Royal Institute of Philosophy Stapledon Colloquium 2020-21
The Stapledon Seminar Series features external speakers and members of the Liverpool department of Philosophy presenting current philosophical research. The seminars are free and all are welcome to attend. The seminar takes place on Thursdays, 3-5pm.
Read about Olaf Stapledon here.
For any organisational queries, contact Dr Vid Simoniti
| Semester 1 | ||
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| 8 October 2020 | Michael Hannon, University of Nottingham |
Disagreement or Badmouthing? The Role of Expressive Discourse in Politics A striking feature of political discourse is how prone we are to disagree. Political opponents will even give different answers to factual questions, which suggests that opposing parties cannot agree on facts any more than they can on values. This impression is widespread and supported by survey data. I will argue, however, that the extent and depth of political disagreement is largely overstated. Many political disagreements are merely illusory. This claim has several important upshots. I will explore the implications of this idea for theories about voter misinformation, motivated reasoning, public reason liberalism, deliberative democracy, and a number of other issues.
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| 22 October 2020 | Helen Steward, University of Leeds |
Laws Loosened: How to make Way for Freedom in a Law-Governed World In this paper, I shall consider a number of different ways in which philosophers in recent years have attempted to offer conceptions of natural law which in various respects suggest that the grip of law on reality might be less tight than has been traditionally supposed. One such loosening is represented by the suggestion that many laws might be best thought of as probabilistic rather than deterministic. A second kind of loosening has been the admission that some laws (perhaps even all laws) might hold only ceteris paribus. Yet a third is the suggestion that laws form a ‘patchwork’, not a pyramid, with the cover of law only “loosely attached to the jumbled world of material things” (Cartwright, 1999). How, though, are these different suggestions related to one another? Which kinds of loosening might entail which other kinds? And which, if any, might be most promising as regards making room in the universe for free will? In this paper I shall try to suggest that the first and second strategies are far less useful than the third in making the kind of space which would be required to subserve the reality of free will; and that a fourth kind of loosening – from laws as dictators to laws as constrainers might yet be more useful than any of the other three in this respect. |
| 5 November | Katherine Furman, University of Liverpool |
Affective Distrust in Science In our interactions with science we are often vulnerable; we don’t have complete control of the situation and there is a risk that we, or those we love, might be harmed. This is not an emotionally neutral experience. There has been an outpouring of philosophical literature on trust in science as the consequences of distrust become clear. This has exclusively focussed on epistemic and value-based dimensions of trust. In this paper I advocate for taking the emotional aspects of distrust in science seriously. I note that taking affect into account helps us better explain instances of serious mistrust, such as was the case in the early days of HIV/AIDS treatment programmes in South Africa and medical interventions during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. It also helps us better account for familiar aspects of the phenomenon, such as the peculiar evidential weightings that individuals make use of in situations of distrust, and the difficulties of re-establishing trust once it is lost. |
| 19 November 2020 | Sacha Golob, King’s College London |
Anti-Liberalism and the Rhetoric of Decline Anti-liberal theorists, from Maurras to MacIntyre, characterise liberal societies as suffering from distinctive, structural forms of malaise: they are in ‘decline’, ‘decadent’, ‘degenerate’, or, as MacIntyre famously suggested, afflicted by ‘barbarism and darkness’. This paper has two aims. First, I sketch some principles for analysing these specific over-arching social categories. Second, I consider the case of the liberal ‘private sphere’ as treated by MacIntyre prior to After Virtue and more recently, in a bid to move beyond some of the longstanding communitarian/liberal debates. |
| 3 December 2020 | Leah McClimans, University of South Carolina |
Patient-Centered Measurement Patient-centered measurement is the idea that patient perspectives on should play an evidentiary role in determining how effective a drug is taken to be, the degree to which a hospital provides good quality or whether a particular intervention should be funded by an insurer. This idea may sound prosaic, but in fact it’s nothing short of revolutionary. Patient-centered measurement treats patient perspectives on par with more traditional metrics such as mortality, morbidity and safety. It says, patient views matter—not as an afterthought, and not only at the bedside, but in the nuts and bolts of creating our evidence base, and thus in macro-level health-care decision-making. The America Food and Drug Administration as well as the UK’s Department of Health have been particularly active in developing patient-centered measurement. In this talk I’ll explore some of this activity and discuss philosophical responses to it. For the most part, philosophers have been critical of patient-centered measures—perhaps even a little cynical about their revolutionary role. We’ve have also tended (wrongly I believe) to think of these instruments as measures of well-being. In this talk, I’m going to argue that the point of these measures is to “capture patient voices”, not measure well-being. The upshot of this shift is that patient-centered measures require an epistemic theory rather than a prudential one. Once we make this shift, a whole new set of problems arise (!) but at least we can start being less cynical about the intent of these instruments. |
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Semester 2 |
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| 25 February 2021 |
René van Woudenberg, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam |
The Epistemology of Reading Epistemologists haven’t really discussed the phenomenon of reading, even though many people come to know many things through reading. In a recent paper I have argued that reading is a source of knowledge in its own right, and that it doesn’t reduce to either attending to testimony, nor to perception. (“Reading as a Source of Knowledge”, Synthese 2021) In my talk I will discuss the nature of reading. I will first argue that there is a distinction between factive and non-factive reading. Next I offer an analysis of non-factive reading, along the way criticizing Jeffrey Goodman’s proposal (in “On Reading” in Acta Analytica 2020). Third I shall argue that three kinds of reading knowledge (=knowledge yielded by reading) should be distinguished: (1) de dicto or hermeneutical knowledge; (2) de re or worldly knowledge; and (3) knowledge for which I haven coined a term, but that is neither de dicto, nor de re. An example of it is this: through reading Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, one may come to know that the book is funny. |
| 11 March 2021 | Anna Bergqvist, Manchester Metropolitan University |
Title TBC |
| 15 April 2021 |
Heidi L. Maibom, University of Cincinnati
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Why Should You Take Another Person’s Perspective? We often take other people’s perspectives on certain types of situations or events. We may do so to understand better another person is upset, or to try to figure out why they acted as they did. Although some people, called simulation theorists, believe we do so in general to understand others, others seem to think it is only required for understanding their more subjective thoughts and experiences. What both positions ignore is the fact that each of us regards the world in relation to ourselves, we have a first-person perspective on the world. We see other people in such terms to. We take the perspective of others, then, to overcome our own partial view of them. Conversely, we take the view of others on ourselves to overcome our own biased view of ourselves. In this talk, I explain the mechanics of perspective, perspective switching, and its importance. |
| 29 April 2021 | Eric Olson, The University of Sheffield |
Cartesian dualism and head injuries Cartesian dualism says that thinking things are immaterial substances: souls. Yet thinking requires an intact brain. This is mysterious: if the body can cause thinking, why can’t it think? And even if a soul is somehow necessary, why would it be the body that helps the soul to think rather than the soul that helps the body to think? We could answer that the soul and the body think together: each does something nonmental, and these contributions add up to thinking. That proposal, though interesting, has no attraction whatever, and it’s unsurprising that no one ever held it. |
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13 May 2021 4-6pm (please note the later than usual time) |
Brian Treanor, Loyola Marymount University |
Melancholic Joy: Seeing the World with New Eyes |