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…
Space & Number in Animal Minds
Workshop
This workshop brings together scientists and philosophers who are interested in how animals represent properties like distance, location, time, and number. The goal is to pursue a richer understanding of how brain and behaviour intersect in natural contexts (e.g. in navigation tasks) and assess the…
A Control Theory of Action - Mikayla Kelley
Seminar
Speaker: Mikayla Kelley One of the central problems in the philosophy of action is to spell out the distinction between action and what merely happens, e.g., a wink versus an eye twitch. This talk proposes a theory of action offering an account of this distinction. The central claim of…
Options must be internal (but don’t blame me if I don’t always do what I ought) - Toby Solomon
Seminar
Speaker: Toby Solomon Abstract: Many people believe that ought implies can. However, when the ``ought’’ in question is the ``ought’’ of ``rationally ought’’ there is a tension between this thesis and another—that the demands of rationality should be first-person accessible. Or, in other…