Programme seminar series
Seminars take place on Wednesdays from 11am to 12.30pm in Mellor 2.15.
(Note: in addition to the programme seminar series, there is a regular postgraduate seminar series.)
Programme seminar series: abstracts
October 16
Title: "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" and Israel’s Genocidal Assault on Gaza
Speaker: Alex Miller (Otago)
In his famous 1967 essay "The Responsibility of intellectuals", Noam Chomsky wrote:
"Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us … [I]t is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies, … [and] it is also [their] duty to see events in their historical perspective".
After a year in which one of the world’s most powerful and sophisticated militaries – armed to the teeth by the United States, and supported by the UK and the countries of the EU – has relentlessly slaughtered a trapped and defenceless civilian population in Gaza, causing tens of thousands of deaths and injuries, the majority of which are among women, children and the elderly, I’ll use Chomsky’s 1967 reflections as a starting point to assess the responsibility of intellectuals in the context of Israel’s ongoing attempted genocide in Gaza.
Time and location: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, October 16, in Mellor 2.15.
October 9
Title: Unlearning separation: How animal justice is not just about animals
Speaker: Wenna Yeo
Arguments for animal justice often depict animals as individuals because they can feel pain, have interests, or are capable of leading flourishing lives. What this means is that animals (or some of them) have intrinsic value such that they are separable ends in themselves, and not means to ends. However, these arguments often do not respond well to the conflicts between species – when similar capabilities, interests, and rights collide. In particular, they do not help us place animal justice in the context of conservation. I suggest then, that the separateness of individuals has been overemphasized. In this talk, I share what I have learned from my kōrero with practitioners in animal welfare, animal health, and conservation about human-animal relationships and unfurls some multispecies relationships. I show how te ao Māori can offer some ways to practice justice as embedded individuals.
Time and location: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, October 9, in Mellor 2.15.
October 2
Title: When is the growing block really just presentism?
Speaker: David Braddon-Mitchell (Uni of Sydney)
The epistemic objection to the growing block is one according to which if the growing block were the correct model of time, we would have no way of telling that we are living in a privileged present. But the growing block is motivated in part by the idea that we can tell that we are in a privileged present, so it is self-undermining. Fabrice Correia and Sven Rosenkranz have argued that their version of the growing block is immune to this objection, via a strategy called “taking tense seriously”. In this talk I will walk us through the various view of time and how we got to this issue, and then argue that the “taking tense seriously” strategy ultimately fails—not because it is not a view which is immune to my epistemic objection, but rather because actually the view is a form of presentism—the view that only the present exists—and the objection was never intended to apply to presentism. In particular the view turns out, after much unpacking, to be very similar to David Ingram’s version of presentism. I’ll conclude by asking how we could have got to the point where we could confuse two such different accounts of the nature of time, and will suggest that it’s due to the effect of Tim Williamson’s influence in causing many to think the fundamental distinction in theories of time is between “permanents” and “temporaryism”.
Time and location: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, October 2, in Mellor 2.15.
September 25
TITLE: Free will expressivism
SPEAKER: Kristie Miller (Uni of Sydney)
In this paper I argue for free will expressivism, the view that the best interpretation of what people are doing when they utter free will sentences is not, as cognitivists maintain, asserting truth apt propositions, but rather, expressing certain attitudes towards the performance of certain actions. I argue that free will expressivism has several advantages over its cognitivist rivals in making sense of our free will practices, and that this is good reason to interpret people thusly.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, September 25, in Mellor 2.15.
September 18
TITLE: Shared Agency in Aristotle's Politics
SPEAKER: João Carvalho (doctoral candidate, Princeton)
In this talk, I argue that in Book I of the Politics, Aristotle articulates a realist notion of collective agency: he thinks that communities (koinoniai) are agents and that their actions are irreducible to the actions of their constitutive members. It is often assumed that a theory of collective agency must distinguish between groups that are agents and groups that are not--mere aggregates of individuals that fall short of the status of group agent. I show that Aristotle's notion of koinonia meets this requirement. The upshot is a view on which collective agencies, for Aristotle, consist primarily in a practical mode of exercising reason through joint deliberation (boulesis).
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, September 18, in Mellor 2.15.
September 11
TITLE: Respect for autonomy following Spinoza’s conception of freedom
SPEAKER: Simon Walker (Bioethics Centre, Otago)
Autonomy has a central place in contemporary bioethics, but there is much debate about what it is and how it should be valued. It is standardly conceived as a kind of freedom, viz. the freedom to ‘self-legislate’, but this conception is not linked to an account of what the self is or what self-legislating involves. The common convention is that being autonomous involves the exercise of certain rational processes, unrelated to the action itself. This means that a person cannot be considered more or less autonomous according to the effects of their actions. Spinoza’s conception of freedom is ontological. He understood freedom as the power to exist and act from the [necessity of one’s own nature,|] and to not be caused to act by other things (Ethics 1d7). In his ontological system, only God-or-Nature is completely free. He also linked freedom with blessedness, and identified free ‘active being’ as the basis of value. He conceived individuals as finite, composite, determinations of God-or-Nature, striving to actualise their nature. This means that our freedom is always a matter of degree. The degree to which we are free depends on how well the parts of our nature are integrated, and on our interactions with other individuals (persons and things). In this presentation I will seek to explain this, and as I do so, I will argue that it provides an account of the value of individual agency and a theoretical basis for intervening when a person’s decisions will lead to self-destructive outcomes.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, September 11, in Mellor 2.15.
August 28
TITLE: Sets, Propositions, Stages, and Chains
SPEAKER: Eileen Nutting (U of Kansas)
As a matter of ontology, iterative accounts of e.g. sets and propositions are lacking in at least three ways. First, without supplementation, they do not track key ontological features of the relevant entities, such as relations of ontological dependence. Second, they are uninformative about what can be included in the class of urelements. And third, considerations of how to account for e.g. sets of propositions and propositions about sets suggest that the stages of iterative hierarchies serve a merely representational role. In light of these failures, I offer an alternative to iterative accounts that centers on chains of e.g. membership or aboutness that track relations of ontological dependence. This account replicates all the best features of iterative accounts, and it also performs well in the respects in which iterative accounts are lacking.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, August 28, in Mellor 2.15.
August 21
TITLE: Thoroughgoing objective list theory and its rivals
SPEAKER: Andrew Moore (Otago)
In a rightly influential 1984 discussion, Derek Parfit established ‘objective list theory’ (OLT) among the leading philosophical accounts of well-being. Yet forty years on, OLT seems still to feature many indeterminacies and several large and unfilled holes. One aim of this talk is to address many of the indeterminacies, and also the theory’s seemingly potholed character, by developing a thoroughgoing OLT. The talk also aims to offer somewhat revisionary analysis of what OLT implies and of what it does not; and of OLT’s relations to hedonist, subjectivist (e.g., preference-fulfilmentist), and perfectionist theories. Through advancing its smaller aims, this talk also aims to vindicate OLT’s standing as a leading contender in philosophy of well-being.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, August 21, in Mellor 2.15.
August 7
TITLE: Progress, Enhancement and Moral Intuition
SPEAKER: Chen Hai (Youth Research Fellow, East China Normal University)
In this study, I try to explain that moral progress is a kind of moral intuition. In the first step, I examined our understanding of the concept of moral progress. I first examined the historical understanding of progress and the difference between scientific progress and other aspects of social progress. Then, I tried to discuss whether morality can and should progress. I believe that morality can and should progress. In the second step, I tried to reflect on people’s understanding of moral progress through their different opinions on moral enhancement. A person who supports moral enhancement must support moral progress, but is it possible for a person who does not support moral enhancement to support moral progress? My answer is positive. With quasi-realism as a bridge, through the reconstruction of metaethics theory, we also found reasons for opponents of moral enhancement to support moral progress. In the third step, based on the above examination of moral progress, I realized that the concept of moral progress is very consistent with the concept of moral intuition I advocated (our moral intuition is composed of rational/cognitive parts and non-rational/non-cognitive parts). Therefore, I concluded that the concept of moral progress is one of our moral intuitions.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, August 7, in Mellor 2.15.
July 31
TITLE: The Standard Picture: A metaethical account of well-being
SPEAKER: Joseph Burke (doctoral candidate, Otago)
My goals in this talk are two-fold. First, I aim to establish the metaethical position that is implied by our usual first-order theorizing about well-being. I call this position the Standard Picture. I argue that the Standard Picture theorist holds five claims: 1: The function of ‘good for’ in expressions of kind ‘X is good for S’ is variable. 2: Among these functions at least one uniquely relates to well-being. 3: For any subject of well-being ‘S’ at any time t there is exactly one correct account of S’s well-being. 4: Well-being is fundamentally normative. 5: There is a single first order account of well-being that applies to all subjects of well-being. My second goal is to introduce and defend a framework for sorting metaethical theories of well-being. I will pursue the two goals of this talk concurrently. I introduce and justify the metaethical framework by arguing for the Standard Picture’s position in it. As I progress through the Standard Picture’s five claims, I give accounts of how theorists can, and do deviate from them, and how this is successfully captured by the framework.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, July 31, in Mellor 2.15.
July 24
TITLE: Can Net Zero Targets Be Both Provisionally Legitimate and Conclusively Absurd?
SPEAKER: Lisa Ellis (Otago)
Net zero targets do not make sense from the perspective of earth science. Even if they did make scientific sense, net zero targets cannot proxy relationships of justice among emitters. Climate justice properly understood obliges emitters to orient their behaviour towards the goal of achieving the climate stability that might enable collective flourishing now and in the future. The conditions of achieving climate stability include things like increasing coordination of climate-affecting actions and decreasing activities that prolong the fossil-fuel era. Net zero targets can only ever serve as provisional instruments of the morally substantive policies that are themselves subject to the standards of climate justice.
However, as provisional instruments of policies on the way to climate justice, net zero targets can facilitate coordination, signal commitment, and even make some contribution towards preliminary emissions reduction. With continual improvement, they could evolve into less absurd instruments than they are at present.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, July 24, in Mellor 2.15.
July 17
TITLE: Grounding Sexual Identity
SPEAKER: Ben Caplan (University of Kansas) In this paper, I argue that facts about an individual’s sexual identity are partially or fully grounded in facts about their sexual orientation, where an individual’s sexual identity (e.g. being queer, being straight) has to do with the social position that they occupy, and their sexual orientation (e.g. being homosexual, being heterosexual) has to do with the sexual dispositions that they have. One consideration in favor of this orientation-based view of sexual identity is that it gets the right results in cases in which an individual hasn’t come out yet, either to themselves or to others. I defend the orientation-based view from an objection, due to Matthew Andler, that it gets the wrong results in a pair of cases: one having to do with “str8 dudes” (men who have sex with men but who present themselves online as straight), the other having to do with intergenerational gay friendship. I conclude by considering the extent to which the orientation-based view is compatible with Andler’s own view, on which facts about an individual’s sexual identity are grounded in facts about the sexuality cultures in which they are, ought to be, included.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, July 17, in Mellor 2.15.
May 22
TITLE: “An embarrassment of riches”? On the one true (relevant) logic
SPEAKER: Zach Weber (Otago Philosophy) Many people have thought that if the parts of a conditional (if-then) have nothing whatsoever to do with each other — no meaningful connection — then the conditional cannot be valid. This leads to searching for systems of relevant logic. There are two salient problems with this noble project.
- Problem 1: Logic is meant to be content neutral, so validity depends only on form, not on the meaning of sentences involved. How then can a formal theory capture "meaningful connection"?
- Problem 2: It turns out there are many, many systems of relevant logic. Models for relevant logics grant us so much control over what is valid and not that there is "an embarrassment of riches"— and no apparent reason to think any one of them gets it right.
In this talk I will explain and address both these problems.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, May 22, in St David F.
May 15
TITLE: Probability, Causality, and the Dog Bite Example
SPEAKER: Malcolm R Forster (UW-Madison) Causes are no longer required to determine their effects, just increase their probability (under some conditions). Subjective probabilities (degrees of belief or credences) do not seem relevant here, so we need a theory of objective probability (chance). I discuss the approach of Hopf (1935) based on Poincaré’s seminal discussion of games of chance (1913). Hopf’s examples are structurally similar to the famous Dog Bite Example, which was introduced in philosophy (McDermott 1995) as (an alleged) counterexample to the transitivity of causation. The similarity may help explain the connection between probability and causation.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, May 15, in St David F.
May 8
TITLE: Sufficiency, liberty, social equality: Justice and the future of publicly funded health care
SPEAKER: Elizabeth Fenton (Centre for Bioethics, Otago) Like many other countries, Aotearoa New Zealand’s publicly funded health care system is struggling. Rising costs, an unstable workforce, and changing population demographics are apparently intractable pressures despite numerous system tweaks and even wholesale reform. This crisis has allowed the private health care sector to flourish, becoming the default provider of non-urgent or elective services, and often also urgent or time-critical care. Some ethicists defend a ‘two-tier’ or ‘dual’ health system, in which public and private sectors operate in tandem, on the grounds that the liberty to purchase more or better health care is an important element of justice. We examine and challenge this view, arguing that the evolution of New Zealand’s health system demonstrates how the private sector undermines and depletes the public sector, creating significant concerns for health equity, social solidarity, and long-term sustainability.
Without change, the future of the public health care sector in New Zealand is uncertain at best. Some have called for “a radically different approach to health and social spending” to address the threat of “creeping privatisation” (ASMS 2023). We agree that radical change is required, and examine a social insurance funding model as a plausible alternative to the current tax-funded model. We argue that a social insurance model has the potential to address some of the challenges facing the New Zealand health system, in particular the growing gap between the public and private ‘tiers.’
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, May 8, in St David F.
May 1: hosted by the Bioethics Centre and the Philosophy Programme
TITLE: The line-drawing problem is your problem too
SPEAKER: John Matthewson (Massey) There is a well-known “line-drawing” problem for accounts of disease that are based on biological dysfunction. Such accounts are generally expected to deliver binary results: disease is absent, or it is present. However, most biological attributes come in degrees. In turn, this seems to require that we classify particular values of these attributes as functional or dysfunctional. For example, the threshold for type 2 diabetes is defined according to specific levels of HbA1c or blood glucose, even though it is clear that glucose metabolism can be more or less impaired, rather than simply impaired or not. Given this, we might suspect that such dividing lines merely reflect our interests, rather than any established biological facts or principles.
The best response here may be to just acknowledge that disease definitions can rely on socially-determined criteria. Diagnostic rules have to be applied in practical settings, after all. I'm not entirely sure things are this simple, but in any case it appears that there is a separate, more fundamental line-drawing problem for these accounts of disease. If we take the biological basis of function seriously, it turns out that functions themselves may come in degrees. This leads to a line-drawing problem that can’t be set aside so easily, as it determines whether a given trait is even a candidate for dysfunction or pathology in the first place
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, May 1, in St David F.
April 24
TITLE: Is Science Western? Yes and No
SPEAKER: Greg Dawes (Otago Philosophy) Is Science Western? More precisely, "yes" on one level and "no" on another. Following Srđan Lelas, I argue that the practice of any science happens on four levels: the operational, the phenomenal, the theoretical, and the metatheoretical. Against those who argue that the operational level is already laden with theory, I argue that the operational level has a partial autonomy (and even a certain priority). I then argue that the operational level of science employs refined versions of epistemic practices found in all societies. It is at the theoretical and metatheoretical levels that the sciences bear the marks of their particular history, in particular of their origins in early modern Europe.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, April 24, in St David F.
April 17
TITLE: The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume and Adam Smith
SPEAKER: Dennis Rasmussen (Professor of Political Science, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Political Philosophy Program, Syracuse) David Hume is widely regarded as the most important philosopher ever to write in English, but during his lifetime he was attacked as “the Great Infidel” for his skeptical religious views and deemed unfit to teach the young. In contrast, Adam Smith was a revered professor of moral philosophy, and is now often hailed as the founding father of capitalism. Remarkably, the two were best friends for most of their adult lives. Dennis Rasmussen will talk about his book, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought, which tells the fascinating story of the friendship between these towering Enlightenment thinkers.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, April 17, in St David F.
April 10
TITLE: The Principle of Sufficient Reason in Spinoza's Ethics
SPEAKER: Michael LeBuffe (Baier Chair of Early Modern Philosophy, Otago) Spinoza's version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) concerns existence and non-existence. While subject of the Ethics, an account that begins with God before proceeding to accounts of mind, the affects, human bondage, and its mitigation, may seem very broad, it is not unrestricted: it concerns existence. The axioms of Ethics 1, therefore, need concern existence only, and they are restricted in this way. While the coherence of central commitments of the Ethics requires that the PSR be consistent with the axioms of Ethics 1, then, the PSR is not identical with or implied by any of them. It is better understood to be a principle that, together with what Spinoza takes to be self-evident truths about existence, grounds the axioms. That is, Spinoza takes the PSR to be a reason for accepting the axioms. Outside its few explicit uses, the PSR influences the argument of the Ethics through them.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, April 10, in St David F.
March 20
TITLE: Semantic Processing And Mental Logic
SPEAKER: Drew Khlentzos (Linguistics, Macquarie University) The idea that human cognitive resources include a mental logic is given little credence in Psychology these days. The consensus is that sixty years of research on human reasoning has shown the Mental Logic (ML) hypothesis to be highly unlikely. Thus, the Mental Model theory of Johnson-Laird denies logic any role in reasoning, and according to one authority, the ‘New Paradigm’ in psychology of reasoning “rejects classical logic as the rulebook for good inference, replacing it with normative rules for probabilistic thinking”. Philosophers have also joined in. Discussing epistemological conceptions of analyticity, Timothy Williamson avers that: “There is little sign of anything modular that contains formal rules to subserve conscious deduction, whether conceived as part of a language module or as part of a reasoning module”.
Yet this is not the picture that emerges from language acquisition studies. Absent a logic processor in the brain, young children would be unable to semantically process the logically complex sentences they manifestly can process ... flawlessly. Beginning with a class of expressions known as Negative Polarity Items, I present empirical evidence supporting this claim. I then turn to sceptical philosophical arguments [due to McGee, Gibbard, Johnson-Laird, Williamson] that could be used to undermine the ML hypothesis.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, March 20, in St David F.
March 13
TITLE: Big Data, Free Riding, and Fair Play
SPEAKER: Jan Mihal (Law, Otago) Does the principle of fair play – one of the most popular and promising means of accounting for political obligation and a duty to obey the law – also generate a duty to share personal data with big data systems? In (overly) simple terms, the principle of fair play holds that when an individual benefits from a collective practice, they have a duty to contribute to that practice. To forgo contributing would be to free ride and free riding is wrong. It follows that, where a collective practice of providing data to a big data system exists and benefits x, x has a duty to likewise provide data. If x forgoes contributing data, x free rides and free riding is wrong.
I discuss a variety of questions that arise in fleshing out this argument, including around what counts as a collective practice, what counts as a (sufficient) benefit, and whether consent or acceptance have any role to play here. These discussions raise unexpected possibilities, including the existence of (quasi-)political obligations owed to private corporations (if they facilitate a collective practice of sufficient benefit) and a refocus away from privacy and transparency to other concerns in the regulation of big data industries.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, March 13, in St David F.
March 6
TITLE: Rethinking the computer
SPEAKER: Fernando Cano-Jorge (postdoctoral fellow, Otago Philosophy) Logicians in the 30s, like Church and Turing, proposed the first mathematical models of computation. Their ideas were immediately adopted and actual computing machines were developed. The technology used in digital computers heavily relies on the principles of classical logic. In particular, the electronic circuits which perform all the operations of a computer are governed by bivalent, truth-functional operations performed by logic gates. Though technology has advanced enormously ever since, the computers we use every day still follow classical logic when processing information. However, non-classical logics have bloomed in the past decades, so one may ask whether computers can work with a non-classical logic. In this talk I introduce a way to implement non-classical logic gates and circuits. This is done by following the principles of Dunn semantics, which can be used to present several non-classical logics. I suggest that by abandoning classical logic we can reexplore the nature and limits of computation.
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, March 6, in St David F.
February 28
TITLE: Can Truth Subvert the Inference-Barriers? A Reply to Mark Nelson
SPEAKER: Charles Pigden (Otago Philosophy) I rescue No-Ought-From-Is from Prior’s counterexamples by reformulating it as the thesis that you can’t get a non-vacuous Ought from an Is. This is an instance of the inference-barrier thesis that in a logical valid argument you can’t get anything non-vacuous out that you have not put in – a thesis I claim to have proved. But (replies Nelson) my proof presupposes that we are working in a language that does not include the truth-predicate. Once we help ourselves to truth (so he claims) we can construct logically valid arguments from non-moral premises to moral conclusions. I reply that his counterexamples to No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is are materially but not logically valid. Taking my cue from Ramsey and Buridan I develop a formal theory of truth that relies on the notion of representing that. It then becomes clear that ‘ought’ must be used as well as mentioned in the premises if Nelson is to derive his moral conclusion with the aid of logic alone. You can’t use truth to break down the barrier between non-X premises and substantively X-conclusions
TIME AND LOCATION: 11am–12.30pm, Wednesday, February 28, in Burns 4.
Lectures
Dan and Gwen Taylor Lecturers
- 2023: Tim Mulgan (Auckland; St Andrews)
- 2019: Tim Dare (Auckland)
- 2018: Gillian Russell (UNC)
- 2017: Julia Driver (Washington University St. Louis)
- 2016: Sally Haslanger (MIT)
- 2015: Jeremy Waldron (NYU)
- 2014: Philip Pettit (Princeton, ANU)
- 2013: Brian Leiter (Chicago)
- 2012: Derek Matravers (Open University)
- 2011: Tim Mulgan (St Andrews)
- 2010: Annette Baier (Otago, Pittsburgh)
Recordings of selected lectures are available on the Division of Humanities podcasts page, and the history of The Dan and Gwen Taylor Fellowship page tells how these lectures were started.