Visiting Speakers - Spring 2007
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"Thomas Reid's Influence on Contemporary Epistemology"
Court Lewis
Date: September 8, 2007
Time: 3:30pm
Place: HSS 104
Klatsch
"Selecting Potential Children and Unconditional Parental Love"
John Davis
Date: September 15, 2007
Time: 3:30pm
Place: HSS 104
Klatsch
“Deflating Deflationism”
Elijah Millgram, University of Utah
Date: September 22, 2007
Time: 3:30pm
For well over two thousand years, truth has been understood to be among the deep philosophical problems -- but if you look at the theories of truth in circulation for the past half century, you'd be hard put to explain why. According to the most popular family of such theories, truth is an almost trivial and easily replaceable linguistic device (which is why these theories call themselves "deflationist"). I will explain how deflationism came to seem like the obvious truth about truth. Then I will point out how deflationists have overlooked the most important function of truth vocabulary in our everyday language. Truth, it turns out, is every bit the deep philosophical problem it was formerly thought to be.
Elijah Millgram received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1991, and taught at Princeton and Vanderbilt before joining the faculty at Utah in 1999 as the E.E. Ericksen Professor. His current research is focused on the theory of rationality, and in particular on practical reasoning and on inference in the face of partial truth. He is the author of Practical Induction (Harvard UP, 1997), of Ethics Done Right: Practical Reasoning as a Foundation for Moral Theory (Cambridge UP, 2005), and the editor of Varieties of Practical Reasoning (MIT Press, 2001). He has written on coherence theory, late British Empiricism (Hume and Mill), and the tradition of philosophy as persona construction. He is a former fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“Three Anti-Metaphysicians: Ayer, Carnap, and Quine”
Gary Hardcastle, Bloomsburg University
Date: October 6, 2007
Time: 3:30pm
If the logical positivists, logical empiricists, and their fellow travelers are known for anything, it's their vehement and, some might say, unreasonable opposition to metaphysics. What metaphysics amounted to for these philosophers, though, and why it merited such opposition, has been the subject of speculation, misunderstanding, and myth since the positivist heyday. Some attention to what three of the most prominent (but hardly the only) anti-metaphysicians of the 1930s actually wrote about metaphysics, combined with a bit of the historical and intellectual context in which they wrote, shows that there were interestingly different notions of metaphysics afoot in the 1930s and that these were combined with interesting and different prescriptions for avoiding, overcoming, or eliminating metaphysics. One immediate effect of such a study is a different, and tempered, attitude toward to the notorious verifiability principle. A second is an appreciation of the role accorded anti-metaphysicians to philosophy itself.
Gary Hardcastle received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California-San Diego and his BS in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of several articles in the history and philosophy of science and co-editor, with Alan Richardson, of Logical Empiricism in North America, Volume XX in the series, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. He is also co-editor, with George Reisch, of Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think (Open Court, 2006) and Bullshit and Philosophy: Guaranteed to Give Perfect Results Every Time (Open Court, 2006).
"Kant and the Right to Lie"
Allen Wood, Stanford University
Date: October 20, 2007
Time: 3:30pm
It will be argued that Kant's views in his "right to lie" essay of 1797 -- often cited as insanely rigoristic and used as evidence that there must be something fundamentally wrong with Kantian ethics -- have been badly misunderstood, are not as extreme as they are usually taken to be, and are quite defensible.
Allen W. Wood is Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor at Stanford University. He studied at Reed College (1960-1964) and Yale University (1964-1968). Before assuming his present position at Stanford, he taught at Cornell University (1968-1996) and Yale University (1996-2000), and he has also held visiting appointments at the University of Michigan (1973), the University of California at San Diego (1986) and Oxford University (2005). Professor Wood’s interests include modern philosophy, especially Kant and the German idealist tradition, and also moral and political philosophy and the philosophy of religion. He is author of eight books and editor or translator of a number of others. He is co-general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant.
TBA
Matt Lu
Date: October 27, 2007
Time: 4:30pm
Place: HSS 104
Klatsch
"The verifiability Criterion of Meaning and Wittgenstein's Semantic Account of Propositions in his TLP: A Reductio Ad Absurdum of Austere Readings of the Tractatus"
Sam Von Mizener
Date: November 3, 2007
Time: 3:30pm,
Place: HSS 104
Klatsch
"Universality, Relativism, and Law in Practical Reasoning"
Vaughn Huckfeldt
Date: November 17, 2007
Time: 3:30pm
Place: HSS 104
Klatsch