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Past Events
“What is Love?” Philosophy Extravaganza ’22
Join the Philosophy Club for a night of discussion and community! We will start at 6pm, have four short presentations, provide dinner and discuss the topic “What is Love?” in small groups. Featured Speakers: Jay Odenbaugh, Catherine Sprecher-Loverti, Dawn Odell and Yueping Zhang. Email philclub@lclark.edu with any questions. Please RSVP here. PLEASE NOTE THAT MASKS WILL BE REQUIRED.
The Determinable Problem for Reductive Theories of Color by Geoffrey Hall (University of Notre Dame)
April 1st, 3:30pm PST via Zoom
Colors, it is often said, have determinate-determinable structure. In particular, if a uniform surface is, say, the color red, then it must have some specific shade of red. I argue that if this is true—if color space has a determinate-determinable structure—then our two most promising reductive theories of color are false. In particular, if color space has determinable-determinable structure, then colors can be neither surface reflectance properties, nor can they be dispositions to produce certain types of experience. This gives rise to a kind of mystery, however, for there are general epistemic grounds for thinking that colors must be reducible. If colors are reducible, they do not have the structure we tend to think they do. If they are not reducible, it is unclear how we could know that the objects around us were colored. I conclude with some general strategies for resolving this tension.
“Who Cooked the Feast for the Victors?” Recentering Human Labor in the Automation Debate by Colin Patrick (Lewis & Clark College)
March 11th, 3:30pm PST via Zoom
In the last few years, as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have begun to replace human workers in fields as diverse as customer service, management, transportation, and combat, it has become common to expect human work (and human beings) to be rendered obsolete altogether in short order—a result that some fear, while others welcome. While acknowledging the undeniable recent advancements in AI in these and other fields, I will argue that hopes and/or fears of full automation must be tempered by something that is emphasized in Marxist and feminist philosophy but downplayed within, and more often entirely missing from, mainstream discussions of this topic, namely the vast amount of collective human labor expended upon, embodied in, and necessary for nearly everything in human life, including in our age of AI, ML, and robots.
