Refugees and the Limits of Political Philosophy
Seminar
Refugees and the Limits of Political Philosophy Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution, but in practice many seek and do not find. Where asylum is in short supply, can we identify principles for prioritizing the asylum claims of some over those of…
Against Moral Encroachment - Georgi Gardiner (Oxford)
Seminar
Moral encroachment holds that the epistemic justification of a belief can be affected by moral factors. If the belief might wrong a person or group more evidence is required to justify the belief. Moral encroachment thereby opposes purism, which holds that epistemic justification is determined…
Kerah Gordon-Solmon (Queen's): Not as a Means: Killing as a Side Effect in Self-Defense
Seminar
A person who keeps her car well maintained and always drives cautiously and alertly decides to drive to the movies. Freak circumstances cause the car to go out of control. It has veered in the direction of a pedestrian whom it will kill unless she, or a third party, blows it up with a…
Medieval Modal Spaces
Seminar
Bob Pasnau (University of Colorado) Medieval Modal Spaces The Aristotelian conception of modality tended, for much of its history, to be founded mainly on what happens in the actual world, leaving little room for unactualized possibilities. Beginning in the later Middle Ages, however,…
Pursuit of Platonic Tethering to the Truth: An Outline of Learning-Theoretic Epistemology
Seminar
24 July, 3:30-5:30pm Sir Roland Wilson Building, 3.03/3.04 Note the unusual location. Hanti Lin (UC Davis) Pursuit of Platonic Tethering to the Truth: An Outline of Learning-Theoretic Epistemology I will defend an epistemological tradition that, I believe, is underappreciated in philosophy…
Saving Lives and Statistical Deaths- Rahul Kumar (Queen's)
Seminar
Recent discussions of contractualism and permissible risk imposition argue that because contractualism holds aggregate welfare to have no bearing on how it is permissible for individuals to relate to one another, it ends up committed to the position that faced with a choice between curing a person…
Neil Mehta (Yale-NUS): The Conceptual Case Against Phenomenal Particularism
Seminar
Phenomenal particularism is roughly the view that external particulars sometimes figure in the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences. In this paper, I argue against phenomenal particularism by appealing to a conceptual explication of the term phenomenal character.