Philosophy Research Seminars

Venue: CAPSTRANS Seminar Room 1003 (Building 19, Arts) map»

When: Tuesdays at 17.30, all are welcome.

Schedule and Abstracts

Tuesday, 6 October

Dr. Peter Slezak UNSW: Cartesian ‘Ideas’ and the First (C17th) Cognitive Revolution

Jerry Fodor (2003) sees Hume’s Treatise as the foundational document of cognitive science, though he concedes that “Descartes got there first.” However, Hume’s “Cartesianism” is an ambiguous inheritance since Hume’s representational account (and Fodor’s) is closer to Malebranche’s version than Descartes’ own. Descartes shared the ‘pragmatism’ and ‘direct realism’ of Arnauld and later Reid – the doctrine that Fodor sees as “the defining catastrophe” in recent philosophy of mind. Since Putnam (1999) and others defend this Arnauld-Reid view today, there has been less progress since the 17th Century than Fodor suggests. I defend Descartes’ conception of representation against misunderstandings that illuminate issues still at the forefront of debate in cognitive science today. For example, despite the wide currency of Dennett’s term, Descartes was not guilty of the ‘Cartesian Theater’ fallacy and, indeed, in his Dioptrics explicitly argued against a conception of representation that would require the notorious homunculus – in the Malebranchean Theater.

Tuesday, 13 October

 Dr. Keith Horton UOW: "Justice, Charity and World Poverty"

What, if anything, are those of us who live in developed countries morally required to do in response to extreme poverty in developing countries? Both in the philosophical literature and in the wider community, discussion of this issue tends to be structured by a distinction between two kinds of duties, duties of justice and duties of charity. I argue that this tendency causes a number of serious problems. From a theoretical from point of view, the vocabulary offered by this distinction is radically insufficent to capture to the complexity of our normative relations to the global poor. And from a practical point of view, the tendency in question leads those who seek to make the case for moral requirements to tackle world poverty to focus on an unattractive and artifically restricted range of arguments. I explore what alternatives are available to us that may reduce these problems.

Tuesday, 20 October

 Dr. Jacqui Poltera UWS: "Autonomy, Ambivalence, and Repression"

Mainstream accounts of autonomy, such as Harry Frankfurt's, hinge on the claim that in order to be autonomous, we should aim to resolve ambivalence since it necessarily threatens autonomy. Recently, however, J. David Velleman has argued that a worrying implication of this aspect of Frankfurt's account is that it can promote repression. This paper argues that although there are cases where it is preferable to aim to resolve ambivalence as soon as possible, this is not always the case. Further, a desire to resolve ambivalence need not promote repression, nor is repression as Velleman understands it necessarily inimical to autonomy. An implication of this discussion is that the relationship between ambivalence, autonomy and repression is less clear than either Velleman or Frankfurt tend to assume.

Tuesday 27th October

Jordi Fernandez: "Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge"


Abstract: 
My aim will be to provide an account of self-deception based on a certain model of self-knowledge. According to this model, our thoughts about our own beliefs are based on our grounds for those beliefs. If this model is correct, then our thoughts about which beliefs we have should be in accordance with our grounds for having those beliefs. I suggest that self-deception is a failure of self-knowledge wherein the subject violates this epistemic obligation. I argue that this view of self-deception explains the tension that we observe between the subject’s speech and her actions as well as our inclination to hold the subject responsible for her condition.

Tuesday 3 November

Dr. Neil Levy (Melbourne/CAPPE/Oxford): The Politics of the Extended Mind

Time: 14:30-17:30  | Venue: 67-202 (Moot Court) | Program »

In earlier work, I argued that the extended mind has significant ethical implications, leading us  to see various kinds of environmental  manipulations as ethically on a par with interventions into the brain. In response, Zoe Drayson and Andy Clark (forthcoming) have argued that I overlook the important difference between the extended and the embedded mind. In this paper, I turn to the political implications of the extended mind thesis. I argue that the view supports what I call weak communitarianism, according to which cognitive resources are goods which demand special protection. I argue that attention to the ways in which external cognitive resources are veristically valuable actually shows not only that weak communitarianism is the strongest that that we can support by reference to the extended mind; it also provides us with resources to criticize stronger forms of communitarianism. I argue that the difference between the extended and the embedded mind is not important, so far as these political considerations are so concerned.

Responses by Richard Menary (UOW) and David Neil (UOW)

Tuesday, 10 November

Dr. Stephen Hetherington (UNSW): “Scepticism as an Intellectualist Mistake”

How many philosophers have claimed to uncover a fundamental failing within sceptical thinking about knowledge? All too many; perhaps the quest is foolhardy. Maybe irrationally undaunted, though, this paper joins that fray — armed with the Rylean distinction between knowing-that and knowing-how. The paper’s conclusion is that sceptical thinking which would deny us knowledge relies upon a mistaken metaphysical presumption about the nature of knowledge and knowing.

 

 

Last reviewed: 4 November, 2009