Putting others on a pedestal: Testimony, Admiration, and Due Respect
Seminar
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…
Making the Goods in Work Accessible and the Paternalism Objection
Seminar
Work can enable people to get consumption items, develop capacities, socialise, contribute to society, give direction to their lives, gain knowledge, and foster their self-esteem and self-respect. This paper outlines a normative argument for policies supporting workers’ access to these goods and…
Quantifying the Human
Seminar
Quantitative measurement in the human sciences remains controversial. Are depression scales, intelligence tests, etc. valid measurement instruments? Do they deliver quantitative or merely ordinal information? Cristian discusses two approaches for understanding practices of quantitative measurement…
Work, Leisure, and the Sources of Meaning in Life
Seminar
Matthew begins with the question ‘what is work?’ Many argue that ‘work’ is a hopelessly indeterminate term that cannot be adequately defined. Against this view, he defends a novel account of what work is. Building on this, he then develops accounts of three other types of human activity that can be…
Transitions in individuality and mesoscale structure
Seminar
In some ways, questions concerning individuality and evolutionary transitions in individuality appear to be uniquely biological. However, many of the underlying concerns regarding the enduring status of collectives and the emergence of higher-level individuals can also be found in other contexts —…
Young Wittgenstein and Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgement
Seminar
In June 1913, Bertrand Russell abandoned writing a book (partly published in 1984 under the title Theory of Knowledge), apparently because of a “paralysing” objection made to him by the 24-year-old Ludwig Wittgenstein, then a research student at Cambridge. Wittgenstein’s objection was directed…
Transformers and the Format of Thought
Seminar
Transformers are an extraordinarily powerful computational architecture, applicable across a range of domains. They are, notably, the computational foundation of contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs’ facility with language have led many to draw analogies between LLMs and human cognitive…