Aesthetic Appreciation, Aesthetic Judgments, and Love (coauthored with Joel Van Fossen) - Daniel Star
Seminar
Aesthetic appreciation is a mental process, while aesthetic judgment is a mental state. This paper explores some interesting mistakes that arise in aesthetics as a result of collapsing differences between appreciation and judgment, and sheds new light on the relationship between the two. The latter…
Liberalism as a Way of Life - Alexandre Lefebvre
Seminar
This presentation is based on Professor Lefebvre's new book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, and about how liberal values and practices can be the basis for a personal worldview, way of living, and spiritual orientation. You don’t have to be liberal and something else, such as Christian, Buddhist…
How Many Empathies Are There? A Puzzle About Co-Experienced Emotions - Heidi Maibom
Seminar
Anybody familiar with the empathy literature will know that everybody’s busy distinguishing one form of empathy from others. And whereas it would certainly be helpful to agree on what the major distinctions are and what to call them, it remains a fact that many, if not most, empathic episodes are…
Compositionality in Deep Neural Networks - Raphaël Millière
Seminar
Computation over compositionally structured representations is central to linguistic processing and cognition. Classical models readily account for this capacity through discrete symbolic representations that can be combined into complex representations with constituent structure. By contrast, it…
Engineering Conceptual Prototypes - Rachel Rudolph
Seminar
Discussion of conceptual engineering within philosophy tends to focus on changes to concepts that result in changes in their extensions. Consider, e.g., changing the concept RAPE to include marital rape. This neglects a prominent view of concepts from psychology, namely Prototype Theory. Conceptual…
Justice in Gestation and Moral Integrity: A Dilemma - Luara Ferracioli
Seminar
Political philosophers have recently turned to the topic of justice in gestation, emphasising that the uterine environment contributes to future health outcomes and talents enjoyed in adulthood. In this presentation, Luara will argue that bringing justice to bear on gestation is more…
How to theorise about social construction - Brian Epstein
Seminar
The claim that basic kinds and categories in the world are “socially constructed” is perennially debated in philosophy and social theory. Over the years, lots of categories—races, genders, sexes, morality, commodities, corporations, and many more—have been put forward as cases of social…