Meetings and Events:

Regular Meetings: Thursday @ 3:30pm in BMU 211

Spring 2011 Events:

March 3, 2011 in BMU 210 @ 3Pm: First colloquium speaker Mohammed Abed
"Genocide as a Process of Social Group Destruction"
Abstract: Genocide is widely considered to be a distinctively heinous crime. I argue that genocide is distinctive, but not in any moral sense. Although it applies to the Holocaust, the term ‘genocide’ does not fully capture the horrific nature of that crime.
The position I defend also implies that genocide is much more widespread than is commonly assumed. There are good reasons to also label as ‘genocide’ some instances of settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and forced cultural assimilation.

March 9, 2011 6:45pm in PAC 134 - Panel Discussion "The Future of Science and Religion" A panel discussion featuring experts from a wide variety of disciplines in philosophy, science and the social sciences, talking about the relationship between science and religion.
The panelists will present a short synopsis of some of their views, followed by a Q&A dialogue with the audience. This event is sponsored by the Philosophy Dept, Phi Sigma Tau, and several student and community organizations.
It is free and open to the public

April 7, 2011 in BMU 304 @ 3:30pm. Student Presentation
Michael Fitzpatrick "The Meaning of Meaning."

April 14, 2011 in Trinity 100 @ 4pm: Second colloquium speaker Alexis Burgess
"Standing in the way of Science and Meaning: Mainstream Semantics + Deflationary Truth"
Abstract: Recent philosophy of language has been profoundly impacted by the idea that mainstream, model-theoretic semantics is somehow incompatible with deflationary accounts of truth and reference. The present paper systematizes the case for incompatibilism, debunks circularity and 'modal confusion' arguments familiar in the literature, and clarifies the thought that the best explanation of the successes of truth-conditional semantics is a version of the correspondence theory of truth.
Finally, the case for compatibility is closed by showing that this IBE argument fails to rule out two kinds of deflationism: the view that Field famously accused Tarski of having; and a novel version of the view that defines referential notions in terms of a deflated concept of truth. The key to reconciliation is to distinguish scientific from metaphysical notions of comparative fundamentality.

April 28, 2011 in BMU 210 @4pm: Third colloquium speaker: Pamela Hieronymi
Topic: "Believing at Will"
Abstract: "It has seemed to many philosophers--perhaps to most--that believing is not voluntary, that we cannot believe at will. It has seemed to many of these that this inability is not a merely contingent psychological limitation but rather is a deep fact about belief, perhaps a conceptual limitation. But it has been very difficult to say exactly why we cannot believe at will. I earlier offered an account of why we cannot believe at will. I argued that nothing could qualify both as having been done 'at will,' in the relevant sense, and as a belief. Thus, no believer could believe at will. If my arguments are correct, our inability to believe at will reveals no genuine lack in our powers of mind, any more than an inability to draw a square circle reveals a lack of artistic skill. My account has been recently criticized by Kieran Setiya, who has provided an account of his own. Here I revisit and defend my account, hopefully in a way that will both make my thought clearer and illumine some of the broader differences between Setiya's approach and my own. I then briefly consider Setiya's own argument, in part to further develop the contrast."

May 5, 2011 @ 5PM. BMU 211. Faculty Presentation
Troy Jollimore and Robert Jones: "The Dude's Virtues of Authenticity".