The Department of Philosophy is pleased to announce the new list of modules offered for AY2013/2014.
To view the list, please visit http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/philo/courses/modulesoffered.html
Commencement Party 2013
The department of philosophy will be hosting a Commencement Party on 28 June, 2013 (evening) at the NUS Shaw Foundation Alumni House for students graduating this semester. More details to follow. In the meantime, mark your calendar…
“Three Puzzles about Spatial Experience” by David Chalmers (6 May)
Is it possible that everything that seems to be on your left is actually on your right? Is it possible that everything in the world is twice as big as it seems to be? Is it possible that everything that seems square is actually an extended rectangle? Through reflection on these and related puzzles I will address some central issues regarding the content of spatial experience. I will use this analysis to shed light on puzzles about skepticism concerning the external world.
Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Monday, 6 May 2013 (Please note that this talk isn’t following our regular day/time for talks)
Time: 10am – 12pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: David Chalmers, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness, Australian National University.
Moderator: Dr. Michael Pelczar
About the Speaker: David Chalmers is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University. He is also Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. His books include “The Conscious Mind,” “The Character of Consciousness,” and “Constructing the World.”
Time Workshop (23 Apr)
The NUS Department of Philosophy will be hosting a workshop on time on Tuesday, 23 April 2013, from 2pm to 5.30pm at the Philosophy Resource Room (AS-05-23) in NUS. (More details below)
Retrocausality – What Would It Take? (2pm – 3.10pm)
by Huw Price, Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and a Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge
Abstract: Some writers argue that retrocausality offers an attractive loophole in Bell’s Theorem in QM, allowing an explanation of EPR-Bell correlations without “spooky action-at-a-distance.” This idea originated more than a decade before Bell’s famous result, when de Broglie’s student, Olivier Costa de Beauregard, first proposed that retrocausality plays a role in EPR contexts. The proposal is difficult to assess, because there has been little work on the general question of what a world with retrocausality would “look like” — what kinds of considerations, if any, would properly lead to the conclusion that we do live in such a world. In this talk I discuss these general issues, with the aim of bringing the more specific question as to whether quantum theory implies retrocausality into sharper focus than has hitherto been possible.
About the Speaker: Huw Price is Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He was previously ARC Federation Fellow and Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, where from 2002—2012 he was Founding Director of the Centre for Time. In Cambridge he is co-founder, with Martin Rees and Jaan Tallinn, of a project to establish a Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
His publications include Facts and the Function of Truth (Blackwell, 1988; 2nd. edn. OUP, forthcoming), Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point (OUP, 1996), Naturalism Without Mirrors (OUP, 2011) and a range of articles in journals such as Nature, Journal of Philosophy, Mind and British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. He is also co-editor (with Richard Corry) of Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality: Russell’s Republic Revisited (OUP, 2007). His René Descartes Lectures (Tilburg, 2008) will shortly appear as Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism (CUP, 2013), with commentary essays by Simon Blackburn, Robert Brandom, Paul Horwich and Michael Williams.
He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow and former Member of Council of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a Past President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. He was consulting editor for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy from 1995–2006, and is an associate editor of The Australasian Journal of Philosophy and a member of the editorial boards of Contemporary Pragmatism, Logic and Philosophy of Science, the Routledge International Library of Philosophy, and the European Journal for Philosophy of Science.
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The Modal Argument Against Temporal Parts (3.15pm – 4.20pm)
by Kenneth Chong, M.A. Student, Department of Philosophy, National University of Singapore
Abstract: One version of the modal argument against temporal parts works in the following way. Assume there are temporal parts. Let ‘D’ be a proper temporal part of ‘Descartes’. Then we have the following inconsistent triad: i) D ≠ Descartes; ii) □ (D ≠ Descartes) (this follows from i) and the principle of the necessity of distinctness); and iii) ◊ (D = Descartes).
Friends of temporal parts have generally been supportive of counterpart theory in dealing with the modal argument against temporal parts. In this paper, I will argue that the counterpart-theoretic solution as advanced by Sider in his book Four-Dimensionalism does not work. Sider’s proposed solution seeks to undermine an argument for ii) above. I will argue, however, that given the flexible nature of counterpart theory, his argument against ii) does not work. Consequently we can still derive a contradiction by assuming that there are temporal parts. Counterpart theorists who are also perdurantists need not fret too much, however. In the course of this paper I will briefly mention one other counterpart-theoretic response. If it is a workable response, then a corollary that falls out from this paper is that counterpart theorists who seek to defend the idea of temporal parts against the modal argument would do well to refocus their attention from Sider’s proposed counterpart-theoretic response to this other counterpart-theoretic response.
About the Speaker: Kenneth is currently pursuing his MA at NUS, where he is receiving some pressure not to be a physicalist under the supervision of his supervisor. In his free time, Kenneth enjoys playing all sorts of games, which might help explain his interest in Philosophy. He also enjoys writing plays, and has recently been published in Voices Clear and True (Vol. 1), a collection of new Singaporean plays.
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Relativity and Experience (4.25pm – 5.30pm)
by Michael Pelczar, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, National University of Singapore
Abstract: Human experience is atomic, in the sense that it ultimately consists of experiences that do not themselves consist of further experiences. Like all conscious experiences, atomic experiences exist absolutely: if any complete and accurate description of the world describes it as including some conscious experience, then every complete and accurate description of the world describes it as including that experience. I argue that these considerations place severe constraints on how our atomic experiences can occur in relativistic spacetime. Specifically, I argue that an atomic experience can occur in relativistic spacetime only as a momentary and unextended point-event. This is bad news for physicalists, but good news for phenomenalists.
About the Speaker: Michael Pelczar is an Associate Professor who joined the Philosophy Department at NUS in 2001. He previously taught at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He received his PhD from the University of Virginia. He is originally from Chestertown, Maryland.
“Intellectual Autonomy” by Allan Hazlett (18 Apr)
Is it good to be intellectually autonomous? If it is, in what way is it good? In this talk I defend the value of intellectual autonomy by appeal to the value of non-testimonial knowledge. I criticize some accounts of the value of non-testimonial belief (namely, those that reject the possibility of reliable belief, knowledge, certainty, and understanding on the basis of testimony), and defend the value of non-testimonial knowledge by appeal to the value of acquaintance (and the propositional knowledge that comes with it), individual achievement, collective risk-mitigation, and democratic legitimacy. Non-testimonial knowledge entails acquaintance (which typically comes with a wealth of propositional knowledge), is always an individual achievement, and has social value in virtue of its connection with mitigating the collective risk of error and with democratic legitimacy.
Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 18 April 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Allan Hazlett, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Edinburgh
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson
About the Speaker:
Allan Hazlett (PhD, Brown University, 2006) is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, having worked previously at Texas Tech and Fordham Universities. He is the author of Luxury of the Understanding: On the Value of True Belief (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and was the winner of the 2007 Rutgers Epistemology Conference Young Epistemologist Prize. Since 2012 he has served as the Secretary of the Scots Philosophical Association. He is currently working on the nature and value of the (so-called) intellectual virtues.
“Seeing, Visualizing, and Believing” by John Zeimbekis (11 Apr)
I begin with an account of how visual processes construct the nonconceptual contents caused by picture perceptions, and then ask how those contents survive into doxastic, personal-level awareness. The account suggests that subjects have a degree of personal-level control over some of the visual processes that yield visual experiences, phenomenal characters, and nonconceptual contents as outputs. The cognitive penetrability of relatively early visual processes potentially conflicts with the use of perception to justify beliefs. I argue that this form of penetrability should be admitted, but that it does not have the pernicious epistemological consequences usually expected of cognitive penetrability because picture-perceptions do not cause beliefs. The account put forward secures a key point for understanding pictures as a form of representation. It shows that the mental states caused by pictures do not form the contents of attitudes or psychological modes (eg illusion, belief or perceptual belief with those contents), but are representations toward which we can subsequently adopt a number of different attitudes depending on the use of the picture. If there is time, I shall place this conclusion in the context of my (2010) proposal that pictures are always used to perform type (as opposed to token) demonstrations.
Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 11 April 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: John Zeimbekis, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Patras
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson
About the Speaker:
John Zeimbekis is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Patras and maître de conférences on leave from the University of Grenoble. He has held fellowships at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, and the University of Pennsylvania. He works on vagueness and appearance properties, pictorial representation, fiction and mind reading, aesthetic value, indexical thought, the contents of perception, and cognitive penetrability. Publications include articles in the BJA, JAAC, Noûs and Philosophical Studies, several articles and book chapters on aesthetics in French and in Greek, and a book on aesthetic judgment (Qu’est-ce qu’un jugement esthétique, Paris: Vrin, 2006). He recently completed a monograph, Pictures, Perception and Meaning, which is under review, and is co-editing (with A. Raftopoulos) a volume entitled Cognitive Penetrability. He is currently treasurer of the European Society for Aesthetics.
“Just Knowers: Towards a Virtue Epistemology in the Mahãbhãrata” by Vrinda Dalmiya (28 Mar)
Adopting the framework of Anglo Analytic Virtue Epistemology, I ask of the Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata, the question: What sort of character or intellectual virtues must a good knower have? Then, motivated by broadly feminist sensibilities, I raise the concern whether motivations for knowing the world can be associated with motivations to rectify injustices in that world – whether, in other words, a good knower is also a ‘just knower.’ I go on to explore the structure of humility and shame as “virtues of truth” in the epic to see whether they can establish a connection between knowing and justice.
Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 28 March 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Vrinda Dalmiya, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson
About the Speaker:
Professor Dalmiya is a feminist epistemologist who did her doctoral studies at Brown University. She has taught at Montana State University, Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, and is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research has expanded into the area of Ethics and she has published on a wide range of topics, ranging from truth and interpretation, Feminism and naturalized epistemology, epistemic humility, to wisdom and love, and care ethics. The Royal Institute of London recently invited her to give a lecture, “From Good Knowers to Just Knowers in the Mahābhārata: Towards a Comparative Virtue Epistemology.”
“Envy, Competition, Markets and Morals” by Arindam Chakrabati (22 Mar)
Inequality generates envy. Even a perfectly happy contented person or community can suddenly be made to feel poorer and unhappier in comparison if they are bombarded with vivid information of the over-achievement, opulence and overconsumption by a neighbor or a neighboring community. Envy is not only a form of suffering, it is a poisonous sentiment which, Adam Smith claims, human beings are naturally ashamed of. It makes them feel doubly small, first because they are objectively less successful and secondly because they are unable to celebrate others’ flourishing. Yet inequality and envy, its emotional counterpart, however morally jarring, appear to be the motivating factors of competition, economic, cultural or intellectual. How can competitiveness, which goads economic growth in a free market, lack of which was supposed to be the bane of socialist regimes, be rooted in such a morally deplorable sentiment as envy? Or is some form of emulative envy a virtue?
In this paper, the complex and obscure relationship between different varieties of envy and their distinction from jealousy and schadenfreude will be discussed. The moral psychology of envy will then be explored, primarily on the basis of the paradoxical relationships between equality, inequality and individual or communal competition.
Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Friday, 22 March 2013
Time: 2.30pm – 4.30pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Arindam Chakrabarti, Professor of Philosophy, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
About the Speaker:
Professor Arindam Chakrabarti, having done his M.A. in Philosophy and Mathematical Logic, from Presidency College Kolkata University, earned his D.Phil from Oxford University in 1982, working under Peter Strawson and Michael Dummett. He taught at Calcutta University and at University College London, Seattle and Delhi University, and for the last 15 years, at the University of Hawaii Manoa. After being trained as an analytic philosopher of language at Oxford, Professor Chakrabarti has spent several years receiving traditional training in Indian logic (Navya Nyaya). Prof Chakrabarti has edited or authored six books, in English, Sanskrit, and Bengali, including Denying Existence, Knowing from Words (with B.K. Matilal)Universals, Concepts and Qualities (with Peter Strawson) and has published more than eighty papers and reviews. He is currently working on a book on moral psychology of the emotions and another monograph on the Isha Upanishad.
[Philosophy Seminar @ NTU] “Cognitive Disjunctivism” by Dr. Eduardo Garcia-Ramirez (20 Mar)
On behalf of the NTU Philosophy Group, you are cordially invited to attend their philosophy seminar on Wednesday, 20 March, from 2.30pm to 4pm at the HSS Conference Room (HSS-05-57), HSS Building, NTU (for a map of the place, go to: http://maps.ntu.edu.sg/maps#q:HSS ).
If you are attending, please RSVP Priya at shanmugapriya@ntu.edu.sg
Abstract:
What is the relevant aspect of a conscious experience when it comes to classifying it? The philosophical debate is divided between those that consider that two conscious experiences are of the same kind if they are subjectively indistinguishable and those that deny such criterion. We will defend a view among the latter. Our central thesis is that the causal cognitive mechanism that underlies the realisation of the states that give place to a conscious experience is relevant when it comes to deciding what kind of experience it belongs to. Based on empirical evidence, we show that perceptions and hallucinations are originated by different cognitive mechanisms and, quite possibly, have distinct properties. Thus, it seems reasonable to claim that perceptions and hallucinations belong to different kinds or have a distinct psychological nature.
About the Speaker: Eduardo Garcia-Ramirez is a junior research fellow at IIFs-UNAM (Mexico). He is interested in the relevance of research from cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics for debates in the philosophy of language, mind and epistemology. Part of his work has focused particularly on the theory of meaning and reference for proper anmes, as well as psychological accounts of empty names. For the past couple years he has been working on a translation of David Lewis’ On the Plurality of Worlds into Spanish.
“Truth and Recognition of Truth: Frege and Nyaya” by Arindam Chakrabarti (21 Mar)
Although a staunch realist in many senses, Gottlob Frege rejected the correspondence theory of truth because it leads to a vicious regress. Donald Davidson has more recently argued that truth (in natural language) is indefinable and any attempt to define truth would be sheer folly. I trace back basic reason why truth could not be defined to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
Yet, we find in Gangeśa, a 14th century New Nyaya epistemologist, a technically fortified definition of true cognition which seems to escape Frege’s, Davidson’s and Kant’s objections. While truth is not considered a natural universal, Gangeśa definition of truth does not postulate any Fregean thoughts or abstract propositions as bearer of truth. Truth remains an artificial relational property of awareness-episodes. While there is no truth without true acts of believing, it is possible for truth of a piece of knowledge to remain unknown even by the knower. Can Nyaya maintain its realism, without postulating Fregean thoughts or any realm of sense?
This paper is an exercise in comparative philosophical logic of truth and recognition of truth, as it were, through a debate between Nyaya and Frege.
Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 21 March 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Arindam Chakrabarti, Professor of Philosophy, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson
About the Speaker:
Professor Arindam Chakrabarti, having done his M.A. in Philosophy and Mathematical Logic, from Presidency College Kolkata University, earned his D.Phil from Oxford University in 1982, working under Peter Strawson and Michael Dummett. He taught at Calcutta University and at University College London, Seattle and Delhi University, and for the last 15 years, at the University of Hawaii Manoa. After being trained as an analytic philosopher of language at Oxford, Professor Chakrabarti has spent several years receiving traditional training in Indian logic (Navya Nyaya). Prof Chakrabarti has edited or authored six books, in English, Sanskrit, and Bengali, including Denying Existence, Knowing from Words (with B.K. Matilal) Universals, Concepts and Qualities (with Peter Strawson) and has published more than eighty papers and reviews. He is currently working on a book on moral psychology of the emotions and another monograph on the Isha Upanishad.