Activities and Events in Philosophy

 

PHILOSOPHY CLUB

The student Philosophy Club hosts a variety of activities during the year, including talks by professional philosophers, chats over coffee and occasional social events with departmental faculty. The president of the club is Tim Prudhomme and the faculty adviser is Dr. Timothy Hinton.

 

PUBLIC LECTURES IN PHILOSOPHY

The Department is pleased to host a number of public lectures in philosophy and related fields in two lecture series: the Philosophy Colloquium Series and the Logic and Cognitive Science Lecture Series (formerly the Cognitive Science Lecture Series). These are sometimes co-hosted by the Philosophy Club. All are welcome.

 

UPCOMING LECTURES AND EVENTS

Unless otherwise indicated, lectures listed below are in the Philosophy Colloquium Series.

Logic and Cognitive Science Initiative Conference on Concepts, September 20-21, 2013. The speakers will be Christopher Hill (Philosophy, Brown), Edouard Machery (History and Philosophy of Science, Pittsburgh), Eric Margolis (Philosophy, British Columbia), Gregory Murphy (Psychology, NYU), Anna Papafragou (Psychology, Delaware), and Paul M. Pietrosky (Philosophy, Maryland).  For further information, click here.

Susan Wolf (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Thursday, October 3, 2013 - further details to be added

Gary Varner (Texas A&M University), "A Two-Level Utilitarian Perspective on Animals," Thursday, October 24, 2013 - further details to be added

 

RECENT LECTURES AND EVENTS

Unless otherwise indicated, lectures listed below were in the Philosophy Colloquium Series.

2012/13

Joseph Levine (University of Massachusetts Amherst), "Modality, Semantics, and the Explanatory Gap," April 11 (Logic and Cognitive Science Lecture Series)

Russell Powell (Boston University), "Genetic Engineering and the Future of Human Nature," April 8 (co-hosted by the Science, Technology and Society Program)

Ian N. Proops (University of Texas at Austin and National Humanities Center), "Kant on the Cosmological Argument,"

March 21

Philosophy and Religious Studies Student Awards Reception, February 27

Stephen Puryear (NC State), "Leibnizian Bodies: Phenomena, Aggregates of Monads, or Both?" January 22

Sanem Soyarslan (Boston University), "The Distinction Between Reason and Intuitive Knowledge in Spinoza's Ethics," January 17

Kristin Primus (Princeton University), "A New Interpretation of Spinoza's Causal Metaphysics," January 15

Jonathan Cottrell (New York University), "The Unity of the Mind and Hume's Appendix," January 10

Alan Baker (Swarthmore College), "Mathematical Properties and Explanation," November 15 (Logic and Cognitive Science Lecture Series)

Christia Mercer (Columbia University and National Humanities Center), "From Metaphysics to Ethics: Seventeenth-Century Notions of Sympathy," October 11

Randolph Clarke (Florida State University and National Humanities Center), "Freely Omitting to Act," September 20

2011/12

Stephen Finlay (University of  Southern California), "The Pragmatics of Normative Disagreement," April 19

John McDowell (University of Pittsburgh),"How Practical Knowledge Relates to Receptive Knowledge," April 10

William A. Bauer (NC State), "Informing Powers," March 20

Philosophy and Religious Studies Student Awards Reception, February 29

L. A. Paul (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and National Humanities Center), "Experience and Temporal Asymmetry," February 9

James Van Cleve (University of Southern California and National Humanities Center), "Reid on Direct Realism and Nonexistent Objects of Conception," November 17

Susanne Sreedhar (Boston University and National Humanities Center), "Mothers, Matriarchs, and Marriage: Hobbes's Puzzling Yet Promising Views on Women," October 20

Logic and Cognitive Science Initiative Conference on Meaning in Context, September 23-24. Speakers: David Barnett (Colorado, Boulder), Janice Dowell (Nebraska-Lincoln), Jeffrey C. King (Rutgers), Angelika Kratzer (Massachusetts), Paul H. Portner (Georgetown), Robert Stalnaker (MIT). For more information, click here.

2010/11

Tom Regan: A Celebration - a workshop on Tom Regan's ethics, April 15-16. Speakers included: Matt Haltemann (Calvin College), Mylan Engel Jr. (Northern Illinois), Alastair Norcross (Colorado), Rebecca Walker (UNC Chapel Hill)

A Time Travel Conference, April 8-9. Speakers: Geoff Goddu (Richmond), Richard Hanley (Delaware), Bradley Monton (Colorado), Chris Smeenk (Western Ontario), Kadri Vihvelin (Southern California)

J. Richard Gott III (Professor of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University), A Time Travel Lecture: "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe," April 8 (presented with support from the University Honors Program and the Zeta Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa)

William A. Bauer (NC State), "Pure Powers and Dispositional Essentialism," March 17

Philosophy and Religious Studies Student Awards Reception, March 16

James Dreier (Brown), "Another World: The Metaethics and Metametaethics of Reasons Fundamentalism," February 24

Eric K. Carter (NC State), "Subjective Attitiudes, Judge-dependence, and Vagueness," February 10

Peter Railton (Michigan and National Humanities Center), "Two Cheers for Virtue," January 27

Robert Mabrito (NC State), "Welfare and Paradox," November 18

Ned Block (NYU), "Consciousness: Rich or Sparse?" November 5 (Logic and Cognitive Science Lecture Series)

Karen Bennett (Cornell), "Building and Causing," Thursday, October 14

Mark Richard (Harvard), "What is Disagreement?" September 30

Timothy Hinton (NC State), " 'Sentiments of the Understanding, Perceptions of the Heart': Constitutional Sentimentalism and the Authority of Morals," September 2

2009/10

Daniel J. Povinelli (University of Louisiana Cognitive Evolution Group), "How the Science of Other Minds Became Science Fiction: An Open Letter to Comparative Psychology," April 8 (Logic and Cognitive Science Lecture Series)

Patricia K. Curd (Purdue University and National Humanities Center), "What Can Humans Know? A Presocratic Answer," March 25

Dorit Bar-On (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and National Humanities Center), "Expression, Action, and Meaning: Expressive Behavior and 'Continuity Skepticism'," March 4

Ekow Yankah (Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University), "Obligation to Govern and the State of Terror," February 18

Gary L. Comstock (NC State), "Human Singularity," with comments by Douglas MacLean (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), February 4

Rüdiger Bittner (University of Bielefeld and National Humanities Center), "Some Naturalisms in Ethics," January 21

Ruth Elizabeth Chang (Rutgers and National Humanities Center), "Do We Have Normative Powers?" November 12

Kit Fine (New York University and National Humanities Center), "State Space," October 29

Logic and Cognitive Science Initiative Conference on Ontology, September 25-26. Speakers: Christopher Menzel (Texas A&M), Barry Smith (SUNY Buffalo), Zoltán Gendler Szabó (Yale), Peter van Inwagen (Notre Dame), Achille C. Varzi (Columbia), Edward N. Zalta (Stanford). For more information, click here.

Gary H. Merrill (GlaxoSmithKline Semantic Technologies Group), "Ontology, Ontologies, and Science," September 3

2008/9

Karen Neander (Duke), "Re-evaluating Resemblance Theories of Content," April 8 (Logic and Cognitive Science Lecture Series)

Stephen Puryear (NC State), "Force, Absolute Motion, and the Threat of Circularity in Leibniz," March 26

Ted Sider (New York University), "The Metaphysics of Fundamentality," February 26

John Doris (Washington University in St. Louis and the National Humanities Center), "A Natural History of the Self," February 12 (Logic and Cognitive Science Lecture Series)

Darrel Moellendorf (San Diego State University and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), "Justice and the Mitigation of Climate Change," January 15 (co-hosted by the Philosophy Club)

Alan Nelson (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), "Mathesis Universalis: Descartes on Universal Wisdom," November 3

Johannes Hafner (NC State), "Kitcher on Mathematical Explanation," October 23 (presentation based on a paper by Johannes Hafner and Paolo Mancosu)

Ronald P. Endicott (NC State), "The Functionalist Circle," October 2

Talk by philosopher in NC State School of Design: Mark Johnson (University of Oregon), "Art Incarnate: Aesthetics of Human Understanding," October 2

Thomas Hofweber (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), "Ambitious, Yet Modest, Metaphysics," September 18

2007/8

J. Michael Dunn (Indiana University), "Logic, Information, Computation," April 17 (GlaxoSmithKline Lecture in Semantics and Ontology)

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Dartmouth), "Moral Intuitions as Heuristics," April 3

Elizabeth Spelke (Harvard), "Origins of Knowledge of Number and Geometry," February 18 (Logic and Cognitive Science Lecture Series)

Amelie Rorty (Harvard University and National Humanities Center), "On the Other Hand: The Ethics of Ambivalence,"
February 14

Stephen Yablo (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), "Truth and Aboutness," January 25 (Logic and Cognitive Science Lecture Series)

Marc Lange (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), "Mathematical Coincidence and Their Relations to Mathematical Explanations and Proofs," January 18 (co-hosted by the Philosophy Club)

Alan Carter (University of Glasgow), "A Plurality of Values," November 15

Meghan Griffith (Davidson College and National Humanities Center), "How to Go Agent-Causal," November 1

William Lycan (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), "More Layers of Perceptual Content," October 19 (Logic and Cognitive Science Lecture Series)

Jeffrey L. Kasser (NC State), "Doubt and Disagreement," October 4

Heather Gert (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), "Wittgenstein's Ruling Family," September 25

Jesse Prinz (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), "The Neural Basis of Consciousness," September 6 (co-hosted by the Philosophy Club)

For a record of earlier lectures and events, please click here.