Author Archives: ZVT

New appointments

08 Wednesday Jun 2016

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We are pleased to announce that the Department of Philosophy has made five new permanent appointments this year.

Ellen Fridland works in empirically informed philosophy of mind with particular interest in issues related to skill (e.g., skill in cognitive development, the role of skill-based considerations in moral cognition, and the role skill plays in the intellectualism/anti-intellectualism debate.) You can learn more about her research here.

Jessica Leech works on contemporary and historical issues in the metaphysics of modality. She has written on the notion of essence and relationships between different kinds of necessity. She is also currently working on a monograph on Kant’s views on modality and their implications for contemporary debates. You can learn more about her research here and here.

Matthew Parrott works in the philosophy of mind/psychology and epistemology, particularly on issues having to do with knowledge of minds (our own and the minds of others) and belief formation (including work on the nature of delusion.) You can learn more about his research here.

Jo Wolff works on metaphysical questions that arise in connection with the foundations of physics. She has written on structural realism, laws of nature, and is currently working on a project regarding the metaphysical nature of quantities. You can learn more about her research here.

Matthew Soteriou works on the philosophy of mind with particular interests in the philosophy of perception, temporal phenomenology, the philosophy of action and mental action, consciousness and the ontology of mind. He has also done work in the epistemology of mental action and its relevance to our understanding of the epistemology of mind in general. You can learn more about his research here.

We’re excited that these new hires will increase the department’s strengths in epistemology, the history of philosophy (esp. Kant), metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and psychology, and the philosophy of action.

Sainsbury Lecture / 19th May / Timothy Williamson

05 Thursday May 2016

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6pm, 19th May 2016

Safra Lecture Theatre, Strand Building, King’s College London

Timothy Williamson (Wykeham Professor of Logic, University of Oxford) will give this year’s Sainsbury Lecture, entitled ‘How to choose between alternative logics‘. The abstract is below, and all are welcome.

Paradoxes  of  vagueness,  truth,  and  sets  have  motivated  many  proposals  to  weaken  
classical  logic.  I  will  argue  that  choosing  between  logics  is  much  more  similar  to  
choosing  between  scientific  theories  than  philosophers  and  logicians  tend  to  think,  
and  that  the  analogy  tells  against  such  weakenings.

Congratulations to Thomas Byrne

13 Wednesday Apr 2016

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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.’

Life and Death in Early Modern Philosophy (14/15/16 April)

11 Monday Apr 2016

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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:

https://lifeanddeathinearlymodernphilosophy.wordpress.com/

UNC-KCL Workshop on Explanation

06 Wednesday Apr 2016

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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.

 

Congratulations to Sophie Stammers

20 Sunday Mar 2016

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I’m very pleased to announce that Sophie Stammers (one of our current PGR students) won the 2015 teorema Essay Prize for Young Scholars on Free Will and Cognitive Science for her paper, “Situation, Reason and the Extended Agent”. Congratulations to Sophie on this wonderful achievement. Keep an eye out for her paper, which will be published in an issue of teorema very soon.

Congratulations to Charles Cote-Bouchard

22 Monday Feb 2016

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Charles Cote-Bouchard (KCL postgraduate student working in epistemology and metaethics) just received word that his paper, ‘Can the Aim of Belief Ground Epistemic Normativity?’ has been accepted for publication by Philosophical Studies. Congratulations to Charles on this fantastic achievement. Interested readers can find an early draft of the paper here.