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 (Forum for Philosophy))
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 […]
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? (Forum for Philosophy)
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. […]
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 […]
Anneli Jefferson (Birmingham): “Moral self image and moral decision making”
Our moral decisions and actions are guided by what we take to be morally permissible and impermissible. In this talk I consider another factor which may affect both our judgment of moral permissibility and our moral conduct, our moral self-image. In particular, I ask whether a positive view […]
Hugh Mellor (Cambridge): “Chances and Conditionals”
In a projected book, “Most Counterfactuals Are False”, Alan Hájek infers the truth of its title from the ubiquity of chance. I argue in this talk that he is wrong: the ubiquity of chance does not verify his title: chances do not falsify counterfactuals. Single-case chances are perfectly consistent with determinism, i.e. […]
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