A/Prof David Macarthur (University of Sydney), “Liberal Naturalism and the Second-Personal Realm”

Abstract:

Scientific Naturalism is a widely popular position in contemporary metaphysics. Naturalists of this stripe are centrally concerned with what has come to be called “the placement problem”: how do we find a “place” for, e.g., mind, meaning, and morals, in the scientific image of the world? In this talk I mean to argue – on the basis of distinguishing theoretical and practical versions of the scientific image – that this problem is misconceived even from within the perspective of scientific naturalism. The default position for naturalism is not Scientific Naturalism but a Liberal Naturalism which opens up the hitherto neglected realm of non-supernatural non-scientific entities. This realm arguably includes those things that are presupposed in the practice of science, e.g., people (scientists), artifacts (e.g. tables) and meaningful communication (e.g. scientific conferences & journals). The claim that these things are non-scientific depends on the idea that the correct deployment of the relevant concepts constitutively depends on what “we” take-as instances of such things as fellow speakers within a linguistic community. Liberal Naturalism thus opens up into a philosophical exploration of interpersonal space or what we might call 2nd-personal realm.

Bio:

David Macarthur is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney.  His philosophical interests are wide-ranging.  He has written articles on scepticism, pragmatism, metaphysical quietism, the meaning of naturalism, Wittgenstein, and philosophy of art and architecture.

Where and when:

Tuesday 15 September, 4.00 to 5.30pm, Burwood Campus, Burwood Corporate Centre, Level 2 (***please note the new venue***).

Hosted by the European Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Group (EPHI) and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

For any inquiries, please contact Sean Bowden.

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY PHILOSOPHY SEMINAR SERIES, SEPTEMBER 1, 2015

Dr Robert Sinnerbrink (Macquarie University), “Empathic Ethics: Phenomenology, Cognitivism, and Moving Images”

Abstract:

Some of the most innovative philosophical engagement with cinema and ethics has come from phenomenological and cognitivist perspectives in film theory. This trend reflects a welcome re-engagement with cinema as a medium with the potential for ethical transformation, that is, with the idea of cinema as a medium of ethical experience. My paper explores the phenomenological turn in film theory (with its focus on affective, empathic, and embodied responses to cinema), emphasizing the ethical implications of phenomenological approaches to affect and empathy, emotion and evaluation, care and responsibility. My claim is that an ‘empathic ethics’ is at work in many films: film provides a powerful means of enacting the affective temporal dynamic between empathy and sympathy, emotional engagement and multiple perspective-taking. Taken together, these elements of cinematic ethics offer experientially rich, context-sensitive, and ethically singular forms of imaginative engagement in social situations that reveal the complexities of a cultural-historical world. I elaborate this thesis by analysing a key sequence from Ashgar Farhadi’s A Separation (2011), a film that offers a striking case study in cinematic ethics.

Bio:

Robert Sinnerbrink is Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (Routledge, forthcoming 2015), New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (Continuum, 2011), Understanding Hegelianism (Acumen, 2007), co-editor of Critique Today (Brill, 2006), and is a member of the editorial board of the journal Film-Philosophy. He has published numerous articles on the relationship between film and philosophy, and is currently a completing a book (with Lisa Trahair and Gregory Flaxman) entitled Understanding Cinematic Thinking: Film-Philosophy in Bresson, von Trier, and Haneke (Edinburgh UP, 2016).

Where and when:

Tuesday 1 September, 4.00 to 5.30pm, Burwood Campus, Burwood Corporate Centre, Level 2 (***please note the new venue***).

Hosted by the European Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Group (EPHI) and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

For any inquiries, please contact Sean Bowden.

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY PHILOSOPHY SEMINAR SERIES, AUGUST 18, 2015

Dr Yuri Cath (La Trobe University), “Revisionary Intellectualism and Gettier”

Where and when:

Tuesday 18 August, 4.00 to 5.30pm, Burwood Campus, Burwood Corporate Centre, Level 2 (***please note the new venue***).

Abstract:

How should intellectualists respond to apparent Gettier-style counterexamples? Stanley (Know how, 2011a, Ch. 8) offers an orthodox response which rejects the claim that the subjects in such scenarios possess knowledge-how. I argue that intellectualists should embrace a revisionary response according to which knowledge-how is a distinctively practical species of knowledge-that that is compatible with Gettier-style luck.

Bio:

Yuri Cath’s research is concerned with foundational questions in epistemology about the nature and sources of different kinds of knowledge, and the import of these issues for debates in the philosophy of mind, moral epistemology, and metaphilosophy. Before joining La Trobe he was Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia (2012-2014) and an AHRC Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews (2008-2012). He completed his PhD at The Australian National University under the supervision of Daniel Stoljar and David Chalmers, and his MA at the University of Auckland. He has also completed a BFA (also at Auckland) with a major in painting, after which he worked in the Auckland Art Gallery before leaving the arts for the more practical field of philosophy.

Hosted by the European Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Group (EPHI) and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

For any inquiries, please contact Sean Bowden.

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY PHILOSOPHY SEMINAR SERIES, JULY 28, 2015

A/Prof Catherine Mills (Monash University), “Undoing ethics: Butler on vulnerability and responsibility”

Abstract:

The concept of vulnerability has been an important point of reference for recent feminist interventions in ethics and political philosophy. Judith Butler presents a case for the ethical and political importance of recognizing the vulnerability that necessarily attends subjectivity insofar as the subject is given over to others from the start. In this paper, I trace the development of Butler’s approach to ethics, arguing throughout that it cannot strictly be understood as an ethics of relationality, since responsibility is for her primarily responsibility for oneself. As I will show, this opens a problem in terms of the normative status of the other, or in other words, of the ‘ought’ of ethics. This problem is resolved in a turn to the thematic of substitutability. But this ultimately ties her efforts more strongly to traditional ethical thinking than she may really wish. Thus, while challenging ‘sovereign’ conceptions of subjectivity, her ethics nevertheless founders on the twin of this view – community conceived as commonality.

Bio:

Catherine Mills is Associate Professor of Bioethics and the recipient of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT120100026) in the Centre for Human Bioethics, Monash University. Her current research explores issues at the intersection of reproductive ethics, feminist philosophy and Continental philosophy. She is the author of Futures of Reproduction: Bioethics and Biopolitics, and The Philosophy of Agamben.

Where and when:

Tuesday 28 July, 4.00 to 5.30pm, Burwood Campus, Burwood Corporate Centre, Level 2 (***please note the new venue***).

Hosted by the European Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Group (EPHI) and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

For any inquiries, please contact Sean Bowden.

A/Prof. Karen Green (University of Melbourne), “Catharine Macaulay as critic of Hume; history, morality, liberty, and enlightenment”

Where and when:

Tuesday 26 May, 4.00 to 5.30pm, Deakin Burwood Campus, room C2.05. All welcome.

Abstract:

Catharine Macaulay’s The History of England challenges Hume’s interpretation of the history of the Stuarts, as developed in his The History of Great Britain, and is grounded in meta-ethical, religious, and political principles that are also fundamentally opposed to those developed by Hume, as she makes clear in her Treatise on the Immutabilty of Moral Truth. The contrast between them is paradoxical from the point of view of those who see progress in science and religious scepticism as developing in step with the development of radical politics and advocacy for political progress. For, Macaulay’s ‘republican’ history, which was read on both sides of the Atlantic as justifying the overthrow of arbitrary governments, was grounded in ancient conceptions of liberty, virtue, and in sincere theistic belief. By contrast, Hume’s moral and religious scepticism led directly to the political conservatism evident in his history. This paper develops this paradox through an outline of their alternative accounts of the significance of the two English revolutions, and the opposing metaphysical and meta-ethical positions that underpin those accounts.

Bio:

Karen Green is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. She has published numerous articles and books, including A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1700–1800 (Cambridge, 2014), A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (with Jacqueline Broad, Cambridge, 2009), and The Woman of Reason: Feminism, Humanism and Political Thought (Continuum, 1995).

Our next seminar, which is open to all, will take place on Tuesday April 28, 4.00-5.30pm, in room C2.05 on our Burwood campus.

Dr Ruth Boeker’s bio, and an abstract for her paper, “Locke and Hume on Personal Identity: Moral and Religious Differences”, can be found here.

The program for the coming weeks can be found here. For any inquiries, please contract Patrick Stokes.