CEPPA Talk

You are warmly invited to the book launch for Bradley Hillier-Smith’s brand-new book The Ethics of State Responses to Refugees (abstract below). The author will be interviewed by Kieran Oberman (LSE), after which we will all be in the opportunity to ask questions and celebrate the new book with some well-deserved drinks. All welcome! Bradley Hillier-Smith: The Ethics of ... Read more

Title: Emotion-Based Environmental Ethics: The Radical Implications of Taking Wonder Seriously Abstract: In environmental ethics, we find many competing theories of environmental value, but little discussion of the epistemological grounds for believing one theory rather than another. Building on the framework of moral empiricism (which I’ve developed elsewhere), I propose an “Emotion-Based” methodology for environmental ethics. The ... Read more

Title: The Idea of Ancestry in African Philosophy Abstract: This paper concerns itself with the rationality of belief in ancestral existence. Although belief in ancestral existence remains widespread globally, I shall focus on a-thinned out version of African forms of this belief. ‘Thinned-out’ in that I am not interested in this or that substantive version of ... Read more

Title: Philosophical Challenges in Risk Communication of Rare and Severe Events Abstract: In this talk, I will discusses different philosophical challenges in communicating and dealing with the risk of rare and severe events. As a case study, I use avalanche risk: a form of voluntary risk taking in which the individual is often partly responsible ... Read more

Please join us on for the Second edition of the Philosophy of Climate Science (PhiCliSci) working group, which will bring together philosophers and climate scientists to discuss central themes relating to the climate crisis. In the first session, climate scientist Simon Lee and philosopher Viviane Fairbank will give presentations on the topic of ‘Climate Modelling ... Read more

Title: Multiple Aims of Science and the New Demarcation Problem Abstract: TBC Location: Edgecliffe G03

Title: The Democratic Soul in Plato and Whitman Abstract: In Books II-IV of the Republic, Plato famously proposes an analogy between the constitution of the Greek city-state and the constitution of the human soul. The methodological assumption that underlies the architecture of the Republic is that philosophical questions about topics that we might today group under the heading ... Read more

Title: Hypocrisy as Evasion Abstract: Hypocrites attract moral condemnation and are widely thought to lack standing to criticise others. This paper argues against attempts to explain this that appeal to moral conditions on blaming and notions of moral authority, proposing instead an account based on a conception of moral interactions as fundamentally dialogical in character. According to ... Read more

Title: Revisiting the Spinoza Controversy in an age of Environmental Crisis Abstract: Modern scientific naturalism arguably tries to ontologically describe or account for the entirety of the natural world using necessity. Scientific naturalism presents logical causal necessity as constituting how nature "makes" things exist, and it presents necessity in the more general or abstract sense ... Read more

Title: The Incomparable Value of the Individual Abstract: Kant believed that every human being should be treated as an end in itself. In the Groundwork, Kant explains many of our duties by arguing that their violation would involve treating a human being as a mere means. But we cannot explain all of our duties that way. Nor ... Read more