Presenters:
Dr. Sarah Crawford Dry, historian of science and author of an award winning book on Madam Curie, has a contract with Oxford UP to write work entitled "The Newton Papers: The Secret History of Newton?s Private Manuscripts."

Professor Robert Iliffe, Department of History, University of Sussex
author of The Very Short Introduction to Newton (Oxford 2007) and editorial director of the online Newton Project, is completing a book entitled "High Priest of Nature: the Heretical life of Isaac Newton."

Sponsors: Political Science, Philosophy, Physics, History, and Pre/Law Club.

March 21, 2013

Axinn 229

Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture Series

Robert Schine, Department of Religion

Spinoza is variously celebrated as a precursor of the Enlightenment, a founder of the theory of the secular liberal state, and as a Biblical critic who demonstrated the impossibility of Mosaic authorship of the Five Books of Moses (the Pentateuch), and coupled his investigation of the Bible with his political theory in a caustic critique of Judaism as a theocratic system that is inimical to freedom. His place as a cultural icon for Jews has therefore always been "conflicted": although expelled from the Amsterdam Jewish community for his philosophical misdeeds, he is nonetheless a prominent Jew. Some, like David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of the State of Israel, argued for Spinoza's rehabilitation. Others, like the philosopher Hermann Cohen, denounced him as a "traitor" to his inherited religion. Professor Schine's lecture will seek to show how the positions of these two thinkers on Spinoza are paradigmatic discussions of an issue that is foundational to understanding the place of Judaism in modernity.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013, 4:30 – 6pm
Franklin Environmental Center, The Orchard-Hillcrest 103

P.D. Magnus, Philosophy Department, State University of New York at Albany

Scientists classify the particular objects that they study into categories or kinds, and then theorize about them. Some of these categories are merely convenient divisions to organize data, but others are really features of the world; the ones which are features of the world are called natural kinds. The standard account traces this distinction back to John Stuart Mill, who, in addition to his more celebrated work in political philosophy, was also an accomplished philosopher of science. In this talk, Magnus author of the recent book Scientific Enquiry and Natural Kinds: From Planets to Mallards argues that the connection to Mill is both more complicated and more interesting than the usual account.

Sponsored by the Philosophy Department and the Albert D. Mead Professorship of Biology

Friday, March 8, 2013, 4:30 – 6pm
McCardell Bicentennial Hall 104

A public lecture by Environmental Philosopher David Abram.

How has human interaction with the atmosphere been affected by slowly shifting understandings of the relation between the body and the mind? Are there unnoticed linkages between the torsions in the planetary climate and current investigations into the science and philosophy of consciousness? This lecture will address the human perception of earth?s atmosphere through the lens of indigenous cosmologies and the intellectual history of the west.

Sponsored by Environmental Studies and Environmental Affairs, the Academic Enrichment Fund, Breadloaf Schools of English, Environmental Journalism, Philosophy Department, English and American Literature Department and the Religion Department.

Thursday, February 28, 2013, 4:30 – 6pm
Franklin Environmental Center, The Orchard-Hillcrest 103

Emmanuel Levinas, who emphasizes our absolute responsibility to the Other as revealed through the visceral face-to-face encounter, Simone de Beauvoir who argues that to be responsible for oneself one must also be responsible for others, and Luce Irigaray, who focuses on the tactile intensity and exclusivity of the maternal-fetal intra-uterine connection, together offer excellent resources for understanding how responsibility is intersubjectively embodied.  Building on their respective accounts and the points of tension between them, I argue that the maternal activity of childbirth produces not only a newborn infant, but also generates a new responsibility to and for the other.  Though this new responsibility to the newborn infant (as a separately existing entity) is produced through the laboring body of the birth mother, I argue that the obligations it entails necessarily extend beyond the birth mother to encompass others who must help to secure the well-being of this vulnerable new being-in-the-world. 

Friday, October 19, 2012

Was Hume a philosopher first and foremost, who turned to writing essays and history out of disappointment with the reception of his Treatise of Human Nature? Did his reputation for atheism mean that he was unable to the life he wanted to live -- the life of a philosophy professor?

I'll argue that the answer to both questions is No. From the beginning of his career Hume was as committed to the study of politics and history as he was to philosophy. His goal was always to be an independent man of letters, and that was what he succeeded in becoming.

 Monday, October 8^th   2012     4:30 PM

Sept 29 2012

Presentation by Dr. W. P. Seeley, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Bates College, and professional sculptor. Kinesthetic empathy—the capacity to use our own bodies to model, interpret, and understand the emotions and behaviors of others in social contexts—is a form of social cognition that has been appealed to in explanations of musical expressiveness, kinetic transfer in dance, narrative understanding, and our emotional engagement with characters in movies and novels. In each of these cases, the same embodied neurophysiological proceses through which we orient ourselves to the actions, emotions, and intentions of others in social contexts are harnessed as expressive devices to communicate the content of an artwork. Artistic communication can thereby be thought of as a collaborative exchange, a collective project in which spectators and audience members reconstruct the rich expressive content of artworks from sparse formal and compositional cues. Perhaps more importantly, creative activity in the arts can be thought of as a dynamic exchange between artists and spectators. Dr. Seeley discusses the role kinesthetic empathy plays in the creative process and our engagement with artworks in a range of media. Introduced by John Spackman, Associate Professor of Philosophy, with comments by Ariele Faber '13.

In the Mahayana Buddhist tradition the cultivation of virtue depends on the practice of introspective vigilance, eventually conferring a kind of spontaneous freedom, the ability to be genuinely responsive as opposed to merely reactive.

Prof. Garfield is Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Smith College, where he teaches Buddhism, philosophy and ethics.

Wednesday, February 1^st

12:15 PM   MBH 216

Race in the Amazon: the role of the human sciences in UNESCO’s International Institute of the Hylean Amazon (IIHA), 1945-1950

Sebastián Gil-Riaño

PhD Candidate, Institute for the History and
Philosophy of Science and Technology

University of Toronto

Many scholars see the mid-twentieth century as a watershed moment when scientists denounced scientific racism. In doing so, they embraced the view that biological differences between human groups are minimal, and that human diversity can mostly be attributed to cultural differences. But is it possible that this post-war anti-racist stance bore significant continuities with the racist projects it claimed to resist? By focusing on the role of anthropologists in UNESCO's (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) initiatives in the Amazon basin from 1945 to 1950, Gil-Riańo examines some of the epistemic complexities that informed the rise of post-war anti-racism.

Thursday, January 26th

Sponsored by: Philosophy Department; Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity; Department of Sociology/Anthropology; Department of History & Department of Political Science

Larry May is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy, Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy, Professor of Law, and Professor of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee; Professorial Fellow, Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics Charles Sturt and Australian National Universities, Canberra; and Chair, Committee for the Defense of Professional Rights of Philosophers American Philosophical Association, July 1, 2011 - June 30, 2014.  He is a highly respected,  well-known international legal scholar and political philosophy professor, and one of the best contemporary Just War theorists. He has given invited  international lectures at numerous important international academic and legal  institutions like Oxford and The Hague.  Professor May’s specialty is writing on  international criminal and legal issues from a moral perspective. Since 2008,  he has written/published the following six books with Cambridge University  Press: Crimes Against Humanity,  War Crimes and Just War, Aggression and Crimes Against Peace, Genocide,  Global Justice and Due Process, and After War Ends (forthcoming). Professor  May's work is international, contemporary, moral and interdisciplinary. He  understands and can convey how international lawyers and philosophers think about the issues he addresses, as well as how persons coming to the issue for the first time or with limited knowledge are likely to approach these issues.  

12:15 p.m., Friday, 11/4

Robert A. Jones ’59 House conference room

Sponsored by the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs, Department of Philosophy, Department of Political Science, Department of Religion,
Brainerd Commons, and the Philosophy Club

Larry May is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy, Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy, Professor of Law, and Professor of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee; Professorial Fellow, Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics Charles Sturt and Australian National Universities, Canberra; and Chair, Committee for the Defense of Professional Rights of Philosophers American Philosophical Association, July 1, 2011 - June 30, 2014.  He is a highly respected,  well-known international legal scholar and political philosophy professor, and one of the best contemporary Just War theorists. He has given invited  international lectures at numerous important international academic and legal  institutions like Oxford and The Hague.  Professor May’s specialty is writing on  international criminal and legal issues from a moral perspective. Since 2008,  he has written/published the following six books with Cambridge University  Press: Crimes Against Humanity,  War Crimes and Just War, Aggression and Crimes Against Peace, Genocide,  Global Justice and Due Process, and After War Ends (forthcoming). Professor  May's work is international, contemporary, moral and interdisciplinary. He  understands and can convey how international lawyers and philosophers think about the issues he addresses, as well as how persons coming to the issue for the first time or with limited knowledge are likely to approach these issues.  

12:15 p.m., Friday, 11/4

Robert A. Jones ’59 House conference room

Sponsored by the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs, Department of Philosophy, Department of Political Science, Department of Religion,
Brainerd Commons, and the Philosophy Club

October 28, 2011
Christian A. Johnson Economics Lecture

Robert A. Jones Conference Room
4:30 PM

Daniel Garber

Stuart Professor of Philosophy

Princeton University

The period from the publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus (1543) and Newton's Principia (1687) is often referred to as the Scientific Revolution. This conception of scientific change has been formalized and generalized in Thomas Kuhn's influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I would like to explore alternative ways of thinking about radical intellectual change. In connection with this, I would like to explore what it might have been like to live through such a period of intellectual instability, and the consequences that this may have for thinking about our own age.

April 28, 2011

David O. Brink
Professor of Philosophy
University of California, San Diego

Many different interpretations have been offered of Mill's higher pleasures doctrine and its role in his conception of happiness.  Focusing on the text of Chapter II of Utilitarianism, but supplementing it with attention to On Liberty and other texts, I defend the heterodox interpretation that Mill should be read as endorsing the perfectionist claim that the chief ingredients of happiness are forms of excellence that exercise our rational capacities.  I defend this perfectionist reading against hedonistic and preference-satisfaction rivals and conclude by addressing some natural doubts about perfectionism as a conception of happiness.

April 11, 2011

Richard Eldridge '75
Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell
Professor of Philosophy
Swarthmore College

This talk elaborates the bases--personal, cultural, and ontological--of Stanley Cavell's senses of what it is to be a modern subject and to practice philosophical modernism.  A comparison of Cavell's sense of the subject with Elizabeth Bishop's suggests that Cavell and Bishop together register distinct senses of rootlessness and of possible satisfaction in modern life that might be more broadly shared.

March 10, 2011

Sarah Richardson
Assistant Professor of the History of Science,
and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Harvard University

While historians, philosophers, and social scientists have attended closely to the ways in which biological conceptions of racial differences are being reshaped in the genomic age, the emerging conception of sex differences in genomics has gone largely unnoticed.  This talk, part of a research project on the history of genetic and genomic conceptions of sex from 1900 to the present, profiles the recent dramatic rise in genomic sex difference research.  Features of this emerging research landscape include institutional support for genomic sex difference research from leaders in the Women's Health Movement, the proliferation of high-profile biomedical research platforms in which sex is a constitutive though not always explicit category of research, including autism research and epigenetics, and the imperatives of technologies for analyzing the human genome, which drive genomic research toward the production of quantitative differences between human groups, including the sexes.  Placing these developments in historical and social context, this talk seeks to frame meaningful questions and to locate points of exchange, intervention, and transformative conversation for feminist and science studies engagements with emerging genomic research on sex difference.

October 21, 2010

Dr. Carla Fehr

Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies

Iowa State University

Since the 1970's the number of women earning doctorates has tripled and the number of women professors has only increased 1.5 times. I argue that the loss of these women hurts the practice of science and engineering research. Those women who persist in science and engineering faculty positions can face a chilly climate in the universities where they work.  I argue that this is not only a problem in terms of being unfair, but that this too has a negative impact on the quality of science and engineering research being produced by our institutions of higher learning. Addressing issues of the underrepresentation of women in the academy and improving their work climate is not simply an ethical matter. It is in the self interest of individuals and institutions because it can improve the quality of their research.

April 23, 2010

Charles Taliaferro
Department of Philosophy
St. Olaf’s College, Northfield, Minnesota

Dr. Taliaferro’s talk will explore how studying animal minds can teach us something important about consciousness and computers. He will present critical objections to current materialist accounts of consciousness, and defend the merits of integrative dualism.
Dr. Taliaferro has had the honor of being invited by five St. Olaf’s graduating classes to deliver the “Last Lecture” on Commencement Weekend. Some of his recent books include: Consciousness and the Mind of God, Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, and Evidence and Faith: Philosophy and Religion Since the Seventeenth Century.
He loves contributing to books that combine philosophy and popular culture, most recently writing on the Olympics, Harry Potter, and superheroes.

April 14, 2010

Hagi Kenaan
Philosophy Department, Tel Aviv University
& Clark Art Institute at Williams College

A lecture on the ethical meaning of images following the original and
influential French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and, in particular,
his articulation of Otherness and the significance of the human face.

Sponsored by Philosophy, French, History of Art & Architecture, Winter Term Enrichment Funds and Ross Commons.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Sarah Hutton
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 
University of Aberystwyth, Wales

Sarah Hutton is a distinguished scholar who has written or edited many books and articles on early modern philosophers, especially women, as well as the history of science and the influences of Platonism. 

Anne Conway (1631-1679) and Damaris Masham (1658/9-1708) are fascinating and rare as women from the history of philosophy. Both were influenced by the Cambridge Platonists; both women engaged with the philosophy of majors figures such as Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke.

Sponsored by Philosophy, History, Religion, Women’s and Gender Studies & Ross Commons

Monday, October 19, 2009

Professor  McMahan is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University and a leading contributor to the growing field of international ethics.  His work on morality, killing, and warfare has yielded seminal books and  dozens of articles, including The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the  Margins of Life (Oxford University Press, 2002). His forthcoming  manuscript, The Morality and Law of War, has already won a prize for  the “best unpublished essay or monograph on the philosophy of war and peace”  from the American Philosophical Association.

Sponsored by the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs, 
the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of Political Science

April 21, 2009