The Spring 2007 Graduate Student Colloquium is being run by Jeremy Ginsburg. The colloquium meets from 4:15–6:15 on Thursdays in the Thesis Room in the Philosophy Program lounge.
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- Date: 1 March
- Speaker: David Pereplyotchik
- Topic: "Descartes on Consciousness, Thought, and Sensation"
- Date: 8 March
- Speaker: David Morrow
- Topic: "Empathy, Evolution, and the Origin of Values"
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Hide the abstract for this paperSee the abstract for this paperMany metaethicists are rightly intrigued by the implications of evolutionary theory, but they need to be more careful in their efforts to understand those implications. Recent empirical evidence about the role of empathy in moral judgments, together with an adaptation of a recent anti-realist argument by Sharon Street, provides a model for constructing good evolutionary arguments in metaethics. Psychological evidence shows physiological and cognitive links between empathy and care-based moral judgments. Primatological evidence suggests that the mechanisms underlying empathy are evolutionarily old. Thus, natural selection has had time and opportunity to impact human care-based moral judgments. This raises a dilemma, as Street argues, for moral realists about care-based morality. Realists can neither deny a connection between the moral facts and the selection pressure on our moral judgments nor give an adequate account of that connection. The way to escape the dilemma is to accept that values have their origin in human acts of valuing. This dilemma, properly supported by empirical facts, illustrates the kind of argument that metaethicists should use to draw conclusions from evolutionary premises.
- Date: 15 March
- Speaker: Brian Robinson
- Topic: "Empty Names and Negative Existentials: A Metalinguistic Approach"
- Date: 22 March
- Speaker: Chris Alen Sula
- Topic: "Reconciling Evolution and Ethics"
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- Date: 12 April
- Speaker: Sergio Gallegos
- Topic: "Identity Explanations"
- Date: 19 April
- Speaker: Mark Alfano
- Topic: "Equivalence or Equivocation: The 'God' of Spinoza's Ethics"
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Hide the abstract for this paperSee the abstract for this paperIn the Ethics, Spinoza claims to establish the existence of God in just 11 deductive steps, three of which (1t8-10)* are unnecessary. "God," he says "or substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite existence, necessarily exists" (1t11). This conclusion is supposed to follow from six definitions and five axioms. Some commentators even contend that his premises are acceptable and his argumentation valid. If these critics are right, Spinoza's proof constitutes an ontological argument that evades Kant's attack in the first Critique. In this essay I will offer a reconstruction of Spinoza's argument in contemporary terms, suggesting that it is valid. Then I will consider objections to its soundness, followed by further objections to its underlying methodological principles. In the end, Spinoza will emerge as a revisionary metaphysician of the first class.
- Date: 26 April
- Speaker: Frank Pupa
- Topic: "Descriptions, Understanding, and Anaphoric Chains: Russell's New Challenge"
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Hide the abstract for this paperSee the abstract for this paperAlmost without exception, opponents to Russell's theory of descriptions have challenged the theory on truth-theoretic grounds. The tactic is simple enough. Russell's opponents concoct cases in which utterances of sentences containing descriptions express propositions that Russell's theory fails to anticipate. In this paper, we issue a challenge on a different ground: understandability. Russell's theory of descriptions, when coupled with Russell's indispensable theory of understanding, generates what we label the 'anaphoric chain problem'. This problem, we argue, forces the thoughtful theorist to reject Russell's theory of descriptions in favor of a non-Russellian rival.
- Date: 3 May
- Speaker: Wade Martin
- Topic: "Phenomenal Properties and the Mind-Body Problem"