I present an epistemic argument against a variety of illusionist theses about the nature of the self and consciousness. Illusionism about xis the view that while the experience of xis real, xs are not real. For example, the experience of red is real, but redness isn’t real. Likewise illusionists about the self and consciousness argue that the experience of the self and consciousness is real, but the self and consciousness (under some definition of them) are not real. Rather, they are presentations of something as being other than it is. Neural-Bi-Directional Illusionism is the thesis that both the self and consciousness are illusions produced by the brain. I offer an epistemic argument against this contemporary position.

Join digitally on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/96127151073 

Some language encourages essentialist thinking. While philosophers have focused on essentialism and generic generalizations, I argue that nouns as a category are poised to refer to kinds and to promote representational essentializing. Our psychological propensity to essentialize when nouns are used reveals a limitation for ameliorative projects. Ameliorated nouns (and their conceptual correlates) can continue to underpin essentializing inferences. Given the way language and cognition function, ameliorative projects can fail to meet core anti-essentialist social and political ends by failing to consider the import of vehicles of representation. Yet, I argue, representational essentialism does not doom anti-essentialist ameliorative projects. Rather, would-be ameliorators ought to attend to the propensities for our representations to essentialize and to the complex relationship between essentialism and prejudice.

Poetry’s importance to the Daoist tradition goes beyond presenting philosophical content in verse. Authors of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi make their claims about philosophy of language, not with proofs, but through demonstrations of open-endedness and invitations to consider what meanings are at stake. I examine the Daoists’ use of poetic techniques such as metaphorical language, rhetorical shifts, and allusion to show that the features of poetry which cause many Western philosophers (beginning with Plato) concern are the very features that Daoist authors depend upon. Through further close reading of other philosophical poems, including examples from British and contemporary American poets, I argue that poetry avails itself of a broader range of resources to engage in philosophical exploration.

Recent work in the epistemology of partisan polarization has wrestled with a growing understanding that appealing to (what are postulated to be) shared objective facts is not sufficient to lead to consensus. Disagreement does not always reflect how parties are interpreting shared facts differently, but rather may reach down to divergences over what “facts” even are. This talk engages constructively with theories of world creation emerging from the Pratyabhijñā Śaiva tradition to develop an enacted, embodied account of human realities that neither rejects facts altogether, nor adheres to the illusion that there is a single, objective reality that is the same for all. The Pratyabhijñā Śaiva tradition claims that the way that humans conceptualize their experience always involves excluding large swaths of potentially relevant information, and these conceptualizations form the contours of our worlds. Since the worlds we experience are just particular carvings of a reality that could be spliced in an infinite number of ways, our resulting realities may only partially overlap. Thinking alongside these traditions about reality as a question of partially overlapping worlds that are continuously created by the interplay of ourselves, others, and our environments opens up space for understanding the partiality of any position, as well as the constitutive role that exclusion plays in creating worlds.

https://zoom.us/j/91247236556 

The thesis of Plato’s Republic is that justice is always good – indeed, that it is always good for the just person and not just good from some impersonal point of view. In this talk I venture an account of why Socrates is concerned to establish exactly this point. I argue that intellectualism about virtue – the view that virtue, and justice in particular, is or crucially involves a kind of knowledge – makes it particularly urgent to establish that justice is always good; denial of that thesis would threaten the coherence of intellectualism. I then show how Socrates’ main line of argument neutralizes this threat. Finally, I speculate on a resultant puzzle: If intellectualism motivates both the thesis and the main argumentative structure of the Republic, how are we to square that with the famous anti-intellectualism of Book 4?

My question in this paper is whether the Charmides presents a serious challenge to the Apology’s portrayal of Socratic self-knowledge and Socrates’ enterprise of testing the wisdom of others. The Charmides is an inquiry into temperance (sophrosunē) and after several unsuccessful attempts, Socrates and Critias seem to arrive at a promising definition – temperance is the knowledge of self (epistēmē heatou). Socrates describes the temperate man as the only man “who will know himself and will be able to examine what he knows and does not know, and in the same way he will be able to inspect other people to see when a man does in fact know what he knows and thinks he knows, and when again he does not know what he thinks he know, and no one else will be able to do this. And being temperate and temperance and knowing oneself amount to this, to knowing what one knows and does not know” (Chrm. 167a1-7).

This description has been noted by commentators to bear significant textual affinities to Socrates’ professed ignorance and his Delphic mission most notably presented in the Apology. The Charmides concludes that temperance, understood in this Socratic sense, is ultimately impossible and useless. Even if it were possible, it would be of no use to our happiness or faring well (eu prattein). This final conclusion has been taken by commentators to be a critical reflection, to various degrees, on Socratic self-knowledge and the enterprise of testing the wisdom of others. In section I of this paper, I survey the range of the positions taken by commentators. I argue that, despite the textual affinities, the Charmides and the Apology does not share the same model of knowledge. The former develops a view of knowledge based on crafts (technai) whereas the latter dialogue does not. In section II, I develop the thesis that temperance, understood as knowledge of self and its abstract rendering knowledge of knowledge, is a kind of craft (technē). I argue that the Charmides is an attempt to develop the Socratic notion of self-knowledge with an account of craft knowledge already present in the Apology. In the Apology, Socrates is careful to praise the craftsmen as knowing “many fine things” but their biggest mistake was believing that this expert knowledge amounted to the most important pursuits and as a result, it overshadowed their wisdom (Apology, 22de-5). The Charmides’ account of temperance as ‘self-knowledge’ corrects this mistake. Those who possess temperance recognize the limitations of their expertise. They entrust matters of which they are ignorant to other experts and cautious against anyone who practices outside of their field of expertise (171d-172a5). I conclude the paper in section III with some comments speculating why the Charmides ultimately rejects the definition of temperance as knowledge of self.

Democratic governance is often thought to be the gold standard of fairness in collective decision making. Fairness in voluntary exchange has not similarly received a fully satisfactory analysis. The most prominent views tend to arrange themselves into two basic camps: the voluntariness conceptions of fair exchange and the equal value conceptions. Though there are insights here, I think both of these fail to grasp the basic structural conditions of fairness in exchange. What I propose to do in this paper is to take the democratic conception of fairness in collective decision making and extend it so that it applies in a distinctive way to voluntary exchange. I think this approach solves some of the puzzles inherent in the other approaches and provides a powerful analysis of the normative principles regulating the structural conditions of voluntary exchange. One further benefit of this approach is that it brings to bear the widely accepted values of democracy to the evaluation of voluntary exchange in a deeply illuminating way, without sacrificing an appreciation of the distinctive features and virtues of voluntary exchange. I want to suggest the fruitfulness of this analysis by applying the democratic conception to market exchange, understood broadly in a neo-classical way. I do not intend to endorse the neo-classical approach, I want simply to show the value of the democratic conception buy showing how it can help evaluate the fairness of markets understood in a neo-classical way. I apply the idea to perfectly competitive markets and to imperfectly competitive markets.

Dr. Bardon is well-known philosopher who works in the philosophy of science. It promises to be an great talk. Hope to see you there!

In his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, George Berkeley presents a revolutionary theory of visual perception. Central to this theory is what scholars have dubbed the “Heterogeneity Thesis,” which Berkeley calls the “main part and pillar” of his theory. This thesis is often interpreted as the claim that there are no common sensibles––that the sensible qualities we touch, for example, are not the sensible qualities we see. On the face of it, the thesis appears to be false, or at least to depart from common sense: we think we often see and touch the same quality or the same object. The aim of this paper is not to defend the Heterogeneity Thesis but to answer a series of questions: what is the Heterogeneity Thesis, what role does it play in Berkeley’s theory of perceptual experience, and why did he view it as the main part and pillar of his theory? I argue that Berkeley adopts several versions of the Heterogeneity Thesis, and that each version plays a crucial role in Berkeley’s story of how we navigate a spatial world, visually.

  Matt Braich  (University of California at San Diego)

 “What’s So Special About Reflection?”

It is our pleasure to invite you to the Festival of Scholars, an opportunity for student-scholars and artists to present their research and art, while also learning from one another.

In Evolutionary Religion, J. L. Schellenberg formulates an account of religion supported by a Darwinian evolutionary theory understood as a science of the deep future.  The possibility of such a future enables the realization that our present understandings of religion are immature and that the future may bring radically altered understandings of divine reality and a time when religious practice is at the center of human well-being.  In this paper, I argue that Schellenberg’s evolutionary religion represents at best but half the evolutionary story, its epistemic side.  Ontologically, it remains fundamentally non-evolutionary.  Positively, I suggest a naturalistic alternative to Schellenberg’s Ultimate, Darwin’s Hegelian Spirit.  In sum, I conclude that Schellenberg’s evolutionary religion is neither sufficiently evolutionary nor religious.

Simon Blackburn claims that we hold two statements about moral possibility that jointly lead to moral anti-realism. The first of these statements is a supervenience claim that says that if a moral state supervenes on a natural state, when the natural state occurs necessarily the moral one will as well. The second statement is a non-entailment claim, which says that the relationship between the natural state and the moral one is not one of logical entailment. In other words, the natural states do not lead to the moral ones by any laws of logic and it is possible that the natural states occur without the moral one. In this paper, I argue that Blackburn’s supervenience argument against moral realism fails. Specifically, he has solved the problem for the realist by smuggling in a supervenience claim, or his argument for anti-realism fails. I show how the way in which Blackburn has defined his terms hurts his argument and aids the realist. By his definitions of his terms, his non-entailment clause is incomprehensible and his underlying notion in his supervenience claim either aids the realist or leaves anti-realism on too shaky of a ground. 

As we navigate through life, we adopt an implicit model of time that is very important to us. In this model the present is special and the past fixed, and this whole structure “flows” forward. Physics suggests that this conception of time is fundamentally wrong about time. It is commonly dismissed as an illusion and removed from their desks and placed on the desks of psychologists. However, psychologist don’t know it’s been put on their desks. So why we have no explanation of why we all naturally adopt this picture of falling through time. The cosmologist Gold emphasized that before we can dismiss the flow we need to explain the “self-consistent set of rules that would give a beast this kind of phoney picture of time.” Here I take up this interdisciplinary project. Appealing to the hard facts of life in a relativistic world, evolution, cognitive science and psychology, I develop a theory of why “beasts” like us feel like we’re falling through time.

Metaphorical utterances are construed as arrayed along a continuum, on one end of which are semi-conventionalized cases amenable to analysis in terms of semantic content, speaker meaning, and satisfaction conditions, and where image-construction is permissible but not mandatory. I call these image-permitting metaphors (IPM’s), and contrast them with image-demanding metaphors (IDM’s) inhabiting the continuum’s other end and whose understanding mandates the construction of a mental image. This construction, I suggest, is spontaneous, is not restricted to visual imagery, and its result is typically somatically marked sensu Damasio. IDM’s may accordingly be used in service of self-expression, and thereby in the elicitation of empathy. Even so, IDM’s may also be vehicles of speaker meaning, and may reasonably provoke banter over the aptness of the imagery they evoke.

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Please join the departments of Philosophy and Classics in honoring Nicholas D. Smith, the James F. Miller Professor of Humanities. Socrates: A Conference brings scholars from across the country who have been influenced by Professor Smith’s scholarly work in epistemology, ancient philosophy, and classical studies, especially his work on Socrates. The conference is free and open to the public.

Please join the departments of Philosophy and Classics in honoring Nicholas D. Smith, the James F. Miller Professor of Humanities. Socrates: A Conference brings scholars from across the country who have been influenced by Professor Smith’s scholarly work in epistemology, ancient philosophy, and classical studies, especially his work on Socrates. The conference is free and open to the public.

Please join the departments of Philosophy and Classics in honoring Nicholas D. Smith, the James F. Miller Professor of Humanities. Socrates: A Conference brings scholars from across the country who have been influenced by Professor Smith’s scholarly work in epistemology, ancient philosophy, and classical studies, especially his work on Socrates. The conference is free and open to the public.

In his recent book, The Ethical Project, Philip Kitcher offers a pragmatic naturalistic metaethical account of moral progress.  Examining ethical practice, Kitcher presents a functional account of it as a social technology for alleviating altruism failures, one exemplified in a phylogeny of moral practice including elimination of chattel slavery and recognition of both women’s rights and gay rights.  He suggests a theory of bio-cultural evolution as an ultimate explanation of this phylogeny and, as proximate mechanisms, social-cultural learning, socially engaged normative guidance and cognitively equipped emotions.  Given these scientifically supported bases, Kitcher argues that pragmatic naturalism offers the best metaethical account of why these changes in moral practice are morally progressive.  Making use of these same scientific bases, I argue that Kitcher’s metaethical account requires the adoption of an objective moral realism, one, nevertheless, that is compatible with his core pragmatism. 

Jay Odenbaugh, Lewis & Clark College
Janet Kourany, University of Notre Dame
Scott Gilbert, Swarthmore College
Jonathan Kaplan, Oregon State University
Quayshawn Spencer, University of San Francisco

A common view in psychology and philosophy holds that strictly speaking we see very little – we see only facing surface features like color, boundaries and illumination.  Everything else is filled in by the mind.  I think that this view is wrong.  I use George Berkeley and Thomas Reid to illustrate how this putatively common sense view is a piece of theory and a product of history.

THIS EVEN IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.