Michael Cholbi (Cal Poly Pomona): Equal Respect for Rational Agency
Seminar
Individuals are owed equal respect. But on the basis of what property of individuals are they owed such respect? One answer, popular among Kantians, is rational agency. This answer appears less plausible in light of the growing psychological evidence that human choice is subject to a wide array of…
Alexander Sandgren (ANU): New Work for a Theory of Intentionality
Seminar
My goal in this paper is to make progress toward a unified theory of intentionality that does not fall prey to either of the most serious species of puzzles facing any theory of intentionality; indeterminacy puzzles (e.g. modal-theoretic arguments, the qua problem, rule-following problems) and…
Interdisciplinary workshop on Social Cognition
Workshop
Social cognition, the ability to accept, process, and apply information about social situtations and contexts, has been studied from many different scientific and philosophical perspectives.This workshop, sponsored by the Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences, will bring together an…
Feasibility and Immigration Workshop
Workshop
Immigration has become a central topic in political philosophy in recent years. Feasibility has also begun to attract a great deal of interest, with a number of political philosophers now paying attention to its nature and appropriate role in normative inquiry. This workshop will bring…
Richard Moore (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): Overexuberant Adaptationism: The Case of Natural Pedagogy
Seminar
Csibra and Gergely argue that, as part of an adaptation for ‘natural pedagogy’, infants are prewired to recognise ‘ostensive signals’ as indicating that a speaker is acting with communicative intent (Grice’s property of ‘non-natural meaning’). I raise a series of objections to their account. First…
Bruno Ippedico: When Chomsky Meets Evolution
Seminar
How did language evolve? The answer depends on what your theory of language says about language. In this talk we will look at Chomsky's latest theory of language, and at Berwick and Chomsky's account of how language, as characterised by Chomsky's theory, evolved. The guiding question will be this…