“On Putnam’s Account of the Precondition of Reference” by Tay Qing Lun (Apr 7)

In ‘Brains in a Vat’, Hilary Putnam argues that causal relations are a precondition of reference, and granted this point, the falsity of certain kinds of skeptical scenarios follow. I argue that his thesis is problematic, as it leads to an unacceptable conclusion: mathematical claims will end up false. Following that, I hope to show how some ways of salvaging his thesis may work, but only at the cost of his thesis’s anti-skeptical force.

Graduate Seminar Series.
Date: Tuesday, 31 Mar 2015
Time: 3 pm – 4 pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Tay Qing Lun
Moderator: Theresa Helke

About the Speaker:

TayQingLun - PhotoQing Lun is pursuing his MA in NUS, where he is currently engaged in research on modal metaphysics.

 

“Conceptions of Time in the Rhetoric of Political Legitimation” by Nomi Claire Lazar (Mar 19)

This paper draws from my book manuscript How Time Frames: Temporal Rhetoric in the Politics of Legitimation, which engages the striking correlation between calendar reform and legitimacy crises. Why, at such moments would a political leader expend resources on a seemingly technical exercise? From Kinich Yax Kuk Mo’s time monuments in Mayan Copan, to Khubilai Khan’s Yuan calendar revision, and from the Julio-Augustan reform to French revolutionary time and Stalin’s five day week, I draw on empirical cases to develop a general theory of time technologies as political tools of legitimation.

For the workshop, I focus on the theory of conceptions of the flow of time, which underlies the argument of the book as a whole. I argue that time is the sort of thing which can be made to serve political aims because, first, time can never be experienced as such and hence there is no objective, independent measure of temporal accuracy. Our only experience of time is of time shaped by technologies, found or made. We simultaneously employ a variety of technologies (conceptual and mechanical), because we have a number of distinct uses for time. Hence, we are always open to multiple conceptions of the flow of time and we continually oscillate between nature- and technology- generated marks of accuracy. Because accuracy is necessarily aim-dependent, these can never be reconciled. This makes time always ripe for reform, and hence for political use. I will conclude with a summary of those political uses time can fruitfully serve.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 19 Mar 2015
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Nomi Claire Lazar, Yale-NUS College
Moderator: Dr. Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

LazarNomi Claire Lazar is Associate Professor of Social Sciences and Acting Head of Study, PPE at Yale-NUS College. She is a political theorist at work on problems which manifest when the ‘hedges’ of political institutions don’t or can’t fix political agents in their way. This work spans the history of political thought, contemporary philosophy, and public policy. In addition to a number of scholarly articles, she is the author of States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies (Cambridge, 2009) and is completing revisions to a new book, How Time Frames. Professor Lazar holds a Ph.D in Political Science from Yale, an MA from the School of Public Policy, University College, London, and a HonBA in philosophy from Toronto, where she was the recipient of the Douglas Bond Symons Prize in philosophy. Before beginning the PhD, she worked in the Criminal Law Policy section of the Department of Justice, Canada. And before joining Yale-NUS, she served as Harper-Schmidt Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, as Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, and as Canadian Bicentennial Visiting Fellow at Yale University.

“Thought Experiments in Ethics” by Peter Kung (Oct 9)

Many compelling thought experiments have played a prominent role in the ethics literature: the transplant case, deciding on the best policies from the original position, being kidnapped and attached to a famous violinist. A wide range of thought experiments in ethics have a distinctive feature: they feature forced choices with fixed outcomes. In a typical ethics thought experiment, an agent A is faced with choice C1 and C2. If A picks C1, then O1¬ will occur. If A picks C2, then O2 will occur. The thought experiment forces the choice between C1 and C2: they are the only relevant options. To suggest another option, C3, is to violate the rules of the game. Likewise, O1¬ and O2 are the only possible outcomes. It is not merely probably that one will occur; it is definite. Suggesting that something other than O1 and O2 will occur is, again, not to play the game.

Starting with the plausible assumption that good thought experiments must be metaphysically possible, I explore whether thought experiments with forced choices and fixed outcomes are metaphysically possible. In my view, attending closely to features of imagination suggests that pessimism is warranted. I contend that the best account of our knowledge of metaphysical possibility is via imagistic imagination. I develop a key distinction between types of content in imagistic imagination, and use this distinction to analyze the metaphysical possibility of forced choices and fixed outcomes. I reach a pessimistic conclusion: we have no reason to think that forced choices and fixed outcomes are metaphysically possible.

I conclude that that any ethical view that counts outcomes as ethically relevant will have to take seriously moral risk, a result I thinks accords with common sense. In everyday ethical reasoning, choices are not forced and outcomes are not fixed. We take into account the chancy nature of our decisions: choosing C1 will likely lead to O1, but there is a chance it will lead to O1.1 or O1.2 or…. On my view, the methodology of thought experiments itself requires that we consider moral risk. This has the implication that some putatively devastating counterexamples in ethics prove to be less devastating than widely thought.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 9 Oct 2014
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Peter Kung, Pomona College
Moderator: Dr. Tang Weng Hong

About the Speaker:

PeterKungPeter Kung (Pennsylvania, B.S. in Computer Science & Engineering, Stanford, M.A. In Philosophy, NYU, Ph.D. In Philosophy) is Associate Professor of Philosophy and former Department Chair at Pomona College. He has held visiting or teaching appointments at New York University, Stanford University, Claremont Graduate University and now the National University of Singapore. Professor Kung’s research centers on two areas: the philosophy of mind, in particular the thought experiments, where is coediting a collection for Oxford University Press titled Knowledge Through Imagination; and epistemology, where he focuses on the limits of skeptical challenges and the proper treatment of probabilistic reasons. He is grateful to have the chance to explore Singapore with his wife, who is also visiting at NUS, and two young children.

“Finality Revived: Powers and Intentionality” by David Oderberg (Sep 16)

Proponents of physical intentionality argue that the classic hallmarks of intentionality highlighted by Brentano are also found in purely physical powers. Critics worry that this idea is metaphysically obscure at best, and at worst leads to panpsychism or animism. I examine the debate in detail, finding both confusion and illumination in the physical intentionalist thesis. Analysing a number of the canonical features of intentionality, I show that they all point to one overarching phenomenon of which both the mental and the physical are kinds, namely finality. This is the finality of ‘final causes’, the long-discarded idea of universal action for an end to which recent proponents of physical intentionality are in fact pointing whether or not they realise it. I explain finality in terms of the concept of specific indifference, arguing that in the case of the mental, specific indifference is realised by the process of abstraction, which has no correlate in the case of physical powers. This analysis, I conclude, reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of rational creatures such as us, as well as only partly demystifying the way in which powers work.

Philosophy Department Seminar
Date: Tuesday, 16 Sep 2014
Time: 3.30pm – 5.30pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: David Oderberg, University of Reading
Moderator: Dr. Tang Weng Hong

About the Speaker:

davidoderbergDavid S. Oderberg is Professor of Philosophy, University of Reading. His chief interest is metaphysics, but he also has a major interest in moral philosophy and has published in a number of areas, including philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and philosophical logic. His most recent book is Real Essentialism (Routledge, 2007, reprinted 2009). He is currently writing a book on the metaphysics of good and evil.

“How Predictive Brains Might Distinguish Between Appearance and Reality” by Malcolm Forster (Aug 14)

In philosophy, the problem of appearance and reality is the problem of saying why the appearance of an object to us gives us information about the way the object really is, even though the same object appears different to different people at different times.  A parallel can be drawn between that problem and a hotly debated topic in neuroscience, about which features of neural activities inside the brain (the “appearances”) carry information about the external world (the “reality”).  The problem of explicating a semantic notion of “carrying information” has also been tackled by philosophers in the past (Fred Dretske, Denny Stampe, Jerry Fodor, and more recently, Brian Skyrms, 2010, Signals).  This talk will argue that the general approach to this problem taken by neuroscientists and these philosophers is fundamentally wrong.  The argument is premised on recent work on causality known as Bayesian causal networks (e.g., Judea Pearl, 2000, 2009).  Once neural networks are re-described as Bayes nets, there is a sharp distinction between internal probabilistic dependencies that can be explained by internal causal connections and those that cannot.  Only those that cannot be explained internally carry information about the external world. The talk will end with a discussion about how this version of naturalistic semantics, Wisconsin style, bears on the philosophical problem of appearance and reality.

Philosophy Department Seminar
Date: Thursday, 14 Aug 2014
Time: 3.30pm – 5.30pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Malcolm Forster, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Moderator: Dr. Tang Weng Hong

About the Speaker:

forsterProfessor Malcolm R. Forster is Professor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin at Madison. His research has focused on issues in the methodology of science, particularly the role of simplicity and unification in confirmation and in statistics, as well as William Whewell’s methodology of science applied to planetary astronomy (the latest publication being M. Forster (2011) “The Debate between Whewell and Mill on the Nature of Scientific Induction”, in Stephan Hartmann (ed.), The Handbook of the History of Logic, Volume 10: Inductive Logic (Elsevier Science, pp. 91-113.). In 2010, he also applied Whewell’s consilience of inductions to quantum physics (“The Miraculous Consilience of Quantum Mechanics”, in Ellery Eells and James Fetzer (eds.), 2010, Probability and Science), and he is now expanding and developing an earlier project applying the method of Bayes Causal Nets to understanding various results in the foundations of quantum mechanics.

“Temporal Experiences & their Parts: the Modal argument” by Philippe Chuard (10 Apr)

According to the Lockean conception of temporal experiences (experiences of succession, duration, change, etc.), such experiences do reduce to mere successions of their temporal parts. However, as Michael Tye (2003) has suggested, there’s a familiar modal consideration undermining the identity of a whole experience of a temporally extended event with the succession of its temporal parts: the two have different modal properties (if the succession couldn’t have occurred without some of its parts, the whole could have, the argument goes) and hence, by Leibniz’s Law, cannot be identical after all. Fortunately, there’s a familiar response, suggesting that the argument equivocates the relevant modal properties (typically, the point is made via so-called “abelardian predicates”).  Still, does the response really stand up to further scrutiny? I try to argue that there’s no reason to think it doesn’t.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 10 Apr 2014
Time: 2 pm – 4 pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Philippe Chuard, Southern Methodist University
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

chuardpageNow an associate professor in philosophy at SMU (Dallas, TX), I work mostly in philosophy of perception, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, with some mild forays into epistemology and metaphysics. I obtained my PhD at the ANU, after studying in Sydney and Geneva (Switzerland) before that. I’ve published a various papers in various journals mostly on the conceptual content of perceptual experiences, and some on the nature of epistemic norms and the nature of perceptual appearances (and the non-transivitity of look-statements).

“A Relativistic Argument Against Presentism” by Jane Loo (25 Mar)

The metaphysical doctrine of presentism has long been suspected of running into trouble with the special theory of relativity, and I argue that these suspicions are well founded.

If the presentist insists on retaining the original form of presentism, which requires an absolute notion of simultaneity, the form of presentism that results, point presentism, is untenable. Alternatively, if the presentist modifies classical presentism to accommodate a relativistic conception of simultaneity, the result is ambiguous, and there are three possible variants of presentism, (1) Relativist presentism, (2) Chauvinistic presentism, and (3) Bowtie presentism, none of which are tenable as well.

Lastly, I discuss cone presentism, which avoids the problems faced by simultaneity defined classical presentism, but faces different problems that arise as a result of its altered definition of “presence”. I argue that cone presentism is also not tenable, and that there is no way to reconcile either presentism or any recognizable descendant thereof with a relativistic conception of spacetime.

Graduate Seminar Series.
Date: Tuesday, 25 Mar 2014
Time: 3 pm – 4 pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Jane Loo
Moderator: Elena Ziliotti

About the Speaker:

JANE_gradprofilepicJane’s main area of research is in the philosophy of space and time, with a focus on modern physics and its influence on traditional theories of time. Her other research interests include personal identity, and applied ethics.

“Indeterminacy and Essence” by Daniel Nolan (28 Mar)

This paper examines an argument to the conclusion that we should not adopt a “deep” theory of essences:  we should instead think that attributions of essence and essential properties are ultimately to be cashed out in other terms.  The argument examined is one that starts from the observation that some essence claims seem to be indeterminate.  We should accept that some of these claims are indeterminate; that the best explanation of this is provided by a broadly semantic theory of indeterminacy; and it will be argued that the best way of applying such an account of indeterminacy to the relevant cases results in a “shallow” theory of essence.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Friday, 28 Mar 2014
Time: 2 pm – 4 pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Daniel Nolan, Australian National University
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

NolanDaniel Nolan is Professor of Philosophy and Deputy Head of the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University.  He is the author of Topics in the Philosophy of Possible Worlds (Routledge 2002), David Lewis (Acumen 2005), and articles on topics including metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophical logic, ethics and metaethics, and philosophy of language.

“Moderately Naturalistic Metaphysics” by Tuomas Tahko (20 Feb)

The paper discusses different approaches to metaphysics and defends a specific, non-deflationary approach that nevertheless qualifies as scientifically-grounded and, consequently, as acceptable from the naturalistic viewpoint. By critically assessing some recent work on science and metaphysics, we argue that such a sophisticated form of naturalism, which preserves the autonomy of metaphysics as an a priori enterprise yet pays due attention to the indications coming from our best science, is not only workable but recommended.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 20 Feb 2014
Time: 2 pm – 4 pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Tuomas Takho, Research Fellow, Academy of Finland / Adjunct Professor, University of Helsinki
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

Tahko_smallTuomas E. Tahko is a Finnish Academy Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the University of Helsinki. He specializes in metaphysics and its methodology, is the editor of Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics (CUP, 2012), and is currently writing the Cambridge Introduction to Metametaphysics. His recent articles include “Soames’s Deflationism About Modality” (Erkenntnis 78, no. 6, 2013), “Truth-Grounding and Transitivity” (Thought 2, no. 4, 2013), and “Boring Infinite Descent” (Metaphilosophy, forthcoming). More details at www.ttahko.net.

 

“Why We Are Probably Not Living in a Computer Simulation” by Preston Greene (17 Oct)

Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument shows that if we believe that civilizations like ours tend to eventually run many simulations of their past history, then we should be nearly certain that we are currently living in such a simulation. Bostrom discusses two reasons why civilizations like ours might not tend to run simulations—neither of which is fully compelling—i) that they tend to become extinct before acquiring the required technology, and ii) that they tend to decide against simulation because they find it morally reprehensible or uninteresting. In this paper, I develop a more compelling reason to think that advanced civilizations tend not to run simulations: viz., that deciding to create simulations of the sort required by the simulation argument is irrational (on the basis of self-interest), and the inhabitants of advanced civilizations are likely to be rational. Thus, reflection on rational decision making shows us that we are probably not living in a computer simulation. Even so, I end by warning that newly-designed experimental research aimed at determining whether our universe is a simulation is more dangerous than has been realized, and the scientific community should consider discontinuing it.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 17 Oct 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Preston Greene, Nanyang Technological University
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

Preston Greene is an assistant professor in the philosophy group at Nanyang Technological University. He completed his PhD at Rutgers University before coming to NTU in August. Before graduate school he was an actor, game show host, educational software developer, and intercollegiate soccer player at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His research concerns ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of science.