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:
On the 10th of December, King’s will be hosting the inaugural London Post-Kantian workshop on the topic ‘Philosophy’s Relationship to Pre-Philosophical Experience’. The workshop will feature papers on Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein.
Programme
1000-1015: Welcome to LPKS and King’s
1015-1130: Stephen Houlgate (Warwick) ‘The Presuppositions of Hegel’s Presuppositionless Logic’
King’s History of Philosophy Seminar will meet regularly throughout the academic year at King’s College London. The Seminar aims to promote discussion of methods and approaches to the History of Philosophy as well as of thinkers and topics within the tradition. We wish to encourage contextual and interdisciplinary perspectives, and welcome researchers in disciplines such as History, Theology, and Political Theory as well as Philosophy. Meetings take place on Fridays from 11am to 1pm. All welcome. For inquiries contact John Callanan (john.callanan@kcl.ac.uk)
Continuing our series of interviews with new members of staff, we have Dr. Katharine O’Reilly.
Katharine (and Roscoe)
Where were you before coming to Kings?
Immediately before coming to King’s I wrote my D.Phil at University College Oxford, but there’s also a sense in which I have been at King’s for nearly a decade. I took the M.Phil Stud. in Ancient Philosophy here from 2010-2014, I have been a GTA from then until now, and in 2018-19, the year I was finishing my D.Phil, I held the Analysis Trust Studentship here in the Department. I’ve also worked on two projects in the Department for a number of years: the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle Project, and the British Journal for the History of Philosophy. As you can probably tell, I’m a very big fan of King’s Philosophy (and now Classics! I’m cross-appointed there).
What got you into philosophy?
When I started University in Canada (University of Toronto) I didn’t really know what philosophy was. But having been at French Immersion schools up until then, it turns out I had been exposed to good deal of philosophy, by way of authors such as Camus and Voltaire. I thought I would be an English major, but in North America you don’t have to declare right away, and can take a breadth of courses in the first year. I signed up to Mark Kingwell’s Introduction to Philosophy because the reading list looked so great. I was immediately hooked.
One focus of your research is prudentialism in the ancient world. Could you tell us what attracted you to this?
My research is broadly interested in ancient moral psychology, and within that realm, I’m particularly interested in prudentialism in the sense of the strategies ancient thinkers and schools recommend for conceiving of and concerning oneself with ones own good. I became interested in this topic by observing the diversity of approaches to thinking about ourselves and our lives in ancient texts. Some suggest we think about our future selves and their good, some our lives as a whole, some our posthumous good, some the recollected goods of our past. I became very interested in the way this kind of autobiographical and prudential thinking underlies the strategies and therapies different figures recommend their followers adopt in order to bring about the right kind of self-interest. So far I have been considering these issue within the thought of Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic schools.
You’ve argued that Plato isn’t as strictly opposed to hedonism as he is sometimes made out to be. What have we been getting wrong about him?
Plato is often characterised as decidedly anti-hedonist. He presents Socrates in dialogue with hedonists repeatedly, and that is usually to critique them, and show that the life they thought they could pursue, with pleasure as its goal, isn’t one they can or should pursue successfully. What this reading misses out, I think, is Plato’s deep and sustained interest in pleasure and the role it ought to play in our lives. He is anything but dismissive of hedonist arguments: he takes them seriously again and again, and even devotes an entire late dialogue (the Philebus) to thinking about the nature of pleasure. That doesn’t mean that Plato is a fan of hedonism, or isn’t critical of it, but what I think it does mean is that he is interested enough in the arguments to develop multiple analyses of the psychology of pleasure and pain. If we read Plato as too dismissive of hedonism, we risk missing the insights these discussions provide. So I would rather characterise Plato as being fascinated by pleasure.
Is there a philosophical idea that you endorse that most people don’t but should?
I think the Cyrenaic advice about anticipating future pain is far more effective than most people give it credit for.
Wouldn’t it be better to be a jellyfish?
Not according to Plato (or so I argue here)! But as the deadlines stack up, it is tempting…
The Annual Conference of the British Society for the History of Philosophy took place at King’s College London on 24-26 April 2019. Over 120 delegates gathered in London for three days of discussion. The conference covered all periods of the history of philosophy, including sessions on Chinese, Islamic, Indian, and other non-western parts of the canon, in nearly 100 papers.
Several KCL faculty, emeritus faculty and students gave papers at the event. Maria Rosa Antognazza delivered the welcome remarks as BSHP Chair. Other King’s speakers included: MM McCabe, Mike Beaney, Richard Sorabji, John Callanan, Jessica Leech, Mark Textor, Katharine O’Reilly, Jon W. Thompson, Carlo Cogliati, and Mike Coxhead.
The British Society for the History of Philosophy (BSHP), launched in 1984, is a registered charity, which exists to promote and foster all aspects of the study and teaching of the history of philosophy. It publishes one of the leading journals in the field, the British Journal for the History of Philosophy (Taylor and Francis), currently based at KCL. Both the BSHP Chair (Professor Maria Rosa Antognazza) and the BJHP Editor (Professor Mike Beaney) are members of King’s Philosophy Department.
Maria Rosa Antognazza is giving the Westfall Lecture in History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University Bloomington on Thursday 20th September.
The title of Rosa’s talk is ‘Physics and Metaphysics in Leibniz’ and the abstract can be found here.
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