The Portland State University Socratic Society is a venue for Philosophy faculty and philosophers from outside the University to present papers or speak on various topics of interest.
Please check periodically for upcoming events, and if you are interested in presenting or participating with the Socratic Society at PSU, please Brad Berman at bberman@pdx.edu.
Upcoming Events
Jing Iris Hu
April 14, 2025, 4:00-6:00 pm, URBN 212 Parsons Gallery
Title: When A Good Deed Evokes Shame in Others
Abstract: Many of us are familiar with a feeling of inadequacy, and even shame, that becomes apparent when standing in comparison with someone who possesses qualities we find desirable. Intriguingly, I will show that this feeling can become morally transformative when one is treated with kindness, trust, and sometimes forgiveness by the person with desirable qualities. For example, when the priest gave Jean Valjean his silver candlesticks after Valjean was caught stealing from him in Les Misérables, Valjean was gifted with undeserved trust. He is shown a higher moral standard that calls to him but also humiliates and hurts him. This experience sometimes brings shame, fear, anxiety, and pain, but it also motivates moral transformation, leading one to attempt to align themselves with the exemplar. It compels one to challenge not only their behaviors, but more importantly, moral identity and personal ideals. This phenomenon invites us to rethink our relationships with others in our moral lives and reconsider the role of seemingly negative and unfavorable emotions and experiences.
Past Events
"History Among the Human Sciences"
Bennett Gilbert, Portland State University
November 6, 2024, 4:00-6:00 pm, URBN 212 Parsons Gallery
What does history have in common with all the humanities and social sciences? Is it not essential to all these disciplines? We will look at what historical study brings to the human sciences and how it forms the basis of theory of culture that includes all these bodies of knowledge.
Bennett Gilbert is Adjunct Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy at Portland State. He is the author of Power and Compassion: On Moral Force Ethics and Historical Change, forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press in 2025.
"Normative Idealization"
Yasha Rohwer, Oregon Institute of Technology
May 21st, 2024, 4:00-6:00 pm, URBN 212 Parsons Gallery
Conservation and restoration use concepts that have both empirical and ethical content. For example, "ecosystem integrity" is thought to both empirically describe a system and to be a property that is morally valuable. However, the idea that ecosystems have integrity doesn't seem literally true. In this paper I argue that ecosystem integrity can be thought of as a scientific idealization that is useful to simplify complex systems to better theorize, gather data, and model the systems of interest. However, if ecosystem integrity is a scientific idealization, then what should we make of the normative content of the concept? I argue that ecosystem integrity can also be thought of as a normative idealization - a tool to help simplify the complexity of the moral value of ecosystems. I then list potential pitfalls of normative idealization and propose two responses.
"Against the Completability of Infinite Tasks"
Miloš Arsenijevic
June 12th, 2024 4:00-6:00 pm URBN 212 Parsons Gallery
In order to establish the possibility of performing infinitely many operations in a finite time, Grunbaum imagined a device in which, according to mathematical analysis, the state of Thompson's Lamp, which is alternatingly switched on and off, would be on as a consequence of infinitely many jabs of the button. However, Janis made a re-arrangement in which the completion of the switchings has an absurd consequence, though the two processes - as given by the two arrangements - are kinematically identical. Still, by using modal logic, I will show how - in complete accordance with standard mathematical analysis - the anti-infinitist solution should look like.
"Mengzi's Losing It"
Derek Lam, CSU-Sacramento
Tuesday, April 9th, 2024 4:00 pm URBN 212 Parsons Gallery
Mengzi states that our human nature consists of our ability to feel compassion, disdain, respect, and (dis-)approval: all human beings have them. But he also states that we lost these four emotional capacities if we don't reflect on or attend to them. There is an apparent contradiction in saying that all humans have them, but some have lost them. This essay offers a close reading of Mengzi's phrase "to lose it" that helps explain away this appearance of contradiction. In doing so, Mengzi is interpreted to be offering an ethics of attention about how we should attend to ourselves and others selectively to have a functional social life.
"From Conceptual Misalignment to Conceptual Engineering: A Case Study on Emotion from Early Chinese Philosophy"
Wenqing Zhao, Whitman College
Thursday, February 9th, 2023 4:00 pm URBN 212: Parsons Gallery
Conceptual misalignment is a pervasive phenomenon in the studies of Non-Western philosophy and the History of Philosophy (NW&HP). However, conceptual misalignment is often undetected, unsuspected, or seen as a hurdle that NW&HP materials need to overcome to contribute to contemporary discussions. Specifically, conceptual misalignment refers to the following: In the process of crystalizing NW&HP materials, a linguistic coordination of concepts is formed between the speaker, i.e., NW&HP, and its context of contemporary anglophone philosophy. However, in philosophically meaningful ways, the original NW&HP concept and its anglophone counterpart misalign. This misalignment is particularly intricate and hard to detect when it comes to concepts of emotion, as they are thought to involve phenomenal and/or intentional features. Through investigating the concept of emotion in early Chinese philosophy, this paper proposes a refocusing on conceptual misalignment as both as necessary feature and method of cross-cultural comparative and history of philosophy. Moreover, I argue that conceptual misalignments between NW&HP and its contemporary counterpart can provide meaningful resources for contemporary conceptual engineering
and amelioration projects.
"A Process Morality for Good Care"
Maurice Hamington, Portland State University
Thursday, November 17th 4:00 pm URBN 204
This presentation addresses some of the ideas in development for the manuscript, Revolutionary Care: Commitment and Ethos.
Feminist care ethics represents a significant shift from the adjudicative approaches found in the Western moral tradition and may have more in common with holistic indigenous moralities such as Ubuntu and Wâhkôhtowin. Care ethics, or better yet, care theory, is a relational way of being that might be described as an embodied process morality. As such, care is a non-ideal theory with corporeal and temporal dimensions rather than abstract rubrics of moral assessment. This process morality is supported by an "emergent normativity" that must be met with body/mind improvisational skills of care.
Given that care is a process, an open-ended heuristic of good care is offered. Accordingly, good care constitutes humble inquiry, inclusive connection, and responsive action. Care is not a binary morality (care/no care) but instead falls on a continuum of degree. This heuristic is not a boilerplate for specific actions of good care but is flexible and liminal to allow for contextually-driven manifestations.
Many people speak of the current worldwide "crisis of care." Care needs to be valued, and practices and habits of good care need to be fostered. Everyone has an embodied and intellectual understanding of care, but can it be brought to the forefront of our personal, social, and political thinking?
"Love Your Patient as Yourself: Why Medical Ethics Needs More Love, and Less Principles"
Tyler Tate, Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU)
Thursday, May 12th, 2022 4:00 pm CH 183
Within medical ethics' dominant doctrine of principlism, to act ethically toward a patient is to successfully coordinate the demands of autonomy, justice, beneficence, and nonmaleficence. Yet this legal-moral framework skews the central relationship of medical care, a relationship where the well-being of clinician and patient should be joined in the mutual project of flourishing. In place of principlism, I will draw both from personal experience as a pediatric palliative care physician, and the philosophical work of Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, and Augustine of Hippo, to describe a practical ethical approach grounded in a conception of neighbor love - specifically, the virtue of love understood as attention to a sufferer's humanity. Here, the sufferer's needs enter the sphere of the caregiver's self-concern and happiness and join them in a unique form of reciprocity and friendship. By reimagining the patient-clinician relationship as a loving relationship - with all of the complexities, conceptual baggage, and partiality that the concept "love" may entail - the stage is set for a medical ethic that contains within itself the resources to resist the fear, dehumanization, and mistrust that proliferate in many healthcare settings today.
"Is Natural Selection Creative?"
Brian McLoone, Portland State University and Fresh Pond Research Institute
Thursday, May 26th, 2022 4:00 pm SMSU 329
There are long-standing debates in evolutionary biology and philosophy about the explanatory scope of natural selection. One debate concerns the importance of selection to explain evolution, relative to non-selective factors like drift and constraints. Another debate concerns whether selection can explain why a token individual has the traits it does. Yet another debate concerns whether selection is "creative," or only filters among traits brought about by mutations and development. I'll briefly review the first two debates, then advance what I believe is the appropriate way to think about the third. I'll argue that selection is creative, for selection can counterfactually change the probability that a novel trait will appear. But we'll also see that selection's creative power is very often misunderstood, which has important implications for explanations of the origins of biological novelty.
"Charles Mills on Justice as Reparations"
Derrick Darby, Rutgers University
Thursday, March 10th, 2022 4:00 pm SMSU 338 Vanport Room
"Arrogance Under Oppression"
E.M. Hernandez, University of California, Irvine
Thursday, April 7th, 2022 4:00 pm SMSU 294
There is a curious phenomenon where people who experience certain forms of marginalization are often taken to be arrogant when they show no signs of superiority. While philosophers have given insightful accounts of the moral psychology of arrogance, none of these views helps us understand what is going wrong in the misattributions to these affectively marginalized people. This talk aims to give a thorough exploration of arrogance under oppression, presenting a different way of understanding the moral psychology of arrogance that will make it clear what is going wrong when someone misattributes arrogance to the affectively marginalized and examine how arrogance may not always be morally vicious when taken up by said marginalized people. I argue that arrogance is a kind of self-preoccupation that involves projecting one's values, goals, and concerns onto others as if they were objective values, goals, and concerns. When the affectively marginalized communicate their self-respect through things like protest, people mistake that self-respect and self-preoccupation given how the affectively marginalized are constructed. Furthermore, given how affective marginalization not only inhibits how the marginalized are understood by others, but inhibits their own affective lives, taking up an arrogant attitude is not always morally vicious, but can be a beautiful form of political resistance.
"Genetics, Well-Being, and the 'Improvers' of Humanity"
Bryan Cwik, Portland State University
Thursday, December 2nd, 2021 4:00 pm CH 401
Over the past several decades many philosophers have become increasingly comfortable with the idea that there are biological properties that are more conducive to well-being than others; that these properties have (or at least, are likely to have) a significant genetic component or basis; and that this generates duties that constrain a variety of actions that impact future people. These ideas underlie a number of positions in contemporary philosophy (such as (so called) liberal eugenics and arguments for biomedical enhancement). In this paper, I criticize these views. I argue that they face both epistemic and moral challenges. Epistemically, they trade on an ambiguity between making prospective and retrospective judgments about the connection between biological properties and well-being. While it is possible, retrospectively, to draw connections between possession of some biological properties and well-being at some stage of an individual's life, making these judgments prospectively, about future individuals or children, faces serious evidential difficulties in all but a restricted class of cases. This poses a serious challenge for claims that actions that aim to improve the chances of well-being of future people by affecting their biological makeup can be justified in terms of any supposed connection between biological properties and opportunities for well-being.
"Recording Injustices Genetically? The Case of the Human Microbiome"
Nicolae Morar, University of Oregon
Wednesday, April 21st, 12:00 pm
This is the century of the gene, as Evelyn Fox Keller has noted (2002). So, it comes with no surprise that gene editing has occupied the news and has sparked some of the most significant bioethical debates of our time. Among the most significant of ethical concerns are the social impacts of widely-adopted genetic technologies. In this presentation, I intend to highlight how experiences of marginalization truly 'edit' parts of our biology and how social conditions literally 'get under our skin'.
"More-than-Human Subjectivities"
Stephanie Erev, Political Science, PSU
Wednesday, May 12th, 12:00 pm
Widely construed as the basis for moral considerability and political agency, subjectivity tends often to be understood as an exclusively-human and self-contained form of being. Yet growing evidence from the life sciences suggests that nonhumans or multiple sorts help to compose the subjective experiences and propensities of human beings. From gut microbial metabolites which operate like pharmacological mood-altering drugs to parasites lurking in your cat's litter box which can augment you appetite for risk, it now appears that many of our "personal" experiences actually include the presence - and express the influence - of diverse nonhuman others. Drawing from Friedrich Nietzsche's theory of the subject as a multiplicity, the essay thematizes these recent findings and proposes a concept of "more-than-human-subjectivities." Reading Nietzsche together with contemporary life-scientific research in such areas as photo-biology, chrono-biology, and studies of the gut-brain axis, the essay concludes with a preliminary discussion of how political agency might be rethought in more-than-human terms.
"Guardian angels, desert and the granting of citizenship"
Patti Tamara Lenard, University of Ottawa
Thursday, May 27th, 12:00 pm
In August 2020, Quebec's Premier referred to asylum seekers laboring in long-term-care homes, largely as personal care workers, as the province's "guardian angels." He proposed to recognize their heroism by granting them citizenship; for their dangerous work, in a time of national crisis, they deserved to be Canadian citizens. This desert-claim felt particularly strong in the midst of a global pandemic that has attacked the most vulnerable in our communities. But, the idea that immigrant ought to demonstrate that they deserve citizenship is common in the naturalization literature. In this paper (which is a chapter in a book I am writing, titled Democracy and Exclusion), I examine the way that "desert" is used to bestow (or to refuse to bestow) citizenship to many categories of individuals whose claims for admission and membership are considered in relation to the benefits they deliver to their host states. These categories include: temporary labor migrants, non-citizen military personnel and, as in the case above, asylum seekers hoping for permanent protection. Ultimately, I argue that the emphasis on desert encourages the exploitation of many highly vulnerable individuals in problematic ways. I argue furthermore that notions of desert must be excised from the determination of who is, and ought to be, entitled to citizenship status.
GRADUATE SCHOOL PANEL
Professors Berman, Coventry, Cwik, Hiller, and Sager
Tuesday, February 23rd 7pm PST
The Department of Philosophy is hosting its annual Graduate School Panel on Tuesday, February 23rd at 7 pm PST. It features five faculty members and is intended to answer students' questions regarding Graduate School in Philosophy (whether it's right for you, how to prepare, how to apply, how to succeed, etc.). Everyone is welcome!
"Better, Braver, and Less Idle: Faith and Inquiry in Plato's Meno"
Nicholas Baima, Florida Atlantic University
Wednesday, January 27th 4:00 pm PST Online
A commonly held view about Plato's Socrates is that he maintains that we ought not form beliefs without sufficient evidence or reason - if we are uncertain of something, we should withhold judgment and pursue the issue impartially. Tyler Paytas and I refer to this claim as the Epistemic Caution Claim. In this talk, I aim the show that Plato's Socrates doesn't adhere to the Epistemic Caution Claim in the Meno. I argue that Socrates' solution to Meno's paradox involves an appeal to faith and its relation to virtue. Although humans lack objective grounds for confidence in the possibility of knowledge, we exhibit excellence in the form of intellectual courage by proceeding on the assumption that knowledge is possible. This in turn allows us to engage in the virtuous activity of rational inquiry. If this is right, then there is reason to doubt the Epistemic Caution Claim since the entire enterprise of rational inquiry is rendered possible only through the willingness to take a leap in the dark.
This talk is related to his forthcoming book Plato's Pragmatism: Rethinking the Relationship between Ethics and Epistemology.
"Disability: A Humanistic-Pluralistic Model"
Avram Hiller, Portland State University
Thursday, November 12th 4:00 pm Online
Many of us are, or at some point will become, disabled, either temporarily or permanently. Most of us know or love someone who is or will be disabled. Disability, as many scholars have emphasized, is part of the human condition. But moreover, the kinds of character traits that persons with disabilities bring to bear in dealing with disabilities are the same human character traits employed by all humans who face significant challenges. And the kinds of attitudes people have towards those with disabilities are similar to the attitudes people have towards other disadvantaged groups. Disability is not just part of the human condition; the human condition is how we deal with disability. In light of this, and in light of the vast diversity of both how people are and the ways and places in which people live, disability must be viewed pluralistically. In this paper, I argue that existing models of disability are inadequate because they pay insufficient attention to the ways in which disability, as a human phenomenon, is also a pluralistic one, in both the meaning of the term "disability" and in its lived experience.
"Competing Claims and the Abuse of the Separateness of Persons"
Jamie Hardy, Portland State University
Thursday, January 23rd, 2020 12:30pm FAB 170-05
A common objection to utilitarianism is that it violates the separateness of persons. The separateness of persons is a normative doctrine that holds that individuals are distinct from each other and ought to be treated as distinct persons. The problem is that the canonical works offer little explanation of the objection. Decades later, there are still only a handful of attempts that explain the separateness of persons with each offering different interpretations. Yet, instead of working through these difficult issues, recent work has attempted to apply the objection to other moral theories.
As an example of how the doctrine of separateness of persons is abused in philosophical debates and why more theoretical work needs to be done on the separateness of persons, I turn to the debate between Competing Claims and the Priority View. In making the case, I argue for three points. First, that the actual argument against the priority view relies on intuitions about the worse off that has no connection to the separateness of persons. Second, that the competing claims view is derivative of Thomas Nagel's pairwise comparison view. However, Nagel's justification for pairwise comparisons is based on an interpretation of equality and not the separateness of persons. Third, I conclude by arguing that the correct interpretation of the separateness of persons demonstrates that the competing claims view and egalitarian views violate the separateness of persons.
"Status Quo Bias, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Eating"
Mylan Engel, Northern Illinois University
Thursday, October 24th, 2019 4:30 p.m. URBN 212G Parsons Gallery
Status quo bias - an irrational cognitive bias in favor of the status quo - often leads us to make suboptimal decisions and to engage in suboptimal behaviors. After highlighting evidence of the prevalent role that status quo bias plays in many of our ordinary decisions, I illustrate how the principal causes of status quo bias often lead us to make unauthentic, suboptimal food choices. I conclude by offering a method for overcoming status quo bias that can help us autonomously align our dietary practices with our fundamental values so as to live more authentic and more ethical lives.
"Inquiry as Epistemic Improvement"
Avery Archer, George Washington University
Monday, October 28th, 2019 4:00 p.m. URBN 212G Parsons Gallery
The goal of my colloquium talk is to add my voice to the recently growing chorus of philosophers who have sought to clarify the nature and purpose of inquiry. To this end, I defend the thesis that one is inquiring into some matter just in case one engages in information gathering or analysis with the aim of improving one's epistemic standing with respect to that matter. Call this the epistemic-improvement view. The epistemic-improvement view is at odds with the widely discussed view of Jane Friedman, who conceives of inquiry as aimed at arriving at a settled position on some matter. Call this the settledness view. My talk will lay out some of the major points of disagreement between the epistemic-improvement view and the settledness view and explain why the former is preferable to the latter.
"Berkeley, Reid, and Perceptual Learning"
Rebecca Copenhaver, Lewis & Clark College
Thursday, November 14th, 2019 4:00 p.m. SMSU 294
Berkeley and Reid treat perception as a developmental ability by which typical humans acquire greater perceptual sensitivity to a greater range of features through repeated interaction with the environment. According to Berkeley, although humans are born without the ability to see distance, size, shape and other spatial features, humans learn to perceive these features by sight. Through practice, visible features such as light and color acquire spatial significance – a long term change in perception by which typical humans see visible spatial features originally unavailable to sight. Reid expanded Berkeley’s theory beyond vision to all of the sense modalities, and to features not originally presented to any sense: kind features such as ‘being a tomato’ as well as evaluative features, such as ‘being beautiful’, or ‘being cruel’. Reid calls these “additional perceptive powers” acquired perceptions.
Philosophers have assimilated the kinds of long-term changes in perception that Berkeley and Reid describe to changes in judgment or belief, on the one hand, or to changes in the contents of perception that are the result of cognitive permeation (also known as cognitive penetration). By contrast, I argue that the changes Berkeley and Reid describe are best seen as cases of perceptual learning: they are long-lasting changes in perception that result from practice and experience with features in the organism’s environment.
"The Most Peculiar Virtue/Vice of Being Apolitical"
Matthew Robert Adams (McCoy Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University)
Friday, May 24th, 2019 4:30 p.m. URBN 212G Parsons Gallery
I begin by disaggregating different reasons why people can be apolitical. I then set out a framework for evaluating the various respects in which being apolitical can be virtuous, vicious, and blameworthy. Against the backdrop of this framework I explore a number of questions, such as how the virtue of being apolitical correlates with increasing injustice in a society.
"Reputation as Demotic Power in Plato's Republic"
Monday, March 11th, 2019 4:30-6:30 p.m. URBN 212 Parson's Gallery
The customary view of the regime of Plato's Republic is that power is exclusively located in the philosophers who are in a hierarchical relationship with the other Kallipoleans. I challenge this view by attending to the positional good of reputation which the many (hoi polloi) attribute. Through a discussion of the institutional and extra-institutional features of Kallipolis, such as the honors which the philosophers pursue and the founding myth which its citizens believe, I show how the philosopher-rules care about the reputation of philosophy and that Kallipolis is a regime where the non-philosophic many truly value philosophy.
"Borders: Representation and Reality"
Border Panel featuring Elena Aviles (PSU, Chicano/Latino Studies), Nica Aquino (artist), Craig Epplin (PSU, World Languages, Spanish), Hector H Hernandez (artist), and Angela Coventry [chair] (PSU, Philosophy)
February 13th, 2019, 5:00pm, AB 200 (School of Art & Design)
In his seminal essay, "What is a Border?" Etienne Balibar write of the "heterogeneity and ubiquity of borders" and observes that "borders are everywhere". Though people often conflate borders with official political borders, borders are also social, cultural, economic, and psychological. Border walls and barbed wire fences gouge landscapes. Borders are etched in law books and embodied by state officials charged with coercing, confining, and deporting transgressors. Languages and dialects nourish communities, but also exclude people without linguistic knowledge or access to interpretation. Borders are mobile, etched on bodies, accompanying people as they traverse space. Furthermore, they are polysemic so that their effects and even their visibility vary depending on people's individual characteristics and social belongings. As a result, borders immobilize some and facilitate the mobility of others, perpetrating structural inequalities.
Though borders structure the fabric of the social world, their nature is mysterious and opaque. Borders are not static. Indeed, borders in significant ways are the efforts to maintain and contest them - if people do not recognize and legitimize them, they cease to exist. In many respects, it is more sppropriate to speak of bordering rather than borders.
The heterogeneity, complexity, and peculiarity of borders call for multidisciplinary efforts to explore the ontological, socio-political, and cultural dimensions of borders. In this spirit, we invite artists and theorists across disciplines and media to present and exhibit in our gallery/symposium Borders: Representation and Reality.
"Why There are So Few Diverse Voices in Philosophy: A Psychodynamic Systems Account, with Recommendations" by Alyssa Luboff (PSU)
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2019 4.00-6.00 p.m. SMSU 294
Philosophy, more than any other branch of the humanities, is dominated by white men. Yet the solution to its diversity problem may be as old as the discipline itself: embracing the ancient practice of philosophy as dialogue. In contemporary academic settings, philosophy is most often practiced as the analysis of arguments. The problem with this narrower conception of philosophy is the aggressiveness of the methods it tends to employ; participants must defend their arguments as if in a duel. While psychologists and neuroscientists have described the "fight-flight-freeze" response that such stressful situations elicit, philosophers have yet to recognize the social and political significance of this response, or of trauma in general. Whether we fight like predators or freeze/flee like prey in response to a social threat depends on our experience of power. Our experience of power, in turn, depends on our personal histories and our social locations. While a philosophical duel may encourage those with a positive experience of social power to argue well, or "fight", it primes those with a negative history of social power to "freeze" or "flee", leaving the conversation in a re-enactment of their past experiences of marginalization. In this way, the aggressiveness of philosophical argument reinforces the power divisions of systemic oppression, creating a discipline that mirrors our current social hierarchies, instead of one that is able to carefully discern and profoundly transform them. By cultivating instead the calm curiosity and respectful exploration of dialogue, philosophy may not only solve its diversity problem, but find that inclusiveness brings it closer to its ideals of truth, freedom, and an ever-expanding perspective.
Alyssa Luboff earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2014 and is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor of University Studies at Portland State University. Her book, Facing Relativism, is forthcoming with Synthese Library (Springer) Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science Series.
"Affirming Racial Equality: Justice, Acknowledgement, and Collective Memory" by Andrew Valls (OSU, Political Science)
Thursday April 19th, 4:30 pm, Meyer Memorial Trust Boardroom (URBN 710)
Much philosophical work has been done on how to address the material harms of historic injustice. There has been a lively debate, for example, on whether slavery and Jim Crow provide a basis for black reparations. Less philosophical attention has been given to the nonmaterial harms of historic injustice, such as the denial of moral and civic equality. In this paper I argue that justice requires that the state acknowledge the harms of the past and reaffirm the equal citizenship and equal moral worth of all citizens. It must reject the racist practices and norms of the past and the symbolic and cultural expressions associated with them. It must memorialize the past so as to convey the appropriate interpretations and evaluations. I explore these requirements of justice by considering the role of truth commissions, apologies, museums, memorials, among other means of affirming the values of a liberal society in the wake of historic injustice. I also consider symbols that express resistance to racial equality and that reflect nostalgia for de jure racial hierarchy.
"The science of number in Plato's Parmenides" by Sophia Stone (Lynn University, Philosophy)
Thursday May 17th, 7:00 pm, location TBD
The deductions in the Second Part of Plato's Parmenides are puzzling. The traditional view is that Socrates is correcting Plato's theory of Forms from the First Part of the dialogue, and the First Part represents Plato's developmental "middle period". Another view is that he is just being playful and that these deductions in the Second Part aren't serious. Perhaps there is a third way of thinking about the deductions. Perhaps we should think about them as preparing us for a study in number? When we analyze the propositions in the Second Part with respect to the problems and proofs that the mathematicians were concerned with about number in ancient Greece that Plato would have known, the deductions seem to prepare one for the study of mathematics.
Perhaps contrary to the tradition, the Second Part is not meant to correct Plato's mistakes in the theory of Forms from the First Part. The properties of number, equality, oddness and evenness, commensurability and incommensurability, seem to be treated in the same manner as they were in Plato's Phaedo. Perhaps it is our understanding of Plato's theory of Forms that needs to be revised, not the theory itself, and perhaps the deductions in the Parmenides are exercises for thinking about mathematics, not Forms, and that once we've understood the deductions, we then are prepared to read correctly Plato's theory of Forms.
If it is true that Plato thought the philosopher needed instruction in mathematics before studying his theory of Forms, then we might first try to understand how Plato thought about and used number before we think about Forms. This paper would be the beginning then, of such a project.
What is Philosophy?
Panel featuring Ken Brashier (Reed College, Religion), Monica Mueller (PSU, Philosophy), and Alex Santana (University of Portland, Philosophy)
Friday, February 9th, 7:00 pm, Cramer Hall 269
The discussion will consider the nature of philosophy with an eye toward diverse philosophical traditions, including Aztec Philosophy, Chinese Philosophy, as well as the Western Tradition. The panel is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
Check out the audio recording of the What is Philosophy? event by clicking the link!
"Care as an Improvisational Ethic" by Maurice Hamington (PSU, University Studies and Philosophy)
January 18th, 2018 4:00pm URBN 212G
This presentation addresses the nature of care ethics, arguing that care is embodied and performative with implications for epistemology, ontology, and moral theory. Drawing from performance philosophy and phenomenology, the improvisational character of care is emphasized in contrast to the a priori and abstract approaches valorized in mainstream moral thinking. The seemingly contradictory notion of "emergent normativity" is discussed in light of the responsive and contextual quality of care. Given this improvisational approach, the question of whether one can "rehearse" for care is discussed. Dramatic improvisation is the guiding metaphor for the presentation in seeking a moral method of care.
"Empiricism in the Philosophy and Physics of Time" by Matias Slavov (UCLA, Post-doc)
November 17th, 2017 3:00pm SMSU 026
Is time an empirical concept? More specifically, what is th relation of temporal notions denoting temporal order, like simultaneity and succession, to observations? I tackle this issue by examining the argument for the relativity of simultaneity in special relativity from a historical-philosophical viewpoint. Does it render the concept of time empirical? If so, this favors empiricist argument over absolutist and transcendental arguments. Nevertheless, I also consider the trouble of radical concept empiricism. I show that it entails a problematic position. It is in tension with a key ontological requirement of special relativity, to wit, the reality of physical events. Therefore a moderate, realism-compatible empiricism is propounded as an explanation for time's concept.
"Emerging Technologies and a Sustainable Future": a panel featuring Bryan Cwik (PSU, Philosophy), Theresa McCormick (PSU, Chemistry), Julius McGee (PSU, Sociology), and Brianne Suldovsky (PSU, Communication)
October 26th, 2017 4:00pm SMSU 296
Technologies that are "just around the corner" have the potential to dramatically remake our world, changing everything from how people work (or whether they work), what they eat, how we relate to each other, and even how long we can expect to live - or so we are told. When it comes to emerging technologies, it is often hard to tell the hype from the reality, the science fiction from the real possibilities. What developments in fields such as bio-technology, nano-technology, artificial intelligence, environmental engineering, and energy really will have the biggest impacts on the future of our world? What do we need to do to ensure that these developments contribute to a sustainable future?