04 Thursday Jun 2020
Posted in Formal Methods, Seminars
The Formal Methods research group re-launches its seminar online in June. We have two guest talks given by Branden Fitelson and by Matt Mandelkern, organized with the London Group for Formal Philosophy.
Continue reading18 Monday May 2020
Posted in Announcements, Events, Ideas, News
Prof Maria Rosa Antognazza will be presenting a paper this evening at the Aristotelian Society on The Distinction of Kind between Knowledge and Belief. The presentation, which will be hosted on Zoom, will be available later as a podcast. Both a draft of the paper and a link to the podcast are available here.
The Distinction of Kind between Knowledge and Belief.
Abstract:
Drawing inspiration from a well-attested historical tradition, I propose an account of cognition according to which knowledge is not only conceptually and ontologically prior to belief; it is also, and crucially, not a kind of belief. In turn, believing is not some sort of botched knowing but a mental state fundamentally different from knowing, with its own distinctive and complementary role in our cognitive life. I conclude that the main battle-line in the history of epistemology is drawn between the affirmation of a natural mental state in which there is a contact between ‘mind’ and ‘reality’ (whatever the ontological nature of this ‘reality’), and the rejection of such a natural mental state. For the former position, there is a mental state which is different in kind from belief, and which is constituted by the presence of the object of cognition to the cognitive subject, with no gap between them. For the latter position, all our cognition is belief, and the question becomes how and when belief is permissible.
06 Monday Apr 2020
Posted in Announcements, Ideas, News, Public engagements, Public talks
Epidemiological models have been frequently mentioned in the media lately. What are they? And how do they work? Professor Alexander Bird with the Sowerby/King’s Philosophy & Medicine project has helpfully produced this introduction to epidemiological modelling for the layperson.
The particular model he will be looking at is the SIR model developed by Kermack and McKendrick in 1927.
Here’s a link to the project. Professor Bird has also produced a paper to accompany the video which is available here.
27 Friday Mar 2020
Posted in Announcements, Ideas, News, Public engagements, Public talks, Uncategorized, Workshops
As everyone is locked up, Clayton Littlejohn has been helpfully recording and gather talks on some recent work in philosophy. This talk is an informal presentation of a paper written with Julien Dutant on epistemic rationality and defeat. It presents a new unified theory of defeat according to which the toxicity of rationality defeaters has to do with the way in which they serve as indicators that we cannot know certain things. The paper engages with recent work on epistemic paradoxes, epistemic rationality, and recent work on defeat.
If you are interested, there are more videos available here.
17 Tuesday Mar 2020
I regret to announce that the following upcoming events have been postponed until further notice:
Colloquium: Robin Durie on ‘Re-valuing Death’ 17th of March
Conference: Philosophy in Medical Education 6th to 8th of April
The GTA Party has also been postponed until a later date.
Teaching in the department shall be moved online from Monday the 23rd of March (though some modules may go online this week).
06 Friday Mar 2020
Posted in Ideas, Interviews, News, Public engagements
Prof. Maria Alvarez recently appeared on the podcast Aleks Listens, here. Over the course of the interview, she discusses being Head of Department, what it means to be an agent, and the importance of talking with people who have different views.
If you are interested in hearing a thoughtful discussion of some important issues, give it a listen.
The interview begins about 10 minutes from the beginning or 1 hour 8 mins from the end (depending on the direction you are coming from).
06 Friday Mar 2020
Posted in Announcements, Events, News
Registration for the 2020 annual British Society for the History of Philosophy conference, Women in the History of Philosophy, 23rd-25th April at Durham University, is now open.
The booking website is: https://www.dur.ac.uk/conference.booking/details/?id=1538
The conference will feature several philosophers from King’s, including Rosa Antognazza, Peter Adamson, Katharine O’Reilly, Branislav Kotoc, and Alan Coffee.
Registration is £90.00 for waged participants and £30.00 for students and unwaged participants.
When registering for the conference you will be able to book college accommodation (which is about a five-minute walk from the conference venue. You will also be able to book a place at the conference dinner on Thursday 23rd April.
Please direct questions to bshp.2020@durham.ac.uk
28 Friday Feb 2020
Posted in Announcements, Events, Ideas, News, Public talks, Uncategorized
The Philosophy and Medicine Colloquium will be meeting on the 17th of March to hear a talk by Dr Robin Durie, University of Exeter. Dr Durie is a member of the Lancet Commission on the Value of Death
17 March 2020 – 17:00-18:30 in the Large Committee Room, Hodgkin Building, Guy’s Campus
If you do not have a KCL ID, please register (free) at this Link.
The Lancet Commission on The Value of Death argues that contemporary society has developed an unhealthy relationship with death due in part to the over-medicalisation of death and dying. Amongst the signs of this unhealthy relationship are the ever increasing amounts of healthcare budgets that are spent on prolonging the lives of those who are dying, with seemingly little or no regard for the quality of the life being prolonged; the investment in the search for immortality amongst the very richest in society, at the same time as the poorest are denied access to even the most basic provision of palliative care; and the gradual shift of the experience of dying from communities and families to hospitals. The core problem of this Lancet Commission is one to which philosophy can make a unique contribution, not least because philosophy has, from its very inception in the work of Plato, understood itself as a “practice for death”. And yet, philosophers such as Spinoza have also argued that “philosophy thinks of death least of all things”. In the first part of this discussion, I will explore this tension in philosophy’s approach towards death; then, I will draw on some more contemporary thinkers, such as Georges Canguilhem, in order to develop a philosophical position from which it may be possible to begin valuing death anew.
07 Friday Feb 2020
Posted in Announcements, Events, News, philosophy of science, Public talks, Research, Seminars
The Birmingham-Bristol-London-Oxford-Cambridge Philosophy of Physics Seminar Series is restarting! This is a research seminar for philosophers of physics across the South of England to meet each term, hosted at King’s College London.
The next two events will take place on Monday 23rd March at 5pm in Bush House (SE) 1.02 and Thursday 21st May at 4:30pm in K2.40, King’s Building, KCL Strand Campus. The speakers will be Emily Adlam and James Read.
For more details see: https://kingsphilosophy.com/bbloc/
05 Wednesday Feb 2020
Posted in Announcements, Events, Ideas, News, Research
The King’s College London Peace Lecture will be given this year by Prof Cécile Fabre on the topic, ‘Snatching Something From Death’: Value, Justice, and Humankind’s Common Heritage
Professor Fabre is a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the author of Justice in a Changing World, Whose Body is it Anyway? Justice and the Integrity of the Person, and in 2012 Cosmopolitan War.
Cécile Fabre has just completed an eight year long project on the ethics of war and peace. She is also working on the ethics of economic statecraft and on the ethics of espionage.
The lecture will be in Bush House Lecture Theatre 1 on Tuesday the 10th of March
The lecture will begin at 6.30pm till 8pm with a reception afterwards
Abstract
When Notre-Dame Cathedral was engulfed by fire on April 15, 2019, the world (it seemed) watched in horror. On Twitter, Facebook, in newspapers and on TV cables ranging as far afield from Paris as South Africa, China and Chile, people expressed their sorrow at the partial destruction of the church, and retrospective anguish at the thought of what might very well have happened – the complete loss of a jewel of Gothic architecture whose value somehow transcends time and space. My aim in this lecture is to offer a philosophical account and defence of the view that there is such a thing as humankind’s common heritage, and that this heritage makes stringent moral demands on us. I first offer an account of the universal value of (some) heritage goods, and then offer a conception of justice at the bar of which we owe it to one another, but also to our ancestors and successors, to preserve that heritage.
