Programme abstracts
Friday 11th July 5.00 p.m. Inaugural Address Sarah Broadie (St Andrews) Theological sidelights from Plato's Timaeus ABSTRACT: Plato’s account of the making of the world by a supreme divinity has often been felt to foreshadow the natural theology associated with orthodox western religion. This paper examines some significant ways (having more than merely antiquarian interest, it is hoped) in which the Timaeus scheme differs from more familiar orthodoxy. Saturday 12th July 9.00 a.m. Radical scepticism, epistemic luck and epistemic value Duncan Pritchard (Edinburgh) ABSTRACT: It is argued that it is beneficial to view the debate regarding radical scepticism through the lens of epistemic value. In particular, it is claimed that we should regard radical scepticism as aiming to deprive us of an epistemic standing that is of special value to us, and that this methodological constraint on our dealings with radical scepticism potentially has important ramifications for how we assess the success of an anti-sceptical strategy. Martijn Blaauw (Amsterdam Free) ABSTRACT: A central intuition many epistemologists seem to have is that knowledge is distinctively valuable. In his paper ‘Radical Scepticism, Epistemic Luck, and Epistemic Value’, Duncan Pritchard rejects the virtue-theoretic explanation of this intuition. This explanation says that knowledge is distinctively valuable because it is a cognitive achievement. It is maintained, in the first place, that the arguments Pritchard musters against the thesis that knowledge is a cognitive achievement are unconvincing. It is argued, in the second place, that even if the arguments against the thesis that knowledge is a cognitive achievement were convincing, there is another explanation of the intuition that knowledge has final value available: the question-relative treatment of knowledge. Saturday 12th July 11.00 a.m. Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling Michelle Kosch (Cornell) ABSTRACT: The explicit topic of Fear and Trembling’s third Problema (the longest single section, accounting for 1/3 of the book’s total length), the theme of Abraham’s silence stands not far in the background in every other section, and its importance is flagged by the pseudonym – Johannes de silentio – under which Kierkegaard had the book published. Here I aim to defend an interpretation of the meaning of the third Problema’s central claim – that Abraham cannot explain himself, ‘cannot speak’ – and to argue on its basis for an interpretation of the work as a whole. John Lippitt (Hertfordshire) ABSTRACT: Though there are significant points of overlap between Michelle Kosch’s reading of Fear and Trembling and my own, this paper focuses primarily on a significant difference: the legitimacy or otherwise of looking to paradigmatic exemplars of faith in order to understand faith. I argue that Kosch’s reading threatens to underplay the importance of exemplarity in Kierkegaard’s thought, and that there is good reason to resist her use of Philosophical Fragments as the key to interpreting the ‘hidden message’ of Fear and Trembling. Key to both claims is the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. I also briefly sketch an alternative reading of the ‘hidden message’, one in which Kierkegaard’s Christian commitments play a notably different role. Saturday 12th July 8.00 p.m. Coincidence and form Kit Fine (NYU) ABSTRACT: How can a statue and a piece of alloy be coincident at any time at which they exist and yet differ in their modal properties? I argue that this question demands an answer and that the only plausible answer is one that posits a difference in the form of the two objects. John Divers (Sheffield) ABSTRACT: I compare a Lewisian defence of monism with Kit Fine’s defence of pluralism. I argue that the Lewisian defence is, at present, the clearer in its explanatory intent and ontological commitments. I challenge Fine to explain more fully the nature of the entities that he postulates and the relationship between continuous material objects and the parts of those Rigid Embodiments in terms of which he proposes to explain crucial, modal and sortal, features of those objects.
Sunday 13th July 9.00 a.m. Expanding the egalitarian toolbox Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan) ABSTRACT: Many problems of inequality in developing countries resist treatment by formal egalitarian policies. To deal with these problems, we must shift from a distributive to a relational conception of equality, founded on opposition to social hierarchy. Yet the production of many goods requires the coordination of wills by means of commands. In these cases, egalitarians must seek to tame rather than abolish hierarchy. I argue that bureaucracy offers important constraints on command hierarchies that help promote the equality of workers in bureaucratic organizations. Bureaucracy thus constitutes a vital if limited egalitarian tool applicable to developing and developed countries alike.
John Skorupski (St Andrews) ABSTRACT: Elizabeth Anderson argues for civic as against distributive egalitarianism. I agree with civic egalitarianism understood as a public ideal, and welcome her interest in the sociological conditions under which it may best flourish. But I argue that she is mistaken in opposing what she calls ‘hierarchies of esteem’ and proposing that where the egalitarian ideal has insufficient hold on civil society it should be implemented by an efficient bureaucracy. We should learn a different lesson from Max Weber. What the ideal of equality needs is not more bureaucracy but more influential advocacy—and that requires healthy ‘hierarchies of esteem’.
Sunday 13th July 11.00 a.m. Virtues of art and human well-being Peter Goldie (Manchester) ABSTRACT: What is the point of art, and why does it matter to us human beings? The answer that I will give in this paper, following on from an earlier paper on the same subject, is that art matters because our being actively engaged with art, either in its production or in its appreciation, is part of what it is to live well. The focus in the paper will be on the dispositions—the virtues of art production and of art appreciation—that are necessary for this kind of active engagement with art. To begin with, I will argue that these dispositions really are virtues and not mere skills. Then I will show how the virtues of art, and their exercise in artistic activity, interweave with the other kinds of virtue which are exercised in ethical and contemplative activity. And finally, I will argue that artistic activity affords, in a special way, a certain kind of emotional sharing that binds us together with other human beings. Dominic McIver Lopes (British Columbia) ABSTRACT: Suppose that, unlike skills, which have instrumental value, a virtue is intrinsically good for its possessor. Thus, good taste is a virtue only if (V) good taste is intrinsically good. But although (V) is plausible, and although it promises to pull some weight in aesthetics, nobody has attempted explanations of (V) that might contribute to accounts of art or the aesthetic. Until now, that is.1 Professor Goldie gets us to (V) from the claim that the exercise of good taste is partly constitutive of human well-being. Broadly speaking, this approach is neo-Aristotelian. However, there is another route to (V), which follows G. E. Moore in finding intrinsic value in the ‘appreciation of what has great intrinsic value’.2 Call this approach ‘neo-Moorean’. Both approaches deserve to be put on the table as we begin to think about virtue, art, and aesthetics.
Sunday 13th July 8.00 p.m. Phenomenal and access consciousness Ned Block (NYU) ABSTRACT: Cynthia Macdonald (QUB) ABSTRACT:
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