Lecture Series

Philipp Haueis
Assistant Professor, Bielefeld University
“Political Goals of Scientific Concepts: The Case of “Climate Crisis””
November 7, 2022
Recent work in practice-based philosophy of science suggests that conceptual change is
justified when using a new concept achieves an epistemic goal to a higher degree. Conversely, scholars working on conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics stress that new concepts of, e.g. gender or race should contribute to the pursuit of social-political aims, such as the fight against injustice. Yet it is also clear that many natural scientific concepts are associated with political goals. The goal of using “global warming” or “climate crisis” to detect and describe anthropogenic causes of climate change, for instance, is associated with political goals of mitigation (stop burning fossil fuels) and adaptation (e.g. prevent harm caused by extreme weather events). In this talk, I ask when it is legitimate to use scientific concepts to pursue political goals in general, and which concept is best to pursue the goals of climate mitigation and adaptation in particular.

James Klagge
Professor, Virginia Tech
February 10, 2023
In my recent book, Wittgenstein’s Artillery: Philosophy as Poetry, I tell a story about how
Ludwig Wittgenstein came to care about the impact of his ideas on his students and readers, and
how he tried a “poetic” style of doing philosophy that could lead to the kind of changes he
sought. This style included aphorisms, vignettes, dialogues, similes, and parables. Although he
did not ultimately think he was successful using this style, I examine various examples of this
poetic style of writing that might serve Wittgenstein’s purposes. This is what I call
Wittgenstein’s “artillery.” In this talk, I will highlight a few of Wittgenstein’s “poems” and
consider other bits of literature that serve similar purposes. Perhaps this is an avenue that
contemporary, even analytic, philosophers should take more seriously.

Yitzhak Melamed
Professor, Johns Hopkins University
“Spinoza’s Transcendent God”
February 17, 2023

Dee Payton
Assistant Professor, University of Virginia
“Normative Metaphysics”
May 4, 2023
3:15 – 5:30 PM
Some projects in feminist metaphysics adopt a realist approach to metaphysics; others adopt a contrasting deflationist approach to metaphysics. The first step in the argument of this paper will be to highlight that both sorts of projects are ultimately driven by underlying normative commitments. So, despite their differences, realist and deflationist projects in feminist metaphysics share this in common. But how, exactly, does feminist metaphysics take its lead from these normative commitments? That question is my central concern in this paper. I will explore three ways that it might be answered: (i) that normative commitments generate epistemic constraints on feminist metaphysics; (ii) that gender terms like ‘woman’ turn out to be normative, in much the same way as terms like ‘good’ and ‘just’; and (iii) that normative commitments generate ontological constraints on feminist metaphysics, such that whatis the case is given, in large part, by what ought to be the case.

CAT PRUEITT
Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia
“How to Satisfy the Body’s Command“
February 11, 2022
Imperativism about pain understands pains as commands issued by one’s body with respect to some aspect of its own physical boundaries. I argue that current versions of pain imperativism do not fully capture the range of possible satisfaction conditions for pain’s imperative content, and so misconstrue the command itself. I work within Colin Klein’s influential homeostatic imperativism, which claims that pains are commands to protect a part of one’s body, but I argue that the content of the body’s command cannot be merely protective. Instead, the existence of cases where pain’s imperative content is satisfied by transforming the relevant bodily boundary indicates that pain is a command to create a part of one’s body, where maintaining one’s previous boundaries is not privileged over transforming one’s boundaries into something new. In this light, pain’s command is better understood as allostatic rather than homeostatic. This understanding of pain as creative opens up an alternative imperativist understanding of the distinction between pain and painfulness/hurt/suffering. The distinction between pain and suffering does not need to rely on a distinction between the physical body and the higher-order agent, as in Klein’s account. Rather, it could concern how one’s response to the command to create a part of one’s body is or is not realizable given one’s embodied world.

ANDREA PITTS
Associate Professor, UNC Charlotte
“Beth Brant, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Political Dimensions of Indigenous-Chicana Transnational Solidarities”
April 8, 2022
In this presentation, Andrea J. Pitts foregrounds the close, personal relationship between Bay of Quinte Mohawk poet and essayist Beth Brant and Chicana poet and essayist Gloria Anzaldúa. Through an analysis of a series of letters exchanged between Brant and Anzaldúa from 1982 to 1990, Pitts underscores the forms of intimacy, support, and conflict described in the letters between the two writers. Additionally, Pitts examines methods for how Latina/x feminists and other non-Native feminists of color may support Indigenous land and bodily sovereignty through an examination of the political stakes of developing transnational solidarities.

MYISHA CHERRY
Assistant Professor, UC Riverside
“On James Baldwin and Black Rage”
May 6, 2022
What I aim to elucidate in this talk is Baldwin’s moral psychology of anger in general, and black rage in particular, as seen in his nonfiction. I’ll show that Baldwin’s thinking is significant for moral psychology and is relevant to important questions at the intersection of the philosophy of emotion, race, and social philosophy. It also has a pragmatic application to the present-day anti-racist struggle. Baldwin’s theoretical account of Black rage, I’ll argue, (1) dignifies Blacks by centering them as people with agential capacities and (2) provides them with a pragmatic politics of rage that is useful in the fight against white supremacy and racial injustice.

AVNER BAZ
Associate Professor
Tufts University

NAOMI SCHEMAN
Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Women’s, & Sexuality Studies
University of Minnesota

JENNIFER FREY
Associate Professor
University of South Carolina

ANTON FORD
Associate Professor
University of Chicago

MICHAEL ROSEN
Senator Joseph S. Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government 
Harvard University

AXEL HONNETH
Columbia/Princeton Institute for Advanced Study 2018-19

LISA GUENTHER
Queens University, Canada

RACHEL MCKINNON
College of Charleston 

MANUEL VARGAS
UCSD

RICKI BLISS
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Lehigh University

MICHELE MOODY-ADAMS
Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory 
Columbia University

LISA TESSMAN
Professor of Philosophy
SUNY Binghamton 

SALLY SEDGWICK
Professor of Philosophy
University of Illinois at Chicago
Mar. 16, 2018
3:00-5:30 pm

JENNIFER WHITING
Professor of Philosophy
University of Pittsburgh

ELIZABETH BARNES
Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of Virginia

ALEX VOORHOEVE
Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method 
London School of Economics
KIE and NIH Visiting Researcher
“Why Death Is Not Bad If You’re Supremely Self-Satisfied: A Defense of One of Epicurus’ Arguments.”

CLINTON TOLLEY
Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of California San Diego

BEATRICE LONGEUNESSE
Silver Professor, Professor of Philosophy
New York University

KRISTIE DOTSON
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Michigan State University

DANIELLE MACBETH
T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy
Haverford College
“Logical Form, Mathematical Practice, and Frege’s Begriffsschrift” 

BRANDON HOGAN
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Howard University
“Hegelian Constitutivism”

ALISON PETERMAN
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
University of Rochester
“Two Questions about Embodiment”

DAVID CHARLES
Professor of Philosophy
Yale University

VANESSA WILLS
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
George Washington University
“False Consciousness”

CHESHIRE CALHOUN
Professor of Philosophy
Arizona State University
“Geographies of Meaningful Living”

DEAN MOYAR
Associate Professor of Philosophy
The Johns Hopkins University
“The Inferential Object: Hegel’s Deduction and Reduction of Consciousness”

ERIC CAMPBELL
Visiting Assistant Professor
McDonough School of Business and Department of Philosophy, Georgetown University
“How To Be a Naturalistic Relativist About Normativity”

RACHANA KAMTEKAR
Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of Arizona
“Plato on Doing What You Want”

AMIE THOMASSON
Professor of Philosophy
University of Miami
“Norms and Necessity”

TOMMIE SHELBY
Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy
Harvard University
“Punishment, Condemnation, and Social Injustice”

ROBERT PIPPIN
Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College
The University of Chicago
“The Significance of Self-Consciousness in Idealist Theories of Logic”

DAN KELLY
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Purdue University
“Responsibility from the Outside In: Shaping the Moral Ecology around Implicit Bias”

SALLY HASLANGER
Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“Social Meaning and Moral Philosophy”

MARY DOMSKI
Associate Professor of Philosophy
The University of New Mexico
“Newton’s Experimental Philosophy: Deducing Truth from the Phenomena”

TOM MULHERIN
Visiting Assistant Professor
Georgetown University
“‘Where Nature Will Speak to Them in Sacred Sounds’: Music and Transcendence in E.T.A. Hoffman”

DANIEL WEISKOPF
Associate Professor of Philosophy, Associated Faculty, Neuroscience Institute
Georgia State University
“The Human Stain: Concepts, Anthropic Kinds, and Realism”

In addition to his lecture, Dan taught a Master Class: “The Reality of Cognitive Models.”

AGNES CALLARD
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in Philosophy
University of Chicago
“The Importance of Being Ashamed”

KAREN STOHR
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar, Kennedy Institute of Ethics
Georgetown University
“Self-Deprecation”
Faculty Work-in-Progress Colloquium

CHARLOTTE WITT
Professor of Philosophy and Humanities
University of New Hampshire
“The Argument for Gender Essentialism”