Anthea Roberts (ANU-RegNet): “Is International Law International?” (book presentation)
Seminar
Is International Law International” takes the reader on a far-reaching tour of the international legal field to reveal some of the patterns of difference, dominance, and disruption that belie international law's claim to universality. Pulling back the curtain on the "divisible college of…
Tom Tillemans: Philosophical Quietism in Nāgārjuna and Nāgārjunians
Seminar
The 2-3rd century C.E. Buddhist thinker Nāgārjuna – of whom, interestingly enough, a statue occupies a prominent position in ANU’s Philosophy Department—advocated a type of quietism in verse 50 of his Sixty Verses on Reasoning(Yuktiṣaṣṭikā): (1) "Superior individuals have no [philosophical]theses…
Matteo Bonotti (Monash): Free Speech: A Relational Defence
Seminar
Much of the recent literature on freedom of speech has focused on the arguments for and against the regulation of certain kinds of speech, such as hate speech and pornography. Less attention, however, has been paid, at least recently, to the analysis of the very normative foundations of freedom of…
Zach Weber (University of Ontago): Limits, contradictions and locality
Seminar
In this talk I revisit some famous logical paradoxes, and consider the possibility that they are utterly ordinary. To do this, I look at the inclosure schema, proposed by Graham Priest as the underlying structure of many paradoxes. The picturesque idea behind the inclosure schema is that paradoxes…
Alex Sandgren and Koji Tanaka: ‘Two kinds of logical impossibility’
Seminar
Abstract: In this paper, we argue that a distinction ought to be drawn between two ways in which a given world might be logically impossible. First, a world w might be impossible because the laws that hold at w are different from those that hold at some other world (e.g. the actual world). Second,…
Wlodek Rabinowicz (Lund): Goodness and Numbers
Other
David is stranded on one island, Peter and Mary on the other. You can either save David alone or both Peter and Mary. Is there a good argument for saving the greater number? John Taurek (1977) famously, or notoriously, denied this. One way to provide such an argument would be to establish an…
David Kalkman (ANU): Would you like Grice with that? Grades of speaker meaning and their comparative ramifications
Seminar
Would you like Grice with that? Grades of speaker meaning and their comparative ramifications. Human communication is unique. We talk about abstract entities, entities displaced in space and time, and even completely non-existent entities. Recent 'post-Gricean' explanatory accounts of…