The Puzzle of Musical Repetition - Jenny Judge
Seminar
Speaker: Jenny Judge Take any piece of music, from any genre you like: pop, classical, jazz, bluegrass, shoegaze, grunge, death metal. Odds are, that piece will be saturated with repetition at every level, from the micro to the macro. Melodies are often stated only to be immediately…
The repugnant conclusion and internal consistency of choice - Susumu Cato
Seminar
Speaker: Susumu Cato The mere addition paradox pioneered by Derek Parfit is revisited. The paradox revolves around two conditions: "mere addition," which posits that adding individuals with positive utility should make a population at least as good as the original, and "non-anti-…
Moral Encroachment Across Species Boundaries - John Matthewson
Seminar
Speaker: John Matthewson Proponents of moral encroachment argue that moral considerations can affect epistemic rationality. Although the various accounts of moral encroachment diverge in important ways, the core claim is that, given a fixed type and quantity of evidence, the…
Oct 11 - TBC
Seminar
Speaker TBC 12–1PM 13 SEPTEMBER 2023 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.
What is life? Narrowing the scope - Emily Parke
Seminar
Speaker: Emily Park The nature of life has been debated for thousands of years. Surveys of the literature have counted over 100 proposed answers to the question "What is life?". Recently the literature has divided into some arguing for pluralist or pragmatic approaches, and others…
Nature, Artifice, and Discovery in Descartes’ Mechanical Philosophy
Seminar
Speaker: Deborah Brown It is often assumed that in the early modern collapse of the Aristotelian distinction between art and nature, the collapse falls on the side of art. That is, all diversity among natures is simply the product of arrangements of matter that result blindly from…
Kraemer’s Puzzle and the Theory of Intentional Action - Kyle Blumberg
Seminar
Speaker: Kyle Blumberg Jane is given the opportunity to push a button which will send a lethal arrow shooting down one of ten specified paths. Jane has no idea which path the arrow will travel down if she pushes the button. But she does know that Bill is standing on path three. Jane…