DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY
COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 2009

WATSON HALL, ROOM 517 @ 4:30 p.m.

Eric Lewis (McGill University)

Title: “Did John Coltrane perform ‘My Favorite Things’ – Genre, Modality, Musical Understanding and ‘all that Jazz’”

Abstract

Standard models of musical work performance rely on a type/token distinction, where musical works lay down norms for their performance, and particular soundings are performances if they satisfy these norms. Such a model is ill-equipped, so I shall argue, to account for much jazz and improvised music practices. I will sketch the outlines of an alternative theory of work performance, where highly improvisational performances of a given musical work are seen as representations of the musical work, which seems to better capture what the relationship of, say John Coltrane’s performances of My Favorite Things to the musical work, My Favorite Things, seems to be. I will then consider whether such a representational theory can account for free improvisations, and improvisations that we might think of as being work creating. I will suggest ways this ontology of improvised performance fits into a wider philosophical consideration of jazz and other improvised musical practices.

EVERYONE WELCOME

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY
COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2009

WATSON HALL, ROOM 517 @ 4:30 p.m.

Henrik Lagerlund (Univ. of Western Ontario)

Title: “Empiricism and Skepticism about Substance in Later Medieval Philosophy”

EVERYONE WELCOME

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY
COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2009

WATSON HALL, ROOM 517 @ 4:30 p.m.

Jennifer Szende (Queen’s)

Title: “Human Rights, Global Justice, and the Cosmopolitan Temptation”

Abstract

A frequent objection to Rawls’s social contract account of global justice has come from the cosmopolitans who point to the narrow scope for human rights offered by Rawls, and contrast this with their own more extensive account of human rights. Cosmopolitans argue for a broader account of human rights, one that follows naturally from liberal commitments to domestic justice. I argue that the disagreement over the content of a doctrine of human rights is not as deep as it first appears, and that although the move from a liberal domestic theory of justice to a global cosmopolitan theory of justice is tempting, it remains problematic.

EVERYONE WELCOME

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY
COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2009

WATSON HALL, ROOM 517 @ 4:30 p.m.

Andrew Bailey (Guelph)

Title: “The Unsoundness of Arguments from Conceivability”

Abstract

It is widely suspected that arguments from conceivability, at least in some of their more notorious instances, are unsound. However, the
reasons for the failure of conceivability arguments are less well agreed upon, and it remains unclear how to distinguish between sound
and unsound instances of the form. In this paper I provide an analysis of the form of arguments from conceivability, and use this analysis to
diagnose a systematic weakness in the argument form which reveals all its instances to be, roughly, either uninformative or unsound. I
illustrate this conclusion through a consideration of David Chalmers modal argument against physicalism.

EVERYONE WELCOME

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY
COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2009

WATSON HALL, ROOM 517 @ 4:30 p.m.

Nolan Ritcey (Queen’s)

Title: “Appraisal and Reason”

Abstract

Moral appraisal is multifaceted. In assessment of an agent’s action, we are sometimes interested in the action itself; other times we are interested in the agent’s attitudes and the considerations that led her to act as she did. Both of these aspects of appraisal employ “reason” as a key concept: we are concerned with whether there is most reason to perform, or avoid, actions of a certain type, with the considerations that struck agents as important, and with the reasons agents eventually act on. I shall argue that attention to this fact about the dual nature of appraisal will serve to dissolve a debate about the existence of external reasons.

EVERYONE WELCOME

THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
AND
THE FACULTY OF LAW
PRESENT

“The Institutional Bases of Distributive Justice”

Samuel Freeman
Professor of Philosophy and Law
University of Pennsylvania

Samuel Freeman is Avalon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Freeman works in social and political philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of law. He is the author of several widely discussed papers and two major books: Justice and the Social Contract (Oxford University Press: 2006) and Rawls (Routledge: 2007). He has also edited the Cambridge Companion to Rawls (2002), as well as John Rawls’s Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2007) and his Collected Papers (1999). He is currently working on longer term projects on contractarianism, and on globalism and distributive justice.

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
4:30 p.m.
Watson Hall, Room 517

Reception to follow at the Univeristy Club

EVERYONE WELCOME

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY

COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2009

WATSON HALL, ROOM 517 @ 4:30 p.m.

Lorne Maclachlan (Queen’s)

Title: “The Traditional Theory of Perception”

Abstract

The traditional causal representative theory of perception is easy to refute, but difficult to disbelieve. In perception, we somehow or other acquire beliefs about the environment on the basis of an input fed in through the senses. The traditional theory offers an explanation of how this is done. We make inferences from sensations or impressions produced in us to the external causes responsible. This pattern of inference, however, can be used only when a system of beliefs about a causally organized external world is already in place and hence cannot be used to explain the original acquisition of such beliefs.

The other side of the story, however, is that the pattern of inference at the heart of the traditional theory is legitimate, if our common sense beliefs about the world are accepted, and concerns associated with the private language argument are laid to rest. Although its wings have been clipped, the theory in this reduced form can be used to justify or correct our original beliefs about the environment, and a plausible explanation can be offered for illusions and hallucinations. More importantly, Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities can be essentially vindicated, permitting the replacement of our common sense conception of the physical world by more scientific theories.

EVERYONE WELCOME

THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY AND
THE VISITING SCHOLAR PROGRAM
PRESENT

“Beyond Belief: Pragmatics in Hate Speech and Pornography”

Rae Langton
(MIT)

Professor Rae Langton joined MIT in the Fall of 2004. Her areas of interest include the history of philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (Oxford, 1998) and Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification (Oxford, 2009). A graduate of the University of Sydney and Princeton University, she held appointments before moving to MIT at Monash University, the Australian National University, Sheffield University, and the University of Edinburgh, where, from 1999 to 2004, she was Professor of Moral Philosophy, a position for which David Hume was turned down in 1755. She was the first woman to be appointed to a Philosophy Chair at a university in Scotland. She has been a visitor and guest speaker at universities in Australia, Canada, USA, UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Germany, India and Switzerland.

Thursday, October 8, 2009
4:30 p.m.
Watson Hall, Room 517

Reception to follow at the University Club

Everyone Welcome

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY
COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2009

WATSON HALL, ROOM 517 @ 4:30 p.m.

Susan Babbitt (Queen’s)

Title: “Secularism, Ethics, Philosophy: A Case for Epistemic Humility”

Abstract

In reaction to the murder of Theo van Gogh, philosophers in the Netherlands argue for what they call “non-religious ethics” or “autonomous ethics”(philosophynow.org/issue61/61berg.htm). While it is clear that secularism does not require atheism, it is generally assumed that secularism is, in some important sense, opposed to religion. But secularism, as it has developed in the Western world since the 19th century, has aimed for free enquiry, seeking to make reason the motor of human progress to counter the apparent rigidity, absolutism and condescending superiority of religious thought. I will suggest that the only understanding of reason that fully meets such goals is one, familiar from recent philosophy of science, involving radical contingency upon circumstances and conditions. However, when we consider what the exercise of reason so conceived means in practical terms, those examining political questions about the nature of a secular society are not well advised to turn specifically toward non-religious ethics. I make a case for the role of what I call epistemic humility in philosophical enquiry, and I suggest that it is at least as rare among non-religious ethicists as it is among religious ethicists.

EVERYONE WELCOME

“OMU EQUALITY”
A RESTORATION OF THE MISSING PARALLEL LINE OF AUTHORITY

NKIRU NZEGWU
(SUNY Binghamton)

Nkiru Nzegwu is Professor of Africana Studies and Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture at Binghamton University, New York, and the found of Africa Resource Center, Inc. (africaresource.com). She teaches aesthetics, African and African Diaspora art, modernity, feminism and African women studies, and has published numerous essays on AFrican sexuality, equality, race and gender, and contemporary AFrican and African Diaspora art. Her publications include Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture (SUNY Press, 2006), and edited anthologies The New African Diaspora (Indiana, 2009), Contemporary Textures: Multidimensionality in Nigerian Art (ISSA, 1999) and Issues in Contemporary African Art (ISSA, 1998).

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24TH, 2009

4:30 P.M.

STIRLING HALL, LECTURE THEATRE A

EVERYONE WELCOME