Events and seminars

2025 programme seminar series

Seminars take place on Wednesdays from 3pm to 4:30pm, across the teaching weeks of both semesters, in Mellor Lab 2.02.

(Note: in addition to the programme seminar series, there is a regular postgraduate seminar series)

Date	Speaker	Title
26 February	Peter Millican (Oxford)	Hume, Naturalism and Scepticism: Rejecting an Influential Narrative
5 March	Jc Beall (Notre Dame)	Classical logic is dead. Long live classical logic!
12 March	Samantha Brennan (Guelph)	A Child's Right to a Gender Open Future
19 March	Postgraduate research conference – no seminar this week
26 March	Charles Pigden (Otago, Philosophy)	Inference-Barriers, Operator Logic and Doing Justice to Shorter: a Response to Gillian Russell’s Barriers to Entailment
2 April	Jan Mihal (Otago, Law)	Methodological Consequentialism in Legal Theory: Thinking Through Noble Lies
9 April	Fernando Cano-Jorge (Otago, Philosophy)	A quiver full of arrows
16 April	Christian Barry (ANU)	Regulated Climate Responsibilities
23 April	Mid-semester break – no seminar this week
30 April	Dana Howard (Ohio State U)	Putting others on a pedestal: Testimony, Admiration, and Epistemic Injury
7 May	Zach Weber (Otago, Philosophy)	To be confirmed
14 May	Michael LeBuffe (Otago Philosophy)	To be confirmed
21 May	Jason Kawall (Colgate U)	To be confirmed
28 May	Heather Dyke (Otago, Philosophy)	Naturalising the Philosophy of Time with the Help of Cognitive Science
16 July	To be confirmed	To be confirmed
23 July	Jean Campos De Souza (Otago, Philosophy)	To be confirmed
30 July	Sungmoon Kim (City University of Hong Kong)	To be confirmed
6 August	Stephen M. Gardiner (University of Washington)	To be confirmed
13 August	Postgraduate research conference - no seminar this week
20 August	To be confirmed	To be confirmed
27 August	To be confirmed	To be confirmed
3 September	Midsemester break – no seminar this week
10 September	To be confirmed	To be confirmed
17 September	To be confirmed	To be confirmed
24 September	To be confirmed	To be confirmed
1 October	To be confirmed	To be confirmed
8 October	Andrew Moore (Otago, Philosophy)	To be confirmed
15 October	Alex Miller (Otago, Philosophy)	To be confirmed

Programme seminar series: abstracts

Putting others on a pedestal: Testimony, Admiration, and Epistemic Injury

Dana Howard (Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Education and Anatomy, The Ohio State University)
Parents of children with disabilities often share their stories to attest to the positive impact parenting such a child has had on their lives. It is important to give due respect to such testimony, but what does due respect entail? Recently Chris Kaposy has argued in “Choosing Down Syndrome,” that respect requires us to not dismiss such narratives as the result of adaptive preferences. I argue that while this is important, it is not enough. First, I introduce a problematic perspective towards this kind of parental testimony, which I call the ‘Pedestal Perspective’: When the audience is presented with the retrospective views and values of these speakers, they may be tempted to interpret their views as an outgrowth, not of adaptive preferences, but of the speaker's extraordinary virtuous character. The temptation is to put speakers, such as these parents, on a pedestal and question whether it would be possible for one to have the openness and compassion that these speakers exemplify. From the pedestal perspective, audience members can thus view the testimony of others as reliable, but not learn anything about their own predicament from that testimony. I then argue that while the pedestal perspective is epistemically coherent it may not be normatively justifiable. A person’s unwillingness [or incapacity] to apply the lessons of these parents to one’s own deliberative situation may amount to testimonial injury - and if systematic, perhaps a form of injustice.
Time and date: 3pm–4:30pm, Wednesday, 30 April
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02

Regulated Climate Responsibilities

Christian Barry (Director of the Research School of the Social Sciences, ANU)
Can a system of regulation change the moral complexion of regulated actions? Our working hypothesis is that it can: if our government imposes a ‘pollution tax’ that functions effectively to contain overall pollution at safe levels, then any individual polluter can be acting justifiably as long as they pay the tax. Indeed, when an effective regulatory scheme operates in the background, it is tempting to adopt a picture of a moral division of labour in which the fundamental responsibility for ensuring that burdens which would otherwise flow from these sorts of actions do not occur lies with a regulatory authority, while the responsibility of those under its authority is principally to comply with its rules. We argue in this paper that whatever appeal this picture of a moral division of labour may have in the context of a fully effective scheme of regulation (we’ll show that even then it has some important limitations) it is considerably less attractive in contexts where regulation is either altogether lacking or exists but falls short in various respects. In a constructive spirit, we will develop an account of how the different respects in which a regulatory system can fail to fully address the imposition of some burden can help shape the responsibilities of actors operating under the auspices of that system. We will be exploring these issues with an eye to illuminating a practically urgent case of this general kind: anthropocentric climate change.
Time and date: 3pm–4:30pm, Wednesday, 16 April
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02

A quiver full of arrows

Fernando Cano-Jorge (Otago, Philosophy)
Philosophical inquiry requires analysing conditional claims, and one would expect logic to provide an account of correct conditional reasoning. However, logic recognizes several notions of implication and these are often in conflict with each other. Does this mean that logic has failed in providing philosophy with the tools it requires? To this, I will answer in the negative. I will argue that the reason why there are many logical notions of implication is because there are many conditional-like relations, as shown by many areas of philosophy. If my point is right, then logic provides exactly what philosophy needs; but it is futile to expect that a single account of conditional reasoning will suffice for all sorts of philosophical inquiries. This argument demands looking into the question ``what is implication?", which in turn requires to single out the necessary conditions that a binary connective must satisfy for it to be considered a conditional connective. My current position on this problem is that (1) there is no positive necessary condition that a binary connective must have in order to be a conditional connective; but (2) there is at least one negative necessary condition: the connective must not be symmetric. The argument for (2) is simple, almost self-evident. The argument for (1) requires that we single out the most standard features of conditionals and show why it is reasonable to expect these to fail in some contexts, of which there are many examples in philosophy.
Time and date: 3pm–4:30pm, Wednesday, 9 April
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02

Methodological Consequentialism in Legal Theory: Thinking Through Noble Lies

Jan Mihal (Law, Otago)
Conceptual engineering is beginning to find its proponents in modern legal theory. Theorists are beginning to ask not only “what is (our concept of) law?” but “what should (our concept of) law be?” Most who ask the latter question think it has a role to play in guiding how we answer the former – a conceptual or metaphysical account of law is to be seen not only as a descriptive exercise but as a normative one, as well. In this presentation, I will introduce the term “methodological consequentialsm” to capture a core aspect of the position of conceptual engineers and others. A methodological consequentialist holds that answers to questions should be judged, at least partly, on the downstream value or benefit – or, in any case, the consequences – of these answers. Taking account of the consequences of certain answers (to, eg, conceptual or metaphysical questions in philosophy or general jurisprudence) is part of good methodology. I draw upon Plato’s example of the Noble Lie to provide some early-stage thoughts and arguments around the possibility and desirability of maintaining a methodological consequentialist position, its applicability and appropriateness across different domains, and possible limitations.
Time and date: 3pm–4:30pm, Wednesday, 2 April
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02

Inference-Barriers, Operator Logic and Doing Justice to Shorter: a Response to Gillian Russell’s Barriers to Entailment

Charles Pigden (Philosophy, Otago)
A barrier thesis is a claim that you cannot logically derive conclusions of one kind from premises of another, Hume’s Law or No-Ought-From-Is being a prime example. All such theses are menaced by a set of counterexamples devised by Arthur Prior in his 1960 paper ‘The Autonomy of Ethics’. In Barriers to Entailment, Gillian Russell formulates and proves a number of Prior-proof barrier theses including Hume’s Law, (Bertrand) Russell’s Law, (You can’t get a general conclusion from particular premises); Hume’s Second Law, (You can’t get a conclusion about the future from premises about the past or present). I compare my solution to Prior’s Paradox with Russell’s before making a number of (mostly friendly) comments and suggestions. An apparent weakness in Russell’s view is that unlike Schurz and I do, she cannot make room for Shorter’s intuition (in what was the first published response to Prior) that in so far as they follow from non-normative premises the conclusions of Prior’s inferences are – somehow– not really moral or normative. I show that we can vindicate a version of Shorter’s idea in the context of Russell’s system.
Time and date: 3pm–4:30pm, Wednesday, 26 March
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02

A Child's Right to a Gender Open Future

Samantha Brennan (Dean, College of Arts University of Guelph)
If children’s rights protect their right to an open future, what does that entail for thinking about children and gender? Across North America, policies that affirm the gender of trans and gender nonbinary children are under attack. Part of the justification of these attacks rests on a particular account of parental rights, one in which parents, not the state, and certainly not children themselves, are deemed to have authority over a child’s gender. Most of the responses to these arguments either argue against the understanding of parental rights put forward or deny that the policies in question follow from parental rights. Instead, I want to look at the issue from the perspective of children’s rights, beginning by looking at a child’s right to an open future. What sorts of behaviors would a more gender-open approach to parenting recommend or require, from an ethical perspective? How should schools treat children if children have a right to a gender-open future?
Time and date: 3pm–4:30pm, Wednesday, 12 March
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02

Classical logic is dead. Long live classical logic!

Professor Jc Beall (The O'Neill Family Chair in Philosophy at University of Notre Dame; Honorary Prof of Philosophy at University of Sydney)
The debate between so-called classical and subclassical logic is this: which relation is logical consequence (i.e., logical entailment, logical validity)? This talk rehearses, in user-friendly terms, the so-called simple argument for the subclassical account over the 'classical' account. This is an important argument upon which to reflect, especially if one otherwise unreflectively heels the 'classical' line. The argument, in short, is that between the 'classical' and target subclassical candidate, the latter is best because it loses no true theories yet gains important live candidates for true theories. Time permitting, I defend one plank of the argument (viz., the 'lose no true theories' part) against a recent worry raised by logicians Hitoshi Omori and Michael De, which can be explained in very simple terms. (If time doesn't permit, I'm happy to discuss the matter afterwards!)
Time and date: 3pm–4:30pm, Wednesday, 5 March
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02

Hume, Naturalism and Scepticism: Rejecting an Influential Narrative

Professor Peter Millican (National University of Singapore and University of Oxford)
David Hume’s philosophy is standardly interpreted as both sceptical and naturalistic, and as such has been inspirational to contemporary thought across a wide range of areas, including epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, and philosophy of religion. A popular interpretative narrative – deriving from Norman Kemp Smith, and later strongly endorsed (both interpretatively and philosophically) by Barry Stroud, Peter Strawson, and many others – views Hume’s naturalism as providing some general response, or even a resolution, to the sceptical problems that he raises. Here I want to challenge this narrative, by drawing distinctions within both naturalism and scepticism, and showing how Hume’s responses to his most prominent philosophical challenges are importantly different, while the idea that he employs a consistent "naturalist" strategy to address them is also misguided when examined in detail. The results are relevant not only to Hume interpretation, but also to the issues that Hume discusses.
Time and date: 3pm–4:30pm, Wednesday, 26 February
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02

Lectures

Dan and Gwen Taylor Lecturers

• 2024: Kristie Miller (Sydney); David Braddon-Mitchell (Sydney)
• 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.