Keith Dowding (ANU): Intuitions and Intuition Pumps In Moral Philosophy
Other
What are moral intuitions and what role do they play in moral theory? Rawls’s reflective equilibrium suggests that we test moral theories by our intuitions and then bring each into line to reach some equilibrium. Intuition pumps work by asking what are our immediate apprehensions about some story…
Laura Valentini (LSE): Legitimate Authority and Unilateral Annexation
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On Friday, March 21st 2014, Russia unilaterally annexed the Crimean peninsula, part of the sovereign state of Ukraine. Does Russia have legitimate authority over the people of Crimea? To address this question, and the more general issues it illustrates, I consider what competing accounts of…
Daniel Gregory (ANU): Inner Speech Is Actual Speech [Mid-Term Review]
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There is a temptation to think that inner speech is imagined speech. It involves the use of imagery and it takes place wholly in the mind. I am going to argue that inner speech is not imagined speech but a type of actual speech. To do so, I will appeal to a range of considerations including the…
MSPT Seminar: Justin Bruner (ANU): The possibility of pluralism
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I consider a community of agents with a variety of different moral beliefs, practices and values. Such diversity often leads to conflict, and recent work by Gregory Kavka (1995) as well Gerald Gaus (2011) has attempted to better understand how such infighting can be avoided. I argue…
John Broome (Oxford/ANU): Rationality
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I shall review some features of rationality. They will include the relation between rationality and responding to reasons, the nature and logic of rational requirements, some particular rational requirements, and the role of rationality in reasoning.
Kyle Stanford (UCI): History, Unconceived Alternatives, and a Scientific Realism Dispute Worth Having
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Historicists suggest that the historical record of scientific inquiry itself give us reasons to doubt the truth of even the best contemporary scientific theories. One recent line of thought holds that the most compelling version of such an historicist challenge is posed by a particular pattern in…