Events
Philosophy Department
Susanna Schellenberg “Perceptual Consciousness as a Mental Activity”
Stevenson Fireside Lounge Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, United StatesAbstract: I argue that perceptual consciousness is constituted by a mental activity. The mental activity in question is the activity of employing perceptual capacities, such as discriminatory, selective capacities. This is a radical view, but I hope to make it plausible. In arguing for this mental activist view, I reject orthodox views on which perceptual […]
Audun Dahl: The Empirical Reality of Moral Reasoning
Humanities 1, Room 202Many theories have viewed reason and reasoning as essential to making moral judgments. In contrast, recent psychological proposals have contested the centrality of reasoning, arguing that most or many moral judgments are based on automatic, emotional reactions (sometimes termed "institutions," e.g. Greene, 2013; Haidt 2013). These proposals are based on experiments taken to show that […]
Maudemarie Clark “Nietzsche’s Nihilism”
Humanities 1, Room 202Nietzsche claims that in realating the "advent of nihilism," he is relating "the history of the next two centuries." He also claims that he himself has been a nihilist, but that he had now left it behind, "outside of self." In this paper, I offer an account of how Nietzsche understands nihilism and of how […]
Philosophy Colloquium: Jonathan Cohen, “Many Molyneux Questions”
Stevenson Fireside Lounge Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, United States"Many Molyneux Questions" Mohan Matthen and Jonathan Cohen Molyneux asked whether a newly sighted man would recognize and distinguish a sphere and a cube by sight alone, assuming that he could previously do this by touch. The most historically important responses to Molyneux arise from views that apply uniformly to questions about the transferability of […]
Ram Neta: “Puzzle of Transparency”
Humanities 1, Room 202The Puzzle of Transparency As you and I are out for a walk, I notice that the sky is getting cloudier and so I ask you "do you believe that it's going to rain?" In response to this question, you normally do not pay attention to your own states of mind, but rather to the […]
Maeve Cooke: “Civil Disobedience as Civil Regeneration: The Radically Transformative Power of Political Law-Breaking”
Humanities 1, Room 210 1156 high st, Santa cruz, CA, United StatesMaeve Cooke is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Professor Cooke's work focuses on the question of truth (intrinsic value) in social and political theory, with particular attention to debates on religion and politics. Her principal book publications are Language and Reason: A Study of Haberma's Pragmatics (MIT […]
Philosophy Colloquium: Ori Simchen
Humanities 1, Room 202“Realism and Instrumentalism in Metaphysical Explanation” Ori Simchen is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Professor Simchen works mostly in the philosophy of language and metaphysics. Most recently he's been working on metasemantics, or foundational semantics, and its relation to formal semantics. He is particularly interested in how to think […]
Philosophy Colloquium: Gene Witmer
Humanities 1, Room 202“Metaphysics and A Priori Vindication” Is there reason to expect any interesting kind of a priori access to metaphysical truths of the sort often in dispute in contemporary philosophy? In this paper I zero in on truths about what is metaphysically necessary and about the essences or natures of things as key topics in metaphysics […]
*ROOM CHANGE* NOW IN 420 – Thi Nguyen: “The Gamification of Public Discourse”
Humanities 1, Room 420 Humanites 1 University of California, Santa Cruz Cowell College, Santa Cruz, CA, United StatesThe pleasures of games include, among other things, the experience of a fantasy of value clarity. In games, our goals and values are clear, quantified, and easy to apply and rank. This provides us with a particular existential balm - a momentary liberation from the ambiguities and difficult pluralities of moral life. Games instrumentalize our ends, […]
Imagining Otherwise: Resisting and Queering Racial and Gender Violence
Humanities 2, Room 259A Philosophy and MAP (Minorities and Philosophy) sponsored Colloquium. Co-sponsored by the Center for Public Philosophy and the Humanities Institute This talk will explore how gender violence intersects with racist and transphobic violence and how those intersections are erased or distorted in public discourse. Professor Medina will examine the communicative dysfunctions that exist around gender […]