Past Events

Per Milam
March 20, 2024

“What Do We Owe the Very Poor?” with Per Milam

We will consider the duties of the affluent to those who are most disadvantaged.

cassie finley
March 1, 2024

“On the Unity of Moral and Intellectual Virtues” by Cassie Finley (Pacific University)

Since the revival of virtue ethics in the mid-20th century, there has been increasing interest in virtue theories within epistemology, aesthetics, political philosophy, philosophy of education, and beyond. Moving beyond virtue ethics’ focus on moral virtues, this aretaic turn in philosophy has led to the proliferation of putatively distinct kinds of virtues. However, relatively little has been said about how to understand the relationship between these kinds of virtues within contemporary virtue theories. I articulate a number of different potential relationships between moral and intellectual virtues, before turning to argue that a unified account of moral and intellectual virtues follows from an understanding of virtues as excellent, reliably motivated character traits. In addition to reintegrating virtue scholarship across domains, this proposed unity of virtues has significant implications within the context of virtue education.

fritzman
February 9, 2024

“Pañcama, Mystical Consciousness that Encompasses Turīya” by J.M. Fritzman (Lewis & Clark College)

The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣadteaches that consciousness has four forms: waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep, and turīya(the fourth). Miri Albahari and Ramakrishna Puligandla maintain that mystics in turīyaexperience their identity with ultimate absolute reality. They further claim that this mystical experience corroborates the ontology of Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta, according to which ultimate reality is impersonal, only ultimate reality is real, and conventional reality is nonreal. A. G. Javadekar also accepts the Advaita ontology, but he denies that mystical experience corroborates it. However, some mystics report ultimate reality either as personal or as simultaneously impersonal and personal. Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda describe another kind of mystical experience of ultimate reality which paraconsistently incorporates and encompasses all other kinds of mystical experiences. This article designates pañcama(the fifth) as the form of consciousness that encompasses turīya.

Devin Fitzpatrick
November 17, 2023

Philosophy Colloquium: Experiences of Depression, Existential Feelings, and Existential Change by Visiting Assistant Professor Devin Fitzpatrick (Lewis & Clark College)

Some feelings seem to color everything. While an emotion like fear is typically “intentional” or directed, being a fear of something, feelings like anxiety or dread are characterized by the vagueness of their object and by the way they pervade consciousness, potentially making any object appear as a threat. Matthew Ratcliffe defines these pervasive feelings as “existential feelings,” senses of possibility like “feeling alive” or “feeling deadened,” and argues that these feelings are “pre-intentional,” conditions of the possibility of the scope and valence of intentional states like beliefs or desires. Change in existential feelings, or “existential change,” may thus have sweeping effects upon a subject’s mental states. The category of the pre-intentional seems promising in accounting for experiences of depression. However, there remains a question of “bi-directionality”: how or if intentional states might affect the pre-intentional, such that changes in, say, beliefs might affect the possibility of existential change. I propose the introduction of a feeling-disposition distinction: existential feelings are not pre-intentional structures but ways of becoming aware of the “existential dispositions” that are pre-intentional structures. I then argue that existential dispositions, and the pre-intentional generally, are a category of states that are introspectively opaque and so ambiguous between being an intentional state, like a “quasibelief,” or non-intentional state, like a reflex. I will show that this redefinition clarifies how beliefs about what one’s experiences of depression signify may induce existential change that alleviates the suffering of these experiences.

November 3, 2023

The Northwest Pacific Conference at Lewis & Clark College

The seventy-fourth annual Northwest Philosophy Conference is scheduled for Friday and Saturday, November 3-4, at Lewis & Clark College. All presentations will be held in John R. Howard Hall.

Matthew C. Altman (Central Washington University) will deliver the Keynote Address, What Do Philosophers Do?, on Friday at 1:30PM.

There is a $50 registration fee for the conference, payable online.

Papers in any philosophical area are welcome. The Northwest Philosophy Conference welcomes submissions from women and members of minority groups.

Loriliai Biernacki
October 20, 2023

Philosophy Colloquium: Can Robots Become Sentient? Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism in Dialogue with Contemporary Neuroscience: Vimarśa and Integrated Information Theory (IIT 3.0) by Loriliai Biernacki (University of Colorado Boulder)

I address how sentience might arise using a comparative analysis of the nondual philosophy of the 11th century Hindu philosopher Abhinavagupta in relation to a contemporary, currently popular neuroscientific theory addressing the relation between the mind and the body, Integrated Information Theory (IIT 3.0). How it is that some things and entities are classified as sentient, while others are not? While much of Indian philosophy engages with the concept of consciousness, often writ in large and abstract terms, as cit or samvit, I suggest that Abhinavagupta’s articulation of consciousness as vimarśa may be better suited as a concept for determining the status of sentience. This analysis of Abhinavagupta’s panentheism, particularly with the concept of vimarśa, brings to the forefront a crucial and often somewhat overlooked premise underlying IIT 3.0’s ontological framework: the implicit and requisite assumption of subjectivity within materiality.

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