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The Real Gettier Challenge by Stephen Hetherington

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‘The Real Gettier Challenge’

Abstract:
Epistemologists have long assumed that they know what main generic thesis is their explicative quarry, as they set out to understand Gettier cases more fully by reaching for one or more of the concepts of epistemic luck, intellectual virtue, defeaters, safety, sensitivity, etc. Not so, I say: epistemologists have also long been badly mistaken about this – that is , about even the generic thesis that they need to be explicating. They have taken the explicandum thesis in question to be something like ‘Any belief that is Gettiered fails to be knowledge.’ But the real epistemological explicandum lurking in these shadows is slightly different. And this slight difference matters – greatly. It implies that much contemporary epistemological thinking about knowledge has been beside the explicative point at best, when claiming to accommodate and even to illuminate what happens within Gettier cases. I have recently explained all of this (and more) in detail in Knowledge and the Gettier Problem. This talk will present part of that book’s argument.

 

Date: 8 August 2019
Time: 2pm to 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Meeting Room (AS3-05-23)

 


About the Speaker:
Stephen Hetherington is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, and (since late 2013) the Editor-in-Chief of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. His books include Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2001), Self-Knowledge (Broadview, 207), How To Know (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), Knowledge and the Gettier Problem (Cambridge University Press, 2016/2018), and What Is Epistemology? (Polity, 2019). His edited books include Epistemology Futures (Oxford University Press, 2006), What Makes a Philosopher Great? (Routledge, 2017), and The Gettier Problem (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

 

 

All are wlecome

 

Epistemic Injustice and Language by Eric McCready

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Abstract:
Epistemic injustice is recently much discussed in the philosophy literature, particularly testimonial injustice, where the credibility assigned to an agent’s speech does not conform with their actual credibility due to factors irrelevant to credibility, such as bias or stereotype. This talk focuses on the case of testimonial injustice due to gender. It provides experimental evidence for gender-based testimonial injustice on the basis of linguistic phenomena in English and Cantonese. Some strategies speakers use to address this kind of injustice are then addressed.

Date: 5 April 2018
Time: 2pm to 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Meeting Room (AS3-05-23)

About the Speaker:
Eric McCready holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Professor in the Department of English at Aoyama Gakuin University. Dr. McCready is the author of Reliability in Pragmatics (OUP) and many articles in semantics and pragmatics.

All are welcome

Call For Mentees @ Philosophy Peer Mentoring AY16-17 Sem 2

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Dear friends,

Taming abstract ideas and arguments, scouring for the sharpest and choicest of words, then impossibly fitting the cumbersome jigsaw pieces together to articulate a response: your first philosophy modules are a veritable trial by fire!

We’re a group of philosophy majors who know that pain all too well.  What we can say is that philosophical thinking and writing are learnable skills.  So we’re conducting a peer mentoring programme to help you develop these skills.  If you’re new to philosophy, you’re our target mentees!

For sure, we’re far from perfect ourselves; just sufficiently battle-scarred to have insider tips and personal experiences of failure and triumph to share.  Our professors, perhaps with too much glee, solemnly agree.  They’re supporting us in the hope that you will have a better experience in philosophy, and also, we suspect, that they can save on the red ink when marking…

The programme will come in two stages.
– Stage A: Philosophical Toolkit – a set of vocabulary and questions you can apply to most philosophical readings to help you make sense of and discuss your readings.
– Stage B: Philosophical Writing – some basic philosophy essay skills that you can apply to most writing tasks in philosophy modules.
Neither of the stages is necessary for the other.  You can join us for either one of the stages, or for both of them.

There will be two sessions of Stage A, both to be held in Week 4 (next week), at AS3-05-23 (Philosophy Resource Room):
– Tuesday (31 Jan) 6.30pm-8.30pm
– Friday (03 Feb) 6.30pm-8.30pm

Please RSVP to Stage A via this link.  If you cannot access the embedded link, you may try entering the following url: <<http://tinyurl.com/peermentoringstagea>>.  Due to space constraints, these sessions will be first come first serve, based on the time-stamp of your completed registration.  We’ll keep you posted regarding your registration via email.

If you are interested in Stage B (Philosophical Writing) instead, keep a look out for more publicity news.  We intend to hold some sessions of Stage B during the period of Week 6 till Recess Week.  If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at nusphilopeermentoring@gmail.com.

Thank you!  We are very much looking forward to this first of many student-run academic activities!

Call for Philosophy Peer Mentors – AY16-17 Sem 2

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Dear fellow philosophy majors,

Hope you’ve settled well into the semester!  We wish to invite you to join us as peer mentors in this semester’s Philosophy Peer Mentoring Programme.

As many of us know from experience, philosophy demands exacting standards from its students.  Those who are new to philosophy are often thrown off course by these demands, causing them to complete their philosophy module with an unsatisfying experience.  The Peer Mentoring Programme aims to offer peer assistance to new students by letting them know what these demands are and how to meet them.
More importantly, our major is small and has the potential to be much more close-knit.  Stereotypically, our major houses isolated individuals who take too long to get to know each other.  What better way to ameliorate this situation than to come together and help each other!  New friendships to be formed, and people to feel less alone in intellectual pursuit – let this programme be a stepping-stone towards that end.

Our professors have been extremely supportive, and FASS has recently commended our project via the FASS Student Leadership Award.  We’d like you to join us to grow our project into a sustainable and far-reaching one.

This semester, we envision our sessions in the following manner:
Stage A, where basic philosophical toolkit is introduced to first-timers.  We will run two sessions of Stage A.
Session 1 – 31 Jan 2017 (Wk 4 Tuesday) 6.30pm – 8.30pm
Session 2 – 03 Feb 2017 (Wk 4 Friday) 6.30pm – 8.30pm
Stage B, where the demands of philosophy essay-writing are introduced to first-timers.

 

We will run three sessions of Stage B.
Session 1 – 15 Feb 2017 (Wk 6 Wednesday) 6.30pm – 8.30pm
Session 2 – 21 Feb 2017 (Recess Tuesday) 11.00am – 1.00pm
Session 3 – 23 Feb 2017 (Recess Thursday) 11.00am – 1.00pm

You may choose to offer your assistance at any number of the above sessions.  Your comfort and availability will be respected.  In addition to the sessions, we will run a short 15-30 minute briefing some time this week.

Please let us know by responding to the following survey: link here.  Should you have any question about this programme, please do not hesitate to approach us at nusphilopeermentoring@gmail.com.

We hope to hear from you soon!

Stoljar’s dilemma, Hempel’s dilemma and the notion of the physical by Erick Llamas

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Stoljar’s dilemma, Hempel’s dilemma and the notion of the physical

The most common strategy to define what the physical is and, therefore, to understand what physicalism says, consists in appealing to the posits of physics. However, Hempel’s dilemma and Stoljar’s dilemma have shown the limits of this approach. In this paper I present a new strategy to define physicalism that does not appeal to the posits of physics. I will argue that the notion of physicalism defended here is immune to the worries raised by the dilemmas and that it brings some virtues of its own.

Date: 17 January 2017
Time: 10am to 12pm
Venue: Philosophy Meeting Room, AS3-05-23

About the Speaker:
Erick is a PhD candidate at the ANU working on metaphysics. His work focuses mostly on the hard problem of consciousness and identity. He is currently developing a non-reductive identity view between the mind and the body that can make sense of both physicalistic and dualistic intuitions without falling into the problems of the views.

ALL ARE WELCOME !!!

Welcome, Dr. Abelard Podgorski & Dr. Lee Wang-yen!

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NUS Philosophy warmly welcomes Dr. Podgorski (Assistant Professor) and Dr. Lee (Visiting Fellow) to Singapore and our beloved department. This semester, Dr Podgorski teaches PH2222/GEK2036 Greek Philosophy (Socrates and Plato), while Dr. Lee teaches GEK2047/GET1026 Effective Reasoning.

Here’s a short introduction for each of them:

1153393Dr. Abelard Podgorski

Dr Podgorski received his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Southern California (2016) and his B.A. in mathematics and philosophy (2009) at Michigan State University. His primary research interests are in rationality, practical reason, epistemology, metaethics, and normative ethics. His major recent research projects concern the role of idealization in normative theory and the development of a process-oriented model of rationality. His website is at http://www.abelardpodgorski.com/ .

Dr. Lee Wang-yen

WangYenLeeLee Wang Yen has a PhD in philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining NUS Department of Philosophy, he taught Logic and Critical Thinking, Philosophy of Science, Critical Thinking in Economics, and Philosophy and Methodology of Research at undergraduate and graduate levels at the Faculty of Science and Faculty of Economics and Administration, University of Malaya. He was a senior research fellow/research co-ordinator at the University of Oxford in 2013-14. He hopes to resume his monograph project on an objective Bayesian account of probabilistic inference, for which he was awarded a Templeton World Charity Foundation grant. He is interested in philosophy of science, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and ethics. His journal articles are in philosophy of science, epistemology, and philosophy of religion.

 

Call for Philosophy Peer Mentors

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Dear fellow philosophy majors,

Hope you’ve settled into Week 3. We wish to invite you to join us as peer mentors in this semester’s continuation of the philosophy essay-writing peer mentoring project!

Last semester, our project broke the inertia against student-run academic activities in our major. The need for a platform for mutual sharing and learning was heartfelt and urgent. New students of philosophy, many from outside our department/faculty, are often thrown off course by the demands of a philosophy term paper. Philosophy’s introduction module no longer demands weekly summaries, so new majors embark on higher-level modules with less writing experience. Experienced writers get stuck on tried-and-tested styles of writing without actively seeking the benefit of peer perspectives and criticism. Graduate TAs are overworked and cannot be expected to coach too many disciples.

Even more importantly, our major is small and has the potential to be much more close-knit. Stereotypically, our major houses isolated individuals who take too long to get to know each other. What better way to ameliorate this situation than to tackle (rant about) writing together! New friendships to be formed, and people to feel less alone in intellectual pursuit – let our programme be a stepping-stone towards that end.

Our professors have been extremely supportive, and FASS has recently commended our project via the FASS Student Leadership Award. We’d like you to join our collective will to grow our project into a sustainable and far-reaching one.

This semester, we envision our sessions in the following manner:
–        Stage 1a, where basic (informal) logic is introduced to first-timers: several sessions to run starting around week 5.
–        Stage 1b, where the demands of philosophy essay-writing are introduced to first-timers: several sessions to run starting around week 5.
–        Stage 2, where participants gather to share their past graded essays for mutual peer criticism, guided by mentors familiar in the particular module/topic. This will happen on a rolling basis, based on mentor availability and registration through a Google Form or similar system.

Scheduling is flexible, and mentors’ comfort and availability are our first priority. Let’s talk and get to know each other if we haven’t already, and then find a mutually favourable fit. Let us know by email if you’d like to join us, mentioning:
–        Which stage(s) of the project you are interested in (feel free to elaborate)
–        Your year of study, roughly how many philosophy modules you have taken, and at what levels
–        (For Stage 2) Which philosophical sub-domains (ethics, epistemology, etc) you are interested to facilitate peer criticism in
–        Your mobile contact details, if you’re okay sharing

Please RSVP to nusphilopeermentoring@gmail.com . Hope to hear from you by Friday 26th August!

Best,
Will Zhang, Ivan Lee, Edison Oh, Rachael Yap, Tan Si En

Screen Shot 2016-08-25 at 06.55.35Screen Shot 2016-08-25 at 06.56.30

A Word from an Alumni: What can I do with a philosophy degree?

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3eb4b70(The writer of the following is Lester Lim, who graduated with a degree in philosophy from NUS in 2010. His honors thesis revolved around the treatment of language by French deconstructionist thinker Jacques Derrida, and the Madhyamika works of Nagarjuna. He currently works as an investment associate for a UK private equity firm.)

THE MOST COMMON questions undergraduates have when considering in taking up a degree in philosophy is “What can I do with such a degree?” or “What are my career prospects, other than being an academic?” Unfortunately these are also the most practical questions that put off otherwise what would be a very rewarding four-year undergraduate period reading philosophy. It is not too far off to say that philosophy is perhaps the most misunderstood degree in the today’s world.

I stood at that path some five to six years ago at the second year of my university when I had to decide on my major. Researching on what some philosophy graduates did after obtaining a degree painted a rather bleak picture – some ended up in teaching, others in generalist positions in the civil service or private sector – nothing that I was too excited about. I was convinced however that philosophy – being such a crucial study of human thought, and thinking – was critically needed in today’s world, where an overload of information oftentimes obscures clarity of thought, and innovation is strikingly absent.

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[Philosophy Seminar @ NTU] “Cognitive Disjunctivism” by Dr. Eduardo Garcia-Ramirez (20 Mar)

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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.

[Philosophy Seminar @ NTU] “A Motor Theory of Bodily Action?” by Dr. Wong Hong Yu (19 Mar)

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On behalf of the NTU Philosophy Group, you are cordially invited to attend their philosophy seminar on Tuesday, 19 March, from 10.30am to 12pm at the HSS Meeting Room 4 (HSS-04-71), 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:

In this talk I will argue against all major accounts of action in the philosophical literature. The unifying theme will be that all extant accounts either fail to capture the intrinsic agentive character of bodily action (the standard causal accounts; Davidson and followers) or attempt to assimilate it to some form of mental action (volitionism and trying theory; Hornsby 1980, McCann 1998). I will then explore whether examining the operation of the motor system itself – something philosophers have not yet done – might give us some insight into the agentive character of bodily action. Finally, I will compare aspects of this motor theory of bodily action with theories of action which also hold that action is intrinsically agentive, but which understand this in terms of the exercise of self-conscious capacities (Thompson 2010; McDowell 2011)

About the Speaker: Hong Yu Wong is currently Group Leader of the Junior Research Group in Philosophy of Neuroscience at the Werner Reichardt Centre of Integrative Neuroscience, an excellence cluster at the Univeristy of Tubingen. His primary research interests concern the relations between perception and action, and the role of the body in structuring these relations.