20 Wednesday Apr 2016
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Professor Bill Brewer will give a three hour masterclass on the topic of personal identity on the 14th of June. The class is part of the Guardian newspaper’s ‘masterclass’ series.
Event details can be found here.
18 Monday Apr 2016
Posted in Conference reports
≈ Comments Off on Workshop: Questions and Enquiry
The international workshop Questions and Enquiry took place on the 5th of April at King’s College London. The workshop, generously funded by the department of Philosophy at King’s College London, and organized by Giulia Felappi, aimed to bring together philosophers and linguists working on the role of questions in enquiry.
Maria Aloni (ILLC & Department of Philosophy, Amsterdam) gave a talk on identity questions, concealed questions and specificational subjects. Maria focused on a recent debate concerning whether sentences like “The number of planets is 8” can be taken as question/answer pairs, and what this can tell us about ontological commitment to numbers.
Manfred Krifka (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin & ZAS Berlin) focused on constituent, alternative, and yes/no questions. He discussed the role of questions in dialogue and suggested taking ‘asking questions’ as forms of ‘common ground management’ on the side of the speakers.
Mike Beaney (KCL & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) talked about R.G. Collingwood’s logic of questions and answers. Mike discussed Collingwood’s views on the role of questions in philosophical and non-philosophical enquiry. He also showed how Collingwood’s work relates to that of Cook Wilson, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Guido de Ruggiero.
Finally, in his talk, Bob Fiengo (CUNY) argued that questions show, firstly, some crucial differences between knowledge and belief and, secondly, that even some basic forms of knowledge are much more multifarious than we presume.
For those who missed the event, part of the material Maria presented can be found on her website, while Manfred’s latest publication on the topic can be found here. Mike’s latest publication on Collingwood can be found in the new edition of Collingwood’s autobiography. Bob discusses some of the ideas he presented at the workshop in a couple of forthcoming papers: ‘Austin’s Cube’, in Moltmann, & Textor, Act-Based Conceptions of Propositional Content, OUP, and ‘On the Representation of Form and Function’, in Tsohatzidis, Interpreting J. L. Austin, CUP.
13 Wednesday Apr 2016
Posted in News
Thomas Byrne, one of the department’s graduate students, has a forthcoming paper in Philosophical Studies. The abstract is below and you can read the paper here.
‘G.E. Moore said that rightness was obviously a matter of maximising plain goodness. Peter Geach and Judith Thomson disagree. They have both argued that ‘good’ is not a predicative adjective, but only ever an attributive adjective: just like ‘big.’ And just as there is no such thing as plain bigness but only ever big for or as a so-and-so, there is also no such thing as plain goodness. They conclude that Moore’s goodness is thus a nonsense. However attention has been drawn to a weakness in their arguments. Mahrad Almotahari and Adam Hosein have sought to plug that weakness. If their plug holds, then there is no goodness. Doing most of their work is the following premise: adjective φ is predicative only if it can be used predicatively in ‘x is a φ K’ otherwise it is attributive. In this paper I argue that this premise is false, that their plug does not hold and that if one is to reject plain goodness it will have to be for other reasons.’
11 Monday Apr 2016
Posted in Events
Questions revolving around the concept of life and its limitations, what it means to lead a good life and what the status of death is are today as relevant as they have been in philosophy’s first beginnings. But these issues and the perspectives on them underwent several changes, and an especially notable one in the early modern period. Fundamental shifts in science and technological advances led to a new awareness of the presence of life in the smallest parts of matter, to the question of what distinguishes life from death, and even to readdressing the general question of what ‘life’ amounts to. The European Society for Early Modern Philosophy (ESEMP) dedicated its triennial conference, which will take place this year in London, April 14 to 16 2016, to these and related questions.
The opening plenary talk by Michael Moriarty (University of Cambridge) will be hosted at King’s College London, followed by two days of talks at Birkbeck College.
The conference is organized and sponsored by the European Society for Early Modern Philosophy and the British Society for the History of Philosophy in association with the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, King’s College London and the Wellcome Trust.
The conference’s webpage, including registration form, can be found here:
06 Wednesday Apr 2016
Posted in Events
A symposium on self-knowledge will be held on the 3rd and 4th May, at Guy’s Campus. Speakers include the department’s Nick Shea, Sherri Roush and Sacha Golob.
A full schedule and more info can be found here.
06 Wednesday Apr 2016
Posted in Events
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conferences, Events, metaethics, philosophy of action, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science
On the 26th and 27th May, the department will host the annual UNC-KCL workshop which this year will be on the theme of explanation.
In addition to talks by graduate students from both London and the University of North Carolina, there will be talks from the department’s Eleanor Knox and Maria Alvarez and UNC’s Marc Lange and John Roberts.
The schedule and registration/access information can be found here.
06 Wednesday Apr 2016
Posted in Events
≈ Comments Off on Reading Group on Acquaintance
A new reading group on the topic of acquaintance will begin this month. The organizers of the reading group intend to give particular focus to the work of John Campbell.
The first meeting will take place at noon on Monday the 11th of April. The location is the Philosophy Graduate Common Room.
For more details, contact Jørgen Dyrstad: jorgen.dyrstad@kcl.ac.uk.
01 Friday Apr 2016
Posted in News
King’s PGR student, Sophie Stammers, has accepted a three year post doctoral research fellowship with the University of Birmingham’s Project Perfect. Congratulations to Sophie on this fantastic achievement!
More information on Sophie and her research can be found on her blog.
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