• About
  • News
  • Events
    • Regular Reading Groups
    • Seminars
    • Public talks
  • Research
    • Conference reports
    • History of Philosophy
    • Mind, Metaphysics, Psychology
    • Formal Methods
    • Rationality
  • Ideas
    • Interviews
    • Essays
  • Resources
  • Department Events Calendar

King's Philosophy

~ Official blog of the philosophy department at King's College London.

King's Philosophy

Category Archives: Ideas

The Real Night at the Museum

01 Tuesday Feb 2022

Posted by vanessabrasseykcl in Announcements, Events, Ideas, Public engagements

≈ Leave a comment

(And how I spent mine)

Mathilde Victoria Prietzel Nielsen (she/her)President of King’s College London Philosophy Society
Undergraduate at King’s College London Department of Philosophy

Mathilde stars with the crew in the adspot for ‘The Pleasures of Regret’

We were summoned at the Prêt across the National Gallery to meet each other, get fuel, a run-through of the plan, and role assignments. I was to be the checker, that is, to keep track of which shots we had done and which we hadn’t (this was not done sequentially!). Other roles included clapper (the wooden board, not hands), extra set of ears, extra set of eyes, prompter/stylist, equipment gather-carrier-set-upper. Once the roles had been assigned we went to the gallery to be let into the gloriously silent halls to get our badges (so as to not get hand-cuffed for wandering the halls at night) before going through the galleries to our first shot, and I must say: Monet, Picasso, and the rest of the gang makes a whole other experience when not diffused by the usual museum buzz.

Though not required, you intuitively lower your eyes, widen your gaze, and raise eyebrows to communicate to and agree with the others that this is not the usual museum experience – it is of course far better.

That is, it is better when you are together with your crew or for the first 150 meters walking alone.

Around 160 you start wondering whether you’re lost and, if so, whom to call on. Cézanne? Raphael? As a team, our main job turned out to be how to keep the lights on whilst keeping the sound off: light sensors required us to keep walking about when filming in order to keep the light on, but it happens that wooden floors may squeak, so we caught ourselves in quite the dilemma (a suitable environment for philosophers, sure). The dilemma we solved with a fusion of modern dance and loss of shoes. The night we rounded off with a communal, laugh, stretch, and yawn.

To appreciate our efforts, please sign up to the online event.!

Would you like to get involved on projects for the centre of Philosophy and Arts? Click here to find out about our events and get in touch

What do you regret?

31 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by vanessabrasseykcl in Announcements, Events, Ideas, Public engagements, Public talks, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Still from: ‘The Pleasures of Regret’

The centre for Philosophy and Arts (KCL) are delighted to announce a new series of events exploring the relationship between art and our emotions. The series launches at The National Gallery with a film, panel discussion, and Q&A on regret. Reserve your free zoom seat here and join Vanessa Brassey from King’s College London, Andy West, author of ‘The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy’, and author and arts journalist Chloë Ashby. The event will be chaired by Sacha Golob, King’s College London.

So, what will we be discussing?

Regrets may be painful or bittersweet. They can be ethically loaded or merely a plaintive ‘perhaps’. Perhaps you could’ve been a contender; loved more kindly; been more philanthropic; or sold your bitcoin before December?

This means that regret is an aromatic concoction of nostalgia, reminiscing and grief with gentle top notes of longing. We will be thinking about the ways it can also be intensely and weirdly pleasurable. And how pictures help us to understand this, on their own special way.  

The Art & Emotion series. Free (but pre-registration required). Make sure you get your seat.

In collaboration with and hosted by The National Gallery London.

Click here to register for tickets

Fake News? So what?

19 Monday Jul 2021

Posted by vanessabrasseykcl in Essays, Ideas

≈ Leave a comment

https://www.publicethics.org/post/what-fake-news-is-and-why-that-matters

Dr Eliot Michaelson has recently been published in Pubic Ethics with a piece titled ‘What Fake News Is and Why that Matters’. As Michaelson puts it, there is a difference between a false story and fake news. The former can arise from accidents or sloppy preparation. The latter however has a pernicious or moral tang that we would do well to articulate and be wary of. What do you think?

Read the full and very engaging article here. We think it’s so clear and bright that you can even read it in the sunshine.

Listen to Dr Eleanor Knox on the BBC’s Inside Science

17 Saturday Jul 2021

Posted by vanessabrasseykcl in Announcements, Ideas, Public talks

≈ Leave a comment

Epidemiologist Julian Peto is advocating mass testing as the key part of a plan to stop the virus spreading. Studies where everyone has been tested have picked up asymptomatic cases. With the addition of isolation and contact tracing this method of testing has been able to massively reduce the spread of the virus. The hope is such a coordinated scheme implemented nationally could help bring the numbers down. There’s a question over which type of test is best to use for mass testing. At the moment many of us do lateral flow tests at home. Although they give instant results their accuracy has been shown to be strongly linked to how well the tests are conducted – hence the need to back up any positive findings with the more accurate PCR test.

PCR takes longer and needs sophisticated lab equipment. However a compromise could be to use RT Lamp tests, they are accurate, give results in around 20 minutes, do require a very basic lab, but without the expensive equipment of PCR. A number of RT lamp tests have now been developed for SARS-Cov2. Kevin Fong has been to see the developers of one of them, the OxLAMP test.

And with the lifting of restrictions how are you going to judge your own personal risk from Covid?

It’s a question that interests philosopher of science Eleanor Knox. She says government mandates on mask wearing and social distancing have allowed us to avoid tricky questions around our own potential risk from the virus and risks our own behaviour might pose to loved ones. Now there’s a lot more to think about in terms of balancing our desires to return to some semblance of normality while levels of Covid infection continue to rise.

Listen to this broadcast from BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science, here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000xtb6

Catch John Callanan on the BBC

05 Saturday Jun 2021

Posted by vanessabrasseykcl in Announcements, History of Philosophy, Ideas, Interviews, Public talks, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Yesterday, Dr. John Callanan joined Melvyn Bragg Broadcaster and host of In our Time, Fiona Hughes Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Essex, and Anil Gomes Associate Professor and Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Trinity College, Oxford to discuss the insight into our relationship with the world that Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) shared in his book The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. It was as revolutionary, in his view, as when the Polish astronomer Copernicus realised that Earth revolves around the Sun rather than the Sun around Earth. Kant’s was an insight into how we understand the world around us, arguing that we can never know the world as it is, but only through the structures of our minds which shape that understanding. This idea, that the world depends on us even though we do not create it, has been one of Kant’s greatest contributions to philosophy and influences debates to this day.

In case you missed it you can catch the episode here:

Are Covid passports a threat to liberty?

13 Tuesday Apr 2021

Posted by vanessabrasseykcl in Ideas, News, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Professor Alvarez is Head of the Philosophy Department at King’s College London. She works on agency, choice and moral responsibility. This weekend her opinion piece in regard to Covid passports was published in The Guardian newspaper. Read it in full here.

“More than 160 years ago John Stuart Mill argued that in a “civilised community”, the only justification for government coercion is the prevention of harm to others. In the UK, and many other countries, long before Covid, coercive state measures, from taxes to car seatbelts, were pervasive and accepted on grounds that go beyond Mill’s justification, or at least involve a very broad interpretation of his harm principle…Some have questioned whether the restrictions have been proportionate.”

What do you think? Read the article to find out whether you agree with Professor Alvarez.

Review: Asylum Monologues from Ice&Fire

08 Thursday Apr 2021

Posted by vanessabrasseykcl in Events, Ideas, Workshops

≈ Leave a comment

by Winnie Ma (PhD candidate)

“You’re lying.” 

“I don’t believe a word you’re saying.” 

“I think you’re just trying to game the system.” 

Hearing these words when you’re trying to report an injustice you’ve experienced is to experience an additional, often overlooked and underestimated kind of injustice – testimonial injustice, which Fricker defines as a kind of injustice that occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word. In recent times, we’ve heard about these sorts of responses and this kind of injustice being perpetrated against women who report sexual harassment and sexual assault, as well as against members of minority ethnic groups (think about responses to Meghan Markle’s recent interview on racism and attitudes toward mental health issues). 

The performance of Asylum Monologues by Ice&Fire, in which actors performed three asylum seekers’ first-hand accounts of their experiences of the UK asylum system highlighted the prevalence and the negative consequences of testimonial injustices perpetrated against asylum seekers. For example, in the first-hand account of Denise, a woman from Nigeria who sought asylum in the U.K. on the basis of her LGBTQIA+ identity, her claim for asylum was met with similar incredulous responses by various officials who accused her of lying about her sexual orientation. In addition to the hardships that led her to seek asylum then, Denise suffered the further injustices of being disbelieved and of being accused of being disingenuous. One consequence of these further injustices, which compounded other experienced injustices, was the deterioration of Denise’s mental state to the point of an attempted suicide. 

Perhaps, just as the #BelieveWomen movement went viral in the wake of the Prof. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony about being sexually assaulted by now U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, we need support for a similar movement for asylum seekers whose experience of testimonial injustices compounds the injustices and hardships they already face – #BelieveAsylumSeekers ? – and really for members of all marginalized groups who are often forced to suffer being silenced in silence.

Review: Thomas Rowe on Dom Lopes’

01 Thursday Apr 2021

Posted by vanessabrasseykcl in Events, Ideas, Public talks, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

By Thomas Rowe

Screen grab care of Mark Sainsbury

According to Lopes, justice is goodness in a relatively large-scale social arrangement. Injustice is thereby badness in such a social arrangement. Aesthetic injustice becomes an issue when cultures encounter one another. The motivating example of the talk was the Canadian government’s use of Haida aesthetic culture (the Spirit of Haida Gwaii sculpture) on the $20 bill. There seemed to be something not quite right about the use of this First Nation art on the national currency. Lopes’s explanation for this is that the use of aesthetic culture subverted the process through which the Haida people fix their own aesthetic profile, contrary to the interest in social autonomy.

The account of aesthetic injustice maps on quite nicely to the familiar notion of political injustice. This is because there is an appeal to the large-scale structural features of society that frame how individuals come into contact with one another. This mirrors the typical approach in political philosophy of seeing justice as a matter of the fundamental political and economic institutions of society.

I will note two points. First, Lopes’s view assumes a perfectionist orientated approach to justice. Perfectionists appeal to an account of a good human life in their accounts of justice. (But what exactly is a good human life?) It is a great contribution, however, to conceive of aesthetic interests as being relevant to justice. The perfectionist approach can be contrasted with approaches of justice such as “realism” which aim to secure conditions for the non-violent coexistence of cultural communities.

Second, Lopes argues that aesthetic injustice can undermine individuals’ capacities to realise the interests of the value of diverse schemes of aesthetic value as well as communities’ interest in social autonomy. These interests can be viewed as part of an account of a good human life, where the former states that it is good, for instance, that there are different ways of doing rock music, and the latter refers to the good of being able to shape one’s life and have an impact on surrounding social practices. Lopes suggested that justice with respect to these interests can be seen as an aspiration to the maximum, and injustice can be seen as the falling below some threshold, where individuals’ capacities to realise these interests are set back to a sufficient degree. But where, we may ask, is this threshold? And what are the particularly aesthetic interests (if any) that are set back by aesthetic injustice? I look forward to hearing more about Lopes’s excellent work on this fascinating area.  

Review: Social Arrangements & Aesthetic Injustice

25 Thursday Mar 2021

Posted by vanessabrasseykcl in Essays, Ideas, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

by Irene Martínez Marín, Aesthetics PhD Candidate (Uppsala University/Visiting researcher KCL)

The Spirit of Haida Gwaii (Sculpture)

Dom Lopes presented at the annual Mark Sainsbury Lecture a novel and promising framework from which to better understand cases of aesthetic injustice: the cosmopolitan theory. The goal of this theory is to capture what is special and sometimes problematic about our engagement with other aesthetic cultures. Lopes started the talk by characterizing justice as goodness in the arrangement of social life. From there, social arrangements of social life are aesthetically unjust when they harm people or communities in their capacity as aesthetic agents, which capacities serve two interests: value diversity and social autonomy. A well-known scenario of aesthetic injustice is cultural appropriation. Lopes’ strategy was to apply his theory to this form of injustice in order to show how there is more to cultural appropriation than “violation of the source culture’s property rights, misrepresentation, disrespect or assimilation”. Using the example of a Haida artwork, ‘Black Canoe’ Lopes convincingly showed that aesthetic cultures also ask for “recognition of the right kind”.  By focusing on how the members of an aesthetic culture coordinate and collaborate around their aesthetic profiles, Lopes concluded that this expertise and interaction can be undercut and harmed. And, that is precisely why cultural appropriation is problematic, because it prevents such capacities. The talk was followed by a lively discussion. Some of the issues that came up in the Q&A: how to draw the line between insider/outsider of an aesthetic culture? Who is aesthetically responsible for acts of aesthetic injustice? Are some artistic developments (those that made other artistic forms disappear) to be characterized as cases of aesthetic injustice? How are we to understand ‘aesthetic value’ within the cosmopolitan theory? The conference was attended by an international audience of over one hundred people, including KCL staff and students.

***

Would you like to post a review on the King’s philosophy blog? If so, then please get in touch with vanessa.brassey@kcl.ac.uk

Review: Aesthetic Injustice

23 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by vanessabrasseykcl in Essays, Ideas, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

by Mari Maldal, 2nd year Philosophy & War Studies

Professor Dominic Lopes

This year’s Mark Sainsbury lecture was given by Professor Dominic McIver Lopes. The topic of which was what he described as a cosmopolitan theory of aesthetic injustice. I have not personally studied philosophy of art, and I am therefore not going to attempt to give a precise account of the theory. I think Professor Lopes did a great job at that himself.

I will however write about my initial thoughts on the conversation. I found Lopes’ conception of aesthetic injustice as a phenomenon separate from cultural appropriation very interesting. The idea that too much attention can limit one’s capacity as an aesthetic agent was something I’d never considered before. Despite being a newcomer to this subject of philosophy, Lopes’ lecture was clear and easy to follow, and like most pieces of great philosophy, it left me with questions I didn’t even know I could ask.

← Older posts

Tags

ancient philosophy Andrea Sangiovanni applied ethics art Art and Philosophy British Society for the History of Philosophy Clayton Littlejohn conference conferences David Papineau employment epistemology ethics Events formal epistemology Formal Methods graduate students guest speakers History of Philosophy Hobbes interview Jessica Leech jobs John Callanan Julien Dutant Kant KHOP Maria Rosa Antognazza Mark Textor metaphysics Michael Beaney migration MM McCabe performance art Philosophy and Medicine Philosophy in Prisons philosophy of language philosophy of mathematics philosophy of medicine philosophy of mind political philosophy postdoc publications public lecture radio Rationality Research at King's Sacha Golob Sarah Fine workshop

Follow King’s Philosophy on Twitter

My Tweets

Recent Posts

  • KHOPS events this term
  • King’s College London Peace Lecture 2023 Announced
  • “What’s the use of hope?” by Kieran Setiya in the Agora series edited by KCL’s @aj_wendland in The New Statesman
  • New Latin Philosophy Reading Group
  • Job: Lecturer in Ethics

Archives

  • January 2023
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • July 2013
  • May 2013

Categories

  • Announcements
  • Conference reports
  • Essays
  • Events
  • Formal Methods
  • History of Philosophy
  • Ideas
  • Interviews
  • Kant
  • KHOPS
  • Mind, Metaphysics, Psychology
  • News
  • philosophy of science
  • Public engagements
  • Public talks
  • Rationality
  • Reading Groups
  • Research
  • Resources
  • Seminars
  • Uncategorized
  • Workshops

A WordPress.com Website.

  • Follow Following
    • King's Philosophy
    • Join 219 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • King's Philosophy
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...