Fredag den 25. januar skal Sivert T. Ellingsen, Master i filosofi fra IFIKK (UiO), holde vårsemesterets første Filosofisk fredagsseminar. Seminaret vil bestå av et foredrag på omtrent en time, etterfulgt av en pause på et kvarter, og avsluttes med en spørsmålsrunde på 30 minutter.

Abstract:

There is a widespread intuition that in some sense, all human beings share the same basic — and unusually strong — moral rights simply in virtue of being human. Among other things, this intuition seems to be the basis for much of our current concern and preoccupation with human rights. Philosophers, however, often discount it, accusing it of having its roots in irrational biases like speciesism — our purportedly unresonable privileging of our own species over other species. And indeed, it has proven difficult to identify any properties that could plausibly ground such a strong form of human moral equality. Assuming that mere membership in the human species has no intrinsic moral relevance, what sort of morally relevant difference could it make? What sort of «rightsmaking» property could be had, and had to the same degree, by all human beings? Recently, however, S. Matthew Liao has suggested that what he calls the genetic basis for moral agency (which, he argues, is plausibly had by all human organisms) is a strong candidate for such a «rightsmaking» property. Notably, Liao gives no positive arguments for this view, and questions whether such arguments are even possible or necessary. In this talk, I explain, defend, and develop Liao’s genetic account of rightholding. I also break with it in places, most notably by sketching out a positive argument for it.

Tid: 25. januar 2019, kl. 18.15-20
Sted: Seminarrom 219, Georg Morgenstiernes hus
Tittel: «The Genetic Account of Rightholding»
Foredagsholder: Sivert T. Ellingsen, Master i filosofi fra IFIKK (UiO)

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-Bilde: Pallas and the Centaur, Botticelli (1482)-

Fredag den 9. november skal Kim Phillips Pedersen, doktorgradskandidat i filosofi ved IFIKK (UiO), holde høstsemesterets femte og siste Filosofisk fredagsseminar. Seminaret vil bestå av et foredrag på omtrent en time, etterfulgt av en pause på et kvarter, og avsluttes med en spørsmålsrunde på 30 minutter.

Sammendrag:
Hearing utterances in a familiar language typically provides us with knowledge of what was said by the speaker in making those utterances. For example, hearing your friend utter the sentence, «Hedgehogs have about five thousand spines,» you straight away come to know that she said that hedgehogs have about five thousand spines. How does one come to know what was said in cases like this? Given the phenomenological immediacy with which the knowledge is formed – one seems to just hear the speaker as saying such-and-such – one might think that the knowledge is immediate, not dependent on further knowledge. Many philosophers are committed to this claim. In this talk I will argue that the knowledge is not immediate: knowledge of what is said in ordinary cases depends on further pieces of knowledge – specifically, knowledge of word meanings. I’ll show that knowing what words mean plays an epistemic role, not just a causal one.

Tid: 9. november 2018, kl. 18.15-20
Sted: Seminarrom 219, Georg Morgenstiernes hus
Tittel: Knowing What Was Said
Foredagsholder: Kim Phillips Pedersen, doktorgradskandidat i filosofi og medlem av ConceptLab ved IFIKK (UiO)

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-—Bilde: Melancolia I, Albrecht Dürer (1514)—-

Fredag den 19. oktober skal Joost Vecht, doktorgradskandidat i filosofi ved IFIKK (UiO), holde høstsemesterets fjerde Filosofisk fredagsseminar. Seminaret vil bestå av et foredrag på omtrent en time, etterfulgt av en pause på et kvarter, og avsluttes med en spørsmålsrunde på 30 minutter. Foredraget vil bli holdt på engelsk.

Sammendrag:
We regularly make claims that people partially master something. For example, we can say that a student of mathematics has some idea of what a derivative is, but doesn’t fully «get it» yet; or claim that a researcher was «on to something» without quite knowing what it was yet.

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–Bilde: A Modern Olympia, P. Cézanne (1874)–

Fredag den 5. oktober skal Dag August Schmedling Dramer, Master i filosofi fra IFIKK (UiO), holde høstsemesterets tredje Filosofisk fredagsseminar. Seminaret vil bestå av et foredrag på omtrent en time, etterfulgt av en pause på et kvarter, og avsluttes med en spørsmålsrunde på 30 minutter.

Sammendrag:
My cat and I find ourselves in the kitchen. We are both endowed with excellent visual systems, eyes, that is, allowing us to take in the world in all its multifarious splendor. We perceive the table, the chairs, and the food, my cat and I, and as such, we can be said to perceive the same right? Not so fast, for if perception for us humans is dependent on culture, rationality, or both, then it seems that my cat and I cannot even be said to inhabit the experiential world in the same way, or rather, I as a encultured and rational being inhabit a world, whereas my cat simply respond to an environment. So is the experiential gulf long held to be unbridgeable by Western philosophers, still a thing even in todays exceptional findings in animal cognition studies? Join this Filosofisk fredagsseminar for an epic tour down perception lane, where the end goal of the journey is to find out whether we are warranted in talking about animals and humans as residing in different experiential spaces or not. What can it even mean to say that animals and humans inhabit the world differently? Where does the natural environment end and the cultural world begin? The talk will evolve around the thinkers of my Master Thesis, McDowell, Dreyfus, Gibson and McIntyre

Tid: 5. oktober 2018, kl. 18.15-20
Sted: Seminarrom 219, Georg Morgenstiernes hus
Tittel: The Spaces of Human and Animal Perception
Foredagsholder: Dag August Schmedling Dramer, Master i filosofi fra IFIKK (UiO)

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