‘Relevance and Possible Lives’ - Pre-Submission Talk
Seminar
Abstract: When there are two groups of people with claims for your assistance and you can only help one of them, which group ought you to choose? The “Relevance View” offers plausible guidance on how to weigh up these competing claims. It allows weak claims to aggregate to outweigh a…
Time and the Decider - David Spurrett (University of KwaZulu-Natal)
Seminar
Speaker: David Spurrett I characterise a family of views about the implementation of action selection as ‘Central Banker’ accounts. Central Bankers are top level executives for cognitive processes of selection. Their activities are often described in economic or financial terms, as maximising…
The Coevolution of Commitment and Cooperation
Seminar
Abstract: In this talk, I argue that a significant factor in the evolution of human cooperation is the coevolution of commitment and cooperation. I show how different methods of undertaking commitments in our evolutionary history have enabled more sophisticated forms of cooperation over time. These…
What is Free Speech?
Lecture
In a country where one can be jailed for one's political opinions, one lacks freedom of speech. Freedom of speech entails the absence of coercive government interference in speech. But the absence of such interference is a merely necessary condition on free speech. What more needs to be the case in…
Selim Berker (Harvard)
Seminar
Selim Berker (Harvard) 12–1PM 12 August 2022 Location: RSSS room 6.71 or online via this Zoom link Paper title, details for accessing the paper and session details will be circulated through the Philsoc-l mailing list, which you can subscribe to here.
The Deontic, the Evaluative, and the Fitting
Seminar
The evaluative categories (goodness, badness, betterness, and the like) and the deontic categories (requiredness, permittedness, forbiddenness, and the like) are separate families of normative categories, each with its own distinctive logic, structure, and basis. The aim of this paper is to argue…
The aboutness argument against the modal theory of states of affairs
Seminar
Abstract: Define a state of affairs to be a way things are or a way things fail to be. The modal theory of states of affairs holds that, for any states of affairs s1 and s2, s1 = s2 iff s1 and s2 are necessarily equivalent to each other (that is, iff, necessarily, s1 obtains iff s2 obtains). A…