Glen Weyl (Yale/Microsoft): “Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society”
Many blame today’s economic inequality, stagnation, and political instability on the free market. The solution is to rein in the market, right? We challenge this thinking— as well as most arguments in favor of and against markets. We offer new, but historically rooted, ways to […]
Simon Beard (Cambridge): “Risk, Relevance and the Aggregation of Competing Claims View”
Alex Voorhoeve has developed his Competing Claims view as a way of mediating between, and quantifying, our pro and anti-segregationist leanings concerning the evaluating of consequences, especially in relation to distributive fairness. Voorhoeve however has declined to consider the implications of this view for how we […]
Matt Farr (Cambridge): “The C Theory of Time”
Does time have a direction? Intuitively, it does. After all, our experiences, our thoughts, even our scientific explanations of phenomena are time-directed: things evolve from earlier to later, and it would seem unnecessary and indeed odd to try to expunge such talk from our philosophical lexicon. Nevertheless, in this talk […]
John D. Norton (Pittsburgh): “The Infinite Lottery”
An infinite lottery machine induces a non-standard inductive logic that turns out to be the same logic appropriate to a problem in inductive inference arising in present theories of eternal inflation.
John D. Norton is Distinguished Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and author of the […]
Tudor M Baetu (Bristol): “Pain in Psychology, Biology and Medicine. Implications for Eliminativist and Physicalist Accounts” (BSPS Lecture)
An analysis of arguments for pain eliminativism reveals two significant points of divergence between assumptions underlying scientific research on pain and assumptions typically endorsed by physicalist accounts. The first concerns the status of the term ‘pain’, which is an […]
The Evolution of Altruism (the Forum)
If evolution is a ‘struggle for existence’, why do we witness so much altruism in nature? From bacteria to baboons, the natural world is full of spectacular examples of organisms cooperating with one another. In the early 1960s, W. D. Hamilton changed the way we think about how such behaviour evolves, […]
Anna Alexandrova (Cambridge): “Defining Mental Health”
Today mental health is a universally valued outcome. It is prioritised by governments, hospitals, schools, employers, charities. And yet mental health appears to be prized more as a label than as a concept, because remarkably for a state so uncontroversially prized, it has no accepted definition. In this talk based on joint […]
Alex Voorhoeve (LSE): “Pleasure, the Complete Life, and Death”
The Greek philosopher Epicurus was an early proponent of hedonism – the view that the good life is the pleasurable life. He also argued that “death is nothing to us”. These two claims appear contradictory. For if pleasure is good, it seems to follow that a longer life that […]
What Is It Really Like to Be a Bat? (the Forum)
Are bats conscious, and how can we tell? What is it like to use sound to navigate? In a classic paper called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, Thomas Nagel used the bat’s capacity for echolocation to introduce philosophical problems concerning conscious experience. But […]
Teruji Thomas (Oxford): “The Veil of Ignorance Revisited”
The rough idea of what I call “the veil of ignorance principle” is to identify the moral or “social” point of view with the point of view of a self-interested individual who is uncertain of his or her own identity. In conjunction with expected utility theory (EUT), such a principle […]
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