Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Recent Episodes
The Aristotelian Society
The Aristotelian Society, founded in 1880, meets fortnightly in London to hear and discuss talks given by leading philosophers from a broad range of philosophical traditions. The papers read at the Society’s meetings are published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. The mission of the Society is to make philosophy widely available to the general public, and the Aristotelian Society Podcast Series represents our latest initiative in furthering this goal. The audio podcasts of our talks are produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London. Please visit our website to learn more about us and our publications: http://www.aristoteliansociety.org.uk
The partiality we display, insofar as we form and sustain personal attachments, is not normatively fundamental. It is a byproduct of the deference and responsiveness that are essential to our engagement with the world. We cannot form and sustain valuable personal relationships without seeing ourselves as answerable to the other participants in those relationships. And we cannot develop and sustain valuable projects without responding to the constraints imposed on our activities by the nature and requirements of those projects themselves. More generally, we cannot engage with the world without meeting it on its terms, and we cannot meet the world on its terms without responding differentially – or displaying partiality – with respect to the objects of our engagement. Partiality is thus a byproduct of engagement. We cannot engage with the world at all without exhibiting forms of partiality.
Samuel Scheffler is University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at NYU. He works primarily in the areas of moral and political philosophy and the theory of value. His writings have addressed central questions in ethical theory, and he has also written on topics as diverse as equality, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, toleration, terrorism, immigration, tradition, death, and the future of humanity. Scheffler received his A.B. from Harvard and his Ph.D. from Princeton. From 1977-2008 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of six books: The Rejection of Consequentialism, Human Morality, Boundaries and Allegiances, Equality and Tradition, Death and the Afterlife (Niko Kolodny ed.), and Why Worry about Future Generations? He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, and he has been a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His first book was awarded the Matchette Prize of the American Philosophical Association. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, and a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is currently at work on a book (tentatively) titled The Lives We Lead: Personal Attachment and the Passage of Time.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Scheffler's talk - "Partiality, Deference, and Engagement" - at the Aristotelian Society on 20th June 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
At a climactic—and, indeed, incendiary—moment in Bernard Williams’ classic essay, “Internal and External Reasons,” Williams says that those who advance moral criticisms by appealing to so-called external reasons are engaging in “bluff”. Williams thus alleges that condemning certain actions of others as somehow not only immoral, but also irrational or contrary to reason is nothing more than a kind of pretense. To say that a favorite pastime that so many of us happily engage in is empty, well—to use an American colloquialism—“them’s fightin’ words!” Indeed, in criticizing certain moral criticisms in this way, Williams’ words are fightin’ words about fightin’ words.
Why does Williams proffer these meta-fightin’ words? Readers—and indeed perhaps Williams himself—have struggled to articulate a precise argument for this claim that there are no external reasons and that those who try to invoke them in criticism of others are engaging in bluff. Thus, the force of Williams’ point has remained, at best, elusive, perhaps even to Williams himself.
In this paper, I first want to defend Williams’ claim that the appeal to external reasons is illegitimate. But I will do so from a perspective that is radically different from the ones usually at work in considering Williams’ position. Indeed, this perspective is one that may or may not (probably not!) be in the spirit of Williams’ actual reasons for rejecting external reasons, so it is important to keep in mind (as I will remind you from time to time) that I am not offering an interpretation of Williams here. The distinctive aspect of my approach is that I argue that a rationalist line of thought can support Williams’ claims. To bring out this line of thought, I will examine the metaphysical commitments of those who engage in what Williams calls bluff. I will then reject those commitments on powerful and widely popular rationalist grounds. I will, in other words, endeavor to support Williams’ charge of bluff by investigating what I call the metaphysics of bluff and by offering a rationalist critique of that metaphysics.
Michael Della Rocca is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He has published widely in early modern philosophy and in contemporary metaphysics. His most recent book, The Parmenidean Ascent (Oxford 2020), defends a radical form of monism in metaphysics, philosophy of action, epistemology, and philosophy of language.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Della Rocca's talk - "Moral Criticism and the Metaphyscis of Bluff" - at the Aristotelian Society on 6th June 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
When we doubt a belief, we examine how things look from a perspective in which that belief is set aside. Sometimes we care about what that perspective recommends and, as a result, we abandon the belief we've been doubting. Other times we don't: we recognize that a perspective in which a certain belief is set aside recommends abandoning it, but we go on believing it anyway. Why is this? In this paper, I'll consider and then reject some proposals concerning when to defer to the perspective of doubt. I'll argue that ultimately the question of whether to defer to doubt on any given occasion can’t be answered through rational deliberation aimed at truth or accuracy. If I’m right, this means that a certain challenge facing defeatist views about higher order evidence cannot be met: namely, providing a motivation for abandoning belief in cases of higher order evidence, but not becoming a global skeptic.
Miriam Schoenfield received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012 and is now an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and an Affiliate Professor at the Dianoia Institute for Philosophy at Australian Catholic University. In addition to teaching at UT Austin, Miriam has served as a Bersoff fellow at New York University, an Associate Professor at MIT, and has taught philosophy in a number of different prison systems. She is the winner of the Marc Sanders Prize in Epistemology and the Young Epistemologist Prize. Her current research focuses on the ways in which Bayesian epistemology, and the aims of truth and accuracy, bear on debates about how to respond to evidence of our own irrationality.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Schoenfield's talk - "Deferring to Doubt" - at the Aristotelian Society on 30th May 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
In the interpretation of Parmenides of Elea, there is a certain vulgate, one widely represented in general histories of philosophy and indeed assumed by philosophers broadly. The metaphysical tenor and thrust of the philosophy of Parmenides, according to this vulgate, is holistic monism: "all things are one," in Greek, hen to pan. As it may be recalled, Parmenides reached his metaphysical conclusions by initially reflecting on the language of to mē on or to ouk on (either of which may be translated as "what is not," or "non-being," or "not being"). Famously, or notoriously, he did rule that there is something conceptually and logically unacceptable in speaking or thinking of "not being." Ascribing that initial philosophical move to Parmenides is certainly beyond dispute. The vulgate, however, adds that he must also have reflected on the language of "different" (heteron) and "other" (allo); and then he proceeded to draw powerful metaphysical inferences in the following way: If, with respect to some A and some B, we are to hold that A is "different from" (or "other than") B, or vice versa, then we are committed to holding that "A is not B" and "B is not A." But if grasping "not-being" is inherently impossible, it should likewise count impossible that we should conceive more narrowly of "A's not being B," or of "B's not being A." Once distinctions of any sort are logically disallowed, the metaphysical conclusion seems inevitable: hen to pan, "all things are one." The epistemological corollary of holistic monism is that the world humans experience, fraught as it is with plurality and pervasively splintered by distinctions, is ultimately and fundamentally an illusion.
Alexander P. D. Mourelatos is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy and in Classics at The University of Texas at Austin, where in 1967 he founded and for twenty years directed, the Joint Classics-Philosophy Graduate Program in Ancient Philosophy. He is the author of The Route of Parmenides (1970; 2nd edn., 2008), and editor of The Pre-Socratics: A Collection of Critical Essays 1974; 2nd edn., 1993). Scholarly articles of his have appeared in journals in: philosophy; classics; ; history of science; and linguistics. On more than 170 occasions, he has delivered invited lectures at academic venues in North and South America, Europe, and Australasia. He received all his academic degrees from Yale University (Ph.D., 1964), and has been awarded two honorary doctorates in his native Greece (University of Athens, 1994; University of Crete, 2017). Students of his and colleagues have presanted him with two collections in his honor: in 2002, Presocratic Philosophy—Essays in Honour of Alexander Mourelatos; and in 2019, a special double issue of the periodical Philosophical Inquiry. He has held research appointments at: the University of Wisconsin, Madison; the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ); the Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington, DC, Harvard University); Cambridge University; and the Australian National University.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Mourelatos's talk - "Parmenides of Elea and Xenophanes of Colophon: the Conceptually Deeper Connections" - at the Aristotelian Society on 23rd May 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
In this paper I give answers to two apparently unrelated questions and aim to convince you that these different concerns are, in fact, intertwined. The first question is, why is dualism so tenacious? The second is, what is really at issue in the debate between Burge and McDowell? Regarding the first question, various contemporary philosophers have cast Descartes as the originator of a pernicious idea about the radical difference between mind and body, an idea with weed-like tenacity, that many have attempted to dig out once and for all, but which always seems to grow back from fragments left in the soil. The problem with this diagnosis of dualistic thinking as the result of an individual philosopher’s influence is that it fails to consider that there may be broader and still active causes of its appeal. What is left unconsidered is the possibility that dualism is symptomatic of the wider tendencies of the scientific culture that Descartes, amongst others, represents, and that it persists not because of the long shadow of one philosopher, but because the essentials of this intellectual culture remain. In Sections 2 and 3 I will argue that this is indeed the case, and that the mode of thought at issue is to do with the dominance of scientific idealisations in our thinking about nature, including human beings and their minds.
In answer to the second question, Fish (2021) has examined the debate between Burge and McDowell over the alleged incompatibility of disjunctivism with the discoveries of perceptual science, and has compared it to a clash of Kuhnian paradigms. Miguens (2020) takes conflicting ideas about representations to be the main point of disagreement. I will argue instead that the point at issue is Burge’s acceptance, and McDowell’s rejection of the ‘Cartesian idealisation’ of mind as a self-contained system. Fish’s treatment of the controversy as a matter of competing research programmes, analogous to scientific ones, neglects the crucial particularity of the case, which is that McDowell’s philosophy of perception declines to define its explanatory objects in the way most conducive to scientific research. For this reason, there is more of a tension with science than McDowell admits; but as I will ultimately argue, this does not invalidate disjunctivism.
Mazviita Chirimuuta is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Her current research interests include philosophy of perception, philosophy of neuroscience, and history of the mind/brain sciences. She received her PhD in Vision Science from the University of Cambridge in 2004. Following that she held post-docs in perceptual psychology, and in philosophy at Monash University and at Washington University in St. Louis. Between 2011-2020 she was Assistant then Associate Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Her book Outside Colour: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Colour in Philosophy was published by MIT Press in 2015, and she is currently working on a monograph under contract with MIT Press, The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience. The new book examines the various strategies that neuroscientists have used to produce simple models of formidably complex neural systems. Given that simplified representations, such as computational models, require departure from literal truth about the brain, the book will consider how to best interpret such abstractions when doing naturalistic philosophy of mind.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Chirimuuta's talk - "Disjunctivism and Cartesian Idealisation" - at the Aristotelian Society on 9th May 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Common-sense (or folk) psychology holds that (generally) we do what we do for the reasons we have. This common-sense approach is embodied in claims like “I went to the kitchen because I wanted a drink” or “She took a coat because she thought it might rain and she hoped to stay dry”. However, the veracity of these common-sense psychological explanations has been challenged by experimental evidence (primarily from behavioural economics and social psychology) which appears to show that individuals are systematically irrational – that often we do not do what we do because of the reasons we have. Recently, some of the same experimental evidence has also been used to level a somewhat different challenge at the common-sense view, arguing that the overarching aim of reasoning is not to deliver better or more logical decisions for individual reasoners, but to improve group decision making or to protect an individual’s sense of self. This paper explores the range of challenges that experimental work has been taken to raise for the common-sense approach and suggests some potential responses. Overall, I argue that the experimental evidence should not (currently) lead us to a rejection of individual rationality.
Emma Borg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading and Joint Director of the Reading Centre for Cognition Research. She has held a number of visiting and advisory positions, including the White Distinguished Fellow for Philosophy at the University of Chicago, and sitting on the Executive Committee of the Mind Association. Currently she serves on the Advisory Board of the Leverhulme Trust, and (due to her work in business ethics) as an Independent Advisor to the Professional Standards Committee of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC). In the past, her research has focused on philosophy of language, particularly the semantics-pragmatics interface, but she currently holds a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for work exploring our understanding of human action.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Borg's talk - "In Defence of Individual Rationality" - at the Aristotelian Society on 25th April 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
This paper is about whether it is rational to intrinsically desire the vague. A proposition is inconsequential if neither it, nor its negation is rational to intrinsically desire. The objects of intrinsic desire are propositions, and the contradictory of propositional vagueness is propositional precision. Every vague proposition is not precise, and every precise proposition is not vague. The question to be pursued thus can be posed as follows: is every consequential proposition precise?
Jack Spencer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Before doing his PhD at Princeton, he studied philosophy and economics at University of Colorado, Boulder. Much of his research has been in metaphysics and decision theory. He is currently thinking about instantaneous rates-of-change, fundamentality, rationality and vagueness.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Spencer's talk - "Intrinsically Desiring the Vague" - at the Aristotelian Society on 21st March 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Photography is highly valued as a recording medium. Traditionally it has been claimed that photography is fundamentally a causal recording process, and that every photograph is the causal imprint of the world in front of the camera. In this paper I seek to challenge that traditional view. I claim that it is based on a ‘single-stage’ misconception of the process that defines photographs as mind-independent images and leaves no room for photographic depiction. I explain my objections to that view and propose an alternative, ‘multi-stage’ account of the process, in which I argue that causal registration of light is not equivalent to recording and reproducing an image. The proposed account can explain how photography functions as an exemplary recording medium, without supposing that every photograph is a mind-independent causal imprint of the world. Intervention or non-intervention by photographers is a more complex matter than the traditional view allows. Using the framework of the multistage account, I describe three different ways that photographic pictures can be produced.
Dawn Phillips studied at the University of Durham and wrote her PhD on Wittgenstein’s say-show distinction. She held philosophy positions at Kent, Cork, Southampton, Oxford, and Warwick. In 2011 she became a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Hull and, also, became Dawn Wilson.
Dawn has published on Wittgenstein early and late, particularly the Tractatus, including articles on logical analysis, clarity, symbolism, the picture theory of language and the expression of thought. With David Connearn, she co-authored an article about Wittgenstein’s House in Skjolden and co-ordinated an international letters campaign for the conservation of the house and its legacy.
She is interested in language, thought and image, particularly in art and aesthetics and the philosophy of photography. Her article, ‘Photography and Causation’, launched a field of debate known as the ‘New Theory’ of photography and was selected as one of twelve classic texts to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the British Journal of Aesthetics. She recently published ‘Invisible Images and Indeterminacy: Why we need a Multi-stage Account of Photography’ and she is co-authoring, with Laure Blanc-Benon, the photography entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. She is writing a book titled Aesthetics and Photography for Bloomsbury, and articles on temporal representation, co-portraiture, and comparing photography with music.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Wilson's talk - "Reflecting, Registering, Recording and Representing: From Light Image to Photographic Picture" - at the Aristotelian Society on 7th March 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Aesthetic beautification is a familiar artistic phenomenon: Even as they face death, heroes and heroines in operas still sing glorious music. Characters in Shakespearean tragedies still deliver beautifully eloquent speeches in the throes of despair. Even depicting suffering and horror, paintings can still remain a transfixing delight for the eyes. In such cases, the work of art represents or expresses something we would, in ordinary life, attribute a negative valence (suffering, horror, death, and the like), but it does so beautifully. Doubtless there is not a single explanation for what transpires in art of this sort or in our experience of it. With some aesthetically beautified art, its foremost goal might be giving aesthetic pleasure, and the beauty of the aesthetic form, even when depicting horrors, is in the service of this primary aim. In other art, the beautification might seek to be jarring and thought-provoking, highlighting a disconnect between the aesthetic frame and what is portrayed. These routes explain much of aesthetic beautification. But I am particularly interested in considering another more specific response still: finding ourselves somehow consoled by the beautification. I begin with some reflections on aesthetic beautification in general, and then turn to consider how beautification and consolation might be connected, and what to make of this.
Andrew Huddleston is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, where he is co-Director of the Centre for Research in Post-Kantian European Philosophy. He studied as an undergraduate at Brown and at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and did his PhD at Princeton under the supervision of Alexander Nehamas. Huddleston previously taught at Exeter College, Oxford and at Birkbeck College, University of London. He specializes in 19th and 20th Century European Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Ethics. His book Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture (2019) was published by Oxford University Press, and he is presently at work on a book tentatively titled Art’s Highest Calling: The Religion of Art in a Secular Age.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Huddleston's talk - "Aesthetic Beautification" - at the Aristotelian Society on 21 February 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Nietzsche’s attitude toward science is ambivalent: he remarks approvingly on its rigorous methodology and adventurous spirit, but also points out its limitations and rebukes scientists for encroaching onto philosophers’ territory. What does Nietzsche think is science’s proper role and relationship with philosophy? I argue that, according to Nietzsche, philosophy should set goals for science. Philosophers’ distinctive task is to ‘create values’, which involves two steps: (1) envisioning ideals for human life, and (2) turning those ideals into prescriptions for behaviour and societal organisation. To accomplish step (2), philosophers should delegate scientists to investigate what moral rules and social arrangements have best advanced this ideal in the past or might in the future.
Rachel Cristy is a Lecturer in Philosophy at King’s College London. She received her PhD in Philosophy from Princeton University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics before coming to King’s. She works on the history of late modern philosophy, primarily on Nietzsche, sometimes putting him in conversation with William James, one of the founders of American Pragmatism. She is especially interested in late modern philosophers’ attitudes toward science, including both epistemological views (on its methods, its limitations, what sort of philosophical foundation it has or needs) and ethical views (on the proper place of science in the life of individuals and societies). She has also published on Kant’s aesthetics as it relates to wine.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Cristy's talk - "Commanders and Scientific Labourers: Nietzsche on the Relationship Between Philosophy and Science" - at the Aristotelian Society on 31 January 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Metaphysicians are in the business of making and defending modal claims – claims about how things must be or cannot be. Wittgenstein’s opposition to necessity claims, along with his various negative remarks about ‘metaphysical’ uses of language, makes it seem almost a truism that Wittgenstein was opposed to metaphysics. In this paper I want to make a case for rejecting that apparent truism. My thesis is that it is illuminating to characterise what Wittgenstein and Anscombe are doing in their philosophical writing as metaphysics without manufactured necessities. Doing so helps to articulate a sharper, more interesting, critique of contemporary metaphysical practices than therapeutic or linguistic framings of Wittgenstein’s method make possible. It also allows us to place Anscombe in the context of a tradition of British metaphysics that emerged in the 1940s in an attempt to reverse the devastating impact on ethics of the new ‘analytical’ philosophy.
Rachael Wiseman is Senior Lecturer in Philosphy at University of Liverpool. She is the author of the Routledge Guidebook to Anscombe’s Intention (Routledge, 2016) and, with Clare Mac Cumhaill, Metaphysical Animals (Chatto & Windus, 2022) — a joint philosophical biography of GEM Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch. She is associate editor (for analytic philosophy) at British Journal for the History of Philosophy.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Wiseman's talk - "Metaphysics by Analogy" - at the Aristotelian Society on 17 January 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
According to the doxastic wrongs thesis, merely entertaining certain beliefs about others can wrong them, even if one does not act on those beliefs. Beliefs based on socially salient characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc., and which turn out to be false and are negatively valenced are prime candidates for the charge of doxastic wronging. My aim, in this paper, is to show that a plausible, Kantian argument for the thesis licences extending the latter to cases in which the belief is true and/or positively valenced. I begin by setting out the doxastic wrong thesis in its general form. I then reject Mark Schroeder’s argument for restricting it to false beliefs, and mount a positive, Kantian argument for including true beliefs within the ambit of the thesis. I end the paper by tackling some objections, in the course of which I extend the thesis to further cases.
Cécile Fabre is Senior Research Fellow in Politics at All Souls College, Oxford, and Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Oxford. She previous taught at the London School of Economics and the University of Edinburgh. She holds degrees from La Sorbonne University, the University of York, and the University of Oxford. Her research interests include theories of distributive justice, issues relating to the rights we have over our own body and, more recently, just war theory,and the ethics of foreign policy.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Fabre's talk - "Doxastic Wrongs, Non-spurious Generalisations and Particularised Beliefs" - at the Aristotelian Society on 15 November 2021. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Heather Widdows is the John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics and Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research and Knowledge Exchange) at the University of Birmingham. She is Deputy Chair of the Philosophy sub-panel for REF 2021 and was a member of the 2014 sub-panel. Her most recent book, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal (2018), was described by Vogue as “ground-breaking” and listed by The Atlantic as one of the best books of 2018. She is author of The Connected Self: The Ethics and Governance of the Genetic Individual (2103), Global Ethics: An Introduction (2011), and The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch (2005). She has co-edited, with Darrel Moellendorf, The Routledge Handbook of Global Ethics (2014). She co-runs the Beauty Demands Network and Blog and the #everydaylookism project.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Widdows' talk - 'No Duty To Resist: Why individual resistance is an ineffective response to dominant beauty ideals' - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 October 2021. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
As the first talk for the 2021-22 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year’s Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Robert Stern (University of Sheffield) as the 114th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society’s President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy.
The 114th Presidential Address was chaired by Bill Brewer (KCL), the 113th President of the Aristotelian Society.
Robert Stern is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, where he has been since 1989. Prior to that he did his BA and PhD at Cambridge, and held a research fellowship at St John’s College Cambridge. His main research interests are in the history of philosophy – particularly Kant and Hegel, and also Kierkegaard, and more recently K. E. Løgstrup, Iris Murdoch, Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Luther. He connects these historical inquires with more systematic questions in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, particularly topics such as realism vs idealism, the use of transcendental arguments, and the nature of moral obligation. His books include three works on Hegel; a collection of papers on Kant; a discussion of transcendental arguments; an investigation into Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard on obligation; and a study of Løgstrup. He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2019, and has served on the Executive Committee of the Aristotelian Society and as President of the British Philosophical Association, and is currently chair of the Philosophy sub-panel for REF2021.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Stern's address - 'The Objectivity of Perception' - at the Aristotelian Society on 5 October 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Julia Borcherding is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Before moving to Cambridge, she was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow at New York University. Julia specializes in early modern philosophy, focusing on moral, epistemological and metaphysical themes and their intriguing interconnections. She has published on the philosophy of Leibniz, Conway, Cavendish, Arnauld and Spinoza. Her current book project The Metaphysics of Emotion investigates the underappreciated metaphysical dimensions of early modern accounts of love.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Borcherding's talk - '“I wish my Speech were like a Loadstone”: Cavendish on Love and Self-Love' - at the Aristotelian Society on 28 June 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Michael Beaney (毕明安) is Regius Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen, Professor of the History of Analytic Philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Recent books include The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy (edited, OUP, 2013) and Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2017). While the main focus of his work has been on the history of analytic philosophy (especially the writings of Frege, Wittgenstein, Stebbing, and Collingwood), his research interests include philosophical methodology (with particular reference to analysis and creativity throughout the history of philosophy), historiography, philosophical translation (he has just completed a new translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus for OUP), and Chinese philosophy (on which he has increasingly been working, especially ancient Chinese philosophy of language and logic). He was editor of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy from 2011 to 2020, and is general editor of a book series on the history of analytic philosophy (published by Palgrave Macmillan), and co-editor of a series entitled ‘BSHP New Texts in the History of Philosophy’ (published by OUP).
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Beaney's talk - 'Swimming Happily in Chinese Logic' - at the Aristotelian Society on 21 June 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Corine Besson is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. She did her undergraduate degree in Philosophy and French Literature at the University of Geneva. She went to Oxford for her postgraduate studies, to first do a B.Phil, and then write a D.Phil. on the relation of second-order logic to the theory of meaning.
Her research interests are in the philosophy of logic, epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy. Her current work focuses mostly on how logic relates to reasoning — from foundational, normative and epistemological perspectives. She has just finished writing a book for Oxford University Press on the relevance of Lewis Carroll’s regress argument (in his Mind 1895 paper ‘What the Tortoise Said to Achilles’) to key debates in the philosophy of logic and reasoning. Its (working) title is: Logic, Reasoning and Regresses: A Defence of Logical Cognitivism.
Corine also runs the Centre for Logic and Language (CeLL) at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, London, and, together with Anandi Hattiangadi (Stockholm), she holds a three year grant from the Bank of Sweden on The Foundations of Epistemic Normativity.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Besson's talk - 'Knowing How to Reason Logically' - at the Aristotelian Society on 7 June 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Kenny Easwaran is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. He did his PhD in the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at UC Berkeley, and then worked at the Australian National University and the University of Southern California before moving to Texas A&M. He has done work on the foundations of probability and decision theory, as well as on the social epistemology of axioms and proofs in mathematical reasoning. His current work focuses on analogies between different possible futures in decisions under uncertainty, the different individuals in social choices, and the different stages of the self in reasoning across time.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Easwaran's talk - 'A New Method for Value Aggregation' - at the Aristotelian Society on 24 May 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Joseph Chan is Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at The University of Hong Kong. He is Global Scholar and Visiting Professor at the University Center for Human Values of Princeton University in 2019-2021 spring semesters. His recent research interests span Confucian political philosophy, comparative political theory, democratic theory, social and political equality, and popular sovereignty. He is the author of Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times (Princeton, 2014) and co-edited with Melissa Williams and Doh Shin East Asian Perspectives on Political Legitimacy: Bridging the Empirical-Normative Divide (Cambridge, 2016). He has been published in numerous journals such as Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, History of Political Thought, the Journal of Democracy, Philosophy East and West, and China Quarterly.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Chan's talk - 'Equality, Friendship, and Politics' - at the Aristotelian Society on 10 May 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Ralf M. Bader is a professor of philosophy at the Université de Fribourg in Switzerland, where he holds the chair for ethics and political philosophy. His research focuses on ethics, meta-ethics, metaphysics, Kant, political philosophy and decision theory. He is also interested in neo-Kantian and early analytic philosophy, as well as the history of political thought. Previously, he was a Fellow of Merton College and an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Oxford, as well as a Bersoff Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow in the Philosophy Department at New York University.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Bader's talk - 'Coincidence and Supervenience' - at the Aristotelian Society on 24 April 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Helga Varden is Professor of Philosophy and Gender and Women Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of St. Andrews, and she is an executive editor of the Journal of Canadian Philosophy. Her main research interests are Kant’s practical philosophy, legal-political philosophy and its history, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of sex and love. In addition to her Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Theory (Oxford University Press, 2020), Varden has published many articles on a range of classical philosophical issues including Kant’s answer to the murderer at the door, private property, care relations, political obligations, and political legitimacy, as well as on applied issues such as privacy, poverty, non-human animals, and terrorism. The talk delivered here—“Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil”—on how theorize political evil, points both backward to a theme running through Sex, Love, and Gender and forward to a central theme in her new book project on Kant’s transformation of the social contract tradition.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Varden's talk - 'Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil' - at the Aristotelian Society on 22 March 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Nicolas Cornell is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He works in normative ethics, contract law, and private law theory. His writing has appeared both in philosophy journals — including “The Possibility of Preemptive Forgiving” (Philosophical Review, 2017) and “Wrongs, Rights, and Third Parties” (Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2015) — and in law reviews — including “Competition Wrongs” (Yale Law Journal, 2020), and “A Complainant-Oriented Approach to Unconscionability and Contract Law” (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 2016). He is currently working on a book manuscript on the relationship between rights and wronging, under contract with Harvard University Press. Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan, he was an assistant professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Cornell's talk - 'Gambling on Others and Relying on Others' - at the Aristotelian Society on 8 March 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Mary-Louise Gill is David Benedict Professor of Classics and Philosophy at Brown University, and works on ancient Greek philosophy, especially Plato’s later metaphysics and method and Aristotle’s natural philosophy and metaphysics. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, and previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh in Classics, Philosophy, and History & Philosophy of Science. She has held visiting positions at Dartmouth College, UCLA, UC Davis, Harvard, University of Paris-1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, and Peking University in Beijing; her fellowships include the Stanford Humanities Center, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is the author of Aristotle on Substance: the Paradox of Unity (Princeton, 1989), of an Introduction and co-translation Plato: Parmenides (Hackett, 1996), and of Philosophos: Plato’s Missing Dialogue (Oxford, 2012); and she coedited Self-Motion: From Aristotle to Newton (Princeton, 1994), Unity, Identity and Explanation in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Oxford, 1994), and Companion to Ancient Philosophy (Blackwell, 2006). She is currently working on various aspects of Aristotle’s hylomorphism, including his treatment of mind and thought in De Anima, and the culmination of his metaphysics in Metaphysics Lambda on the relation between human and divine substance.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Gill's talk - 'Aristotle’s Hylomorphism Reconceived' - at the Aristotelian Society on 22 February 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Barbara Sattler is professor for ancient and medieval philosophy at Bochum University, and has taught at St. Andrews, Yale, and Urbana-Champaign before. The main areas of her research are issues in metaphysics and natural philosophy in the ancient Greek world, especially in the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle. She focuses on the philosophical processes through which central concepts of metaphysics and natural philosophy, such as space or speed, arise in Greek antiquity. By showing that such concepts were originally spelt out in ways significantly different from the way they are today, she aims to make us aware both of the rich conceptual basis we often take for granted, as well as to sketch out possible alternative understandings. She is the author of The Concept of Motion in Ancient Greek Thought – Foundations in Logic, Method, and Mathematics (CUP 2020), and is currently writing a book on ancient notions of space.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Sattler's talk - 'Paradoxes as Philosophical Method and their Zenonian Origins' - at the Aristotelian Society on 1 February 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Lee Walters is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Southampton. Prior to joining Southampton, Lee studied philosophy at UCL and taught at Oxford. Lee’s main interests are in metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and philosophical Logic, with a particular emphasis on the philosophy of fiction. Lee has been an Associate Editor of Analysis; a trustee of the British Society of Aesthetics; has held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship; and has been a junior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, CEU, Budapest.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Walters' talk - 'The Linguistic Approach to Ontology' - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 January 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Leigh K. Jenco is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics. She received her PhD in political science at the University of Chicago, before teaching at Brown University and the National University of Singapore. Her research works across the disciplinary platforms of political theory, global intellectual history, and Asian studies to demonstrate the value of Chinese thought for posing new questions of political life. She has served as associate editor of the flagship journal American Political Science Review (2016-2020) and principal investigator for the Humanities in the European Research Area grant project "East Asian Uses of the European Past" (2016-2019). She is the author of Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West (Oxford UP, 2015), and Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao (Cambridge UP, 2010). Most recently, with Megan Thomas and Murad Idris, she co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Oxford UP, 2020).
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Jenco's talk - 'Moral Knowledge and Empirical Verification in Late Ming China' - at the Aristotelian Society on 16 November 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Adrian Haddock is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Stirling, and between 2017 and 2019 he was a Senior Research Fellow in the Forschungskolleg Analytic German Idealism (FAGI) at the University of Leipzig. His work centres on the idea of subjectivity, and on its significance for understanding the fundamental concerns of philosophy. He has written on action, perception, knowledge, and language. He is currently in the process of completing a book manuscript, entitled Subject and Object, and editing (with Rachael Wiseman) a collection of essays on the philosophy of G.E.M. Anscombe.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Haddock's talk - 'The Wonder of Signs' - at the Aristotelian Society on 2 November 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Tommy J. Curry is a Professor of Philosophy and holds the Personal Chair of Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are 19th century ethnology, Critical Race Theory & Black Male Studies. He is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press 2017), which won the 2018 American Book Award, and Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of Racial Empire (SUNY Press 2018), which recently won the Josiah Royce Prize for American Idealist Thought. He has also re-published the forgotten philosophical works of William Ferris as The Philosophical Treatise of William H. Ferris: Selected Readings from The African Abroad or, His Evolution in Western Civilization (Rowman & Littlefield 2016). In 2019 he became the editor of the first book series dedicated to the study of Black males entitled Black Male Studies: A Series Exploring the Paradoxes of Racially Subjugated Males on Temple University Press. Dr. Curry’s research has been recognized by Diverse as placing him among the Top 15 Emerging Scholars in the United States in 2018, and his public intellectual work earned him the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy’s Alain Locke Award in 2017. He is the past president of Philosophy Born of Struggle, one of the oldest Black philosophy organizations in the United States.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Curry's talk - 'Must there be an Empirical Basis for the Theorization of Racialized Subjects in Race-Gender Theory?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 19 October 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
As the first talk for the 2020-21 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year's Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Bill Brewer (King's College London) as the 113th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society's President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy.
Bill Brewer is Susan Stebbing Professor of Philosophy at King's College London, having previously been Research Fellow at King’s College Cambridge, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and Professor of Philosophy at Warwick, and also a visiting professor at Brown and Berkeley. He is author of Perception and Reason (Oxford: OUP, 1999) and Perception and Its Objects (Oxford: OUP, 2011), and of many papers on perception, action, objects, and knowledge. He is co-editor of Spatial Representation (Oxford: OUP, 1999) and The Nature of Ordinary Objects (Cambridge: CUP, 2019). He works on Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics, and Epistemology, and is currently returning to an abiding interest in the objectivity of perceptual experience. He is co-editor of Philosophy, the journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Brewer's address - 'The Objectivity of Perception' - at the Aristotelian Society on 5 October 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
As the first talk for the 2020-21 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year's Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Bill Brewer (King's College London) as the 113th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society's President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy. Please visit our Council page for further information regarding the Society's past presidents.
The 113th Presidential Address will be chaired by Helen Steward (Leeds) - 112th President of the Aristotelian Society.
Walter Dean works in philosophy of mathematics and mathematical and philosophical logic. He also has interests in theoretical computer science and the history and philosophy of computation. He is currently working on applications of Reverse Mathematics and computational complexity theory within philosophy and on the historical and foundational significance of Gödel’s completeness theorem. He is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick where he convenes the Mathematics and Philosophy degree. Before coming to Warwick, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Paris 7, following a PhD in Computer Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a PhD in Philosophy from Rutgers.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Dean's talk - 'On Consistency and Existence in Mathematics' - at the Aristotelian Society on 15 June 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Béatrice Han-Pile studied philosophy, history and literature at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) and was awarded a Fellowship from the Thiers Foundation while completing her doctoral thesis on Michel Foucault. Before coming to Essex, she taught in France at the Universities of Paris IV-Sorbonne, Reims and Amiens. She is the author of Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical (Stanford University Press, 2002). She has published mostly on Foucault, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, phenomenology (in particular Heidegger) and the philosophy of agency. In 2015-2018 she was Principal Investigator on a three-year AHRC-funded project on ‘The Ethics of Powerlessness: The Theological Virtues Today’ (EoP). She is currently working on medio-passive agency, both in itself and through the writings of early Christian thinkers (John Cassian and St Augustine) and of more recent authors such as Nietzsche, Foucault and Heidegger. She is also working on hope as a (medio-passive) virtue of powerlessness and on the conditions under which this theological virtue might afford us with appropriate ethical guidance in secular contexts.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Han-Pile's talk - 'Two Puzzles in the Early Christian Constitution of the Self: Reflections on Foucault’s Interpretation of John Cassian' - at the Aristotelian Society on 8 June 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Anna Mahtani is Associate Professor in philosophy at the London School of Economics. She did her PhD on vagueness at Sheffield, and then worked at Oxford and the Open University, before arriving at the LSE. She studies decision theory, formal epistemology, and the philosophy of language, and works at the intersection of these different disciplines. She is currently working on several projects: tracing the implications of Frege’s puzzle for various principles of welfare economics; analysing the phenomenon of ‘awareness growth’; and writing a book called The Objects of Credence.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Mahtani's talk - 'Dutch Book and Accuracy Theorems' - at the Aristotelian Society on 1 June 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Maria Rosa Antognazza is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. Educated at the Catholic University of Milan, she has held research and visiting fellowships in Italy, Germany, Israel, Great Britain and the USA, including a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, a two-year research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, and the Leibniz-Professorship at the University of Leipzig (Leibniz’s Alma Mater) in 2016. She served as Head of the King’s Philosophy Department from 2011/12 to 2014/15 and is the current Chair of the British Society for the History of Philosophy. Her research interests lie in the history of philosophy, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. Her publications include Leibniz on the Trinity and the Incarnation: Reason and Revelation in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press 2007); Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge University Press 2009; winner of the 2010 Pfizer Award); and Leibniz: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2016). She is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Leibniz (Oxford University Press 2018) and of early modern texts including Hugo Grotius, The Truth of the Christian Religion, London, 1743 [Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics] (Liberty Fund 2012) and (with Howard Hotson) Alsted and Leibniz on God, the Magistrate and the Millennium (Harrassowitz Verlag 1999). In addition, she has contributed numerous articles and chapters to refereed journals and collective volumes. Most recently, she has been awarded the 2019-2020 Mind Senior Research Fellowship for work on her book Thinking with Assent: Renewing a Traditional Account of Knowledge and Belief (forthcoming with Oxford University Press).
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Antognazza's talk - 'The Distinction of Kind between Knowledge and Belief' - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 May 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Derrick Darby is Henry Rutgers Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He discovered his passion for philosophy growing up in New York City’s Queensbridge public housing projects, as he reports in his TEDx talk Doing the Knowledge. After getting his undergraduate degree at Colgate University, he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. His work in social and political philosophy has focused on rights, inequality, and democracy, and generally examines how the lived experience and history of race and anti-black racism connects with theoretical and normative philosophical questions. He is the author of Rights, Race, and Recognition (Cambridge University Press, 2009). His most recent book, co-authored with historian John L. Rury, is The Color of Mind: Why the Origins of the Achievement Gap Matter for Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2018). His op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Detroit Free Press, The Newark Star Ledger, and elsewhere. He is the founding organizer of the Social Justice Solutions Research Collaboratory at Rutgers and directs its renowned Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Darby's talk - 'Rights Externalism and Racial Injustice' - at the Aristotelian Society on 11 May 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Nancy Cartwright is a methodologist and philosopher of the natural and human sciences, with special focus on causation, evidence and modelling. Her recent work has been on scientific evidence, objectivity and how to put theory to work. She is a Professor of Philosophy at Durham University and the University of California San Diego, having worked previously at Stanford University and the London School of Economics. Professor Cartwright is a former MacArthur fellow, a fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society (the oldest honorary academic society in the US), the Academia Europeae and Leopoldina (the German Society for Natural Science). She has won the Hempel Prize for lifetime achievement in philosophy of science and with Elliott Sober, the Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. She is Tsing Hua Honorary Distinguished Chair Professor in Taiwan and has been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of St Andrews and Southern Methodist University. Her latest books are Nature, the Artful Modeler and Improving Child Safety: deliberation, judgement and empirical research with Eileen Munro, Jeremy Hardie and Eleonora Montuschi.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Cartwright's talk - 'Why Trust Science?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 27 April 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Dana Kay Nelkin is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, and an Affiliate Professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. Her areas of research include moral psychology, ethics, bioethics, and philosophy of law. She is the author of Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 2011), and a number of articles on a variety of topics, including self-deception, friendship, the lottery paradox, psychopathy, forgiveness, moral luck, and praise and blame. She is also a co-editor of the The Ethics and Law of Omissions, The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility, and Forgiveness: New Essays. Her work in moral psychology includes participation in an interdisciplinary research collaboration of philosophers and psychologists, The Moral Judgements Project, which brings together normative and descriptive enquiries about the use of moral principles such as the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing and the Doctrine of Double Effect. Other roles include membership of the advisory board of the UC San Diego Institute for Practical Ethics, service as the North American representative to the Society of Applied Philosophy, and on the Academic Advisory Board of the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Nelkin's talk - 'Equal Opportunity' - at the Aristotelian Society on 30 March 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Andrew Bacon is an associate professor at the University of Southern California. His main interests are in metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. He has recently completed a book on vagueness entitled Vagueness and Thought, and is presently writing a textbook on higher-order logic aimed at metaphysicians.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Bacon's talk - 'Vagueness at Every Order' - at the Aristotelian Society on 16 March 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Alexander Douglas is a lecturer in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological, and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. Previously he taught at Heythrop College, University of London. He studies early modern rationalism, particularly various forms of Cartesianism and especially that of Spinoza. He is interested in the idea that human reason can access a reality not visible to the senses and aims to trace some of its history, involving the history of formal logic and theology as well as of philosophy. He is the author of Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism: Philosophy and Theology (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is also interested in critiques of political economy and is the author of The Philosophy of Debt (Routledge, 2015). He is currently writing a book that draws on Spinoza’s philosophy to present the thesis that ‘special hope’ – hope that exceeds scientifically-warranted belief – is both a personal and political virtue.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Douglas' talk - 'Spinoza’s Unquiet Acquiescentia' - at the Aristotelian Society on 17 February 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Philip Goff is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. His work is focused on how to integrate consciousness into our scientific worldview, and he defends panpsychism on the grounds that it avoids the difficulties faced by the more traditional options of physicalism and dualism. He has published an academic book on this topic – Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (Oxford University Press) – as well as a book aimed at a general audience – Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (Rider in UK, Pantheon in US). Goff has also published in newspapers and magazines, such the Guardian, Aeon, the Times Literary Supplement and Philosophy Now. He blogs at Conscience and Consciousness and can be found on Twitter.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Goff's talk - 'Panpsychism and Free Will' - at the Aristotelian Society on 3 February 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Emily Thomas is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Durham University. Prior to this she obtained a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and held a NWO grant at the University of Groningen. She has published widely on the history of metaphysics, especially space and time. In 2018 she published two books: a monograph Absolute Time: Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics (Oxford University Press) and a collection Early Modern Women on Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press). Her next book, on the philosophy of travel, is forthcoming in 2020. She has recently started a new, AHRC-funded project exploring time in early twentieth century British metaphysics.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Thomas' talk - 'Time and Subtle Pictures in the History of Philosophy' - at the Aristotelian Society on 20 January 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Meena Dhanda is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Politics at the University of Wolverhampton. She is an advocate of socially engaged philosophy. Her research focus is on understanding injustices, prejudices and misrepresentations suffered by powerless groups, which she pursues through transdisciplinary studies, specifically connecting caste, class, gender and race. Her work includes: The Negotiation of Personal Identity and Reservations for Women, besides papers in international journals, book chapters and reference works.
She holds a doctorate from Oxford University, where she was a Commonwealth Scholar and a Rhodes Junior Research Fellow. As PI, she has led three transdisciplinary research projects: 1) for the University of Wolverhampton (Black and Minority Ethnic Students’ Experience), 2) for the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (Caste Aside: Dalit Punjabi Identity and Experience) and 3) for the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) (Caste in Britain) leading a consortium of experts from SOAS, Manchester Metropolitan, Goldsmiths, Middlesex and Wolverhampton. Her two EHRC reports (Dhanda et al 2014a and Dhanda et al 2014b) were used by the UK Government Equalities Office in its public consultation on how caste discrimination must be legally addressed in Britain.
Professor Meena Dhanda is an executive member of SWIP UK and the BPA. She is placed on Amnesty International’s Suffragette Spirit Map of Britain (2018) in recognition of her long-standing commitment to anti-discrimination research and practice.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Dhanda's talk - 'Philosophical Foundations of Anti-Casteism' - at the Aristotelian Society on 9 December 2019. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Colleen Murphy is a Professor in the College of Law with courtesy appointments in the Departments of Philosophy and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is also Director of the Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program. Previously she was an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University, a Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, and a Visiting Professor at the 4.TU Centre for Ethics in the Netherlands. She works on topics in ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law, with a particular focus on transitional justice and the ethical dimensions of risk. She is the author of The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which received the North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award; A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation (Cambridge University Press, 2010); as well as more than 50 articles and book chapters. She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, Journal of Moral Philosophy, and Science and Engineering Ethics. Professor Murphy is a past member of the American Philosophical Association’s (APA) Committee on the Status of Women and current member of the APA Committee on Philosophy and Law.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Murphy's talk - 'On Principled Compromises ' - at the Aristotelian Society on 4 November 2019. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Glen Pettigrove is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, occupying the Chair in Moral Philosophy previously held by Glasgow’s favourite son, Adam Smith. Before joining the Glasgow department Glen was Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland. He specializes in moral psychology, normative ethics, and early modern philosophy. He has a particular interest in the role of the emotions in our personal and collective lives and has written on anger, cheerfulness, forgiveness, guilt, love, and shame. He is the author of Forgiveness and Love (Oxford University Press, 2012) as well as numerous articles on virtue, religious ethics, and group attitudes.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Pettigrove's talk - 'Ambition, Love, and Happiness' - at the Aristotelian Society on 21 October 2019. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
As the first talk for the 2019-20 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year’s Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Helen Steward (University of Leeds) as the 112th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society’s President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy.
Helen Steward is Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Action at the University of Leeds. She received her D.Phil from the University of Oxford in 1992. Before moving to Leeds in 2007, she was Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford for 14 years. Her research interests lie mainly in the philosophy of action and free will, the philosophy of mind, and the metaphysical and ontological issues which bear on these areas (e.g. causation, supervenience, levels of explanation, the event/state distinction, the concepts of process and power). She has also worked on the category of animality and on understandings of the human being which take seriously our membership of the animal kingdom, and related biological and evolutionary perspectives on ourselves. She is the author of The Ontology of Mind (Oxford: OUP, 1997) and A Metaphysics for Freedom (Oxford: OUP, 2012), as well as many papers on free will, agency, mental causation and ontology of mind.
The 112th Presidential Address was chaired by Jonathan Wolff (Oxford) – 111th President of the Aristotelian Society.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Steward's address - 'Free Will and External Reality: Two Scepticisms Compared' - at the Aristotelian Society on 7 October 2019. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Kathleen Stock is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex. She works in philosophy of imagination and fiction, and has a growing interest in issues of gender, sex, and sexual orientation. She has also published on the nature of sexual and other kinds of objectification. Her most recent major publication is Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination (Oxford 2017).
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Stock's talk - 'What is Sexual Orientation?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 3 June 2019. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Thomas Sattig is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Tübingen. He completed his D.Phil. at Oxford University, where he was also a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow. Subsequently, he held positions as Assistant Professor at Tulane University and at Washington University in St. Louis. Sattig works primarily in metaphysics. He focuses on issues concerning material objects, persons, time, modality, mereology, and indeterminacy, often following metaphysics to regions where it meets philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. His publications include the monographs The Language and Reality of Time (OUP, 2006) and The Double Lives of Objects: An Essay in the Metaphysics of the Ordinary World (OUP, 2015). He currently works on the nature and our experience of the flow of time.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Sattig's talk - 'The Flow of Time in Experience' - at the Aristotelian Society on 20 May 2019. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Christian List is Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the London School of Economics and a Fellow of the British Academy. He works at the intersection of philosophy, economics, and political science, with a particular focus on individual and collective decision-making and the nature of intentional agency. Recently, a growing part of his work has addressed metaphysical questions, e.g., about free will, causation, probability, and the relationship between “micro” and “macro” levels of analysis in the human and social sciences. In 2011, he published Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (co-authored with Philip Pettit). His latest book, titled Why Free Will is Real, is due to appear in 2019.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor List's talk - 'What’s Wrong with the Consequence Argument: A Compatibilist Libertarian Response' - at the Aristotelian Society on 13 May 2019. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Cheshire Calhoun is CLAS Trustee Professor of Philosophy at Arizona State University and chair of the American Philosophical Association’s board of officers. Her work spans the philosophical subdisciplines of normative ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of emotion, feminist philosophy, and gay and lesbian philosophy. She has recently published a collection of previously published essays under the title Moral Aims: Essays on the Importance of Getting it Right and Practicing Morality with Others (OUP 2016), and a new book titled Doing Valuable Time: The Present, the Future, and Meaningful Living (OUP 2018). She is series editor for Oxford University Press’s Studies in Feminist Philosophy. Her essay “Geographies of Meaningful Living” won the 2015 Journal of Applied Philosophy essay prize; and her essays on forgiveness and civility were included in the Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best philosophy essays published in a year (1992, 2000).
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Calhoun's talk - 'Responsibilities and Taking On Responsibility' - at the Aristotelian Society on 29 April 2019. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Stephen Mulhall is Professor of Philosophy and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. His research interests include Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Sartre; moral philosophy; the relationship between philosophy, theology and religion; and the relationship between philosophy and the arts (especially film and literature). His most recent publications include: ‘The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy’ (OUP, 2015), and ‘On Film: 3rd Edition’ (Routledge, 2016).
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Mulhall's talk - ' Heidegger’s Fountain: Ecstasis, Mimesis and Engrossment in the Origin of the Work of Art' - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 March 2019. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Sophia Connell is lecturer in ancient philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. She did her MPhil and PhD at the University of Cambridge. She is a former Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge and taught philosophy in Cambridge for many years, receiving the Pilkington Prize for teaching excellence in 2016. Her main research interests are ancient Greek philosophy and the history of analytic philosophy. She has published Aristotle on Female Animals: Study of the Generation of Animals (Cambridge University Press) in 2016 and is working on a philosophical commentary of key portions of the same Aristotelian treatise. Her current research focuses on the relationship between Aristotle’s natural and political sciences, in particular how our biology impacts on morality and ethics. She is also busy editing The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Biology (2019) and the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Special Issue on 20th Century Women Philosophers.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Connell's talk - 'Care and Parenting in Aristotelian Ethics' - at the Aristotelian Society on 4 March 2019. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Nicholas K. Jones’ research interests lie at the intersection of metaphysics with the philosophy of logic and language, especially anything connected with objecthood. He is currently working on the metaphysics of higher-order quantification and applications of higher-order resources within metaphysics.
He arrived at the University of Birmingham as a Birmingham Research Fellow in 2013, and has been Senior Lecturer there since 2017. Before joining Birmingham, he was a Fitzjames Research Fellow at Merton College, University of Oxford, and Jacobsen Research Fellow at KCL and the Institute of Philosophy, following a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. He has been a Visiting Scholar at MIT, a Visiting Fellow on the ConceptLab project at the University of Oslo, and received the Sanders Prize for Metaphysics in 2012. He is from North Derbyshire.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Jones' talk - 'Propositions and Cognitive Relations' - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 February 2019. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Amia Srinivasan is an Associate Professor of philosophy at Oxford and a tutorial fellow at St John’s College. Previously she was a permanent lecturer at University College London and a Prize Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. She works on topics in epistemology, metaphilosophy, political philosophy and feminism, and is currently writing a book on the genealogy of belief. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is an associate editor of Mind, and a contributing editor of the London Review of Books.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor All Srinivasan's talk - 'Pn Genealogy' - at the Aristotelian Society on 4 February 2019. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Keith Allen is Senior Lecturer at the University of York. He has been at York since 2007, and before that was Jacobsen Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy (2005-7). His areas of research include colour, perception, and the history of philosophy, particularly early modern philosophy and phenomenology. He is the author of A Naïve Realist Theory of Colour (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Deputy Director of the University of York’s Humanities Research Centre.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Allen's talk - 'Should We Believe Philosophical Claims on Testimony?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 21 January 2019. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Stephen Neale is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics, and Kornblith Chair in the Philosophy of Science and Value at the City University of New York. He is a British philosopher and specialist in the philosophy of language who has written extensively about meaning, information, interpretation, and communication, and more generally about issues at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Neale's talk - 'Means Means Means' - at the Aristotelian Society on 26 November 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Rae Langton is Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Newnham College. Born and raised in India, she studied Philosophy at Sydney and Princeton, and has taught philosophy in Australia, Scotland, the USA, and England. She held professorships at Edinburgh 1999-2004 and at MIT 2004-2013. She works in moral and political philosophy, speech act theory, philosophy of law, the history of philosophy, metaphysics, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (Oxford University Press, 1998), and Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification (Oxford University Press, 2009). Her best known articles are ‘Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts’, ‘Duty and Desolation’, and ‘Defining Intrinsic’ (co-authored with David Lewis). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013, to the British Academy in 2014, and to the Academia Europeae in 2017. She is one of five Cambridge faculty on Prospect Magazine’s voted list of 50 ‘World Thinkers 2014’, chosen for ‘engaging most originally and profoundly with the central questions of the world today’. In 2015 she gave the John Locke Lectures, currently being finalised for publication. She plans to give the H.L.A.Hart Lecture in 2019.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Langton's talk - 'Empathy and First Personal Imagining' - at the Aristotelian Society on 12 November 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Fabienne Peter is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick and currently the Head of Department. She specializes in moral and political philosophy and in epistemology. The justification of political decisions has been a longstanding focus of her research and she has published extensively on political and democratic legitimacy. She is currently primarily working on topics in social, moral and political epistemology and in meta-ethics, especially on questions relating to the justification of actions and beliefs.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Peter's talk - 'Normative Facts and Reasons' - at the Aristotelian Society on 29 October 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Sarah Fine is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at King’s College London. She is also a Fellow at the Forum for European Philosophy. She co-edited (with Lea Ypi) Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her research to date has focused on the ethics of migration, and particularly the question of whether states have a moral right to exclude non-citizens. In recent years, she also has been thinking a lot about methodology in political philosophy, and about work at the intersection of philosophy and the arts.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Fine's talk - 'Refugees, Safety and a Decent Human Life' - at the Aristotelian Society on 15 October 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
As the first talk for the 2018-19 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year's Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Jonathan Wolff (University of Oxford) as the 111th President of the Aristotelian Society.
Jonathan Wolff is the Blavatnik Chair in Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. He was formerly Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Arts and Humanities at UCL.
His recent work has largely concerned equality, disadvantage, social justice and poverty, as well as applied topics such as public safety, disability, gambling, and the regulation of recreational drugs, which he has discussed in his books Ethics and Public Policy: A Philosophical Inquiry (Routledge 2011) and The Human Right to Health (Norton 2012). His most recent book is An Introduction to Moral Philosophy (Norton 2018).
Earlier works include Disadvantage (OUP 2007), with Avner de-Shalit; An Introduction to Political Philosophy (OUP, 1996, third edition 2016); Why Read Marx Today? (OUP 2002); and Robert Nozick (Polity 1991). He has had a long-standing interest in health and health promotion, including questions of justice in health care resource allocation, the social determinants of health, and incentives and health behaviour. He has been a member of the Nuffield Council of Bioethics, the Academy of Medical Science working party on Drug Futures, the Gambling Review Body, the Homicide Review Group, an external member of the Board of Science of the British Medical Association, and a Trustee of GambleAware. He writes a column on higher education for the Guardian.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Wolff's address - 'Equality and Hierarchy' - at the Aristotelian Society on 1 October 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
The 92nd Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Oxford from 6 to 8 July 2018. The Joint Session is a three-day conference in philosophy that is held annually during the summer by the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. It has taken place at nearly every major university across the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Since 1910, the Joint Session has grown to become the largest gathering of philosophers in the country, attracting prestigious UK and international speakers working in a broad range of philosophical areas. Inaugurated by the incoming President of the Mind Association, the Joint Session includes symposia, open and postgraduate sessions, and a range of satellite conferences.
This podcast is a recording of the sixth and final symposium at the Joint Session - "Fundamental Powers" - which featured Alexander Bird (KCL) and Barbara Vetter (Freie Universität Berlin).
Alexander Bird is Peter Sowerby Professor of Philosophy and Medicine at King’s College London, having previously been professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol. His published books are Philosophy of Science (1998), Thomas Kuhn (2000), and Nature’s Metaphysics (2007). His current project Knowing Science, Knowing Medicine aims to bring insights from general epistemology to bear on the philosophy of science and medicine.
Barbara Vetter is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. She has previously taught at Humboldt-Universität Berlin and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen, and holds a BPhil and a DPhil from Oxford University. Barbara Vetter is the author of Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality (OUP 2015), co-editor of Dispositionen: Texte aus der zeitgenössischen Debatte (with Stephan Schmid, Suhrkamp 2014) and has published various articles on dispositions, modality, abilities, and related issues in metaphysics, semantics, and philosophy of science. Most of her work focusses on developing and defending a disposition-based approach to modality.
The 92nd Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Oxford from 6 to 8 July 2018. The Joint Session is a three-day conference in philosophy that is held annually during the summer by the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. It has taken place at nearly every major university across the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Since 1910, the Joint Session has grown to become the largest gathering of philosophers in the country, attracting prestigious UK and international speakers working in a broad range of philosophical areas. Inaugurated by the incoming President of the Mind Association, the Joint Session includes symposia, open and postgraduate sessions, and a range of satellite conferences.
This podcast is a recording of the fifth symposium at the Joint Session - "Benevolence" - which featured Nomy Arpaly (Brown) and Erasmus Mayr (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg).
Nomy Arpaly is a professor of philosophy at Brown University. She is the author of three books (one of which is co-authored with Timothy Schroeder) and various articles, all concerning what she still insists on calling "moral psychology”, though the students coming to her seminars are often disappointed to learn that the there will be no discussion of trolley cases, FMRI machines, or people asked about trolley cases while hooked to FMRI machines. She has written about rationality, akrasia, desire, reasons, virtue, deliberation, moral worth, moral responsibility, and the relationship between being a good person and having accurate moral beliefs. She is currently working on a new project in normative ethics.
Erasmus Mayr is Professor of Philosophy at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. His main research interests lie in philosophy of action and ethics; his publications include Understanding Human Agency (OUP 2011). Before coming to Erlangen, he studied philosophy and law at the LMU Munich, and spent some time at Oxford University and the Humboldt University in Berlin.
The 92nd Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Oxford from 6 to 8 July 2018. The Joint Session is a three-day conference in philosophy that is held annually during the summer by the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. It has taken place at nearly every major university across the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Since 1910, the Joint Session has grown to become the largest gathering of philosophers in the country, attracting prestigious UK and international speakers working in a broad range of philosophical areas. Inaugurated by the incoming President of the Mind Association, the Joint Session includes symposia, open and postgraduate sessions, and a range of satellite conferences.
This podcast is a recording of the fourth symposium at the Joint Session - "What Brains-in-Vats Can Know" - which featured Ofra Magidor (Oxford) and Aidan McGlynn (Edinburgh).
Ofra Magidor is Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford. She completed a BSc in Mathematics, Philosophy, and Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a BPhil and DPhil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Prior to her current appointment she was Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow at Balliol College and the University of Oxford, and a Junior Research Fellow at Queen’s College, Oxford. Her research focuses on Metaphysics, Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, and Philosophical Logic.
Aidan McGlynn is a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, having previously worked at the Northern Institute of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, and having studied at the University of St Andrews and the University of Texas at Austin. He recently completed a series of papers and a monograph on knowledge first approaches to epistemology and the philosophies of language and mind. Since then, he has been working on evidence, first-person thought and self-knowledge, epistemic entitlement, pornography, epistemic injustice, silencing, and objectification.
The 92nd Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Oxford from 6 to 8 July 2018. The Joint Session is a three-day conference in philosophy that is held annually during the summer by the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. It has taken place at nearly every major university across the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Since 1910, the Joint Session has grown to become the largest gathering of philosophers in the country, attracting prestigious UK and international speakers working in a broad range of philosophical areas. Inaugurated by the incoming President of the Mind Association, the Joint Session includes symposia, open and postgraduate sessions, and a range of satellite conferences.
This podcast is a recording of the second symposium at the Joint Session - "Racial Justice" - which featured Charles Mills (CUNY) and Katrin Flikschuh (LSE).
Charles W. Mills is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. He works in the general area of social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. He is the author of over a hundred journal articles, book chapters, comments and replies, and six books: The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997); Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 1998); From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Contract and Domination (co-authored with Carole Pateman) (Polity, 2007); Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality: Race, Class and Social Domination (University of the West Indies Press, 2010); and Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Katrin Flikschuh is Professor of Modern Political Theory at the London School of Economics. She primarily works on Kant's political philosophy and its relation to contemporary liberalism. More recently she has begun to work on modern African philosophy. From April 2014 to December 2017 she is Principal Investigator of a Leverhulme Trust funded International Network that seeks to engage African and Western political theorists and philosophers with one another. She is author of Kant and Modern Political Philosophy (CUP 2000, 2008), Freedom. Contemporary Liberal Perspectives (Polity 2007), and What is Orientation in Global Thinking? A Kantian Enquiry (CUP, 2017). She is co-editor, with Lea Ypi, of Kant and Colonialism (OUP 2014).
The 92nd Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Oxford from 6 to 8 July 2018. The Joint Session is a three-day conference in philosophy that is held annually during the summer by the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. It has taken place at nearly every major university across the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Since 1910, the Joint Session has grown to become the largest gathering of philosophers in the country, attracting prestigious UK and international speakers working in a broad range of philosophical areas. Inaugurated by the incoming President of the Mind Association, the Joint Session includes symposia, open and postgraduate sessions, and a range of satellite conferences.
This podcast is a recording of the first symposium at the Joint Session - "Plato on the Uses and Value of Knowledge" - which featured Verity Hale (Yale) and Melissa Lane (Princeton).
Verity Harte is George A. Saden Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Yale University. She is the author of Plato on Parts and Wholes: the Metaphysics of Structure (2002) and of various articles on ancient philosophy. She is co-editor (with MM McCabe, Robert W. Sharples and Anne Sheppard) of Aristotle and the Stoics Reading Plato (2010), (with Melissa Lane) of Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy (2013), and (with Raphael Woolf) of Rereading Ancient Philosophy: Old Chestnuts and Sacred Cows (2017). She is presently writing a monograph on Plato's Philebus.
Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where she is also Director of the University Center for Human Values, and an associated faculty member in the Departments of Classics and of Philosophy. Previously she taught in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, after receiving there an M.Phil. and PhD in Philosophy. She writes largely though not exclusively on ancient Greek political philosophy. Her books include Method and Politics in Plato’s Statesman (Cambridge 1998); Plato’s Progeny (Duckworth 2001); Eco-Republic (Peter Lang 2011 / Princeton 2012); and Greek and Roman Political Ideas (Penguin 2014; revised edition published as The Birth of Politics, Princeton 2015). She and Verity Harte co-edited Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy (Cambridge 2013). In 2018 she will be the Carlyle Lecturer at Oxford and give the Knox Lecture at St Andrews and the Royal Institute of Philosophy/Royal Society of Edinburgh annual lecture; she has also delivered named annual public lectures at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Wesleyan University, the University of Auckland, Leiden University; the University of Florida; the University of New Hampshire; and Harvard University, and has been named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
The 92nd Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Oxford from 6 to 8 July 2018. The Joint Session is a three-day conference in philosophy that is held annually during the summer by the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. It has taken place at nearly every major university across the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Since 1910, the Joint Session has grown to become the largest gathering of philosophers in the country, attracting prestigious UK and international speakers working in a broad range of philosophical areas. Inaugurated by the incoming President of the Mind Association, the Joint Session includes symposia, open and postgraduate sessions, and a range of satellite conferences.
This podcast is a recording of the inaugural address to the Joint Session - "W(h)ither Metaphysical Necessity?" - which was delivered by the incoming President of the Mind Association, John Divers (Leeds). John is a first-generation University entrant who studied, and subsequently taught, Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield and currently holds that position at the University of Leeds. The dominant theme in his published work is modality, including the 2002 book Possible Worlds and (in progress) Necessity After Quine. John is also an Editor of Thought and Director of the Leverhulme Trust Research Project, Thinking Counterfactually - How "Would have been” reveals what is and what must be.
Victoria McGeer is a Senior Research Scholar in the Center for Human Values and Lecturer in Philosophy at Princeton University. She is also a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University. Her published work reflects her wide range of interests encompassing topics in moral psychology, the development of agential capacities and its impairments, responsibility, the nature of folk-psychological explanation, problems of self-knowledge, and the metaphysics of mind. Her paper, “Mind-making practices: the social infrastructure of self-knowing agency and responsibility” was selected for inclusion in The Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best philosophy articles in 2015. McGeer received her B.A. in government and philosophy from Dartmouth College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. McGeer's talk - 'Intelligent Capacities' - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 June 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Holly Lawford-Smith is a senior lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Melbourne. She held previous positions at the University of Sheffield and the Australian National University. She is currently interested in collective action, collective agency, and collective responsibility, and also their applications in climate ethics, the ethics of consumption, and the ethics of privilege.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Lawford-Smith's talk - 'Collective Culpability and Collective Punishment' - at the Aristotelian Society on 4 June 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Lisa Shapiro is Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. Her research concerns accounts of human nature in the 17th and 18th centuries. In particular, she is interested the place of the passions (or emotions) in these accounts, as vehicles of human cognitive connection to the world. Her work has focused on Descartes, Spinoza and Hume, but also touched on Malebranche and Condillac. Her current project concerns accounts of the development of human rational capacities – or an embodied human mind – in the period. This research intersects with her commitment to rehabilitating the work of women thinkers of the early modern period. She is the PI on a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant New Narratives in the History of Philosophy in an effort to include many of these women (2015-2018). She is editor of the forthcoming Pleasure: A History in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series. She is the translator and editor of The Correspondence of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes and co-editor, with Martin Pickavé, of Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, as well as author of numerous articles.
This This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Shapiro's talk - 'Assuming Epistemic Authority' - at the Aristotelian Society on 1 June 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Alison Hills is Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at St John’s College, University of Oxford. Her research is in Moral Philosophy. Her PhD was on Kant’s moral theory, in particular, on whether Kant shows that we have reason to be moral. She also has interests in metaethics (especially moral knowledge) and normative ethics (especially Kant’s moral theory). She has also written on applied ethics, about whether our intentions have any moral significance, and about the moral status of animals. Her most recent book, The Beloved Self (OUP), addressed the conflict between egoism and morality, and whether we can justify claims that we have reasons to be moral.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Hills' talk - 'Moral and Aesthetic Virtue' - at the Aristotelian Society on 23 April 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Martin Saar is professor of social philosophy at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main (since fall 2017). He has taught in Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin and Leipzig. His areas of specialization and teaching are contemporary political and social philosophy and the history of early modern and modern political thought (with focus on Spinoza, Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault, Critical Theory, Post-structuralism, and interdisciplinary research on collective memory, affect, ideology, and power).
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Saar's talk - 'What is Social Philosophy?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 19 March 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Sarah Moss is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. She works primarily in epistemology and the philosophy of language, and often on questions at the intersection of these subfields. She is the author of Probabilistic Knowledge (forthcoming with Oxford University Press), in which she defends a unified probabilistic theory of the contents of belief, assertion, and knowledge. For instance, she argues in her book that credences can constitute knowledge, in just the same way that full beliefs constitute knowledge. Her current work concerns the consequences of her theory of probabilistic knowledge for how we think about racial profiling and legal standards of proof.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Moss's talk - 'Moral Encroachment' - at the Aristotelian Society on 5 March 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Alex Voorhoeve is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He works primarily in the theory and practice of distributive justice (especially with respect to health care), in decision theory, and moral psychology, but also has interests in the work of Epicurus, Mandeville, Hume and Smith. His articles have appeared in Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs, and Economics & Philosophy, among other places. He is the author of a book of interviews with leading thinkers, Conversations on Ethics (Oxford, 2009), and co-author of Making Fair Choices on the Path to Universal Health Coverage (World Health Organization, 2014).
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Voorhoeve's talk - 'Epicurus on Pleasure, the Complete Life, and Death: A Partial Defence' - at the Aristotelian Society on 19 February 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Craig French is a philosopher of mind and psychology at the University of Nottingham. This podcast is an audio recording his talk - 'Naïve Realism and Diaphaneity' - at the Aristotelian Society on 5 February 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Sarah Sawyer is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. She has published on externalism and singular thought in the philosophy of mind, on proper names and fictional terms in the philosophy of language, on self-knowledge, epistemic warrant and scepticism in epistemology, and on judgement, motivation and reasons in metaethics. She is on the executive committee and council for the Royal Institute of Philosophy, is Publications Officer of the Mind Association Occasional Series and is an Associate Editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Sawyer's talk - 'The Importance of Concepts' - at the Aristotelian Society on 22 January 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Laurent Jaffro is professor of moral philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne since 2009 and a senior fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France since 2017. He is presently visiting professor at the University of Neuchâtel. He formerly taught philosophy at Blaise Pascal University and at the University of Nanterre. He is editor of Analyse et Philosophie, a series at Vrin. He has published on eigteenth-century British moral philosophy, especially on the third earl of Shaftesbury, and more recently on Thomas Reid. His current project focuses on ‘second-best ethics’, that is, ethics for agents who are chronically subject to weakness and have difficulties to align their conduct with their important values and commitments.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Jaffro's talk - 'Forgiveness and Weak Agency' - at the Aristotelian Society on 27 November 2017. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Elizabeth Ashford is senior lecturer in moral philosophy at the University of St Andrews. She did her MA at UNC Chapel Hill and her BA and DPhil at Oxford University, and was awarded her DPhil in 2002. Her main research interests are in moral and political philosophy. She has recently finished a contribution to UNESCO Volume I, Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right (OUP forthcoming), and her current research project is to develop a book on utilitarian and Kantian conceptions of impartiality and of rights. During the academic year 2005-6 she was a Visiting Faculty Fellow in Ethics at the Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and the following summer she was an H.L.A. Hart Visiting Fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Ethics and the Philosophy of Law.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Ashford's talk - 'The Infliction of Severe Poverty as the Perfect Crime' - at the Aristotelian Society on 13 November 2017. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
John Gardner FBA is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, with the title of Professor of Law and Philosophy in the University of Oxford. From 2000 to 2016 he held Oxford’s Chair of Jurisprudence. Before that he was Reader in Legal Philosophy at King’s College London (1996-2000), Fellow and Tutor in Law at Brasenose College, Oxford (1991-6) and Examination (‘Prize’) Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (1986-91). He has also held visiting positions at Columbia University, Yale University, the University of Texas at Austin, Princeton University, the Australian National University, the University of Auckland, and most recently Cornell University. He serves on the editorial boards of numerous journals including the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Ethics, Law and Philosophy, and The Journal of Moral Philosophy. Called to the Bar in 1988, he has been a Bencher of the Inner Temple since 2002 (although he does not practice). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2013. He teaches and writes on the philosophy of private law, of criminal law, of public law, and of law in general, as well as in nearby areas of moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of action.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Gardner's talk - 'Discrimination: The Good, the Bad, and the Wrongful' - at the Aristotelian Society on 30 October 2017. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
A research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris since 1979, François Recanati has taught in several major universities around the world, including Berkeley, Harvard, Geneva, and St Andrews. In addition to his CNRS job, he is a ‘directeur d’études’ at EHESS and the Director of Institut Jean-Nicod, a research lab in philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science hosted by the Ecole Normale Supérieure. His publications in the philosophy of language and mind include more than one hundred articles, many edited books, and a dozen monographs, the most recent of which are Mental Files (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Mental Files in Flux (Oxford University Press, 2016). He was the first President of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy (1990-93), and the Principal Investigator of a research project on Context, Content and Compositionality funded by the European Research Council (Advanced Grant, 2009-2013). He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012, and was awarded the CNRS Silver Medal in 2014 and a Honorary Doctorate from Stockholm University (also in 2014). He is the general editor of the Jean-Nicod book series published by MIT Press and of the Context and Content series published by Oxford University Press.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Recanati's talk - 'Fictional, Metafictional, Parafictional' - at the Aristotelian Society on 16 October 2017. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
As the first talk for the 2017-18 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year's Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Helen Beebee (University of Manchester) as the 110th President of the Aristotelian Society.
Helen Beebee is Samuel Hall Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. She completed her PhD at King’s College London in 1996, and has previously held positions at Edinburgh, St. Andrews, UCL, The Australian National University, and Birmingham. Her research falls mostly within metaphysics, focussing primarily on causality, laws of nature, and freedom of the will. Her publications include a monograph on Hume (Hume on Causation, Routledge 2006) and a textbook, Free Will (Palgrave, 2013), and she is currently Principal Investigator for an AHRC project, ‘The Age of Metaphysical Revolution’, which focusses on the work and correspondence of David Lewis in the context of his role in the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. She has served as President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science (2015-17), Director of the British Philosophical Association (2007-11), a member of the AHRC Advisory Board (2008-13), and a co-editor of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (current), as well as a member of various executive committees of learned societies and journal editorial boards. She is a Patron of the Athena SWAN Charter.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Beebee's address - 'Philosophical Scepticism' - at the Aristotelian Society on 2 October 2017. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Shamik Dasgupta is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He works primarily in metaphysics and the philosophy of science, with additional research interests in epistemology and ethics.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Dasgupta's talk - 'Normative Non-Naturalism and the Problem of Authority' - at the Aristotelian Society on 19 June 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Daniel Viehoff is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at New York University. His research focuses on political, legal, and moral philosophy. He is especially interested in questions of political authority and legitimacy, and in democratic theory. Daniel is currently completing a book manuscript on the special duties we have to obey democratically made decisions. In addition he is doing work on the nature of voting rights and the justification of democratic enfranchisement.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Viehoff's talk - 'Serving the Governed' - at the Aristotelian Society on 5 June 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Ursula Renz is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, where she teaches classes in both Theoretical Philosophy (epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy) and Early Modern Philosophy. She has published widely on Early Modern Philosophy (Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Shaftesbury), Kant, the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism (Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer), as well as on the emotions, self-knowledge, and the problem of epistemic trust. In her talk, she will address a few philosophical problems of which she became aware of during her work for the edited volume Self-Knowledge: A History (OUP 2017).
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Renz's talk - 'Self-Knowledge as a Personal Achievement' - at the Aristotelian Society on 22 May 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Gerald Lang teaches Philosophy at the University of Leeds, and received his training in Bristol and Oxford. He was the co-editor of Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Williams (OUP 2012), along with Ulrike Heuer, and How We Fight: Ethics in War (OUP 2014), along with Helen Frowe. He has published on a large number of topics in moral and political philosophy: distributive justice, political liberty, consequentialism, fairness, life and death issues in reproductive ethics, well-being and death, self-defence, the ethics of war, and aspects of practical reason and metaethics. He is currently writing a monograph, Strokes of Luck, about the role of luck in normative ethics and justice, work on which has been partly funded by the Mind Association. His next major research project will be concerned with self-defence, war, and the foundations of deontology.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Lang's talk - 'What Follows from Defensive Non-Liability?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 8 May 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Beate Roessler is Professor of Ethics and its History at the University of Amsterdam; from 2003 to 2010 she also taught as Socrates-Professor for the Foundations of Humanism at Leiden University. She formerly taught philosophy at the Free University, Berlin, Germany, and at the University of Bremen, Germany. In 2003/4 she was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin; she is a co-editor of the European Journal of Philosophy. Her publications include The Value of Privacy, Polity Press 2005; Social Dimensions of Privacy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (ed. with D.Mokrosinska), Cambridge UP 2015; Von Person zu Person. Zur Moralität persönlicher Beziehungen, (ed. with A. Honneth, Frankfurt 2008). Her current research focuses on problems in individual autonomy.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Roessler's talk - 'Privacy as a Human Right' - at the Aristotelian Society on 6 March 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Lea Ypi is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. She is the author of Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (Oxford University Press 2012) and, with Jonathan White, The Meaning of Partisanship (Oxford University Press, 2016). She has edited Migration in Political Theory (OUP 2016, with Sarah Fine) and Kant and Colonialism (OUP 2015, with Katrin Flikschuh). She is currently writing a book on “Teleology and System in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” (under contract with Oxford University Press).
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Ypi's talk - ' Pragmatist Coherence as the Source of Truth and Reality' - at the Aristotelian Society on 20 February 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Genia Schӧnbaumsfeld is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton who specializes in Epistemology, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and the Philosophy of Religion. She is the author of The Illusion of Doubt, forthcoming with Oxford University Press later this year, and of A Confusion of the Spheres – Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion, also with Oxford UP (2007). In her new book she argues that radical scepticism is an illusion generated by a Cartesian picture of one’s evidential situation, which, once undermined, makes available to one a ‘realism without empiricism’ that allows unmediated contact with the objects and persons in one’s environment which an appearance of doubt had threatened to put forever beyond one’s cognitive grasp.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Schӧnbaumsfeld's talk - 'Beliefs-in-a-Vat' - at the Aristotelian Society on 6 February 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Eleanor Knox is a Lecturer in Philosophy at King's College London. Her work has two strands, one in the foundations of spacetime physics, and another in inter-theoretic relations in physics and science more generally. The two come together when thinking about emergent spacetimes in theories of quantum gravity; much of her work focusses on Spacetime Functionalism, an approach to the interpretation of spacetime theories that promises to help us understand emergent spacetimes. After a BA, BPhil and DPhil at Oxford, Eleanor moved to London, first as a Chandaria Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, and then as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and then Lecturer at KCL. She is the winner of the 2015 James T. Cushing Prize in the History and Philosophy of Physics.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Knox's talk - 'Novel Explanation and the Special Sciences - Lessons From Physics' - at the Aristotelian Society on 23 January 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Hasok Chang is the Hans Rausing Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Previously he taught for 15 years at University College London, after receiving his PhD in Philosophy at Stanford University following an undergraduate degree at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of Is Water H2O? Evidence, Realism and Pluralism (Springer, 2012), winner of the 2013 Fernando Gil International Prize, and Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (Oxford University Press, 2004), joint winner of the 2006 Lakatos Award. He is also co-editor (with Catherine Jackson) of An Element of Controversy: The Life of Chlorine in Science, Medicine, Technology and War (British Society for the History of Science, 2007), a collection of original work by undergraduate students at University College London. He is a co-founder of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP), and the Committee for Integrated History and Philosophy of Science. He has recently been the President of the British Society for this History of Science.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Chang's talk - 'Pragmatist Coherence as the Source of Truth and Reality' - at the Aristotelian Society on 9 January 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
James Studd is the University Lecturer in the Philosophy of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow and Tutor at Lady Margaret Hall. In addition to the philosophy of mathematics, he works on the philosophy of logic, with occasional forays into the philosophy of language and metaphysics. He is currently writing a book about absolute generality (forthcoming with OUP).
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Studd's talk - 'Generality, Extensibility, and Paradox' - at the Aristotelian Society on 28 November 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Beth Lord is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. She works on history of philosophy in the continental tradition, with a particular focus on Spinoza. Currently she is researching the concept of equality in Spinoza’s texts from its geometrical origins to its metaphysical and political uses. She recently led a three-year AHRC-funded research project that investigated the relevance of Spinoza’s concepts of ratio and equality to housing design. She is co-author (with Peg Rawes, Bartlett School of Architecture) of a short, open-access film on Spinoza and the UK housing crisis, Equal by Design, and editor of the forthcoming collection Spinoza’s Philosophy of Ratio. Her earlier books include Spinoza’s Ethics: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide, and Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze. She has been at Aberdeen since 2013; prior to that she worked at the University of Dundee (2004-12), and received her PhD from the University of Warwick in 2004.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Lord's talk - 'Disagreement in the Political Philosophy of Spinoza and Rancière' - at the Aristotelian Society on 14 November 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Elizabeth Cripps is a senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual Duties in an Interdependent World (Oxford, 2013), which defends a 'weakly collective' moral duty to act on climate change and explores the implications for individual duties. She currently works on population, climate change and justice, and on the intersect between climate duties and parents' duties to their children.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Cripps' talk - 'Justice, Integrity and Moral Community' - at the Aristotelian Society on 31 October 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Christopher Daly is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He has published in metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of language. He is a co-editor of the journal Analysis.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Daly's talk - 'Persistent Philosophical Disagreement' - at the Aristotelian Society on 17 October 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
As the first talk for the 2016/17 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year's Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Tim Crane (University of Cambridge) as the 109th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society's President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy. Please visit our Council page for further information regarding the Society's past presidents.
The 109th Presidential Address will be chaired by Susan James (Birkbeck) - 108th President of the Aristotelian Society.
Tim Crane is Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Before coming to Cambridge in 2009 he taught at UCL for twenty years and founded the Institute of Philosophy in the University of London in 2005. He is the philosophy editor of the TLS and general editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Crane is the author of a number of books, including The Mechanical Mind (1995, 3rd edition 2016), Elements of Mind (2001), The Objects of Thought (2013) and Aspects of Psychologism (2014). He has defended a conception of the mind which rejects both scientistic reductionism and the idea that philosophy of mind should be insulated from science, and he has argued that intentionality — the mind’s direction on its objects, or its representational power — is the essential feature of the mind.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Crane's address - 'The Unity of Unconsciousness' - at the Aristotelian Society on 3 October 2016. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Dorothea Debus teaches Philosophy at the University of York. Her main areas of research lie in the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology. She has written on philosophical questions relating to the phenomena of memory, the imagination, attention, and the emotions, and more recently she has started work on a new research project which investigates our active involvement with our own mental lives. The paper presented here will offer some of this new material for discussion.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Debus's talk - 'Shaping Our Mental Lives' - at the Aristotelian Society on 20 June 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Hilary Greaves is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include foundational issues in consequentialism ('global' and 'two-level' forms of consequentialism), aggregation, moral psychology and selective debunking arguments, population ethics, the interface between ethics and economics, the analogies between ethics and epistemology, and formal epistemology. She currently directs a three-year project on population ethics, funded by The Leverhulme Trust.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Greaves's talk - 'Cluelessness' - at the Aristotelian Society on 6 June 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Dominic Scott is a Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University and a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. He has worked in many areas of ancient Greek philosophy, especially in epistemology and ethics. He is the author of Recollection and Experience (CUP 1995) and Plato's Meno (CUP 2006). His most recent book is Levels of Argument: a Comparative Study of Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (OUP 2015). He has also recently edited The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter (OUP 2015) and co-authored The Humanities World Report 2015 (Palgrave Macmillan).
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Scott's talk - 'From Painters to Poets: Method in Plato, Republic X' - at the Aristotelian Society on 23 May 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Peter Poellner is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He has published on topics in the philosophy of value, the philosophy of mind, and the history of philosophy – in the latter area, especially on Nietzsche, Husserl and Sartre.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Poellner's talk - 'Phenomenology and the Perceptual Model of Emotion' - at the Aristotelian Society on 9 May 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Mary Leng is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York. Prior to coming to York she held a Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge, and a Lectureship at the University of Liverpool, as well as visiting positions at the University of British Columbia and the University of California at Irvine. She received her PhD in from the University of Toronto, and studied Mathematics and Philosophy as an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford. Although a naturalist in the Quinean tradition, she has argued against Quine that the naturalist approach to ontology does not support belief in the existence of mathematical objects. She is interested in the question of what a naturalist should say about other areas of discourse, particularly ethical discourse.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Leng's talk - 'Naturalism and Placement' - at the Aristotelian Society on 25 April 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Jessica Leech is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests, contemporary and historical, centre around the topic of modality. She has written on topics in the metaphysics of modality such as relative necessity, and on the nature of logical laws. In her writing she has also explored what Kant had to say about modality, and issues arising from that. She is in the final stages of writing a book that attempts to draw out Kant's views on modality, and apply them to contemporary issues in the metaphysics of modality.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Leech's talk - 'The Mereology of Representation' - at the Aristotelian Society on 7 March 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Tobias Rosefeldt is professor of philosophy at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He works on Kant’s theoretical philosophy and has written a book on Kant’s theory of the self. He is currently interested in giving an interpretation of Kant’s distinction between appearances and things in themselves that is able to solve some of the notorious problems with it. He is also interested in contemporary metaphysics and the philosophy of language and tries to show that you can believe that there are things that do not exist without being a Meinongian.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Rosefeldt's talk - 'Closing the Gap' - at the Aristotelian Society on 22 February 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Jules Holroyd was a lecturer in the philosophy department at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests are in moral psychology, political philosophy and feminist philosophy. Her recent research has focused on how our models of responsibility and agency might be responsive to the ndings of empirical psychology. She is working on a Leverhulme funded project with psychologists at the University of Sheffield, investigating how moral responses - such as blame - might in uence the expression of implicit bias. In January 2016 Jules will join the University of Shef eld as a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Holroyd's talk - 'What Do We Want From a Model of Implicit Cognition?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 8 February 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
James Wilson integrates philosophy with other relevant disciplines, such as epidemiology, economics and political theory to explore conceptual and practical challenges in the sustainable and equitable improvement of human wellbeing. He focuses particularly on public health ethics, and the ownership and governance of ideas and information. He received his PhD from UCL in 2002, then held temporary lectureships in Philosophy at University of Roehampton (2002-3) and Birkbeck (2003-4), before becoming Lecturer in Ethics at the Keele University (2004-8). He has been at UCL since 2008, rst as Lecturer in Philosophy and Health, and then as Senior Lecturer in Philosophy.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Wilson's talk - 'Internal and External Validity in Thought Experiments' - at the Aristotelian Society on 25 January 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Tim Bayne holds the Rotman Chair in the Philosophy of Neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario and is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Otago and his doctorate from the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Unity of Consciousness (OUP, 2010) and Thought: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013). His current research focuses on the measurement of consciousness and the use of neuroimaging to ascribe consciousness to brain-damaged patients.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Bayne's talk - 'Gist!' - at the Aristotelian Society on 11 January 2016. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Fiona Woollard is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Southampton. She works in normative and applied ethics, the philosophy of sex and the philosophy of pregnancy and motherhood. In her first book, Doing and Allowing Harm (Oxford, 2015), she argues that constraints against doing harm and permissions to allow harm are necessary for anything to belong to a person, even that person’s body. She also defends a ‘moderate’ account of requirements to prevent harm to others.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Woollard's talk - 'Dimensions of Demandingness' - at the Aristotelian Society on 30 November 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Jérôme Dokic is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (now part of PSL Research University) and a member of Institut Jean-Nicod in Paris. He has written many essays on indexicality, perception, memory and imagination. His work has lately focused on philosophical and empirical issues concerning noetic or metacognitive feelings such as presence, familiarity and confidence. His books include La philosophie du son with Roberto Casati (Philosophy of sound, Chambon, 1994), L’esprit en mouvement. Essai sur la dynamique cognitive (Mind in motion. Essay on cognitive dynamics, CSLI, Stanford, 2001), Qu’est-ce que la perception? (What is perception?, Vrin, 2nd edition 2009) and Ramsey. Truth and Success with Pascal Engel (Routledge, 2002).
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Dokic's talk - 'Aesthetic Experience as Metacognitive Feeling' - at the Aristotelian Society on 16 November 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Benjamin Sachs is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of St. Andrews. He has worked on issues in distributive justice, health care justice, coercion, normative ethics, environmental ethics, and the ethics of research on human subjects. He is currently interested in animal ethics and in addition is planning to write several papers that would together constitute an argument for contractarianism.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Sach's talk - 'Contractarianism as a Political Morality' - at the Aristotelian Society on 2 November 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
David Enoch is The Rodney Blackman Chair in the Philosophy of Law, at The Faculty of Law and the Philosophy Department, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studied law and philosophy in Tel Aviv University, where he earned his B.A. and LL.B. in 1993. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from NYU in 2003. David works primarily in moral, political, and legal philosophy. His publications include: Taking Morality Seriously (OUP, 2011); “Against Public Reason”, in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 1 (2015); “Agency, Shmagency”, Philosophical Review 115 (2006); and “Why Idealize”, Ethics 115(4) (2005).
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Enoch's talk - 'What’s Wrong with Paternalism:Autonomy, Belief and Action' - at the Aristotelian Society on 19 October 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
As the first talk for the 2015/16 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year's Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Susan James (Birkbeck, University of London) as the 108th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society's President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy. Please visit our Council page for further information regarding the Society's past presidents.
The 108th Presidential Address will be chaired by Adrian Moore (Oxford) - 107th President of the Aristotelian Society.
Susan James is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. Among her books are Passion and Action: The Emotions in Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1997); Margaret Cavendish: Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise (Oxford University Press, 2012). She is currently working on a collection of essays, Spinoza on Learning to Live Together.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor James' address - 'Freedom and Nature: A Spinozist Invitation' - at the Aristotelian Society on 5 October 2015. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Susanna Siegel is Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She is author of The Contents of Visual Experience (Oxford University Press, 2010), and numerous articles in the philosophy of perception. Recent papers discuss the varieties of influences on perceptual experiences from cognition, affect, and learning, their impact on the epistemic role of perception, and the nature of belief.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Siegel's talk - 'Epistemic Charge' - at the Aristotelian Society on 15 June 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Giles Pearson is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He has been at Bristol since 2007. Prior to that he was a lecturer at Birkbeck College, London (2006-2007), and a research fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge (2003-6). His research is in ancient philosophy and metaethics, with particular interests in Aristotle’s moral and philosophical psychology, and philosophical accounts of motivation. He is the author of Aristotle on Desire (2012, Cambridge University Press) and he co-edited (with M. Pakaluk) Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle (2011, Oxford University Press). He is currently working on his second monograph, on contemporary metaethics, concerning the role of desire in motivation.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Pearson's talk - 'What are Sources of Motivation?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 1 June 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Sacha Golob is a Lecturer in Philosophy at King’s College London; prior to that he was a Research Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge. His research focuses on the intersection between the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind, action and ethics. He is the author of Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom and Normativity (CUP 2014), and the editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy (CUP 2016).
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Golob's talk - 'Self-Knowledge, Agency and Self-Authorship' - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 May 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Simon Prosser is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. His main research interests are in the philosophy of mind and in metaphysics. He has published articles on temporal experience, intentionalism about conscious experience, indexical thoughts, the metaphysics of time, and emergent properties. He is currently adding the finishing touches to a monograph on the experience of time and change, and also writing a couple of papers on the individuation of concepts. In the future he plans to write more about the nature of conscious experience.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Prosser's talk - 'Why are Indexicals Essential?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 11 May 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Christoph Hoerl is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His research is mainly in the philosophy of mind, with a particular interest in philosophical questions about the nature of temporal experience, memory, and our ability to think about time.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Hoerl's talk - 'Writing on the Page of Consciousness' - at the Aristotelian Society on 27 April 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Matthew Chrisman is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. His research has focused on ethical theory, the philosophy of language, and epistemology. He has published widely in these areas, including articles in the Journal of Philosophy, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophers’ Imprint and Philosophical Studies. Recent papers have been on the meaning of moral terms, the semantics of deontic modals, and the nature of epistemic normativity. He is one of the lead authors of Philosophy for Everyone (Routledge 2014). His research monograph The Meaning of ‘Ought': Beyond Descriptivism and Expressivism in Metaethics will be published with Oxford University Press. He is co-editing a collection on Deontic Modality for Oxford University Press. His textbook What Is This Thing Called Metaethics? is under contract at Routledge.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Chrisman's talk - 'Knowing What One Ought To Do' - at the Aristotelian Society on 9 March 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Louise Richardson is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Richardson's talk - 'Perceptual Activity and Bodily Awareness' - at the Aristotelian Society on 23 February 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Sophie Gibb is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy, Durham University. Her research is in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, with particular interests in the mental causation debate, the categories of being, and causation, laws and powers. Recent papers are on the ontology of the mental causation debate, the subset account of property realization, and tropes and laws. She is leader of the philosophy of mind work group within the Durham Emergence Project, which is an interdisciplinary research initiative involving collaboration between philosophers and physicists, made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Gibb's talk - 'Defending Dualism' - at the Aristotelian Society on 9 February 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Dominic Gregory teaches Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. He has written on the logic, epistemology, and metaphysics of modality, but his work has lately focused upon various questions concerning distinctively sensory representations such as pictures and sensory mental images. His recent book "Showing, Sensing, and Seeming" (OUP 2013) develops a general account of the nature of the contents belonging to those representations: the book contains detailed philosophical examinations of sensory mental imagery and pictorial representation, and of memory, photography, and analogous nonvisual phenomena.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Gregory's talk - 'Visual Content, Expectations, and the Outside World' - at the Aristotelian Society on 26 January 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Michael Garnett is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College. He works in political philosophy and the philosophy of agency, where his research concerns a number of issues related to the idea of freedom. Recent papers are on the nature of autonomy, the idea of human unpredictability, coercion, and the relationship between freedom and agency.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Garnett's talk - 'Freedom and Indoctrination' - at the Aristotelian Society on 12 January 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Jens Timmermann is Reader in Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He was trained as an ancient philosopher but now largely works on Kant’s ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of law. Recent publications include a volume on Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason” (edited jointly with Andrews Reath), a German-English edition of Kant’s “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals” and an article on the possibility of moral conflict in Kantian ethics. He is currently interested in Kant’s account of irrational action, in his theory of sympathy and in the notorious essay on the “Alleged Right to Lie”.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Timmermann's talk - 'What’s Wrong with "Deontology"' - at the Aristotelian Society on 1 December 2014. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Paulina Sliwa is a University Lecturer in Philosophy and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. She received her PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her undergraduate degree from Balliol College, Oxford. Her research interests are in Epistemology, Ethics, and Moral Psychology. Recently, she has written about higher-order evidence, moral testimony, moral motivation, and the nature of moral praise and blame.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Sliwa's talk - 'Understanding and Knowing' - at the Aristotelian Society on 17 November 2014. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
John Heil is professor of philosophy at Washington University in St Louis and Honorary Research Associate at Monash University. His work centers on topics in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. He is interested in the extent to which medieval and early modern approaches to metaphysical issues might shed light on contemporary debates over the nature of substances, properties, and relations (especially causal relations), and truthmakers for modal truths. Many of these themes are addressed in his most recent book, The Universe as We Find It (Oxford, 2012).
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Heil's talk - 'Genre, Interpretation and Evaluation' - at the Aristotelian Society on 20 October 2014. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Catharine Abell is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at The University of Manchester. Her research is predominantly in aesthetics and focuses on issues concerning the representational arts. She has published papers on topics such as the nature of depiction, how representational works of art express emotions and other mental states, and what it is for something to be an artwork. Her current research addresses issues such as the nature of fiction, the interpretation of works of fiction, and what styles and genres are and their effects on the interpretation and evaluation of works of fiction and other representational artworks. Together with Joel Smith, she is also working on the AHRC- funded project, Knowledge of Emotion, about how we know the emotional states of others.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Abell's talk - 'Genre, Interpretation and Evaluation' - at the Aristotelian Society on 20 October 2014. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
As the first talk for the 2014/15 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year’s Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Adrian Moore, University of Oxford, as the 107th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society’s President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy.
The 107th Presidential Address was chaired by David Papineau (KCL) – 106th President of the Aristotelian Society.
Adrian Moore is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he is also a Tutorial Fellow at St Hugh’s College. He was an undergraduate at Cambridge and a graduate at Oxford, where he wrote his doctorate under the supervision of Michael Dummett. He is one of Bernard Williams’ literary executors. His publications include The Infinite; Points of View; Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty: Themes and Variations in Kant’s Moral and Religious Philosophy; and, most recently, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Moore's address - 'Being, Univocity and Logical Syntax' - at the Aristotelian Society on 6 October 2014. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
The 88th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Cambridge from 11 to 13 July 2014. The Joint Session is a three-day conference in philosophy that is held annually during the summer by the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. It has taken place at nearly every major university across the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Since 1910, the Joint Session has grown to become the largest gathering of philosophers in the country, attracting prestigious UK and international speakers working in a broad range of philosophical areas. Inaugurated by the incoming President of the Mind Association, the Joint Session includes symposia, open and postgraduate sessions, and a range of satellite conferences.
This podcast is a recording of the fifth and final symposium at the Joint Session - "Self-Regulation" - which featured Tamar Szabó Gendler (Yale) and Jennifer Nagel (Toronto). Tamar Gendler is the Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, and Deputy Provost for Humanities and Initiatives at Yale University, where she has taught since 2006. Previously, she taught Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Cornell and Syracuse Universities, after earning her PhD at Harvard University in 1996. Much of her recent philosophical work has focused a cluster of issues surrounding the relations between explicit and implicit attitudes, particularly in the context of habit, self-regulation, and implicit bias; other current interests include general questions about philosophical methodology, and a number of specific issues that arise from thinking about the relation between imagination and belief. Her earlier philosophical work addressed various topics in metaphysics and epistemology including conceivability and possibility, perceptual experience, personal identity, and the methodology of thought experiment. A collection of some of her papers was published under the title Intuition, Imagination and Philosophical Methodology (Oxford, 2010). Jennifer Nagel is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Chair at the University of Toronto, where she has worked since 2000. She was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College Oxford in 2012, and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Jerusalem in 2011. Her recent work focuses on the relationship between intuitive knowledge attribution and knowledge itself; it aims to bridge the gap between empirical work on mental state attribution and theoretical work in epistemology.
The 88th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Cambridge from 11 to 13 July 2014. The Joint Session is a three-day conference in philosophy that is held annually during the summer by the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. It has taken place at nearly every major university across the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Since 1910, the Joint Session has grown to become the largest gathering of philosophers in the country, attracting prestigious UK and international speakers working in a broad range of philosophical areas. Inaugurated by the incoming President of the Mind Association, the Joint Session includes symposia, open and postgraduate sessions, and a range of satellite conferences.
This podcast is a recording of the fourth symposium at the Joint Session - "The Ethical Significance of Persistence" - which featured Amber Carpenter (York) and Stephen Makin (Sheffield). Amber Carpenter has been Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York since 2007; she has taught at St. Andrews, Cornell and Oxford. She has published in Ancient Greek philosophy, especially the ethics, epistemology and metaphysics of Plato, and is the co-founder of the Yorkshire Ancient Philosophy Network. She was an Einstein Fellow at the Einstein Forum, which enabled her to begin work in Indian Buddhist philosophy, and subsequently held an Anniversary Lectureship from the University of York. Her book on metaphysics as ethics in Indian Buddhism appeared in 2013. Her interests include the nature of pleasure and reason and their respective places in a well-lived life; the implications of metaphysics for ethics; and the nature of knowledge, our striving for it, and the effects this has on our character. Stephen Makin took his first degree at Edinburgh University, and then moved to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, to study for a PhD. His research was originally on the philosophy of the early Wittgenstein, but his interests rapidly turned to ancient philosophy. His doctoral thesis was on pre-Socratic atomism. He was a research fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, before being appointed to a lectureship in Sheffield in 1984. Stephen has published papers on philosophy of religion, Democritean atomism, method in ancient philosophy, the metaphysics of Aristotle, and Aquinas’ philosophy of nature. His book on principle-of-insufficient-reason arguments in ancient philosophy was published by Blackwell in 1993 under the title Indifference Arguments. His translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book 9, along with a substantial commentary, was published in the Clarendon Aristotle Series in 2006. His research interests also include various topics in contemporary metaphysics.
The 88th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Cambridge from 11 to 13 July 2014. The Joint Session is a three-day conference in philosophy that is held annually during the summer by the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. It has taken place at nearly every major university across the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Since 1910, the Joint Session has grown to become the largest gathering of philosophers in the country, attracting prestigious UK and international speakers working in a broad range of philosophical areas. Inaugurated by the incoming President of the Mind Association, the Joint Session includes symposia, open and postgraduate sessions, and a range of satellite conferences.
This podcast is a recording of the third symposium at the Joint Session - "Culpability, Duress and Excuses" - which featured Gideon Rosen (Princeton) and Marcia Baron (St. Andrews). Gideon Rosen is Chair of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. He joined the faculty of Philosophy in 1993, having taught previously at the University of Michigan. His areas of research include metaphysics, epistemology and moral philosophy. He is the author (with John Burgess) of A Subject With No Object (Oxford, 1997). Marcia Baron is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews and Rudy Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University. Her main interests are in moral philosophy and philosophy of criminal law. Publications include Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology (Cornell 1995), Three Methods of Ethics: A Debate, co-authored with Philip Pettit and Michael Slote (Blackwell, 1997), “Manipulativeness” (2003), “Excuses, Excuses” (2007), “Virtue Ethics, Kantian Ethics, and the ‘One Thought Too Many’ Objection” (2008), “Kantian Moral Maturity and the Cultivation of Character” (2009), “Gender Issues in the Criminal Law” (2011), “Self-Defense: The Imminence Requirement” (2011), and “Rape, Seduction, Shame, and Culpability in Tess of the d’Urbervilles” (2013). Forthcoming articles include “The Ticking Bomb Hypothetical” and “The Supererogatory and Kant’s Wide Duties.”
The 88th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Cambridge from 11 to 13 July 2014. The Joint Session is a three-day conference in philosophy that is held annually during the summer by the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. It has taken place at nearly every major university across the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Since 1910, the Joint Session has grown to become the largest gathering of philosophers in the country, attracting prestigious UK and international speakers working in a broad range of philosophical areas. Inaugurated by the incoming President of the Mind Association, the Joint Session includes symposia, open and postgraduate sessions, and a range of satellite conferences.
This podcast is a recording of the second symposium at the Joint Session - "Moral Testimony" - which featured Hallvard Lillehammer (Birkbeck) and Roger Crisp (Oxford). Hallvard Lillehammer is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. From 2000 to 2013 he taught in the Faculty of Philosophy at Cambridge University, where he was the Sidgwick Lecturer and a Fellow of King’s College, Churchill College, and the Judge Business School. He has published widely in moral and political philosophy, in particular on issues in contemporary metaethics, the history of ethical thought, and matters of life and death. Roger Crisp is Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Mill on Utilitarianism (1997) and Reasons and the Good (2006), and has translated Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for CUP. He is currently writing a book on Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics.
The 88th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Cambridge from 11 to 13 July 2014. The Joint Session is a three-day conference in philosophy that is held annually during the summer by the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. It has taken place at nearly every major university across the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Since 1910, the Joint Session has grown to become the largest gathering of philosophers in the country, attracting prestigious UK and international speakers working in a broad range of philosophical areas. Inaugurated by the incoming President of the Mind Association, the Joint Session includes symposia, open and postgraduate sessions, and a range of satellite conferences.
This podcast is a recording of the first symposium at the Joint Session - "Truth and Meaning" - which featured Ian Rumfitt (Birmingham) and Alan Weir (who was filling in for Gary Kemp). Ian Rumfitt studied philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford, and at Princeton University, and has taught it at Keele University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and back at Oxford, where he was for seven years a Tutorial Fellow of University College. He has held a position at Birkbeck University of London since 2005. He works mainly in philosophy of language and logic, and in the history of analytic philosophy (Frege) with forays into metaphysics and the philosophy of mathematics. Gary Kemp is a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow. He’s written books and papers on the Philosophy of Language and Philosophical Logic (recently: Quine versus Davidson: Truth, Reference and Meaning, and What is this thing called Philosophy of Language?), and a few papers in Aesthetics. He earned his Ph.D. in 1993 from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
The 88th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Cambridge from 11 to 13 July 2014. The Joint Session is a three-day conference in philosophy that is held annually during the summer by the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. It has taken place at nearly every major university across the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Since 1910, the Joint Session has grown to become the largest gathering of philosophers in the country, attracting prestigious UK and international speakers working in a broad range of philosophical areas. Inaugurated by the incoming President of the Mind Association, the Joint Session includes symposia, open and postgraduate sessions, and a range of satellite conferences.
This podcast is a recording of the inaugural address to the Joint Session - "Reasons for Belief, Perception and Reflective Knowledge" - which was delivered by the President of the Mind Association, Alan Millar (Stirling). Alan Millar received his first degree from the University of Edinburgh and then a Ph.D from the University of Cambridge. He was appointed to the University of Stirling in 1971, becoming a Professor of Philosophy in 1994. He has been Professor Emeritus at Stirling since 2010. In 2005 he was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is a member of the Editorial Board of The Philosophical Quarterly and has served on the Executive Committee of the Aristotelian Society. He is currently a member of the Executive Committee of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. His main areas of interest are epistemology and the philosophy of mind and language, though he has made occasional contributions to the history of ethics that deal with ideas of Joseph Butler and John Stuart Mill. His publications include Reasons and Experience (Clarendon Press, 1991), Understanding People: Normativity and Rationalizing Explanation (Oxford University Press, 2004) and The Nature and Value of Knowledge: Three Investigations (Oxford University Press, 2010), co-written with Duncan Pritchard and Adrian Haddock.
Elizabeth Barnes has been a senior lecturer at Leeds since 2006. Before going to Leeds she was a PhD student in the Vagueness Project of the Arche AHRC Research Centre for the philosophy of logic, language, mathematics, and mind at the University of St. Andrews. Her main research interests are in metaphysics and ethics.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Barnes' talk - 'Going Beyond the Fundamental: Feminism in Contemporary Metaphysics' - at the Aristotelian Society on 16 June 2014. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Before joining the University of Edinburgh as Chancellor’s Fellow in January 2014, Alix Cohen taught at the universities of York and Leeds, having previously held a Junior Research Fellowship at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of Kant and the Human Sciences: Biology, Anthropology and History (Palgrave, 2009) and has published papers on Kant as well as Hume and Rousseau. She is currently editing Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology: A Critical Guide (CUP, 2014) and Kant on Emotion and Value (Palgrave, 2014). Alix is also Associate Editor of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy and the Oxford Bibliography Online (OUP), and Executive Member of the British Society for the History of Philosophy and the UK Kant Society.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Cohen's talk - 'Kant on the Ethics of Belief' - at the Aristotelian Society on 2 June 2014. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Ulrike Heuer is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Leeds having previously worked in the philosophy departments at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and Barnard College. She has also been a faculty fellow of the Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and of the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at Tulane University. Her research focuses on theories of practical reasons, the relation of reasons and values, various problems in normative ethics, and philosophy of action. She is currently working on a project on the moral significance of intentions funded by the British Academy.
This podcast is an audio recording of Prof. Heuer's talk - 'Intentions and the Reasons for Which We Act' - at the Aristotelian Society on 19 May 2014. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Tim Button is a University Lecturer, and a Fellow of St John’s College, at the University of Cambridge. He has published articles in metaphysics, logic and philosophy of mathematics. His first book, "The Limits of Realism" (OUP, 2013), deals with the relationship between semantics and scepticism. It critically explores explores and develops several themes from Hilary Putnam’s work on realism and antirealism, notably: the model-theoretic arguments; the connection between truth and justification; the brain-in-vat argument; semantic externalism; and conceptual relativity.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Button's talk - 'The Weight of Truth' - at the Aristotelian Society on 12 May 2014. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Eileen John is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Her research is in aesthetics and philosophy of literature, with particular interests in literature and knowledge, and some broader interests in personal autonomy, moral psychology, and conditions for ethical life. Recent papers are on second-personal constraints on love, the nature of our concern for fictional characters, and expressive thought in poetry. She directs Warwick’s Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. John's talk - 'Literature and Disagreement' - at the Aristotelian Society on 28 April 2014. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Jessica Moss is Professor of Philosophy. She received her B.A. from Yale University and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University (2004). Her primary area of research is ancient philosophy, especially ethics and psychology. Her article “Akrasia and Perceptual Illusion” was chosen for The Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best articles published in philosophy in 2009. Her book "Aristotle on the Apparent Good: Perception, Phantasia, Thought, and Desire" was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. Moss has previously held positions at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Oxford, and currently at NYU.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Moss' talk - 'Plato's Appearance/Assent Account of Belief' - at the Aristotelian Society on 10 March 2014. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Paul Faulkner is a senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. His research interest is principally in testimony and trust. He is the author of 'Knowledge on Trust' (OUP 2011).
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Faulkner's talk - 'A Virtue Theory of Testimony' - at the Aristotelian Society on 24 February 2014. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Conor McHugh is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Southampton. He has published articles on a range of topics in epistemology and philosophy of mind, including self-knowledge, epistemic warrant, mental agency, doxastic control and freedom, epistemic responsibility, the aim of belief, and assertion. He is currently working on epistemic normativity and the nature of belief, on the normativity of attitudes more generally, and on related issues in value theory. He is an investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘Normativity: Epistemic and Practical’ at the University of Southampton.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. McHugh's talk - 'Fitting Belief' - at the Aristotelian Society on 10 February 2014. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on German idealism, including "Kant’s Theory of Form" (1982), "Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness" (1989), "Modernism as a Philosophical Problem" (1991), and "Hegel’s Practical Philosophy" (2008). He has also written on literature ("Henry James and Modern Moral Life" (2000)) and film ("Hollywood Westerns and American Myth" (2010). His most recent books are "Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy" (2010), "Hegel on Self-Consciousness" (2011), and "Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy" (2012), and "Kunst als Philosophie: Hegel und die Philosophie der bildlichen Moderne" (2012). He has been visiting professor at universities in Amsterdam, Jena, Frankfurt, and at the Collège de France. He is a past winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a member of The American Philosophical Society.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Pippin's talk - 'The Significance of Self-Consciousness in Idealist Theories of Logic' - at the Aristotelian Society on 27 January 2014. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Nicholas Shea is an interdisciplinary philosopher of mind, and of psychology, cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience. He came into philosophy via an MA at Birkbeck and PhD at King’s College London. He then worked as a research fellow in Oxford, based in the Faculty of Philosophy and Somerville College and affiliated to the Department of Experimental Psychology, before joining King’s College London in 2012.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Shea's talk - 'Exploited Isomorphism and Structural Representation' - at the Aristotelian Society on 13 January 2014. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Francesco Berto is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy and Research Leader at the Northern Institute of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen. He has also worked at the University of Notre Dame (IN, USA), the Sorbonne-Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris, and the Universities of Padua and Venice (Italy). He has published monographs on metaphysics and the philosophy of logic, and papers in Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, the European Journal of Philosophy, Synthèse, the Review of Symbolic Logic, Philosophia Mathematica, American Philosophical Quarterly, Dialectica, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Berto's talk - 'On Conceiving the Inconsistent' - at the Aristotelian Society on 2 December 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Jonathan Lear is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago and a member of the Committee on Social Thought. He is author most recently of 'Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation', 'A Case for Irony', and 'Freud'.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Lear's talk - 'Integrating the Non-Rational Soul' - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 November 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Tim Mulgan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland, and Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of The Demands of Consequentialism (Oxford University Press 2001), Future People (Oxford University Press 2006), Understanding Utilitarianism (Acumen 2007), and Ethics for a Broken World (Acumen/McGill-Queens University Press 2011). He is currently completing a manuscript for Oxford University Press entitled Purpose in the Universe: the moral and metaphysical case for ananthropocentric purposivism.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Mulgan's talk - 'Ethics for Possible Futures' - at the Aristotelian Society on 4 November 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Robert Kane (Ph. D. Yale University) is University Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and Professor of Law at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of seven books and more that seventy articles on the philosophy of mind, free will and action, ethics and value theory and philosophy of religion, including Free Will and Values (1985), Through the Moral Maze (1994), The Significance of Free Will (Oxford, 1996), A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (Oxford, 2005), Four Views of Free Will (co-authored with John Fischer, Derk Pereboom and Manuel Vargas, Blackwell, 2007) and Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom (Cambridge, 2010). He is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (2002, 2nd edition, 2011), among other anthologies, and a multiple contributor to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. His lecture series, The Quest for Meaning: Values, Ethics and the Modern Experience, appears in The Great Courses on Tape Series of The Teaching Company (Chantilly, Virginia). His book, The Significance of Free Will, was the first annual winner of the Robert W. Hamilton Faculty Book Award. His article, “The Modal Ontological Argument” (Mind, 1984), was selected by The Philosopher’s Annual as one of ten best of 1984. The recipient of fifteen major teaching awards at the University of Texas, including the President’s Excellence Award for teaching in the University’s Honors Program, he was named in 1995 one of the inaugural members of the University’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers. He is known internationally for his defense of a libertarian or incompatibilist view of free will (one that is incomaptible with determinism) and for his attempt to reconcile such a view with modern science.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Kane’s talk - 'Acting “of One’s Own Free Will”: New Perspectives on an Ancient Philosophical Problem' - at the Aristotelian Society on 21 October 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
David Papineau was born in Italy and educated in Trinidad, England, and South Africa. He has a BSc in mathematics from the University of Natal and a BA and PhD in philosophy from Cambridge. He has lectured at Reading University, Macquarie University, Birkbeck College London, and Cambridge University. Since 1990 has been Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. He was President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science for 1993-5 and President of the Mind Association for 2009-10. In 2010 he gave the Carnap Lectures in Bochum, Germany, and in 2011 the Frege Lectures in Tartu, Estonia.
This year's Presidential Address marks the inauguration of Professor David Papineau (KCL) as the 106th President of the Aristotelian Society.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Broadie's address - 'Sensory Experience and Representational Properties' - at the Aristotelian Society on 7 October 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Oliver Pooley a University Lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Oriel College, Oxford. He works in the philosophy of physics and in metaphysics. Much of his research focuses on the nature of space, time and spacetime. Oliver read Physics and Philosophy at Balliol College, and took an MASt in Maths at St John’s College, Cambridge, before returning to Oxford to do graduate work in Philosophy. Before taking up his current position at Oriel, he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford. This podcast is an audio recording of Oliver's talk - "Relativity, the Open Future, and the Passage of Time" - at the Aristotelian Society on 3 June 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Clayton Littlejohn is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at King’s College London. His publications include Justification and the Truth-Connection (Cambridge University Press, 2012), This is Epistemology (Wiley, Forthcoming), and Epistemic Norms, edited with John Turri (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming). His current research concerns the relation between theoretical and practical reason. This podcast is an audio recording of Clayton's talk - "The Russellian Retreat" - at the Aristotelian Society on 13 May 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Gary Watson is Provost Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of Southern California. Gary's area of specialization is moral, political philosophy and legal philosophy, with a special concentration on the theory of agency and responsibility. More recently, his research investigates the question of whether criminal law has a coherent normative underpinning. This podcast is an audio recording of Gary's talk - "Psychopathy and Prudential Deficits" - at the Aristotelian Society on 13 May 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Fabian Freyenhagen is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Essex, having previously taught at Sheffield and Cambridge. Apart from articles and a forthcoming book on Adorno’s (practical) philosophy, he has also published on Kant and Hegel as well as on contemporary political philosophy. He has co-edited two books (Disputing the Political: Habermas and Rawls, with Gordon Finlayson; and The Legacy of John Rawls, with Thom Brooks). He is Co-Investigator of a major AHRC-funded research initiative, the Essex Autonomy Project (http://autonomy.essex.ac.uk), and has also published in this area. This podcast is an audio recording of Fabian's talk - "Ethical (Self-)Critique" - at the Aristotelian Society on 29 April 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Ian Phillips is a Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at University College London. Before that he was a Fellow by Examination at All Souls College, Oxford University. Ian is the author of numerous articles in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, one of which was recently awarded the William James Prize for Contributions to the Scientific Study of Consciousness. He is currently writing a book on our experience of time. This podcast is an audio recording of Ian's talk - "Perceiving the Passing of Time" - at the Aristotelian Society on 22 April 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Rowan Cruft has taught philosophy at the University of Stirling since 2002. He has published articles on the nature and justification of rights and duties, focusing on comparisons between different forms of right: human rights, contractual rights, property rights, legal rights. He is co-editor of Crime, Punishment and Responsibility: the jurisprudence of Antony Duff (OUP 2011), and is currently co-editing OUP’s Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (forthcoming 2014). This podcast is an audio recording of Rowan's talk - "Why is it Disrespectful to Violate Rights?" - at the Aristotelian Society on 4 March 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
John Carriero is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of Between two Worlds: a Reading of Descartes’s “Meditations” (2009) and co-editor with Janet Broughton of A Companion to Descartes (2008). He is especially interested in understanding early modern rationalist thought as the outgrowth of the seventeenth-century collision between the new science and Aristotelianism. His essays “Spinoza on Final Causality” (2005) and “Substance and Ends” (2008) are two significant contributions to that project. This podcast is an audio recording of John's talk - "Epistemology Past and Present" - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 February 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Josh Parsons was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and studied at Victoria University, Wellington before moving to Australia to do his PhD at the Australian National University. He worked at the Arché research centre, University of St Andrews (2001- 2004; after leaving he retained an honorary position at St Andrews until 2010); University of California, Davis (2004-2005); and Otago University (2006-2011). Josh returned to the UK to take up a lecturership at Oxford University in December 2011. This podcast is an audio recording of Josh's talk - "Presupposition, Disagreement and Predicates of Taste" - at the Aristotelian Society on 4 February 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Tom Stern is a Lecturer in Philosophy at University College London, where he is also the Academic Director of the European Social and Political Studies programme. Before starting at UCL, he studied at Cambridge and at the University of Chicago. His research interests include Nietzsche and aesthetics. As regards Nietzsche, he has written a number of articles exploring various candidates for a positive ethics in Nietzsche’s philosophy. These include discussions of the concept of the Übermensch, of Eternal Recurrence, of Nietzsche’s conception of freedom and (for the Aristotelian Society) of amor fati. As regards aesthetics, his book – Philosophy and Theatre (Routledge) – is forthcoming in 2013. This podcast is an audio recording of Tom's talk - "Nietzsche, Amor Fati and The Gay Science" - at the Aristotelian Society on 21 January 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Clare Chambers is University Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge. Her field is political philosophy, particularly feminist and liberal theories of justice, equality, autonomy, culture, family and the body. Clare is the author of two books: Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice (Penn State University Press, 2008) and, with Phil Parvin, Political Philosophy: A Complete Introduction (Hodder, forthcoming 2012). She has also written numerous articles and chapters on feminist and liberal political philosophy. This podcast is an audio recording of Clare's talk - "The Marriage-Free State" - at the Aristotelian Society on 7 January 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Before coming to King’s College London, Maria Alvarez was a lecturer at the University of Southampton, having previously taught at the universities of Oxford and Reading. Maria is also a member of the Executive Committee of the British Philosophical Association. Her research interests include the philosophy of action, including the metaphysics and explanation of actions, reasons for action, agent causation, and the problem of free will and moral responsibility. This podcast is an audio recording of Maria's talk - "Agency and Two-Way Powers" - at the Aristotelian Society on 10 December 2012. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Angela Breitenbach is a Lecturer in the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the history of modern philosophy, in particular the philosophy of Kant, as well as questions in philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, and aesthetics. She has published on various aspects of Kant’s philosophy, and is the author of Die Analogie von Vernunft und Natur (The Analogy of Reason and Nature, de Gruyter 2009). Angela was educated in Cambridge and Berlin, and held a Junior Research Fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. She spent the last three years as a Lecturer at the University of East Anglia before moving to Cambridge in October 2012. This podcast is an audio recording of Angela's talk - "Aesthetics in Science: A Kantian Proposal" - at the Aristotelian Society on 3 December 2012. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Guy Longworth is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on the nature of linguistic understanding and its role in the communication of knowledge. He has also written on testimony, generative linguistics, and the work of J. L. Austin. This podcast is an audio recording of Guy Longworth's talk - "Sharing Thoughts About Oneself" - at the Aristotelian Society on 19 November 2012. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Johannes Roessler is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Warwick University. He has published articles on issues in the philosophy of mind, epistemology and cognitive development, and has co-edited three interdisciplinary volumes: Agency and Self-Awareness (2003), Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds (2004) and Perception, Causation and Objectivity (2011). This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Roessler's talk - "The Epistemic Role of Intentions" - at the Aristotelian Society on 5 November 2012. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra is the author of Resemblance Nominalism (Oxford University Press, 2002) and co-editor of Real Metaphysics (Routledge, 2003). He has written many articles on metaphysics and early modern philosophy. He is a Fellow and Tutor at Oriel College, University of Oxford. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Rodriguez-Pereyra's talk - "Resemblance Nominalism, Conjunctions and Truthmakers" - at the Aristotelian Society on 22 October 2012. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Sarah Broadie is in the Moral Philosophy Department at the University of St Andrews. She has previously worked in philosophy departments at Princeton, Rutgers, Yale, the University of Texas at Austin, and Edinburgh University. Her publications include Nature, Change, and Agency in Aristotle’s Physics (1982); Passage and Possibility: a study of Aristotle’s modal concepts (1982); Ethics with Aristotle (1991); Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Commentary, with translation by Christopher Rowe (2002); Aristotle and Beyond, Essays on Metaphysics and Ethics (2007); Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus (2011); Philoponus on Aristotle, Physics 4. 10-14 (on Time), translation and notes (2012). She is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Academia Europaea.
This year's Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Sarah Broadie (St. Andrews) as the 105th President of the Aristotelian Society.
This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Broadie's address - 'Actual Instead' - at the Aristotelian Society on 8 October 2012. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Michael Smith is the author of The Moral Problem (1994); Ethics and the A Priori: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Meta-Ethics (2004); and the co-author of Mind, Morality and Explanation: Selected Collaborations (2004), a collection of papers written in various combinations by Smith, Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit when they were colleagues at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. In 2004 Smith moved to Princeton University where is currently McCosh Professor of Philosophy. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Smith's talk - "Agents and Patients" - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 June 2012. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Kieran Setiya was an undergraduate at Cambridge and a graduate student at Princeton. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and is the author of Reasons without Rationalism (Princeton, 2007) and Knowing Right From Wrong (Oxford, forthcoming). This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Setiya's talk - "Knowing How" - at the Aristotelian Society on 14 June 2012. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Michael Thompson received his PhD in Philosophy at UCLA, where he was a student of Philippa Foot. He is a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and was formerly an Assistant Professor at UCLA. He is the author of Life and Action (Harvard University Press 2008, 2012; Suhrkamp 2011) and "What is it to Wrong Someone?" in Reason and Value, ed. Wallace et al. (O.U.P. 2006). This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Thompson's talk - "You and I" - at the Aristotelian Society on 21 May 2012. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Frank Jackson is a regular visiting professor at Princeton University and holds fractional research positions at The Australian National University and La Trobe University. He is a Corresponding Fellow of The British Academy. His publications include: Perception (Cambridge UP 1977), Conditionals (Blackwell1987), The Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, co-authored with David Braddon-Mitchell (Blackwell, 1996), From Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford UP 1998), Language, Names, and Information (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Jackson's talk - "Leibniz's Law and the Philosophy of Mind" - at the Aristotelian Society on 14 May 2012. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Fiona Leigh is a Lecturer in Philosophy at University College London, where she joined the Department in 2009, after earning her PhD (Monash). Fiona’s area of research specialty is Plato’s later metaphysics, especially Plato’s Sophist, and she has published papers in journals including Phronesis, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Aperion, and Journal of Philosophy of Education. Currently she is working on a monograph length reading of the Sophist, and is interested in the potentially positive role of art in Plato’s work. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Leigh's talk - "Restless Forms & Changeless Causes" - at the Aristotelian Society on 5 March 2012. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Heather Logue is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on issues in metaphysics and epistemology, and particularly on issues concerning perceptual experience. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Logue's talk - "Why Naïve Realism?" - at the Aristotelian Society on 20 February 2012. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Stacie Friend is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London, where she has been teaching since 2007. Her research is at the intersection of aesthetics and philosophy of language and mind, focusing primarily on issues relating to fiction. She has published papers on the nature of fiction, discourse and thought about the non-existent, the metaphysics of fictional characters, emotional responses to fiction and tragedy and the cognitive values of literature. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Friend's talk - "Fiction as a Genre" - at the Aristotelian Society on 6 February 2012. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Dudley Knowles retired in July 2011 as Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He studied for his first degree at Bedford College, University of London, graduating in 1970. After a spell managing a hotel in Glencoe, he studied for a two-year thesis (MLitt) at the University of Glasgow, where he was appointed lecturer in 1973. He remained in Glasgow throughout his academic career. Although he has published on a variety of topics, his main interests have been in political philosophy and its history. He has published three books – Political Philosophy(2001), Hegel and The Philosophy of Right (2002) and Political Obligation (2010) – and edited several more. In retirement, he has continued to work on problems associated with political obligation and is preparing a second edition of Political Philosophy. He anticipates working on the nature and value of political freedom in his dotage. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Knowles' talk - "Good Samaritans & Good Government" - at the Aristotelian Society on 21 November 2011. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Seth Yalcin is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science. Prior to that he was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He works mostly in the philosophy of language, on descriptive and foundational issues in natural language semantics. Lately his work has borrowed ideas from formal epistemology and from metaethical expressivism to develop accounts of the meaning of epistemic and deontic modals, probability operators, conditionals, attitude verbs, and the language of spatial orientation. He also has research interests in metaphysics, on questions about the nature of modality, information, and randomness. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Yalcin's talk - "Bayesian Expressivism" - at the Aristotelian Society on 9 January 2012. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Daniel Rothschild is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Prior to that he was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Princeton University. His research focuses on natural language semantics and pragmatics. He has written on specific constructions such as conditionals, descriptions, questions, and modals, as well as foundational topics such as presupposition, expressivism, game-theoretic pragmatics, and dynamic semantics. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Rothschild's talk - "Expressing Credences" - at the Aristotelian Society on 5 December 2011. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
David Barnett is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Prior to arriving at CU in 2005, he held positions at the University Vermont and Davidson College. In 2008, he was a visiting professor at NYU, where he obtained his PhD in in 2003. Barnett works mainly in philosophy of language and metaphysics, but also has interests in philosophy of mind. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Barnett's talk - "Counterfactual Entailment" - at the Aristotelian Society on 21 November 2011. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Øystein Linnebo is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, where he arrived in January 2010, having held positions at the Universities of Bristol, Oxford, and Oslo. He obtained his PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University in 2002 and an MA in Mathematics from the University of Oslo in 1995. Linnebo’s research interests lie in philosophical logic, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, early analytic philosophy, as well as parts of philosophy of language and philosophy of science. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Linnebo's talk - "Reference by Abstraction" - at the Aristotelian Society on 7 November 2011. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Gianfranco Soldati works on phenomenology, mind and knowledge. Among other things he is interested in problems related to self-knowledge and in the philosophical analysis of experience. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Soldati's talk - "Direct Realism and Immediate Justification" - at the Aristotelian Society on 20 October 2011. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
Marie McGinn is Professor Emerita in Philosophy at the University of York, and part-time Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Her main areas of research include the philosophy of Wittgenstein, epistemology and the philosophy of mind. She is the 104th President of the Aristotelian Society for the 2011/12 academic year. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor McGinn's inaugural address titled, "Non-Inferential Knowledge." The Address took place on 10 October 2011 at the Chancellor's Hall of Senate House, University of London. This podcast was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy.