk begins with a catalogue of 'tried and true' kinds of evidence normally adduced for singular causal claims and offers a poison example in illustration. It then presents a type of model – a SCEM (Singular Causal Equations Model) – that defends WHY these are evidence. Despite the equations, the model is not technically difficult to understand: it is just a generalisation to multi-valued variables of JL Mackie's theory that causes are INUS conditions (insufficient but necessary parts of unnecessary but sufficient conditions). I close with a discussion of Donald Davidson's demand that singular causation be grounded in causal principles and a query about the role middle-level principles might play here.* Best wishes, Chris, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Ralf Bader at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held this Tuesday, 18th May, from 2:30-4:15pm. We will be meeting over Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/95544943588 (Meeting ID: 955 4494 3588). We are delighted to welcome *Ralf Bader* (Fribourg) who will be presenting on *'Partial Comparability'*. The abstract of the talk follows. *This paper considers cases of partial comparability where various dimensions of evaluation are taken to be not fully but only partially comparable such that some but not all gains and losses on these dimensions can be traded off against each other. It will be argued that these cases are to be given an epistemic interpretation such that objectively there is complete comparability that is only partially epistemically accessible to us.* Best wishes, Chris, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Ralf Bader at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held this Tuesday, 18th May, from 2:30-4:15pm. We will be meeting over Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/95544943588 (Meeting ID: 955 4494 3588). We are delighted to welcome *Ralf Bader* (Fribourg) who will be presenting on *'Partial Comparability'*. The abstract of the talk follows. *This paper considers cases of partial comparability where various dimensions of evaluation are taken to be not fully but only partially comparable such that some but not all gains and losses on these dimensions can be traded off against each other. It will be argued that these cases are to be given an epistemic interpretation such that objectively there is complete comparability that is only partially epistemically accessible to us.* Best wishes, Chris, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Lucy McDonald at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held this Tuesday, 11th May, from 2:30 - 4:15pm. We will be meeting over Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/95544943588 (Meeting ID: 955 4494 3588). We are delighted to welcome *Lucy McDonald* (St John's College, Cambridge) who will be presenting on *‘**The Philosophy of Flirting’*. The abstract of the talk follows. *In this talk I will use tools from philosophy of language to develop an account of flirting. Flirting, I argue, is a conversational game involving presuppositions of intimacy (‘push’ moves) and playfully insincere blocking manoeuvres (‘pull’ moves). Flirters seek to create intimacy, so they presuppose that such intimacy already exists. They do this by performing acts which would be impolite if intimacy were absent. Through processes of accommodation, such intimacy becomes real. This account enhances our understanding of a common social ritual, and it can also be deployed in political and legal contexts to undermine sexual harassment apologism.* Best wishes, Chris, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Lucy McDonald at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday, 11th May, from 2:30 - 4:15pm. We will be meeting over Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/95544943588 (Meeting ID: 955 4494 3588). We are delighted to welcome *Lucy McDonald* (St John's College, Cambridge) who will be presenting on *‘**The Philosophy of Flirting’*. The abstract of the talk follows. *In this talk I will use tools from philosophy of language to develop an account of flirting. Flirting, I argue, is a conversational game involving presuppositions of intimacy (‘push’ moves) and playfully insincere blocking manoeuvres (‘pull’ moves). Flirters seek to create intimacy, so they presuppose that such intimacy already exists. They do this by performing acts which would be impolite if intimacy were absent. Through processes of accommodation, such intimacy becomes real. This account enhances our understanding of a common social ritual, and it can also be deployed in political and legal contexts to undermine sexual harassment apologism.* Best wishes, Chris, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Joe Horton at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held this Tuesday, 4th May, from 2:30-4:15 pm. We will be meeting over Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/95544943588 (Meeting ID: 955 4494 3588). We are delighted to welcome Joe Horton (UCL) who will be presenting on 'New and Improvable Lives'. The abstract of the talk follows. *According to weak utilitarianism, at least when other things are equal, you should maximize the sum of well-being. This view has considerable explanatory power, but it also has two implications that seem to me implausible. First, it implies that, other things equal, it is wrong to harm yourself, or even to deny yourself benefits. Second, it implies that, other things equal, given the opportunity to create new happy people, it is wrong not to. These implications can be avoided by accepting a complaints-based alternative to weak utilitarianism. However, complaints-based views face two decisive problems, originally noticed by Jacob Ross. I here develop a view that avoids these problems while retaining the advantages of complaints-based views.* Best wishes, Chris, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Joe Horton at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday, 4th May, from 2:30-4:15 pm. We will be meeting over Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/95544943588 (Meeting ID: 955 4494 3588). We are delighted to welcome *Joe Horton* (UCL) who will be presenting on *'New and Improvable Lives'*. The abstract of the talk follows. *According to weak utilitarianism, at least when other things are equal, you should maximize the sum of well-being. This view has considerable explanatory power, but it also has two implications that seem to me implausible. First, it implies that, other things equal, it is wrong to harm yourself, or even to deny yourself benefits. Second, it implies that, other things equal, given the opportunity to create new happy people, it is wrong not to. These implications can be avoided by accepting a complaints-based alternative to weak utilitarianism. However, complaints-based views face two decisive problems, originally noticed by Jacob Ross. I here develop a view that avoids these problems while retaining the advantages of complaints-based views.* Best wishes, Chris, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Helen Frowe at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held *tomorrow*, 16th March, from 2:30-4:15 pm. We will be meeting over Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93118163825 (Meeting ID: 931 1816 3825). This week, we are delighted to welcome *Helen Frowe *(Stockholm) who will be presenting on '*Refugee Discrimination and Offsetting the Costs of Rescue*'. The abstract of the talk follows. *Consider Refuge:* *Refuge: Alice and Betty face equally grave harms in their own countries, and can avoid these harms only by resettlement abroad. France is considering whether to admit Alice or Betty. Alice speaks French and will be able to work. Her contributions to the French economy will offset any financial costs of her rescue. Betty does not speak French, will struggle to learn, and will not be able to work. She will not offset the costs of her rescue. * *In this talk, I argue that, other things being equal, the French government is morally required to take into account Alice’s ability to offset the cost of her resettlement. I do not argue that France must prioritise Alice’s admission over Betty’s. I argue that, in the absence of countervailing non-financial costs, France must admit Alice and their doing so has no bearing on whether they may exclude Betty. This is true even if France has already met its refugee quota (in a sense to be explored) and any further admissions are thus seemingly supererogatory. The financial costs of resettling refugees who can offset the financial costs of their admittance are illegitimate grounds for excluding those refugees. * Best wishes, Chris, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Helen Frowe at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday, 16th March, from 2:30-4:15 pm. We will be meeting over Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93118163825 (Meeting ID: 931 1816 3825). This week, we are delighted to welcome *Helen Frowe *(Stockholm) who will be presenting on '*Refugee Discrimination and Offsetting the Costs of Rescue*'. The abstract of the talk follows. *Consider Refuge:* *Refuge: Alice and Betty face equally grave harms in their own countries, and can avoid these harms only by resettlement abroad. France is considering whether to admit Alice or Betty. Alice speaks French and will be able to work. Her contributions to the French economy will offset any financial costs of her rescue. Betty does not speak French, will struggle to learn, and will not be able to work. She will not offset the costs of her rescue. * *In this talk, I argue that, other things being equal, the French government is morally required to take into account Alice’s ability to offset the cost of her resettlement. I do not argue that France must prioritise Alice’s admission over Betty’s. I argue that, in the absence of countervailing non-financial costs, France must admit Alice and their doing so has no bearing on whether they may exclude Betty. This is true even if France has already met its refugee quota (in a sense to be explored) and any further admissions are thus seemingly supererogatory. The financial costs of resettling refugees who can offset the financial costs of their admittance are illegitimate grounds for excluding those refugees. * Best wishes, Chris, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Alexander Horne at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held tomorrow, 9th March, from 2:30-4:15 pm. We will be meeting over Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93118163825 (Meeting ID: 931 1816 3825). This week, we are delighted to welcome our very own Alexander Horne (Trinity College) who will be presenting on 'You can run, but you cannot hide: social norms and social normativity'. The abstract of the talk follows. *There are many stupid, inefficient and immoral social norms. As a result, most people think we sometimes have no reason at all to do as they require. But most people are wrong. Or so I will argue. I attempt to establish a claim of a posteriori necessity regarding social norms’ reason-giving power that follows from the best account of what they and we are like. My argumentative strategy for establishing that conclusion is to show that the relevant instrumental normativity is simply contingent on an agent’s having any desires whatsoever, on the model of a universal hypothetical imperative.* Best wishes, Chris, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Alexander Horne at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday, 9th March, from 2:30-4:15 pm. We will be meeting over Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93118163825 (Meeting ID: 931 1816 3825). This week, we are delighted to welcome our very own Alexander Horne (Trinity College) who will be presenting on 'You can run, but you cannot hide: social norms and social normativity'. The abstract of the talk follows. *There are many stupid, inefficient and immoral social norms. As a result, most people think we sometimes have no reason at all to do as they require. But most people are wrong. Or so I will argue. I attempt to establish a claim of a posteriori necessity regarding social norms’ reason-giving power that follows from the best account of what they and we are like. My argumentative strategy for establishing that conclusion is to show that the relevant instrumental normativity is simply contingent on an agent’s having any desires whatsoever, on the model of a universal hypothetical imperative.* Best wishes, Chris, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Cian Dorr at Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday, 2nd March. As usual, we will be meeting from 2:30-4:15 pm, and you can join us on Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93118163825 (Meeting ID: 931 1816 3825). This week, we are delighted to welcome Cian Dorr (NYU) who will be speaking on "Plural Signification and Semantic Paradox", the abstract of which follows. *Suppose that Socrates is saying that not everything Socrates is saying is true. (Perhaps he has forgotten who he is, sees someone else saying that snow is black, and wrongly believes that that person is Socrates.) If everything he is saying is true, then since one of the things he’s saying is that not everything he is saying is true, one of the things he’s saying is false: a contradiction. So, not everything he’s saying is true. But then one of the things he’s saying—namely, that not everything he’s saying is true—is true. Therefore he is saying at least two things. This argument is sometimes called “Prior’s Paradox”, after A.N. Prior who first formalized it (though the argument was already implicitly endorsed by Bradwardine in the 1320s). But there is nothing paradoxical about it, unless one antecedently assumes that anyone uttering at most one sentence is thereby saying at most one thing. Like Bradwardine, I will regard the argument as an effective refutation of that assumption. Other “semantic paradoxes”, like the Liar, likewise turn out under inspection simply to be sound arguments for the one-many character of various other semantic (intentional) relations. For example, we can argue that ‘This sentence expresses something false’ expresses at least two things, namely something false, and the truth that it expresses something false. In some closely related cases, we can use a Berry-style argument to strengthen ‘at least two’ to ‘infinitely many’. Such claims of multiplicity might seem costly if they were thought of merely as escape routes to block paradox. But they make both intuitive and theoretical sense relative to a more general "Plural Signification” picture which I will sketch, on which it is characteristic of all “intentional” relations to be radically one-many. * Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía, and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Cian Dorr at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held this Tuesday, 2nd March, on Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93118163825 (Meeting ID: 931 1816 3825). As usual, we will be meeting from 2:30-4:15 pm. This week, we are delighted to welcome Cian Dorr (NYU) who will be speaking on "Plural Signification and Semantic Paradox". Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía, and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Alexander Bird at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held tomorrow, Tuesday 23rd February, on Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93118163825 (Meeting ID: 931 1816 3825). *This week we will be returning to our regular time of 2:30-4:15 pm. * We are delighted to welcome our very own Bertrand Russell Professor, Alexander Bird (St John's College). Professor Bird will be giving a talk entitled "Against Empiricism", the abstract of which follows: *Most philosophers of science are empiricists. Most philosophers of science are realists. But, I argue, it is not reasonable to be both an empiricist and a realist. Nor is instrumentalism a reasonable position. So an empiricist should be an outright sceptic about science. Conversely, someone who wishes to have a positive attitude to at least some parts of science, should not be an empiricist. I conclude by pointing out that scientific practice is inconsistent with empiricism.* Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía, and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
Re: [CamPhilEvents] Alexander Bird at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, Apologies, the Zoom link provided in our previous email was incorrect. You can join us on Tuesday at* 2:30 pm* to listen to Professor Bird's talk through https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93118163825 (Meeting ID: 931 1816 3825). Again, apologies for any confusion this might have caused. Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc On Thu, 18 Feb 2021 at 09:56, Moral Sciences Club wrote: > Dear all, > > > > The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held this Tuesday, 23 > February, on Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/92022376494 (Meeting ID: > 920 2237 6494). As many of you will know, last week we moved the meeting > back two hours to accommodate our speakers. *This week we will be > returning to our regular time of 2:30-4:15 pm. * > > > > We are delighted to welcome our very own Bertrand Russell Professor, > Alexander Bird (St John's College). Professor Bird will be giving a talk > entitled "Against Empiricism", the abstract of which follows: > > > > *Most philosophers of science are empiricists. Most philosophers of > science are realists. But, I argue, it is not reasonable to be both an > empiricist and a realist. Nor is instrumentalism a reasonable position. > So an empiricist should be an outright sceptic about science. Conversely, > someone who wishes to have a positive attitude to at least some parts of > science, should not be an empiricist. I conclude by pointing out that > scientific practice is inconsistent with empiricism.* > > > > Best wishes, > > Christopher, Emma, Sofía, and Wouter > -- > Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter > Cohen > Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club > Faculty of Philosophy > University of Cambridge > msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk > http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc > > _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Alexander Bird at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held this Tuesday, 23 February, on Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/92022376494 (Meeting ID: 920 2237 6494). As many of you will know, last week we moved the meeting back two hours to accommodate our speakers. *This week we will be returning to our regular time of 2:30-4:15 pm. * We are delighted to welcome our very own Bertrand Russell Professor, Alexander Bird (St John's College). Professor Bird will be giving a talk entitled "Against Empiricism", the abstract of which follows: *Most philosophers of science are empiricists. Most philosophers of science are realists. But, I argue, it is not reasonable to be both an empiricist and a realist. Nor is instrumentalism a reasonable position. So an empiricist should be an outright sceptic about science. Conversely, someone who wishes to have a positive attitude to at least some parts of science, should not be an empiricist. I conclude by pointing out that scientific practice is inconsistent with empiricism.* Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía, and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Changed Time: Plunkett and McPherson at the MSC
Dear all, the next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held this Tuesday, 16 February, on Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/92022376494 (Meeting ID: 920 2237 6494). *Due to time zone issues, the meeting will take place from 4:30 until 6:15pm – two hours later than usual.* We are delighted to welcome David Plunkett (Dartmouth) and Tristram McPherson (Ohio State), who will be giving a talk entitled "Topic Continuity in Conceptual Ethics and Beyond". The abstract for the talk is as follows: *One important activity in conceptual ethics and conceptual engineering involves proposing to associate a new intension with an existing lexical item. Many philosophers think that one important way to evaluate such a proposal concerns whether it preserves the “topic” picked out the existing lexical item, and several have offered competing proposals concerning what is required for topic continuity. Our paper does two things. First, we distinguish the descriptive question of what is required for “topic continuity” as we currently understand it, from the conceptual ethics question of how it would be best for conceptual ethicists to use ‘topic continuity’ in evaluating their projects. Second, we motivate and provide a context-sensitive answer to the conceptual ethics question. This answer is motivated by the idea that there are several distinct considerations that we can care about in thinking about topic continuity, and how best to weigh them against each other can vary from context to context. We conclude by locating our account in a broader way of thinking about topic across a range of inquiries.* Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía, and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Changed Time: Plunkett and McPherson at the MSC
Dear all, the next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held this Tuesday, 16 February, on Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/92022376494 (Meeting ID: 920 2237 6494). *Due to time zone issues, the meeting will take place from 4:30 until 6:15pm – two hours later than usual.* We are delighted to welcome David Plunkett (Dartmouth) and Tristram McPherson (Ohio State), who will be giving a talk entitled "Topic Continuity in Conceptual Ethics and Beyond". The abstract for the talk is as follows: *One important activity in conceptual ethics and conceptual engineering involves proposing to associate a new intension with an existing lexical item. Many philosophers think that one important way to evaluate such a proposal concerns whether it preserves the “topic” picked out the existing lexical item, and several have offered competing proposals concerning what is required for topic continuity. Our paper does two things. First, we distinguish the descriptive question of what is required for “topic continuity” as we currently understand it, from the conceptual ethics question of how it would be best for conceptual ethicists to use ‘topic continuity’ in evaluating their projects. Second, we motivate and provide a context-sensitive answer to the conceptual ethics question. This answer is motivated by the idea that there are several distinct considerations that we can care about in thinking about topic continuity, and how best to weigh them against each other can vary from context to context. We conclude by locating our account in a broader way of thinking about topic across a range of inquiries.* Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía, and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Justin Snedegar at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held this Tuesday, 9 February, from 2:30 until 4:15 pm, on Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93118163825 (Meeting ID: 931 1816 3825). We are delighted to welcome Justin Snedegar (St Andrews), who will be giving a talk entitled "Dismissing Blame". The abstract for the talk is as follows: *When someone blames you, you might accept the blame or you might reject it, challenging the blamer’s interpretation of the facts, or providing a justification or excuse. Either way, there are opportunities for edifying moral discussion and moral repair. But another common response is to simply dismiss the blame, refusing to engage with the blamer even by rejecting the blame. This talk aims to make sense of this kind of response: what are we doing, when we dismiss blame? This is important for understanding when and why such a response is or is not legitimate, and should shed light on questions both about blame itself and about the standing to blame. My answer is that when we dismiss blame, we dismiss a demand or expectation that we lower ourselves before the blamer.* Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía, and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Justin Snedegar at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held this Tuesday, 9 February, from 2:30 until 4:15 pm, on Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93118163825 (Meeting ID: 931 1816 3825). We are delighted to welcome Justin Snedegar (St Andrews), who will be giving a talk entitled "Dismissing Blame". The abstract for the talk is as follows: *When someone blames you, you might accept the blame or you might reject it, challenging the blamer’s interpretation of the facts, or providing a justification or excuse. Either way, there are opportunities for edifying moral discussion and moral repair. But another common response is to simply dismiss the blame, refusing to engage with the blamer even by rejecting the blame. This talk aims to make sense of this kind of response: what are we doing, when we dismiss blame? This is important for understanding when and why such a response is or is not legitimate, and should shed light on questions both about blame itself and about the standing to blame. My answer is that when we dismiss blame, we dismiss a demand or expectation that we lower ourselves before the blamer.* Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía, and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Lucy Allais at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held this Tuesday, 2 February, from 2:30 until 4:15 pm, on Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93118163825 (Meeting ID: 931 1816 3825). We are delighted to welcome Lucy Allais (San Diego/Johannesburg), who will be giving a talk entitled "Property, Market and Freedom". The abstract for the talk is as follows: *Kant’s political philosophy is based on freedom; and it opens with an account of property. What is the relation between these? Is the right to do what you want with your property a fundamental freedom that can be limited only by other people’s equal freedom? Or do the exclusions involved in defending private property involve a fundamental unfreedom of some? There is debate in the literature about whether a political philosophy based on defending and enabling equal external freedom rather than on meeting needs would support redistributive taxation and market regulation. My aim in this paper is to investigate the relation between freedom, property and economic justice in Kant’s political philosophy by thinking about the relation between external freedom, property and so-called free markets. Liberalism is associated with ‘free’ markets, but what conception of free markets follows from a Kantian account? What is it for markets to be free? My argumentative strategy is reconstructive not primarily based on claims made in Kant’s texts directly about markets and the economy (of which there are very few), and many of the issue I discuss with respect to markets are contemporary concerns. But my aim is to explore what follows from Kant’s political philosophy for how we should think about markets. As is well known, the Doctrine of Right is very sketchy, leaving much work for us to do in working out what follows from the account. My approach is influenced by Charles Mills’ critique of ideal theory, as well as his ‘occupy liberalism’ approach to rethinking liberalism, though my focus (unlike his) is on Kant’s political philosophy. My interest is in theorizing non-ideal concerns specifically in relation to property and markets in Kant’s account of justice. I argue that, in Kant’s account, voluntary market exchange of property is something that must be thought of as depending on and being subordinate to the framework of civic equality, rather than something fundamental which drives what civic equality is and constrains it. I argue that this has implications for the responsibility of the state to manage natural resources, including those that affect the climate.* Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía, and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Lucy Allais at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held this Tuesday, 2 February, from 2:30 until 4:15pm, on Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93118163825 (Meeting ID: 931 1816 3825). We are delighted to welcome Lucy Allais (San Diego/Johannesburg), who will be giving a talk entitled "Property, Market and Freedom". The abstract for the talk is as follows: *Kant’s political philosophy is based on freedom; and it opens with an account of property. What is the relation between these? Is the right to do what you want with your property a fundamental freedom that can be limited only by other people’s equal freedom? Or do the exclusions involved in defending private property involve a fundamental unfreedom of some? There is debate in the literature about whether a political philosophy based on defending and enabling equal external freedom rather than on meeting needs would support redistributive taxation and market regulation. My aim in this paper is to investigate the relation between freedom, property and economic justice in Kant’s political philosophy by thinking about the relation between external freedom, property and so-called free markets. Liberalism is associated with ‘free’ markets, but what conception of free markets follows from a Kantian account? What is it for markets to be free? My argumentative strategy is reconstructive not primarily based on claims made in Kant’s texts directly about markets and the economy (of which there are very few), and many of the issue I discuss with respect to markets are contemporary concerns. But my aim is to explore what follows from Kant’s political philosophy for how we should think about markets. As is well known, the Doctrine of Right is very sketchy, leaving much work for us to do in working out what follows from the account. My approach is influenced by Charles Mills’ critique of ideal theory, as well as his ‘occupy liberalism’ approach to rethinking liberalism, though my focus (unlike his) is on Kant’s political philosophy. My interest is in theorizing non-ideal concerns specifically in relation to property and markets in Kant’s account of justice. I argue that, in Kant’s account, voluntary market exchange of property is something that must be thought of as depending on and being subordinate to the framework of civic equality, rather than something fundamental which drives what civic equality is and constrains it. I argue that this has implications for the responsibility of the state to manage natural resources, including those that affect the climate.* Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía, and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Zoe Walker at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held this Tuesday, 26 January, from 2:30 until 4:15, on Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93118163825 (Meeting ID: 931 1816 3825). We are delighted to welcome Zoe Walker (Cambridge), who will be giving a talk entitled 'A Sensibility of Humour'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: *Some say that only a sexist can be amused by a sexist joke. Others think that your sense of humour reveals nothing about you at all, and it’s perfectly fine to enjoy whatever humour you like. In this paper, I forge a path between these views, arguing that your sense of humour reveals nothing about your beliefs, but does nonetheless reveal something else important about your character. I arrive at this position by fleshing out an account of sense of humour as a sensibility, with emotional, perceptual and motivational aspects to it. I also propose a method for improving one’s sense of humour if one finds it to be wanting.* Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía, and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Zoe Walker at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tuesday, 26 January. We are delighted to welcome Zoe Walker (Cambridge), who will be giving a talk entitled 'A Sensibility of Humour'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: Some say that only a sexist can be amused by a sexist joke. Others think that your sense of humour reveals nothing about you at all, and it’s perfectly fine to enjoy whatever humour you like. In this paper, I forge a path between these views, arguing that your sense of humour reveals nothing about your beliefs, but does nonetheless reveal something else important about your character. I arrive at this position by fleshing out an account of sense of humour as a sensibility, with emotional, perceptual and motivational aspects to it. I also propose a method for improving one’s sense of humour if one finds it to be wanting. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93118163825 (Meeting ID: 931 1816 3825). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Lisa Bortolotti at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held Tomorrow (1st December). We are delighted to welcome Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Delusion and Identity'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: In this paper I ask whether there is a definition of delusion which encompasses how the word ‘delusion’ is used in lay talk, where delusions are implausible or mistaken beliefs, and how ‘delusion’ is used in psychiatry, where delusions are symptoms of mental disorders. Using a variety of examples, I show that often talked-about features of delusions—such as being false, bizarre, or pathological—should not be regarded as defining features because they are not necessary conditions for a belief to be delusional. Next, I propose a unified notion of delusion as a belief that is irresponsive to counter-evidence and central to a person’s identity. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https:/ <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455>/zoom.us/j/98343588455 <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455> (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter. -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Lisa Bortolotti at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tuesday (1st December). We are delighted to welcome Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Delusion and Identity'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: In this paper I ask whether there is a definition of delusion which encompasses how the word ‘delusion’ is used in lay talk, where delusions are implausible or mistaken beliefs, and how ‘delusion’ is used in psychiatry, where delusions are symptoms of mental disorders. Using a variety of examples, I show that often talked-about features of delusions—such as being false, bizarre, or pathological—should not be regarded as defining features because they are not necessary conditions for a belief to be delusional. Next, I propose a unified notion of delusion as a belief that is irresponsive to counter-evidence and central to a person’s identity. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https:/ <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455>/zoom.us/j/98343588455 <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455> (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter. -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Caspar Hare at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held tomorrow (24th November). We are delighted to welcome Caspar Hare (MIT), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Pleasing the Crowd Within'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: Some metaphysicians tell us that in the near vicinity of every person there are many further person-like things, with slightly different mereological, temporal or modal properties. So, for example, in the near vicinity of David Attenborough there is Hairless David Attenborough. Hairless David Attenborough is just like David Attenborough except in this respect: David Attenborough’s hair is part of David Attenborough, but not part of Hairless David Attenborough. Suppose they are right. Does this have any bearing on what we ought to believe and do in ordinary contexts? I say it does, though not for the reasons you might think. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https:/ <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455>/zoom.us/j/98343588455 <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455> (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter. -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Caspar Hare at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tuesday (24th November). We are delighted to welcome Caspar Hare (MIT), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Pleasing the Crowd Within'. The abstract will be sent within the following few days. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https:/ <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455>/zoom.us/j/98343588455 <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455> (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter. -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Hartry Field at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tomorrow (17th November). We are delighted to welcome Hartry Field (NYU), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Naive Properties'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: Naive property theory consists of (1) an Abstraction Principle, asserting the existence of each property definable (from parameters) in the property-theoretic language; (2) an Instantiation Principle, making the obvious generalization of the claim that (necessarily) the property of not being an electron is satisfied by just those things that aren’t electrons; and perhaps (3) an Identity Principle, which takes necessary coextensiveness as sufficing for identity of properties. (3) seems less obvious than the others, but in any case, (1) and (2) by themselves lead to contradiction in classical logic. A classical logician is likely to follow the lead of the standard resolution of the set-theoretic paradoxes, by weakening (1). This is highly problematic, and I tentatively suggest that weakening (2) is the better option for the proponent of classical logic. But I prefer keeping both (1) and (2), in a non-classical setting. This allows us to also come very close to keeping (3), if we want it. There’s much prior work allowing us to keep (1) and (2) in a non-classical setting, but until recently, only in logically weak languages. Gilmore and Kripke did it for a language without well-behaved conditionals, and without restricted quantifiers, in a logic with a 3-valued semantics. Skolem and Chang did it for a language that did include a well behaved conditional, but without any quantifiers at all, in a logic with a continuum-valued semantics. Both theories are very attractive in their limited domains, and they agree where they overlap, so it’s natural to try for a common generalization of both. In this talk I’ll show how to achieve that. (My previous published work generalized only Gilmore-Kripke, not Skolem-Chang, and gave a less tractable theory.) I’ll include some discussion of two different kinds of conditionals: ordinary indicative conditionals and quantifier-restricting conditionals. We ultimately need a theory of both, and of how they interact, in a framework suitable for the paradoxes. There won’t be time for the details, but I’ll try to hit some key points about how this goes. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https:/ <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455>/zoom.us/j/98343588455 <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455> (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter. -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Hartry Field at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tuesday (17th November). We are delighted to welcome Hartry Field (NYU), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Naive Properties'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: Naive property theory consists of (1) an Abstraction Principle, asserting the existence of each property definable (from parameters) in the property-theoretic language; (2) an Instantiation Principle, making the obvious generalization of the claim that (necessarily) the property of not being an electron is satisfied by just those things that aren’t electrons; and perhaps (3) an Identity Principle, which takes necessary coextensiveness as sufficing for identity of properties. (3) seems less obvious than the others, but in any case, (1) and (2) by themselves lead to contradiction in classical logic. A classical logician is likely to follow the lead of the standard resolution of the set-theoretic paradoxes, by weakening (1). This is highly problematic, and I tentatively suggest that weakening (2) is the better option for the proponent of classical logic. But I prefer keeping both (1) and (2), in a non-classical setting. This allows us to also come very close to keeping (3), if we want it. There’s much prior work allowing us to keep (1) and (2) in a non-classical setting, but until recently, only in logically weak languages. Gilmore and Kripke did it for a language without well-behaved conditionals, and without restricted quantifiers, in a logic with a 3-valued semantics. Skolem and Chang did it for a language that did include a well behaved conditional, but without any quantifiers at all, in a logic with a continuum-valued semantics. Both theories are very attractive in their limited domains, and they agree where they overlap, so it’s natural to try for a common generalization of both. In this talk I’ll show how to achieve that. (My previous published work generalized only Gilmore-Kripke, not Skolem-Chang, and gave a less tractable theory.) I’ll include some discussion of two different kinds of conditionals: ordinary indicative conditionals and quantifier-restricting conditionals. We ultimately need a theory of both, and of how they interact, in a framework suitable for the paradoxes. There won’t be time for the details, but I’ll try to hit some key points about how this goes. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https:/ <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455>/zoom.us/j/98343588455 <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455> (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter. -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Handout for Roxane Noël's presentation
Dear all, The handout for Roxane Noël's presentation is attached. The same handout will be shared via the Zoom chat. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/98343588455 (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter. -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Handout for Roxane Noël's talk today
Dear all, Attached to this email is the handout for Roxane Noël's talk today. It will also be shared via the Zoom chat. Best wishes, Chris, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Roxane Noël at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held Tomorrow (10th November). We are delighted to welcome Roxane Noël (Cambridge), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Say It like You Mean It: An Investigation of Abelard’s Legacy in Twelfth-Century Logic'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: The problem of universals is often seen as one of the central issues in medieval philosophy, opposing nominalists to realists. This talk is part of a broader project aiming to shed more light on nominalism after Abelard’s death, i.e. in the second half of the twelfth century. Here, I focus on the use of the technical notion of ‘*sermo*’ in two texts from this period, the *Summa Dialectice Artis* and the anonymous commentary on the Categories from Ms Oxford Bodleian Library D’Orville 207, to show how these texts can be linked to Abelardian thought, and what it means for the history of nominalism. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https:/ <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455>/zoom.us/j/98343588455 <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455> (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Roxane Noël at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tuesday (10th November). We are delighted to welcome Roxane Noël (Cambridge), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Say It like You Mean It: An Investigation of Abelard’s Legacy in Twelfth-Century Logic'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: The problem of universals is often seen as one of the central issues in medieval philosophy, opposing nominalists to realists. This talk is part of a broader project aiming to shed more light on nominalism after Abelard’s death, i.e. in the second half of the twelfth century. Here, I focus on the use of the technical notion of ‘*sermo*’ in two texts from this period, the *Summa Dialectice Artis* and the anonymous commentary on the Categories from Ms Oxford Bodleian Library D’Orville 207, to show how these texts can be linked to Abelardian thought, and what it means for the history of nominalism. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https:/ <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455>/zoom.us/j/98343588455 <https://zoom.us/j/98343588455> (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Stephen Yablo at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held tomorrow (3rd November). We are delighted to welcome Professor Stephen Yablo (MIT), who will be giving a talk entitled 'How and Why to be Logically Non-Omniscient'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: *Some ideas from aboutness theory are applied to the problem of logical omniscience. The goal is less to excuse our failure to draw certain (valid) inferences than to explain the failure, to the point in some cases of applauding it.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/98343588455 (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Stephen Yablo at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tuesday (3rd November). We are delighted to welcome Professor Stephen Yablo (MIT), who will be giving a talk entitled 'How and Why to be Logically Non-Omniscient'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: *Some ideas from aboutness theory are applied to the problem of logical omniscience. The goal is less to excuse our failure to draw certain (valid) inferences than to explain the failure, to the point in some cases of applauding it.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/98343588455 (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Handout for Sally Haslanger's presentation
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held today. For Professor Haslanger's talk there will be a handout, which is attached to this email. The same handout will be shared via the Zoom chat. Her paper on which the talk is based is also attached. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/98343588455 (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Sally Haslanger at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tuesday (27th October). We are delighted to welcome Professor Sally Haslanger (MIT), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Political Epistemology and Social Critique'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: *Under conditions of ideology, a standard model of normative political epistemology – relying on a domain-specific reflective equilibrium – risks status-quo bias. Social critique requires a more critical standpoint. What are the aims of social critique? How is such a standpoint achieved and what grounds its claims? One way of achieving a critical standpoint is through consciousness raising. Consciousness raising offers a paradigm shift in our understanding of the social world; but not all epistemic practices that appear to “raise” consciousness, are warranted. However, under certain conditions sketched in the paper, consciousness raising produces a warranted critical standpoint and a pro tanto claim against others. This is an important epistemic achievement, yet under conditions of collective self-governance, there is no guarantee that all warranted claims can be met simultaneously. There will be winners and losers even after legitimate democratic processes have been followed.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/98343588455 (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Amie Thomasson at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next tomorrow (20th October). We are delighted to welcome Professor Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Should Ontology be Explanatory?'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: *Since Quine, it has been common to hold that the goal of ontology is to determine what entities we should or must ‘posit’ as part of a best total explanatory theory. Accordingly, whether putative entities such as meanings, properties, or numbers contribute explanatory power is often taken as a central criterion for whether we should accept that they exist.* *I will argue that this is a mistake. The explanatory power criterion arises from failing to understand the diverse functions that different areas of discourse can serve. A deeper understanding of the way these forms of discourse enter language, and of the functional roles they play, makes clear why we should reject the explanatory power criterion, and reject the explanatory conception of ontology. I will close with some remarks about how we should rethink our approach to existence questions—and, more deeply, how we should re-focus our philosophical efforts.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/98343588455 (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Amie Thomasson at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tuesday (20th October). We are delighted to welcome Professor Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Should Ontology be Explanatory?'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: *Since Quine, it has been common to hold that the goal of ontology is to determine what entities we should or must ‘posit’ as part of a best total explanatory theory. Accordingly, whether putative entities such as meanings, properties, or numbers contribute explanatory power is often taken as a central criterion for whether we should accept that they exist.* *I will argue that this is a mistake. The explanatory power criterion arises from failing to understand the diverse functions that different areas of discourse can serve. A deeper understanding of the way these forms of discourse enter language, and of the functional roles they play, makes clear why we should reject the explanatory power criterion, and reject the explanatory conception of ontology. I will close with some remarks about how we should rethink our approach to existence questions—and, more deeply, how we should re-focus our philosophical efforts.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/98343588455 (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Kwame Anthony Appiah at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held tomorrow (13th October). We are delighted to welcome Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU), who will be giving a talk entitled 'The Philosophy of Work'. Here is the abstract for his talk: *A discussion of the changing ways in which work fits into the main ethical project: making a life. Globalization and automation are seen as posing challenges for many kinds of workers. What -- if anything -- can philosophy say about the appropriate social response?* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/98343588455 (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Kwame Anthony Appiah at the Moral Sciences Club and Club Programme 2020-21
Dear all, The Moral Sciences Club is pleased to announce its programme of speakers for 2020-21, details of which you can find attached to this email. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Club will have to hold its meetings virtually for the foreseeable future. Whilst we are disappointed that this means we will not be able to see you all in person, we are incredibly excited about the opportunity this presents us with to host speakers from around the world. We hope you are just as excited about the programme as we are. For our first meeting of the academic year, we are delighted to welcome Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) who will be speaking on 'The Philosophy of Work', the abstract is as follows: *A discussion of the changing ways in which work fits into the main ethical project: making a life. Globalization and automation are seen as posing challenges for many kinds of workers. What--if anything- can philosophy say about the appropriate social response?* The meeting will be held on the 13th October from 2:30 - 4:15pm BST, you can join us on Zoom via: https://zoom.us/j/98343588455 (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). With best wishes, Chris, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Recommendations for MSC Speakers
Dear all, This email is a reminder that today, 1st August, is the last day that speakers can be recommended for next year’s Moral Sciences Club talks. You can do so by filling in the following form: https://www.surveymonkey.de/r/YS8ZTKQ?fbclid=IwAR208jplssB9InBGqm-ywyeKv6F6wPtiRH4lTH4cpVyGVsbqpqBgQ2hajJo If you have any difficulty in completing the form do get in touch with us by email. We look forward to hearing from you, and we hope that you are all well. Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía, and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez, and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Recommendations for MSC Speakers
Dear all, We are writing to invite you to recommend speakers for next year’s Moral Sciences Club talks. You can do so by filling in the following form, but if you have difficulty in completing the form do get in touch with us by email: https://www.surveymonkey.de/r/YS8ZTKQ?fbclid=IwAR208jplssB9InBGqm-ywyeKv6F6wPtiRH4lTH4cpVyGVsbqpqBgQ2hajJo Please fill the form in by *noon* of the *1st August*, if you would like your suggestion to be noted. We look forward to hearing from you, and we hope that you are all well. Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Moral Sciences Club - Easter meetings cancelled
Dear All, We hope this finds you well. We are writing to inform you that, regrettably, all meetings of the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club in Easter term are cancelled due to Coronavirus. We will discuss the possibility of re-inviting those speakers whose talks will not go ahead with next year’s secretaries. Kind Regards, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Cancelled - Moral Science Club 10 March
Dear all, Due to the ongoing UCU industrial action, next week's Moral Sciences Club meeting (10 March) is cancelled. This decision has been made in discussion with the speaker, Ruth Chang, who will be invited to speak next year. Thank you for your understanding, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] UCU Strike and Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, In view of the upcoming UCU industrial action, next week's Moral Sciences Club meeting (25th February) is cancelled. This decision has been made in discussion with the speaker, Quill Kukla, who will be invited to speak next year. In light of this, we would like to make you aware of the MAP teach-out on Monday 24th February (4-6pm in King's College Audit Room), at which Quill Kukla will be speaking. Thank you for your understanding, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Manuel Garcia-Carpintero at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear All, This is a reminder that the next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held tomorrow (11th February). We are delighted to welcome Manuel Garcia-Carpintero (Barcelona), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Two Views on Rule-Constituted Kinds'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: The paper distinguishes between two conceptions of kinds defined by constitutive rules, the one suggested by Searle, and the one invoked by Williamson to define assertion. Against recent arguments to the contrary by Maitra, Johnson and others, it argues for the superiority of the latter as an account of games. On this basis, the paper argues that the alleged disanalogies between standard games and language games suggested in the literature in fact don’t exist. The paper relies on Rawls’s distinction between types (“blueprints”, as Rawls called them) of practices and institutions defined by constitutive rules, and those among them that are actually in force, and hence truly normative; it defends along Rawlsian lines the plurality of norms applying to actual instances of rule-constituted practices, and uses this fact to counter the plausible examples that Maitra, Johnson and others provide to sustain their case. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday today. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Manuel Garcia-Carpintero at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear All, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tuesday (11th February). We are delighted to welcome Manuel Garcia-Carpintero (Barcelona), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Two Views on Rule-Constituted Kinds'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: The paper distinguishes between two conceptions of kinds defined by constitutive rules, the one suggested by Searle, and the one invoked by Williamson to define assertion. Against recent arguments to the contrary by Maitra, Johnson and others, it argues for the superiority of the latter as an account of games. On this basis, the paper argues that the alleged disanalogies between standard games and language games suggested in the literature in fact don’t exist. The paper relies on Rawls’s distinction between types (“blueprints”, as Rawls called them) of practices and institutions defined by constitutive rules, and those among them that are actually in force, and hence truly normative; it defends along Rawlsian lines the plurality of norms applying to actual instances of rule-constituted practices, and uses this fact to counter the plausible examples that Maitra, Johnson and others provide to sustain their case. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 10th. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Rachel Sterken at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear All, This is a reminder that the next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held tomorrow (28th January). We are delighted to welcome Rachel Sterken (Oslo), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Authentic Speech'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: This talk provides an account of what it is to speak authentically. Authentic speech is an under-explored topic: Philosophers of language have produced theories of many different forms of speech, but authenticity has been overlooked. This, I suggest, is a mistake: descriptions of speech as authentic (or inauthentic) are ubiquitous and authenticity plays an important role in many communicative exchanges. The talk has three main parts: 1. I provide an account of authentic speech, 2. I show how it differs from sincere speech, and 3. I argue that there are speech acts that have authenticity conditions. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in Sidgwick Hall at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday today. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Rachel Sterken at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear All, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tuesday (28th January). We are delighted to welcome Rachel Sterken (Oslo), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Authentic Speech'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: This talk provides an account of what it is to speak authentically. Authentic speech is an under-explored topic: Philosophers of language have produced theories of many different forms of speech, but authenticity has been overlooked. This, I suggest, is a mistake: descriptions of speech as authentic (or inauthentic) are ubiquitous and authenticity plays an important role in many communicative exchanges. The talk has three main parts: 1. I provide an account of authentic speech, 2. I show how it differs from sincere speech, and 3. I argue that there are speech acts that have authenticity conditions. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in Sidgwick Hall at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 27th. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Miranda Fricker at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear All, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tuesday (21st January). We are delighted to welcome Professor Miranda Fricker (CUNY/Sheffield), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Williams' Naturalistic Philosophy'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: A natural approach to interpreting Bernard Williams’ ethical philosophy is to picture it as a web of inter-related commitments where no commitment has unique priority. For in reading his work it is not easy to discern any single commitment as prior to the rest. Despite this, and in an experimental spirit, I will however venture an interpretation that does present a single conviction as the fundamental philosophical motivation. At the heart of Williams’ thought is a philosophical instinct for freedom conceived as outstripping constraints of rationality, and it is this instinct that expresses itself in each of the signature commitments of his work. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 20th. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Peter Millican at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear All, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held tomorrow (19th November). We are delighted to welcome Professor Peter Millican (Oxford), who will be giving a talk entitled 'What Hume Really Thought about Causation'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: This paper has been written to round off a collection of my papers for OUP, entitled *Hume on Causation and Free Will* (anticipated 2021). It brings together work from the last two decades, including crucial elements as yet unpublished, and aspires to provide a convincing overall account of Hume’s settled views, in the light of various controversies treated in previously published papers (e.g. regarding determinism, the two definitions, and the “New Hume”). It starts from a well-evidenced summary of twelve “key points” to which Hume is clearly committed, and then builds on these to address the familiar interpretative debates (e.g. between reductionist, projectivist, and sceptical realist readings). It sets out all the main features of Hume’s theory as I interpret it, and highlights what I take to be the decisive factors in the various debates, while delegating detailed discussion to the earlier papers. A systematic summary and references will be given in a handout, which aims to provide a convenient resource for tutors or students aiming to find their way around this notoriously complex interpretative terrain. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in Sidgwick Hall at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. Best wishes, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Peter Millican at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear All, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tuesday (19th November). We are delighted to welcome Professor Peter Millican (Oxford), who will be giving a talk entitled 'What Hume Really Thought about Causation'. The abstract for the talk is as follows: This paper has been written to round off a collection of my papers for OUP, entitled *Hume on Causation and Free Will* (anticipated 2021). It brings together work from the last two decades, including crucial elements as yet unpublished, and aspires to provide a convincing overall account of Hume’s settled views, in the light of various controversies treated in previously published papers (e.g. regarding determinism, the two definitions, and the “New Hume”). It starts from a well-evidenced summary of twelve “key points” to which Hume is clearly committed, and then builds on these to address the familiar interpretative debates (e.g. between reductionist, projectivist, and sceptical realist readings). It sets out all the main features of Hume’s theory as I interpret it, and highlights what I take to be the decisive factors in the various debates, while delegating detailed discussion to the earlier papers. A systematic summary and references will be given in a handout, which aims to provide a convenient resource for tutors or students aiming to find their way around this notoriously complex interpretative terrain. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in Sidgwick Hall at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 18th. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Kenny Walden at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear All, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held tomorrow (Tuesday 12 November). We are delighted to welcome Kenny Walden (Dartmouth), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Agency and Genius'. The abstract for the talk is as follows. The nature of agency places two demands on us, one of creativity and another of intelligibility. But these demands are in tension: the most straightforward ways of satisfying one clash with the other. I analogize this tension to one that characterizes artistic production and suggest that its resolution is found in the mysterious capacity that Kant calls "genius". The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in Sidgwick Hall at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday today. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Kenny Walden at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear All, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tuesday (12 November). We are delighted to welcome Kenny Walden (Dartmouth), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Agency and Genius'. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in Sidgwick Hall at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 11th. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Benjamin Marschall at the Moral Sciences Club - Please note the earlier than usual start time (2:00pm)
Dear All, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tuesday (5 November). We are delighted to welcome Benjamin Marschall (Cambridge), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Carnap's Defence of Abstract Objects'. Here is the abstract for his talk: Abstract objects such as numbers are commonly thought to pose philosophical problems, and have frequently been rejected on account of being metaphysically dubious. According to Carnap this attitude is mistaken, however, as even empiricists can happily accept abstracta – provided that talk about them is understood as internal to a linguistic framework. In this paper I explain what Carnap’s internalism amounts to, and argue that it fails to work in full generality by combining two arguments by Gödel and Beth. The meeting will be held from 2:00pm until 3:45 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. The earlier than usual start time is to allow attendees who wish to do so time to make their way to Elliott Sober's third Tarner Lecture in the Winstanley Lecture Theatre, Trinity College, which commences at 4:00pm. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 4th. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Luvell Anderson at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held tomorrow (Tuesday 22nd October). We are delighted to welcome Luvell Anderson (Syracuse), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Roasting Ethics'. The abstract is as follows: "What are the rules of the comedic roast? Initially, there might seem to be a tension between ‘the comedic’ and ‘roasting’ or ‘insult.’ The comedic is concerned with *the funny*, light-hearted mirth or fun, while insults are mean-spirited in nature, tools of injury. So how can the two be combined to produce something fun? Obviously, the mixing of the two isn’t always successful. Just as adding too much salt to a dish can make it unpalatable, being heavy-handed with the insults can make an intended humorous utterance emotionally unbearable. There is a delicate balance that must be struck to ensure that insults within the roasting context are taken “in good fun.” In this talk I briefly entertain a few views that attempt a resolution of this apparent tension. I conclude with a proposal that suggests when they are succesful, roasts employ mechanisms that redirect attention from the joke’s content to its formal properties; it is when those mechanisms fail that roasting becomes disagreeable." The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday today. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Luvell Anderson at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 22nd October. We are delighted to welcome Luvell Anderson (Syracuse), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Roasting Ethics'. Abstract to follow. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 21st. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, _ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Nick Denyer at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear All, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held tomorrow (Tuesday 15 October). We are delighted to welcome Nick Denyer (Cambridge), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Euclid, Plato, and Aristotle on What Geometry is About'. Here is the abstract for his talk: Euclid’s *Elements* astonished and astonishes by its way of making claims that are general (“in *every* triangle”) and exact (“the interior angles sum to *two* right angles”), and then giving those claims rigorous proofs. I look at the place in the *Elements* of the so-called ‘postulates’, in which - as I will argue - Euclid invites us to imagine an idealised drawer of geometrical diagrams, whom I will call ‘Valentina’. I will look at how postulating Valentina helps Euclid solve a problem posed by Plato: what can be the bearing of particular, temporary, and changing diagrams on general, everlasting, and stable truths? In showing how Euclid’s solution works, I borrow a lot from Aristotle. The key ideas are that we may identify the existence of a geometrical object with the possibility of drawing such an object, that we may prove it possible to draw an object by actually drawing it, and that for this purpose drawing the object in our imagination can be — if our imagination is suitably disciplined — as good as drawing it on the board. Postulating Valentina turns out to be a marvellous way of disciplining our imagination: imagining her to draw a geometrical object will indeed show that the object can be drawn, and therefore that it exists eternally. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 14th. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Nick Denyer at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 15 October. We are delighted to welcome Nick Denyer (Cambridge), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Euclid, Plato, and Aristotle on What Geometry is About'. Here is the abstract for his talk: Euclid’s *Elements* astonished and astonishes by its way of making claims that are general (“in *every* triangle”) and exact (“the interior angles sum to *two* right angles”), and then giving those claims rigorous proofs. I look at the place in the *Elements* of the so-called ‘postulates’, in which - as I will argue - Euclid invites us to imagine an idealised drawer of geometrical diagrams, whom I will call ‘Valentina’. I will look at how postulating Valentina helps Euclid solve a problem posed by Plato: what can be the bearing of particular, temporary, and changing diagrams on general, everlasting, and stable truths? In showing how Euclid’s solution works, I borrow a lot from Aristotle. The key ideas are that we may identify the existence of a geometrical object with the possibility of drawing such an object, that we may prove it possible to draw an object by actually drawing it, and that for this purpose drawing the object in our imagination can be — if our imagination is suitably disciplined — as good as drawing it on the board. Postulating Valentina turns out to be a marvellous way of disciplining our imagination: imagining her to draw a geometrical object will indeed show that the object can be drawn, and therefore that it exists eternally. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 14th. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Moral Sciences Club Programme 2019/20
Dear all, The Moral Sciences Club is pleased to announce its programme of speakers for 2019/20, detailed below. (Please note that some titles are provisional.) All meetings will be held from 14:30 to 16:15 at Newnham College, followed by tea and coffee and then dinner in the evening. Michaelmas Term 2019 Date Speaker (Institution)Title of TalkLocation 15th October Nick Denyer (Cambridge) Euclid, Plato, and Aristotle on What Geometry is About Jane Harrison Room 22nd October Luvell Anderson (Syracuse) Roasting Ethics Jane Harrison Room 29th October Robert Pasnau (CU Boulder) Choosing between Faith and Heresy Barbara White Room 5th November Benjamin Marschall (Cambridge) Carnap’s Defence of Abstract Objects Jane Harrison Room 12th November Kenny Walden (Dartmouth) Agency and Genius Sidgwick Hall 19th November Peter Millican (Oxford) What Hume Really Thought about Causation Sidgwick Hall 26th November Lucy McDonald (Cambridge) Catcalls and Accommodation Jane Harrison Room 3rd December Justin Snedegar (St Andrews) How Do Reasons Compete? Barbara White Room Lent Term 2020 Date Speaker (Institution)Title of TalkLocation 21st January Miranda Fricker (CUNY) Williams' Naturalistic Philosophy Jane Harrison Room 28th January Rachel Sterken (Oslo) <http://sms.csx.cam.ac.uk/media/2911394>Authentic Speech Sidgwick Hall 4th February Robert Hopkins (NYU) Ryleing the Irreal: sensory imagining as knowledge of perceiving Jane Harrison Room 11th February Manuel Garcia-Carpintero (Barcelona) The Metasemantics of Force-Indicators <http://sms.csx.cam.ac.uk/media/2920142> Jane Harrison Room 18th February Anne Bosse (Cambridge) Generics in Use Jane Harrison Room 25th February Rebecca Kukla (Georgetown) TBD Jane Harrison Room 3rd March Beatrice Han-Pile (Essex) 'The Doing is Everything': A Middle-Voiced Reading of Agency in Nietzsche Jane Harrison Room 10th March Ruth Chang (Oxford) Hard Choices Jane Harrison RoomEaster Term 2020 Date Speaker (Institution)Title of TalkLocation 28th April Anastasia Berg (Cambridge) Desire: Between Action and Passion Jane Harrison Room 5th May David Plunkett (Dartmouth) Evaluation Turned on Itself: The Vindicatory Circularity Challenge to the Conceptual Ethics of Normativity Jane Harrison Room 12th May Christopher Peacocke (Columbia) Two Kinds of Explanation Jane Harrison Room 19th May Ofra Magidor (Oxford) <http://sms.csx.cam.ac.uk/media/2989768>TBD Jane Harrison Room For more information about the club, and any updates to titles, see https://phil.cam.ac.uk/research/seminars-phil/seminars-msc <https://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/research/seminars-phil/seminars-msc>. We look forward to seeing you at Newnham. Best wishes, Alex, Roxane and Zoe -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Recommendations for MSC Speakers - Deadline Extended
Dear all, we have extended the deadline to submit recommendations for next year's program to Monday 24 June. Thank you to all those who have already submitted their recommendations. For each recommendation, it would be helpful if you could also indicate the area in which they work. If you're aware of potential speakers that are not based in Europe, but who will be in the UK next year, feel free to include them in your suggestions. If you wish to put forward more than one speaker, please rank your preferences. We would like to invite a diverse range of people to give talks, so do bear this in mind. Best wishes, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Moral Sciences Club Photo
Hello everyone, the Moral Sciences Club photo can now be ordered under https://www.lafayettephotography.com/Default.aspx with the login code *190521cms1* . All the best, -- Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Recommendations for MSC Speakers
Dear all, We will soon begin inviting speakers for next year's Moral Sciences Club talks. If you have any suggestions for speakers, please let us know by the 17th June. It would be helpful if you could also indicate the area in which they work. If you're aware of potential speakers that are not based in Europe, but who will be in the UK next year, feel free to include them in your suggestions. If you wish to put forward more than one speaker, please rank your preferences. We would like to invite a diverse range of people to give talks, so do bear this in mind. Best wishes, Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Pekka Väyrynen + photograph and AGM at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, This is to remind you that the last meeting of the year will be held on Tuesday 21st May. There will be the traditional annual photograph. The photography for the annual Club photograph is due to start at 1.50 pm, *so we ask that members who wish to be in the photograph meet at the gardens of Newnham College by 1.40 pm.* After the photograph and before the talk we will hold the Annual General Meeting at 2.10 pm in the Jane Harrison Room, Newnham. For our last talk, we are delighted to welcome Pekka Väyrynen (Leeds) who will be giving a talk entitled “Practical Commitment in Evaluative Discourse”. His abstract is as follows: Evaluative and normative judgments play a distinctive practical role in our thought. This paper concerns how their practical role is reflected in language. It is widely assumed that at least those evaluative terms that can be used to express “thin” evaluative concepts, such as ‘good’ and ‘ought’, are associated with such practical roles somehow as a matter of meaning. But such semantic views are rarely given explicit defense or even articulation. I first elucidate some different forms such views might take, and identify a representative version as my target. I then argue that we have reason to reject this view. Terms like ‘ought’ can be used, even in normative contexts, to assert thin evaluative claims which don’t play the term’s customary practical role. This gives us a choice: either offer some plausible explanation of why the relevant practical features don’t show up in these cases despite the role they are assigned in our semantic theory, or else don’t build them into our semantic theory. I argue that plausible semantic explanations don’t look particularly forthcoming. (In the full paper I also outline what an alternative pragmatic account of how thin evaluative terms are associated with their practical roles might look like, to establish it as at least a serious option.) Time permitting, I'll close with some remarks on how my arguments bear on a range of views in metaethics and the philosophy of normativity. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Pekka Väyrynen + photograph and AGM at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The last meeting of the year will be held on Tuesday 21st May. There will be the traditional annual photograph. The photography for the annual Club photograph is due to start at 1.50 pm, *so we ask that members who wish to be in the photograph meet at the gardens of Newnham College by 1.40 pm.* After the photograph and before the talk we will hold the Annual General Meeting at 2.10 pm in the Jane Harrison Room, Newnham. If you have any items for the agenda, please let the Secretaries know by Monday, 20th. For our last talk, we are delighted to welcome Pekka Väyrynen (Leeds) who will be giving a talk entitled “Practical Commitment in Evaluative Discourse”. His abstract is as follows: Evaluative and normative judgments play a distinctive practical role in our thought. This paper concerns how their practical role is reflected in language. It is widely assumed that at least those evaluative terms that can be used to express “thin” evaluative concepts, such as ‘good’ and ‘ought’, are associated with such practical roles somehow as a matter of meaning. But such semantic views are rarely given explicit defense or even articulation. I first elucidate some different forms such views might take, and identify a representative version as my target. I then argue that we have reason to reject this view. Terms like ‘ought’ can be used, even in normative contexts, to assert thin evaluative claims which don’t play the term’s customary practical role. This gives us a choice: either offer some plausible explanation of why the relevant practical features don’t show up in these cases despite the role they are assigned in our semantic theory, or else don’t build them into our semantic theory. I argue that plausible semantic explanations don’t look particularly forthcoming. (In the full paper I also outline what an alternative pragmatic account of how thin evaluative terms are associated with their practical roles might look like, to establish it as at least a serious option.) Time permitting, I'll close with some remarks on how my arguments bear on a range of views in metaethics and the philosophy of normativity. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Meghan Sullivan at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, This is to remind you that the next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 14th May. We are delighted to welcome Meghan Sullivan (Notre Dame) who will be giving a talk entitled 'The Love Imperative - A Defense'. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. *If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com ) by midday today*. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Moral Sciences Club AGM and Photograph
Dear all, The Moral Sciences Club Annual General Meeting will be held on Tuesday 21st May at 2.10 pm in the Jane Harrison Room, Newnham. If you have any items for the Agenda, please let the Secretaries know by May 15th. Prior to that there will be the traditional annual photograph. The photography for the annual Club photograph is due to start at 1.50 pm, so we ask that members who wish to be in the photograph meet at the gardens of Newnham College by 1.40 pm. All the best, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Meghan Sullivan at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 14th May. We are delighted to welcome Meghan Sullivan (Notre Dame) who will be giving a talk entitled 'The Love Imperative - A Defense'. Here is an abstract for the talk: *We naturally think of love as discriminatory -- you love your partner more than strangers, your friends more than your adversaries, and your home team over opponents. Indeed, most philosophers -- influenced by the Greeks -- have worked hard to carve out a theory of when and why we are permitted to be so partial in our affections. Universal love, if we can even understand it, seems only like an option for saints or hippies... not a realistic or practical ethical framework for most of us. In this talk, I'll offer a philosophical defense of the Love Imperative, which features in various manifestations in many religiously motivated approaches to morality. I'll look specifically at one Christian understanding, defend it from some difficult objections, and indicate how it might be the basis for a mainstream philosophical approach to ethics. This talk draws in part from a book manuscript I am currently working on that develops an intellectualist conception of love and argues for key applications in moral theory, epistemology and philosophy of religion.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Jenny Saul at the Moral Sciences Club - Tuesday 7th May
Dear all, This is to remind you that Jenny Saul (University of Sheffield) will be speaking at MSC tomorrow. Her talk is entitled 'Norms of Racial Discourse in the Age of Trump' and her abstract is as follows: Once upon a time, not too long ago, it was accepted wisdom that overt racism would doom a candidate for national political office in the United States. Of course, there was still a good deal of racism among white Americans—but a politician who openly espoused obviously racist views was thought to be unelectable. Elaborate signaling strategies were developed as ways of playing on these racist sentiments for political gain without being too obvious about it. Political psychologists studied these strategies, though philosophers tended to focus on vastly more obviously racist speech: slurring or derogatory terms. Just as philosophers were starting to explore these signaling strategies, however, something happened. The world changed dramatically in a way fundamentally at odds with the previously accepted wisdom: Donald Trump was elected President, despite very overt expressions of racism. New, and deeply pressing questions emerged. Chief among them, of course are (1) the descriptive question of how what seemed like fixed norms have come to be, apparently, smashed; and (2) the normative question of how we should respond to our new reality. This paper focuses on (1), exploring in depth how what political psychologists said could not happen happened. I will argue that a norm against racist speech is still (as I write this, anyway) widely though not universally in force; but that it is not nearly as effective as we might have thought that it was. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. *If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club *( mscsecretar...@gmail.com) *by noon today*. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Jenny Saul at the Moral Sciences Club - ABSTRACT
Dear all, Following on from yesterday's e-mail we now have the abstract for Jenny Saul's MSC talk next Tuesday. The updated title of her talk is 'What is Happening to Our Norms Against Racist Speech*?'. *Her abstract is as follows: Once upon a time, not too long ago, it was accepted wisdom that overt racism would doom a candidate for national political office in the United States. Of course, there was still a good deal of racism among white Americans—but a politician who openly espoused obviously racist views was thought to be unelectable. Elaborate signaling strategies were developed as ways of playing on these racist sentiments for political gain without being too obvious about it. Political psychologists studied these strategies, though philosophers tended to focus on vastly more obviously racist speech: slurring or derogatory terms. Just as philosophers were starting to explore these signaling strategies, however, something happened. The world changed dramatically in a way fundamentally at odds with the previously accepted wisdom: Donald Trump was elected President, despite very overt expressions of racism. New, and deeply pressing questions emerged. Chief among them, of course are (1) the descriptive question of how what seemed like fixed norms have come to be, apparently, smashed; and (2) the normative question of how we should respond to our new reality. This paper focuses on (1), exploring in depth how what political psychologists said could not happen happened. I will argue that a norm against racist speech is still (as I write this, anyway) widely though not universally in force; but that it is not nearly as effective as we might have thought that it was. Best, Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Jenny Saul at the Moral Sciences Club - Tuesday 7th May
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 7th May. We are delighted to welcome Jenny Saul (University of Sheffield), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Norms of Racial Discourse in the Age of Trump'. We will send out an abstract later on in the week. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 6th May. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Cheshire Calhoun at the Moral Sciences Club - Tuesday 30th April
Dear all, This is just to remind you that the next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 30th April. We are delighted to welcome Cheshire Calhoun (Arizona State), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Responsibilities and Taking on Responsibility'. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. *If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com ) by midday today*. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Cheshire Calhoun at the Moral Sciences Club - Tuesday 30th April
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 30th April. We are delighted to welcome Cheshire Calhoun (Arizona State), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Responsibilities and Taking on Responsibility'. Here is the abstract for her talk: *There is a familiar, everyday notion of a responsibility. Much of daily life on and off the job is consumed with taking care of responsibilities in this sense. But what is a responsibility, and how are responsibilities related to obligations? Reflection on the phenomenon of taking on responsibilities suggests that the concept of ‘a responsibility’ is distinct from that of ‘an obligation,’ and that not all responsibilities are also obligations even though many are.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 29th. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Karamvir Chadha at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, This is to remind you that the next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club (and the final meeting of term) will be held on Tuesday 12th March. We are delighted to welcome Karamvir Chadha (Cambridge) who will be giving a talk entitled 'Conditional Consent'. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 11th (today). This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Karamvir Chadha at the Moral Sciences Club - Tuesday 12th March
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 12th March. We are delighted to welcome Karamvir Chadha (Cambridge) who will be giving a talk entitled 'Conditional Consent'. Here is the abstract for his talk: *The English courts are developing a concept of "conditional consent" to sexual intercourse. Someone can place a condition on their sexual consent, and sex in breach of that condition is non-consensual. But there is doubt about how far the concept should extend. There is little doubt that sex in breach of a condition to wear a condom can be non-consensual. But should sex in breach of a condition of payment also be considered non-consensual? To help provide a principled answer to this question, I distinguish two ways in which someone can place conditions on their morally valid consent. I suggest that this distinction helps provide a principled approach for whether to extend the law of conditional consent to sexual intercourse to cover conditions like payment, as well as helping us understand how we place conditions on our morally valid consent in non-sexual contexts. * The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 11th. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Liam Kofi Bright at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, This is to remind you that the next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 5th March. We are delighted to welcome Liam Kofi Bright (LSE), who will be giving a talk entitled 'The Scientist Qua Scientist Makes No Assertion' (co-authored with Haixin Dang). Here is the abstract for his talk: *Assertions are, speaking roughly, descriptive statements which purport to describe something. Philosophers have given a lot of attention to the idea that assertions come with special norms governing their behaviour. Frequently, in fact, philosophers claim that for something to count as an assertion it has to be governed by these norms. So what exactly are the norms of assertion? Here there is disagreement. Some philosophers believe assertions are governed by special factive norms, to the effect that an assertion must be true, or known to be true, or known with certainty to be true - or in any case that an assertion is normatively good just in case it meets some condition that entails its truth. Other philosophers place weaker epistemic constraints on good assertion. For instance the claim that an assertion is justified given the assertor's evidence. We argue that no such norm could apply to a special class of scientific utterances - namely, the conclusions of scientific papers, or more generally the sort of utterances scientists use to communicate the results of their inquiry. Such utterances might look like paradigm instances of descriptive statements purporting to describe something, yet the norms of assertion philosophers have surveyed are systematically inapt for science. Hence, either philosophers are generally wrong about these norms, or strictly speaking scientists should not be considered to be making assertions at all when they report their results. After surveying our argument for this negative claim, we end by suggesting a norm of utterance that would be more appropriate to scientific practice.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 4th (today). This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Liam Kofi Bright at the Moral Sciences Club - Tuesday 5th March
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 5th March. We are delighted to welcome Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) as our speaker. He has not yet confirmed the topic of his talk, but you can read more about his research here: https://www.liamkofibright.com/ The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 4th. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Øystein Linnebo at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 26th February. We are delighted to welcome Øystein Linnebo (Oslo) who will be giving a talk entitled 'Generality explained'. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. *If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com ) by midday today*. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Øystein Linnebo at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 26th February. We are delighted to welcome Øystein Linnebo (Oslo) who will be giving a talk entitled 'Generality explained'. Here is an abstract for the talk: *What explains a true universal generalization? This paper distinguishes two kinds of explanation. While an instance-based explanation proceeds via each instance of the generalization, a generic explanation is independent of each instance, relying instead on completely general facts about the properties or operations involved in the generalization. This distinction is illuminated by means of a truthmaker semantics, which is also used to show that instance-based explanations support classical logic, while generic explanations support only intuitionistic logic.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Adrian Haddock at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 19th February. We are delighted to welcome Adrian Haddock (Stirling) who will be giving a talk entitled 'Self-Consciousness, Sensory Consciousness, and Indirect Discourse'. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. *If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com ) by midday today*. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Adrian Haddock at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 19th February. We are delighted to welcome Adrian Haddock (Stirling) who will be giving a talk entitled 'Self-Consciousness, Sensory Consciousness, and Indirect Discourse'. Here is an abstract for the talk: *This paper falls into three parts. The first part considers some difficulties for the idea of indirect discourse, in order to bring out a distinction between two kinds of report: those given from within what they report, which say how things are for the subject; and those given from outside, which say how things are in themselves. The second part draws on this distinction to shed light on the philosophical idea of self-consciousness—the idea that Aristotle captures by saying that the mind “thinks itself”—and then draws on this idea to put in place a further distinction between an understanding that proceeds from within, and an understanding from outside. Finally, the third part exploits this last distinction to explain what is at stake in the apparent disagreement between those who acknowledge that cases of sensory consciousness are conceptual acts, and those who profess to see no reason to think this.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Cathy Mason at Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, This is to remind you that the next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held tomorrow, Tuesday 12th February. We are delighted to welcome Cathy Mason (Cambridge) who will be giving a talk entitled 'Humility and Moral Development'. Here is an abstract for the talk: *Humility can seem like a somewhat 'unfashionable' virtue: the word can conjure an image of cringing servility, unduly romanticised feelings of inferiority, or a level of self-denial which seems ill-placed in a life well-lived. But the term can also capture something of great ethical importance. In this paper, I will propose an account of humility that attempts to capture this moral significance. I will then explore the connection between humility and ethical development, seeking to argue that humility has an important role in ethical improvement. If such a connection is vindicated, it suggests that humility is valuable twice over: it has intrinsic worth but is also instrumentally valuable, enabling us to become better people. * The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. *If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com ) by midday today - Monday 11th*. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Cathy Mason at the Moral Sciences Club - Tuesday 12th February
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 12th February. We are delighted to welcome Cathy Mason (Cambridge) who will be giving a talk entitled 'Humility and Moral Development'. Here is an abstract for the talk: *Humility can seem like a somewhat ‘unfashionable’ virtue: the word can conjure an image of cringing servility, unduly romanticised feelings of inferiority, or a level of self-denial which seems ill-placed in a life well-lived. But the term can also capture something of great ethical importance. In this paper, I will propose an account of humility that attempts to capture this moral significance. I will then explore the connection between humility and ethical development, seeking to argue that humility has an important role in ethical improvement. If such a connection is vindicated, it suggests that humility is valuable twice over: it has intrinsic worth but is also instrumentally valuable, enabling us to become better people. * The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 11th. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Cecilia Heyes at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, This is to remind you that the next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 5th February. We are delighted to welcome Cecilia Heyes (Oxford) who will be giving a talk entitled 'Cognitive Gadgets'. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. Instead of the usual dinner we will go to a pub immediately after the talk, if you want to join just stick around, there is no need to sign up. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] CORRECTION: Cecilia Heyes at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, apologies for the second email, unfortunately the announcement contained a small mistake: Instead of the dinner we will just go to a pub immediately after the talk, if you want to join just stick around, there is no need to sign up. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc -- Forwarded message - From: Moral Sciences Club Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2019 at 09:21 Subject: Cecilia Heyes at the Moral Sciences Club To: , Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 5th February. We are delighted to welcome Cecilia Heyes (Oxford) who will be giving a talk entitled 'Cognitive Gadgets'. Here is an abstract for the talk: *Evolutionary psychology casts the human mind as a collection of cognitive instincts - organs of thought shaped by genetic evolution and constrained by the needs of our Stone Age ancestors. This picture was plausible 25 years ago but, I argue, it no longer fits the facts. Research in psychology and neuroscience - involving nonhuman animals, infants and adult humans - now suggests that genetic evolution has merely tweaked the human mind, making us more friendly than our pre-human ancestors, more attentive to other agents, and giving us souped-up, general-purpose mechanisms of learning, memory and cognitive control. Using these resources, our special-purpose organs of thought – including our capacity to ascribe mental states - are built in the course of development through social interaction. They are products of cultural rather than genetic evolution, cognitive gadgets rather than cognitive instincts.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Cecilia Heyes at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 5th February. We are delighted to welcome Cecilia Heyes (Oxford) who will be giving a talk entitled 'Cognitive Gadgets'. Here is an abstract for the talk: *Evolutionary psychology casts the human mind as a collection of cognitive instincts - organs of thought shaped by genetic evolution and constrained by the needs of our Stone Age ancestors. This picture was plausible 25 years ago but, I argue, it no longer fits the facts. Research in psychology and neuroscience - involving nonhuman animals, infants and adult humans - now suggests that genetic evolution has merely tweaked the human mind, making us more friendly than our pre-human ancestors, more attentive to other agents, and giving us souped-up, general-purpose mechanisms of learning, memory and cognitive control. Using these resources, our special-purpose organs of thought – including our capacity to ascribe mental states - are built in the course of development through social interaction. They are products of cultural rather than genetic evolution, cognitive gadgets rather than cognitive instincts.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Anna Marmodoro at the Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 29th January. We are delighted to welcome Anna Marmodoro (Oxford/Durham), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Building the world without relations. The master builders: Anaxagoras, Plato and Aristotle'. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. *If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com ) by midday today.* This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Anna Marmodoro at the Moral Sciences Club - Tuesday 29th January
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 29th January. We are delighted to welcome Anna Marmodoro (Oxford/Durham), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Building the world without relations. The master builders: Anaxagoras, Plato and Aristotle'. Here is an abstract for the talk: *Can Plato improve on Russell? I will offer a new understanding of Plato’s Theory of Forms which I hope will motivate a re-conception of relations in contemporary philosophy. In Plato’s theory, ‘participation in a Form’ is the mechanism by which properties are instantiated in things. There is no other mechanism of instantiation of a property, for any type of property, than participation in a Form. Since Forms are uniform (monoeides), participation is in uniformity. It follows that neither the Forms, nor their instantiation can ground asymmetrical properties in things. How, then, does Plato account for the metaphysics of relations? Could it lead us to a novel understanding of relations? I aim to stimulate thoughts in this direction. * The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 28th. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Stacie Friend at Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held *tomorrow *- Tuesday 22nd January. We are delighted to welcome Stacie Friend (Birkbeck), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Fiction and Emotion: The Normative Question'. Here is an abstract for her talk: *In his 'How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?' (1975) and a series of subsequent replies to critics, Colin Radford argued that emotional responses to fictional characters are incoherent, inconsistent and irrational. Nearly everyone disagrees with this conclusion, but (I maintain) for the wrong reasons. Radford's challenge is this: In ordinary circumstances, it would be irrational for someone to persist in pitying a person if she knows that the person does not exist or has not suffered; but this is exactly our situation when we pity Anna Karenina. If we disagree with Radford, we must explain why emotions in the two scenarios elicit different normative judgements. In this paper I consider and reject some obvious explanations, and propose an alternative.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. *If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com ) by 2pm today. *This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and it will take place at Thaikhun - those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the specific details by email closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Stacie Friend at the Moral Sciences Club - Tuesday 22nd January
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 22nd January. We are delighted to welcome Stacie Friend (Birkbeck), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Fiction and Emotion: The Normative Question'. Here is an abstract for her talk: *In his 'How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?' (1975) and a series of subsequent replies to critics, Colin Radford argued that emotional responses to fictional characters are incoherent, inconsistent and irrational. Nearly everyone disagrees with this conclusion, but (I maintain) for the wrong reasons. Radford's challenge is this: In ordinary circumstances, it would be irrational for someone to persist in pitying a person if she knows that the person does not exist or has not suffered; but this is exactly our situation when we pity Anna Karenina. If we disagree with Radford, we must explain why emotions in the two scenarios elicit different normative judgements. In this paper I consider and reject some obvious explanations, and propose an alternative.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 21st. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and it will take place at Thaikhun - those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the specific details by email closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] REMINDER: Nick Stang at Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, this is a reminder that next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 27th November. We are delighted to welcome Nick Stang (Toronto), who will be giving a paper entitled 'On The Very Idea of an Alien Language: Old Problems for New Carnapians'. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. *If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk at the Moral Sciences Club, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com **) by midday on Monday.* This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and it will take place in the evening at a location to be determined (those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details by email closer to the time). Best, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Nick Stang at Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 27th November. We are delighted to welcome Nick Stang (Toronto), who will be giving a paper entitled 'On The Very Idea of an Alien Language: Old Problems for New Carnapians'. The abstract is as follows: *Carnapian views in meta-ontology have been thriving in recent decades. While these “neo-Carnapians” differ in many important ways, they all trace the inspiration for their views back to Carnap 1950. The key idea of Carnap 1950 was the distinction between ontological questions asked within a “linguistic framework” (i.e. once we have decided to speak the platonist language) and ontological questions asked outside such a framework (i.e. when we are deciding whether to speak the platonist language). I will argue that these neo-Carnapian views inherit from their mentor a deep problem, the problem of “radically alien” language frameworks (i.e. frameworks with no ontology in common with ours). I argue that the neo-Carnapians are committed to the possibility of such frameworks, but cannot account for them. At best, this generates within neo-Carnapian meta-metaphysics exactly the kind of unanswerable metaphysical questions it was designed to avoid, i.e. about the limits of possible languages and the underlying metaphysical structure of the world. At worst, it generates a contradiction within their theory itself. Davidson raised a similar problem for logical positivism. In fact, the problem is structurally analogous to one that dominated the early reception of Kant’s philosophy. These old problems, I will argue, remain dauntingly difficult ones for neo-Carnapians.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk at the Moral Sciences Club, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday*.* This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and it will take place in the evening at a location to be determined (those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details by email closer to the time). Best, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Angelika Kratzer slides
Hi all, Please see below the slides for this afternoon's talk. Best, Annie -- Forwarded message - From: Kratzer, Angelika Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2018, 8:37 am Subject: Re: Invitation to Speak at University of Cambridge Moral Sciences Club To: Moral Sciences Club Dear Annie, I posted the slides for my talk, so people can load them onto their laptops if they wish. https://umass.box.com/v/cambridge Looking forward to meeting you later today, — Angelika _ 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.
[CamPhilEvents] Reminder: Angelika Kratzer at Moral Sciences Club
Dear all, This is to remind you that next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held tomorrow, Tuesday 20th November. We are delighted to welcome Professor Angelika Kratzer (Amherst), who will be giving a paper entitled 'What’s an Epistemic Modal Anyway'. The abstract is as follows: *Epistemic modals like English “might” have a special place in contemporary > philosophy. They seem to give rise to distinctive puzzles and are therefore > considered to be “semantically distinctive in ways that set them apart from > other modals in significant respects” (Yalcin 2016). I will argue for a > unified semantics for epistemic and non-epistemic modals that projects > modal domains from pieces of reality in a completely uniform way.* > The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. *If you would like to have dinner with the speake*r in the evening following the talk at the Moral Sciences Club, *please email the secretaries of the **club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com **) by 2pm on Monday.* This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and it will take place in the evening at a location to be determined (those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details by email closer to the time). Best, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _ 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.
