The Aristotelian Society, founded in 1880, meets fortnightly in London to hear and discuss talks given by leading philosophers from a broad range of philosophical traditions. The papers read at the Society’s meetings are published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. The mission of the Society is to make philosophy widely available to the general public, and the Aristotelian Society Podcast Series represents our latest initiative in furthering this goal. The audio podcasts of our ...
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20/06/22: Samuel Scheffler on Partiality, Deference, and Engagement
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The partiality we display, insofar as we form and sustain personal attachments, is not normatively fundamental. It is a byproduct of the deference and responsiveness that are essential to our engagement with the world. We cannot form and sustain valuable personal relationships without seeing ourselves as answerable to the other participants in thos…
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6/05/22: Michael Della Rocca on Moral Criticism and the Metaphysics of Bluff
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At a climactic—and, indeed, incendiary—moment in Bernard Williams’ classic essay, “Internal and External Reasons,” Williams says that those who advance moral criticisms by appealing to so-called external reasons are engaging in “bluff”. Williams thus alleges that condemning certain actions of others as somehow not only immoral, but also irrational …
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30/05/22: Miriam Schoenfield on Deferring to Doubt
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When we doubt a belief, we examine how things look from a perspective in which that belief is set aside. Sometimes we care about what that perspective recommends and, as a result, we abandon the belief we've been doubting. Other times we don't: we recognize that a perspective in which a certain belief is set aside recommends abandoning it, but we g…
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23/05/22: Alexander Mourelatos on 'Parmenides of Elea and Xenophanes of Colophon: the Conceptually Deeper Connections'
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In the interpretation of Parmenides of Elea, there is a certain vulgate, one widely represented in general histories of philosophy and indeed assumed by philosophers broadly. The metaphysical tenor and thrust of the philosophy of Parmenides, according to this vulgate, is holistic monism: "all things are one," in Greek, hen to pan. As it may be reca…
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09/05/22: Mazviita Chirimuuta on Disjunctivism and Cartesian Idealisation
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In this paper I give answers to two apparently unrelated questions and aim to convince you that these different concerns are, in fact, intertwined. The first question is, why is dualism so tenacious? The second is, what is really at issue in the debate between Burge and McDowell? Regarding the first question, various contemporary philosophers have …
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25/04/22: Emma Borg on A Defence of Individual Rationality
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Common-sense (or folk) psychology holds that (generally) we do what we do for the reasons we have. This common-sense approach is embodied in claims like “I went to the kitchen because I wanted a drink” or “She took a coat because she thought it might rain and she hoped to stay dry”. However, the veracity of these common-sense psychological explanat…
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21/03/22: Jack Spencer on Intrinsically Desiring the Vague
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This paper is about whether it is rational to intrinsically desire the vague. A proposition is inconsequential if neither it, nor its negation is rational to intrinsically desire. The objects of intrinsic desire are propositions, and the contradictory of propositional vagueness is propositional precision. Every vague proposition is not precise, and…
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07/03/22: Dawn Wilson on Reflecting, Registering, Recording and Representing: From Light Image to Photographic Picture
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Photography is highly valued as a recording medium. Traditionally it has been claimed that photography is fundamentally a causal recording process, and that every photograph is the causal imprint of the world in front of the camera. In this paper I seek to challenge that traditional view. I claim that it is based on a ‘single-stage’ misconception o…
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21/02/22: Andrew Huddleston on Aesthetic Beautification
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Aesthetic beautification is a familiar artistic phenomenon: Even as they face death, heroes and heroines in operas still sing glorious music. Characters in Shakespearean tragedies still deliver beautifully eloquent speeches in the throes of despair. Even depicting suffering and horror, paintings can still remain a transfixing delight for the eyes. …
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31/01/22: Rachel Cristy on Commanders and Scientific Labourers: Nietzsche on the Relationship Between Philosophy and Science
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Nietzsche’s attitude toward science is ambivalent: he remarks approvingly on its rigorous methodology and adventurous spirit, but also points out its limitations and rebukes scientists for encroaching onto philosophers’ territory. What does Nietzsche think is science’s proper role and relationship with philosophy? I argue that, according to Nietzsc…
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17/01/22: Rachael Wiseman on Metaphysics by Analogy
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Metaphysicians are in the business of making and defending modal claims – claims about how things must be or cannot be. Wittgenstein’s opposition to necessity claims, along with his various negative remarks about ‘metaphysical’ uses of language, makes it seem almost a truism that Wittgenstein was opposed to metaphysics. In this paper I want to make…
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15/11/2021: Cécile Fabre on Doxastic Wrongs, Non-spurious Generalisations and Particularised Beliefs
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According to the doxastic wrongs thesis, merely entertaining certain beliefs about others can wrong them, even if one does not act on those beliefs. Beliefs based on socially salient characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc., and which turn out to be false and are negatively valenced are prime candidates for the cha…
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18/10/2021: Heather Widdows on 'No Duty To Resist: Why individual resistance is an ineffective response to dominant beauty ideals'
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Heather Widdows is the John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics and Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research and Knowledge Exchange) at the University of Birmingham. She is Deputy Chair of the Philosophy sub-panel for REF 2021 and was a member of the 2014 sub-panel. Her most recent book, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal (2018), was described by Vogue as…
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4/10/2021 – 114th PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: Robert Stern asks ‘How is human freedom compatible with the authority of the Good?’ Murdoch on moral agency, freedom, and imagination
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As the first talk for the 2021-22 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year’s Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Robert Stern (University of Sheffield) as the 114th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society’s President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy. The 114th Presi…
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28/06/2021: Julia Borcherding on “I wish my Speech were like a Loadstone” – Cavendish on Love and Self-Love
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Julia Borcherding is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Before moving to Cambridge, she was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow at New York University. Julia specializes in early modern philosophy, focusing on moral, epistemological and metaphysical themes and their intriguing interconnections. She has published on the philosophy of Leibni…
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21/06/2021: Michael Beaney on Swimming Happily in Chinese Logic
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Michael Beaney (毕明安) is Regius Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen, Professor of the History of Analytic Philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Recent books include The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy (edited, OUP, 2013) and Analytic…
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07/06/2021: Corine Besson on Knowing How to Reason Logically
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Corine Besson is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. She did her undergraduate degree in Philosophy and French Literature at the University of Geneva. She went to Oxford for her postgraduate studies, to first do a B.Phil, and then write a D.Phil. on the relation of second-order logic to the theory of meaning. Her research i…
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24/05/2021: Kenny Easwaran on a New Method for Value Aggregation
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Kenny Easwaran is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. He did his PhD in the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at UC Berkeley, and then worked at the Australian National University and the University of Southern California before moving to Texas A&M. He has done work on the foundations of probability and decision t…
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10/05/2021: Joseph Chan on Equality, Friendship, and Politics
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Joseph Chan is Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at The University of Hong Kong. He is Global Scholar and Visiting Professor at the University Center for Human Values of Princeton University in 2019-2021 spring semesters. His recent research interests span Confucian political philosophy, comparative political theory,…
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24/04/2021: Ralf Bader on Coincidence and Supervenience
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Ralf M. Bader is a professor of philosophy at the Université de Fribourg in Switzerland, where he holds the chair for ethics and political philosophy. His research focuses on ethics, meta-ethics, metaphysics, Kant, political philosophy and decision theory. He is also interested in neo-Kantian and early analytic philosophy, as well as the history of…
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22/03/2021: Helga Varden on Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil
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Helga Varden is Professor of Philosophy and Gender and Women Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of St. Andrews, and she is an executive editor of the Journal of Canadian Philosophy. Her main research interests are Kant’s…
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08/03/2021: Nicolas Cornell on Gambling on Others and Relying on Others
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Nicolas Cornell is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He works in normative ethics, contract law, and private law theory. His writing has appeared both in philosophy journals — including “The Possibility of Preemptive Forgiving” (Philosophical Review, 2017) and “Wrongs, Rights, and Third Parties” (Philosophy & Public Affairs…
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22/02/2021: Mary-Louise Gill on Aristotle’s Hylomorphism Reconceived
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Mary-Louise Gill is David Benedict Professor of Classics and Philosophy at Brown University, and works on ancient Greek philosophy, especially Plato’s later metaphysics and method and Aristotle’s natural philosophy and metaphysics. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, and previously taught at the University of Pittsburg…
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01/02/2021: Barbara Sattler on Paradoxes as Philosophical Method and their Zenonian Origins
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Barbara Sattler is professor for ancient and medieval philosophy at Bochum University, and has taught at St. Andrews, Yale, and Urbana-Champaign before. The main areas of her research are issues in metaphysics and natural philosophy in the ancient Greek world, especially in the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle. She focuses on the philosophical pr…
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18/01/2021: Lee Walters on the Linguistic Approach to Ontology
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Lee Walters is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Southampton. Prior to joining Southampton, Lee studied philosophy at UCL and taught at Oxford. Lee’s main interests are in metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and philosophical Logic, with a particular emphasis on the philosophy of fiction. Lee has been an Associate Edito…
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