Yannik Thiem (Villanova): More Than Add-On Diversity: Equity and Inclusion Initiatives in Philosophy in the USA
Seminar
Philosophy in the USA continues to be a remarkably non-diverse discipline, demographically (ca. 75% white and 75% male), linguistically, and methodologically, even though the numbers of scholars from historically underrepresented groups have indeed increased over the past decade. However, a central…
Krister Bykvist: "Escaping impossibility theorems in population ethics"
Seminar
Decision-makers are in a hurry to find morally justified responses to climate change. Population ethicists have thrown a spanner in the works by formulating various impossibility theorems that show that no theory about the value of population change can satisfy all the conditions we are inclined to…
How AI Can Improve Human Moral Judgments - Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Lecture
HMI Public Lecture: How Artificial Intelligence can Improve Human Moral Judgments Presented by: Professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (joint work with Joshua August Skorburg) Ethicists usually appeal to their own intuitions with little evidence that their intuitions are reliable or shared by others…
Bryce Huebner: 'Does it Really Matter if We are Hallucinating? A Neuro-Yogācarin Perspective
Seminar
A number of philosophers and cognitive scientists have recently started to explore the possibility that perception is really a kind of ‘controlled hallucination’. But as exciting as this rhetoric is, they’ve said little about what ‘control’ amounts to; and few of them have explained why it matters…
Chris Howard: Consequentialists Must Kill
Seminar
Many contemporary act consequentialists define facts about what we ought to do in terms of facts about what we ought to prefer to be the case. They claim that we ought to perform an action if and only if (and because) we ought to prefer its outcome to the outcome of any available alternative. Some…
Jim Weatherall: Thursday Seminar - "Infinite space and modern cosmology"
Seminar
Over the last four decades, (physical) cosmologists have developed startlingly precise ways of measuring our universe. This period has also seen the rise and widespread acceptance of a "standard model" of cosmology, which describes the large-scale structure and history of the universe since the big…
Nomy Arpaly: Philsoc Seminar - Deliberation and Fetish
Seminar
Nomy Arpaly (Brown University): “Deliberation and Fetish” We often take it as speaking well of a person that before she has acted, she deliberated as to what the right thing to do would be. We often at least partially excuse such a deliberator if she does the wrong thing in a situation where it is…