Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Event Date: 21May 2012
Senate House
University of London
London WC1E 7HU

The Aristotelian Society presents:

Professor Michael Thompson (University of Pittsburgh) – You and I

Michael Thompson received his PhD in Philosophy at UCLA, where he was a student of Philippa Foot. He is a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and was formerly an Assistant Professor at UCLA. He is the author of Life and Action (Harvard University Press 2008, 2012; Suhrkamp 2011) and “What is it to Wrong Someone?” in Reason and Value, ed. Wallace et al. (O.U.P. 2006).

Event Date: 14 May 2012
Senate House
University of London
London WC1E 7HU

The Aristotelian Society presents:

Professor Frank Jackson (Princeton University) – Leibniz’s Law and the Philosophy of Mind

We draw some metaphysical conclusions about colour and belief from some epistemological commonplaces. It turns out that this requires us to challenge orthodoxy on the causal efficacy of mental properties and to rewrite the standard argument against dualism, but in a way which is good news for functionalists about the mind.
Under what conditions is P evidence for Q? A comprehensive answer to that question is hard and inevitably controversial. We can however say three things that are, it seems to me, uncontroversial. Whether or not P is evidence for Q depends on i) what Pis, ii) what Q is, and iii) the background evidence. The details of how one might enlarge on these three observations will inevitably be controversial but the basic thought behind each is close to a truism.
The essay is about how to deploy these observations, along with some equally commonsensical observations about when we are entitled to believe that one or another property is instantiated, to reach conclusions in the philosophy of mind on subjects that have been much debated. You might describe this essay as an exercise in using the noncontroversial to adjudicate the controversial. I expect that it will, in its turn, be controversial.
Much of the argumentation will employ Leibniz’s law in epistemic contexts. I know from experience that this worries people. We all know that epistemic contexts are opaque. This, perhaps understandably, suggests that using Leibniz’s law in epistemic contexts involves a fallacy of the famous masked man variety. This means it is sensible (essential?) to take a moment to review why it is fine to use Leibniz’s law in epistemic contexts. Our review will be conducted as a short commentary on an issue that Quine most especially put on the table many years ago, in for example (1966).

Frank Jackson is a regular visiting professor at Princeton University and holds fractional research positions at The Australian National University and La Trobe University. He is a Corresponding Fellow of The British Academy. His publications include: Perception (Cambridge UP 1977), Conditionals (Blackwell1987), The Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, co-authored with David Braddon-Mitchell (Blackwell, 1996), From Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford UP 1998), Language, Names, and Information (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Professor Jackson has held a number of visiting positions, most recently as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Cambridge University in 2011.

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Event Date: 5 March 2012
Senate House
University of London
London WC1E 7HU

The Aristotelian Society presents:

Dr Fiona Leigh (UCL): Restless Forms, Motionless Causes

It is widely held that Plato’s Forms rest or change or both in Plato’s Sophist. The received opinion is, however, quite false – or so I will argue. There is no direct support for it in the text and several passages tell against it. I will further argue that, contrary to the view of some scholars, Plato did not in our dialogue advocate a kind of change recognizable as ‘Cambridge change’, as applicable to his Forms. The reason that Forms neither change nor rest is that they are purely intelligible entities, not susceptible to changing or being at rest. Since Plato continues in the Sophist to treat Forms as causes, it follows that Forms are changeless causes. I ask what conception of cause might allow for this view, and reject the suggestion that Plato was some kind of proto-dispositionalist about causation. Instead I suggest that he understood causation to incorporate a notion of structuring, such that Forms can be seen to structure their participants and so cause them to possess the attributes they possess.

Dr Fiona Leigh is a Lecturer in Philosophy at University College London, where she joined the Department in 2009, after earning her PhD (Monash). Fiona’s area of research specialty is Plato’s later metaphysics, especially Plato’s Sophist, and she has published papers in journals including Phronesis, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Aperion, and Journal of Philosophy of Education. She has edited the proceedings of the 6th Keeling Colloquium, a collection of papers on the voluntary, friendship and luck in Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics (Brill, forthcoming 2012). Currently she is working on a monograph length reading of the Sophist, and is interested in the potentially positive role of art in Plato’s work. Fiona has an MA in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA (hons) in Philosophy and Social Theory from the University of Melbourne.

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Event Date: 20 February 2012
Senate House
University of London
London WC1E 7HU

The Aristotelian Society presents:

Dr Heather Logue (University of Leeds) – Why Naïve Realism?

Much of the discussion of Naive Realism about veridical experience has focused on a consequence of adopting it—namely, disjunctivism about perceptual experience. However, the motivations for being a Naive Realist in the first place have received relatively little attention in the literature.  In the first part of the paper, I will criticise arguments for Naïve Realism offered by M.G.F. Martin, John Campbell, and (some exegetes of) John McDowell.  In the second part, I will elaborate and defend the claim that Naïve Realism provides the best account of the phenomenal character of veridical experience.

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Event Date: 6 February 2012
Senate House
University of London
London WC1E 7HU

The Aristotelian Society

presents:

 Dr Stacie Friend (Heythrop): Fiction as a Genre

Standard theories define fiction in terms of an invited response of imagining or make-believe. I argue that these theories are not only subject to numerous counterexamples, they also fail to explain why classification matters to our understanding and evaluation of works of fiction as well as non-fiction. I propose instead that we construe fiction and non-fiction as genres: categories whose membership is determined by a cluster of non-essential criteria, and which play a role in the appreciation of particular works. I claim that this proposal captures the intuitions motivating alternative theories of fiction.

Stacie Friend is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London, where she has been teaching since 2007. Her research is at the intersection of aesthetics and philosophy of language and mind, focusing primarily on issues relating to fiction. She has published papers on the nature of fiction, discourse and thought about the non-existent, the metaphysics of fictional characters, emotional responses to fiction and tragedy and the cognitive values of literature. She is currently working on a monograph, Matters of Fiction.

Before coming to Heythrop, Dr Friend taught at Birkbeck College (2005-7) and at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania (2003-05). She was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2002-03. She received her BA in Philosophy and English Literature from the University of Miami, Florida (1995) and her PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University (2002).

Dr Friend is the Secretary of the British Society of Aesthetics, as well as an organiser of the London Aesthetics Forum series of talks at the Institute of Philosophy in London.

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Event Date: 9 January 2012
Senate House
University of London
London WC1E 7HU

The Aristotelian Society

presents:

Seth Yalcin (Berkeley) – Bayesian Expressivism

There is a tension between the broadly decision-theoretic view of agents and the received picture of linguistic communication. The received view takes the transmission of nongraded, ‘binary’ belief as the paradigm. What one generally ‘puts into play’, in making an assertion, is a potential object of (nongraded, binary) belief: a proposition. What the compositional semantics of the language is charged with doing, fundamentally, is determining propositions relative to context. From a decision-theoretic perspective, this picture of communication is fixated on the objects of credence and preference, and lacks explicit room for the structure of credence and preference per se. That ultimately makes for a very peculiar bottleneck: to communicate with language, the Bayesian agent must squeeze her decision-theoretically structured state of mind into a binary, ungraded propositional medium for transmission. To remove the bottleneck, we must upgrade the received picture of communication. I describe a way of doing so, by equipping our semantics and pragmatics with decision-theoretic distinctions. The basic intuition behind the technical apparatus developed is expressivist in spirit: just as we can express those aspects of our states of mind which consist in their bearing some representational content, so too can we express `structural’ aspects of our states of mind, such as the ways that they apportion probability and utility.

Seth Yalcin is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science. Prior to that he was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He works mostly in the philosophy of language, on descriptive and foundational issues in natural language semantics. Lately his work has borrowed ideas from formal epistemology and from metaethical expressivism to develop accounts of the meaning of epistemic and deontic modals, probability operators, conditionals, attitude verbs, and the language of spatial orientation. He also has research interests in metaphysics, on questions about the nature of modality, information, and randomness.

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Event Date: 5 December 2011
Senate House
University of London
London WC1E 7HU

Daniel Rothschild (Oxford)  – Expressing Credences

After presenting a simple expressivist account of reports of probabilistic judgments, I explore a classic problem for it, namely the Frege-Geach problem. I argue that is a problem not just for expressivism, but for any reasonable account of ascriptions of graded judgments. I suggest that the problem can be resolved by appropriately modelling imprecise credences.

Daniel Rothschild is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Prior to that he was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Princeton University. His research focuses on natural language semantics and pragmatics. He has written on specific constructions such as conditionals, descriptions, questions, and modals, as well as foundational topics such as presupposition, expressivism, game-theoretic pragmatics, and dynamic semantics.

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Event Date: 21 November 2011
Senate House
University of London
London WC1E 7HU

David Barnett
Counterfactual Entailment

Counterfactual Entailment is the view that a counterfactual conditional is true just in case its antecedent entails its consequent. I present an argument for Counterfactual Entailment, and I develop a strategy for explaining away apparent counterexamples to the view. The strategy appeals to the suppositional view of counterfactuals, on which a counterfactual is essentially a statement, made relative to the supposition of its antecedent, of its consequent.

David Barnett is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Prior to arriving at CU in 2005, he held positions at the University Vermont and Davidson College. In 2008, he was a visiting professor at NYU, where he obtained his PhD in in 2003. Barnett works mainly in philosophy of language and metaphysics, but also has interests in philosophy of mind. He has written on the nature of indeterminacy and vagueness, the necessity of origins thesis, the theory of stuffs, scientific essentialism, the nature of conscious beings, personal identity, and the semantics of conditional statements. He is currently developing a novel theory of content.

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Event Date: 7 November 2011

Senate House – University of London

THE ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY


presents

Professor Øystein Linnebo (Birkbeck):

Reference by Abstraction

Frege suggests that criteria of identity should play a central role in an account of reference, which will be capable of explaining reference to abstract objects. Inspired by Frege’s suggestion, this paper develops a simplified but precise model of how we may come to refer to abstract letter types. We start with an interpreted language concerned with letter tokens. We then add vocabulary suitable for talking about letter types and adopt precise rules which ensure that the extended language is used precisely as if it was concerned with letter types.
Since the rules are logically impeccable and invoke only unproblematic concrete objects, this extension is legitimate. There are nevertheless reasons to interpret the extended language as not only apparently but genuinely referring to letter types. But the reductionist character of the rules is used to argue that the abstract referents are metaphysically “lightweight”.

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Event Date 24 October 2011
Senate House – University of London

THE ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY
Presents

Professor Gianfranco Soldati (Fribourg):
Direct Realism and the Properties of Experience

Abstract:

Direct realism with respect to perceptual experiences has two facets, an epistemological one and a metaphysical one. From the epistemological point of view it involves the claim that perceptual experiences provide immediate justification. From the metaphysical point of view it involves the claim that in perceptual experience we enter in direct contact to items in the external world. In a more radical formulation, often associated with naïve realism, the metaphysical conception of direct realism involves the idea that perceptual experiences depend on the items in the external world they are related to. This paper describes a simple account that makes room for immediate justification provided by perceptual experience.

The simple account establishes an explanatory relation between the justificational role of a perceptual experience and the fact that such an experience provides a reason for a belief. The account is evaluated in the light of some objections. Different ways to react to those objections are discussed. It will appear that in order to preserve the explanatory relation established by the simple account, one has to accept naïve realism. By breaking the connection between reason and justification, on the other side, one jeopardises the possibility for perceptual experience to deliver immediate justification.

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