Massimo Renzo (KCL): Consent and Intentions
Seminar
What does it take to give morally valid consent? Is it enough that the consenter forms a particular mental state or does one need to communicate (or perhaps attempt to communicate) the presence of that mental state? This question has received significant attention in the news recently, primarily in…
Victoria McGeer (ANU/Princeton): Intelligent Capacities
Seminar
In The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle argued that a more sophisticated understanding of the dispositional nature of “intelligent capacities” could help us resist an unfortunate philosophical temptation to view the mind as consisting in a range of metaphysically mysterious causal powers and…
Christine Sypnowich (Queen's): What's Wrong with Equality of Opportunity
Workshop
How do we know if people are equal? There are a number of issues at stake for contemporary philosophers when determining if the goals of egalitarian distributive justice have been achieved: defining the metric of equality, or ‘equality of what’; determining whether the goal is equality per se, or…
Deborah Brown (UQ): Automata
Seminar
The rise of automation in the 17th century — the production of machines that “move of their own accord” — raised interesting questions for philosophical worldviews committed to the new mechanical philosophy. On the one hand, there was the promise that much of what appeared in nature to be animated…
Can you afford (not) to be an ethical consumer? (Prof. Christian Barry)
Other
Topical talks by leading College of Arts and Social Sciences Academics
Colin Klein (ANU): What do we represent when we represent peripersonal space?
Seminar
Work in both animals and humans has emphasised that the brain specifically tracks the space near the body---the so-called peripersonal space (PPS). These representations appear to be multimodal and expressed in body-centred coordinates. They also play an important role in defence of the body…
Climate Harms - Garrett Cullity (Adelaide)
Seminar
How should we think of the relationship between the climate harms that others will suffer in the future and our current emissions activity? Who does the harming? Which harms are attributable to which agents? We can ask these questions of both individual agents and groups. I begin by considering…