History of Philosophy Group
Spring 2024
Melissa Lane (Princeton), Wednesday 4/24/2024 in LBB 155, 3:30 PM
History of Philosophy Group Workshop: 'To Know is to Act; to Act is to Know': Plato’s Republic on how to educate true rulers
Jessica Gelber (Toronto), 2/20/2024
Department talk "Aristotle on interspecies relations" (2/16/2024), plus a class presentation on "Teleology and Understanding"
Rusty Jones (Oklahoma), (3/19/2024)
Department talk "Thrasymachus' Conception of Justice" (3/18/2024), and a Workshop talk on "Xenophon’s Socrates on Teaching and Learning"
Fall 2023
Emily Austin (Wake Forest), 10/27/2023
Colloquium talk "Laughing at Tyrants: Plato on What Makes Vice Amusing", plus a Workshop talk "Hellenistic Philosophy and Modern Sensibilities"
Saturday 10/28/2023 in HUMN 345 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Emily Austin (Wake Forest)
"Epicurus and Social Justice"
Friday 11/10/2023 in HUMN 335 3:20 PM - 5:20 PM
Travis Rebello (ֱ Boulder)
"The Problem of the Socratic Elenchus in Plato's Gorgias"
In Gorgias, Plato treats Socrates’ question-and-answer method of inquiry as, at once, a method of testing persons and a method of testing propositions. Here, as I will try to show, Plato is trying to have his cake and eat it too.
Spring 2023
Thursday 3/23/2023 in UMC 245
Monte Ransome Johnson (UC San Diego)
"Intimations of Autonomy in Plato, Democritus, and Aristotle"
Sponsered by the Center for the Study of Origins and the Benson Center.
Friday 3/24/2023 in UMC 382
Monte Ransome Johnson
Workshop on the Anonymus Iamblichi.
Sponsered by the Center for the Study of Origins and the Benson Center.
Fall 2022
Friday 10/28/2022 12:15-1:15pm in HLMS 269
Domenica Romagni (ֱ State)
"Descartes and the Hard Problem of Consonance: The Influence of Music on Descartes' Mature Views on Perception"
Descartes is well-known for his mechanistic picture of sensory perception. However, he is less renowned for his views on music theory, despite the fact that some of his earliest work was dedicated to the subject. In this talk, I will outline the evolution of Descartes' views on music and auditory perception, beginning with his Compendium Musicae, and argue that this was instrumental in the development of his mature views on sensory perception, broadly speaking.
Friday 11/4/2022, 12:15-1:15pm, Hellems 269 and via Zoom
Prof. Eirik Lang Harris (ֱ State University)
"The Han Feizi on Politically Relevant Merit"
EirikLangHarris@gmail.com
The most prominent advocacy of political meritocracy in recent years has come from those who see themselves inspired by the Confucian philosophical tradition. Unfortunately, they often ignore competing Chinese visions of political meritocracy and direct challenges to the Confucian vision from within the Chinese tradition.
The Confucian conception of political merit is intertwined to its conception of morality and as such virtue is seen as an essential component. To defend such a position and its applicability, they need to show both that inculcation of virtue is possible and that these virtues are politically relevant. One prominent historic critic of Confucianism, Han Feizi, worries about both claims. While agreeing that political merit matters and that ministers and bureaucrats should be chosen on the basis of their merit, he has a vastly different conception of what constitutes politically relevant merit, one that is both is both task specific and amoral in nature.
What Confucians fail to grasp, argues the Han Feizi, is that what leads to virtue is non-identical to what leads to a well-ordered, flourishing state. At times, a choice must be made between following morality and securing the state. Insofar as Confucianism requires moral virtue as a core component of merit, it not only misidentifies what constitutes politically relevant merit, it focuses on and characterizes as meritorious traits that are actually detrimental to a well-ordered and flourishing state
Friday 11/11/2022 3:15-5pm Dawn Jacob
Friday 11/18/2022 3:15pm, HLMS 269
Naomi Reshotko, Professor of Philosophy at DU
"Recollection (anamnesis) and Opinion (doxa) of Plato’s Forms"
The talk will include an overview of her book, Opining Beauty Itself: The Ordinary Person and Plato’s Forms (SUNY, 2022) plus questions and discussion.
Summer 2022
6/15/2022 Clerk Shaw (Tennessee) (Zoom) - "On the self-refutation argument in Plato’s Theaetetus"
Contact Mitzi Lee (mitzi.lee@colorado.edu) if you would like the link.
Spring 2022
Meetings will be held on Fridays at 3:30-5pm, via Zoom or in person in Hellems 269, as noted. Anyone interested in attending is invited to email mitzi.lee@colorado.edu for the Zoom link.
1/21 Gagan Sapkota (Zoom link to follow) - "Culpable Ignorance in Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics"
3/4 Mitzi Lee (Hellems 269) - "What kind of a virtue ethicist is Aristotle?"
3/11 Dom Bailey (Hellems 269) - "The Real Problem of Dion and Theon"
4/8 Caleb Cohoe (Metro State) (Hellems 269) - "Does Augustine Give Up Wisdom for Faith? How Augustine Reconfigures the Intellectual Virtues"
A number of scholars, including John Cooper, see Augustine as ending the Greco-Roman tradition of philosophy as a way of life by turning to divine revelation in place of rational argument. Faith replaces understanding. Against this, I argue that Augustine never gives up on wisdom as the source of happiness and our true goal. His view of wisdom is set up to meet Socratic and Stoic requirements: wisdom must give us understanding of all things and wisdom must be sufficient for motivating us to act rightly and love properly. Indeed, the early Augustine is more optimistic than Socrates about the possibility of attaining wisdom. As his thought develops, however, Augustine’s Christian understanding of wisdom reconfigures his view of epistemic norms. He switches from seeing wisdom (sapienta) as attainable through philosophical inquiry to thinking that full wisdom will only be achieved in the next life through God’s self-revelation. This leads him to modify the epistemic norms we should live by now. Many things that we cannot demonstrate and do not fully understand should be confidently believed and can even count as known. Augustine, unlike his Platonic predecessors, sees perception and testimony as sources of knowledge (scientia), since the operative standards for human knowledge are intermediate ones, not the final and ultimate understanding that we hope for but cannot yet achieve. Humility and acceptance play a role in the epistemic domain that they did not for previous thinkers. Augustine’s acceptance of divine testimony as the key source of practical wisdom also raises new questions about whether we need other sorts of knowledge since there is, for him, a shortcut to wisdom in a way there was not for earlier philosophers. Nevertheless, even for Augustine the Christian theologian and bishop, we should seek the sort of contemplative wisdom the philosophers desire, while recognizing that this wisdom can only be achieved by seeing God face to face. (Trin. XIV 19.25)
Friday 4/15 3:30–5:00pm, HLMS 269 - History of Philosophy Group Workshop: Tommy Bonn (ֱ Boulder) - “Some Neglected Platonic Anti-Harm Arguments”
Fall 2021
Meetings will be in HLMS 269, unless otherwise indicated.
Saturday, 11/13/2021, 10am-12pm
This is a pre-read; if you wish to receive the paper, please contact mitzi.lee@colorado.edu
Spring 2021
Thurs, Jan 28, 2021, 12:30pm-1:30pm
Thurs, March 11, 2021, 12:30pm-1:30pm
Thurs, April 1, 2021, 12:30pm - 1:30pm
Spring 2020
Mark Boespflug, talk on Mary Astell
January 22, 3:45-5:15, UMC 384
Yuval Avnur (Visiting Scholar, Scripps College), "Pascal’s Birds: Signs and Significance in Nature"
Friday April 10 3:15-5:00 online via Zoom
Please contact Professor Mitzi Lee for information
Abstract: Blaise Pascal’s most famous contribution to philosophy is his “wager” argument, which aims to convince non-believers that it is in their interest to try to believe despite lacking convincing evidence. Less attention has been paid to what happens before the wager, or why Pascal thought that evidence fails to convince nonbelievers. Perhaps this is because Pascal’s views here can be difficult to discern. The primary difficulty is that, while he emphasized that God is hidden from us in our current state, he also seemed to accept the view, common in the Christian tradition in which he was operating, that signs of God are everywhere in nature. How does Pascal reconcile these two claims? I consider two interpretations of this: Garber (2010), which posits a sort of epistemological relativity, and Kolakowski (1995), which posits a sort of skepticism. Both get something right, but both also fall short of explaining how Pascal’s God is both hidden and apparent. I offer a novel interpretation, which emphasizes the role of love in generating the relevant experiences of nature and explaining their epistemological upshots. Key to all of this is the idea that religious experience of the relevant sort arises within a framework, not of beliefs per se, but of a relationship with something whose existence cannot coherently be settled by those experiences. Pascal’s view, according to this interpretation, makes an important and underappreciated contribution to religious epistemology, and the epistemic significance of experience in general.
Conceptual engineering – a philosophical methodology where we consider how we ought to talk and think about concepts, regardless of how we may currently talk and think about them – is a rapidly growing subfield in contemporary philosophy. The catalyst for this emerging literature is Sally Haslanger’s influential work on “ameliorative” approaches to the concepts of race and gender. Herman Cappelen has recently observed that “[i]n my lifetime, I have never seen interest in a philosophical topic grow with such explosive intensity”.
Within this literature, however, a certain narrative regarding the history of conceptual engineering has become standard: Rudolf Carnap, particularly in his work on explication, is taken to be the trailblazer for this philosophical methodology. In turn, Carnap’s debate with P.F. Strawson over whether a concept that has been philosophically engineered can be regarded as continuous with our pre-engineered concept has been a site of substantial discussion. In this paper, I argue that this telling of the history of conceptual engineering is misguided. The philosopher whose work elaborates the methodology of what we now call conceptual engineering most clearly and in the most depth is Alice Ambrose. Ambrose, however, as far as I can tell, has not been cited once in the post-Haslanger literature on conceptual engineering. Here is a sample formulation of Ambrose’s position (one that would easily be at home in any of the current publications on conceptual engineering): “[P]hilosophical theories are not, as they appear to be, answers to questions, but are proposals to alter language: that they do not in fact attempt to clarify a concept or to explain a current usage, but instead, in a concealed way, propose that a word’s use shall be modified for philosophical purposes”.
I will argue that Ambrose’s work is not only the clearest forerunner of contemporary discussions of conceptual engineering, but also that it draws out the consequences of embracing this methodology in ways that even these contemporary discussions fail to do. In the paper, I first present Ambrose’s metaphilosophical views. I then compare them to the contemporary literature on conceptual engineering and show how Ambrose applies her metaphilosophical position to areas throughout philosophy, in particular to discussions on the ontology of mathematical objects, to problems of skepticism, and to questions concerning inductive inference.
In Rorty’s influential volume The Linguistic Turn, Ambrose’s central metaphilosophical paper is included with a response by Roderick Chisholm (a reprint of their exchange in The Journal of Philosophy). I reply on Ambrose’s behalf to Chisholm’s criticisms and conclude by contrasting the merits of tracing the history of conceptual engineering to Ambrose rather than Carnap. I argue that the standard narrative downplays Carnap’s skepticism of traditional metaphysics and has led to a preoccupation with questions of conceptual continuity that Ambrose’s work offers us an exit from.
Wednesday, May 13
Jackson Colter (CSU), talk on Stoic Cosmopolitanism (10am-12pm), and Christopher Moore (Penn State), talk TBA, 2-4pm.
Fall 2019
Spring 2019
Philip Choi, “Buridan on Moral Certainty”
Tuesday January 29th, 3:00pm, Hellems 269
Joseph Stenberg, "Thomas Aquinas, Happiness, and the Unity of Ethics"
Thursday February 7th, 3:00pm, Hellems 269
Abstract: Most of us think that being happy is just about something like enjoyment or contentment or satisfaction. Because we think of happiness in this way, we also tend to think that, in principle and even in practice, we can be happy while breaking all manner of moral rules, while having questionable character, and while living quite meaningless lives. In this talk, I will trace the origins of this view from the present day back into the Middle Ages. I will then spend most of the talk reconstructing a fascinating alternative view put forward by the 13th century Dominican, Thomas Aquinas – a view that develops out of an ancient understanding of happiness. In the end, I will show that, if Aquinas is right about the nature of happiness, our being happy absolutely requires our following moral rules, our developing good character, and our living meaningful lives.
Dominic Bailey, “Powers in Plato”
Tuesday February 12th, 3:00pm, Hellems 269
James Doyle (Harvard), “The pear-theft in Augustine's Confessions and ancient theories of motivated irrationality”
Monday February 25th, 4:00pm, Hellems 269
ABSTRACT: Socrates supposed that all practical errors were consequences of ignorance, and so held that there is no such thing as akrasia, whereby the agent allegedly knows that he is acting contrary to his best judgment. Plato (Republic IV) and Aristotle (NE VII) both reject Socrates' view as psychologically unrealistic, holding that the prospect of pleasure, for example, can lead one to act akratically. I shall argue that Augustine's diagnosis of his youthful theft of the pears in Confessions II shows that Plato and Aristotle did not fully emerge from the unrealistic 'rationalism' they object to in the Socratic view, because in neglecting the role of unconscious fantasy in human action, they make the role of pleasure in undermining judgment, as it were, too intelligible.
Robert Pasnau, “Medieval Modal Spaces"
Thursday March 21, 2:30pm, Hellems 269
Abstract: The Aristotelian conception of modality tended, for much of its history, to be founded mainly on what happens in the actual world, leaving little room for unactualized possibilities. Beginning in the later Middle Ages, however, particularly in the work of John Duns Scotus, a much more expansive conception of modality appears, tied to Scotus’s libertarian conception of freedom. Here I look at how Scotus and, later, Ockham attempted to create more conceptual space for nonactual possibilities, with regard to the past, the present, and the future.
Dan Wolt (Sao Paolo Post-doc, Princeton PhD), “Kalokagathia in the Eudemian Ethics VIII 3”
Thursday April 4, 2-4pm, Hellems 269
Rachel Barney (Toronto), “Techne as a Model for Virtue in Ancient Philosophy”
Thursday April 11, 2-4pm, Hellems 269
Mitzi Lee, “Aristotle’s revisionist concept of justice”
Thursday April 25, 3-5pm, Hellems 369
Fall 2018
Daniel Coren, "Aristotle on External Resting Points"
Monday October 8th, 2-3:30pm, Hellems 269
Mark Boespflug
Monday October 22nd, 2-3:30pm, Hellems 269
Philip Choi, "First Things First in Medieval Epistemology"
Monday November 12, 1:30 pm, Hellems 269
Spring 2018
Daniel Coren, "Aristotle on Motion in Incomplete Animals"
April 23, 4:00-6:00pm, Hellems 269
Fall 2017
Mark Boespflug, "Locke on Doxastic Voluntarism"
October 19, 2:30-4:00pm, Hellems 269
Spring 2017
January 23
February 20
February 27
Joseph Stenberg, "John Buridan on Happiness"
March 3, 3:30-5:00pm Hellems 269
Bob Pasnau, “Moments of Decision: A First Try at Medieval Voluntarism” (joint talk with CMEMS)
April 10
April 26, 3:30-5pm Hellems 269
Fall 2016
Tuesday Nov. 15, 3:30-5:00pm, Hellems 269
Tyler Huismann, "The art or the artisan? A causal puzzle in Aristotle"
Tuesday Nov. 29 3:30-5:00pm, Hellems 269
Daniel Coren presenting to the History of Philosophy Group workshop, April 23, 2018