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Current Events

������ Veroni Memorial Lectures in Philosophy and the Humanities

Timothy Morton

Rita Shea Guffey Professor of English
Rice University 

Having Mercy

Tuesday, October 15, 2024, 7 p.m.
Location: KIVA

Book Signing to follow

In this lecture I will be arguing that mercy is not only a thing we do, it is a thing we are. Mercy is curiously wired into the ontological structure of our being as lifeforms. I will be taking the Book of Genesis as a primary text, teasing out some of the deep philosophical implications of the Hebrew for the ways in which the “spirit of God” is (in the words of the King James Version) “moving on the waters.” Mercy is in short supply in the political realm right now. The rise of the ultra-right around the world indicates that being without mercy is on the menu. It suggests that we take a fresh look at why mercy is foundational to our coexistence. Kent State, the sight of historic and tragic events that evoke this theme most powerfully, is a most fitting place to begin to address this urgent issue.

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University and Director of the Cool America Foundation. Morton is the author of 25 books, translated 47 times into 20 languages; and the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. Morton has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Susan Kucera, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Olafur Eliasson, Pharrell Williams and Justin Guariglia. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory at UC Irvine.

������ Veroni Memorial Lectures in Philosophy and the Humanities

Postponed

Kate A. Manne

Associate Professor of Philosophy, Cornell University

Demoralizing Fatness

Postponed
Location TBA

Please note: registration is required for this event. .

The speaker has requested that all guests wear masks at this event.

Fatness is often moralized. Through a variety of channels—the news, entertainment, social media, and ordinary conversation—fat bodies are depicted as a moral problem, and fat people as a moral failure. The atmosphere may be one of moral panic or, by turns, patronizing concern and ostensibly well-meaning hand-wringing. But the best argument to the conclusion that one is morally obligated not to be fat—namely, that fatness represents a burden on the health care system—turns out to be surprisingly weak. Not being fat is simply not a moral obligation. I conclude with a debunking explanation as to why fatness has wrongly been moralized, in view of the disgust often garnered by fat bodies. 

Kate Manne is Associate Professor of philosophy at Cornell University, where she’s been teaching since 2013. Manne’s research is in moral philosophy, feminist philosophy, and social philosophy. She has written two books—Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (Crown, 2020)—and is currently working on a third, called Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia (Crown, 2024). As well as academic articles, she regularly writes opinion pieces, essays, and reviews on moral and political topics for a wider audience, which have been published in venues including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Cut, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Politico.

KENT STATE PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE IN REMEMBRANCE OF MAY 4TH

Annually in March

The ������ Philosophy Department has held a Philosophy Graduate Student Conference every year in memory of the events of May 4, 1970 since the inauguration of our graduate program in 1992–93. The Conference is open to all areas of philosophy, and conference participants come to Kent from around the globe. A call for papers goes out every fall.

Recent Events

������ Veroni Memorial Lectures in Philosophy and the Humanities

Dan Zahavi

Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research
the University of Copenhagen, Denmark

We, You, and I

Wednesday, April 17, 2024, 7 p.m.
Location: CVA 165
Dessert Reception to Follow

During the past few decades, collective intentionality has been intensively explored in various disciplines including social, cognitive and developmental psychology, economics, sociology, political theory, anthropology, ethology, and the social neurosciences. Much of the empirical work in these areas has drawn inspiration from and relied on the theoretical analyses of a handful of analytic philosophers, notably Searle, Bratman, Gilbert, and Tuomela, whose work have often gravitated around the question of whether and how collective intentions differ from aggregations of individual intentions. Whereas the contemporary debate on collective intentionality in analytic philosophy has lasted a few decades, questions concerning the nature of we, and the relation between self, intersubjectivity, and community are obviously far older. We can find a particular rich discussion of these topics in early phenomenology. Indeed, while starting out with an interest in the individual mind, phenomenologists began their exploration of dyadic forms of interpersonal relations shortly before the start of World War I and were already deeply engaged in extensive analyses of collective forms of intentionality a few years later. In my talk, I will present some core insights from this early debate, and in particular look at the contributions of Husserl, Walther, and Schutz. 

Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His primary research area is phenomenology and philosophy of mind, and their intersection with empirical disciplines such as psychiatry and psychology. In addition to a number of scholarly works on the phenomenology of Husserl, Prof. Zahavi has written on the nature of selfhood, self-consciousness, intersubjectivity, empathy, and most recently on topics in social ontology. Since 2020, Prof. Zahavi has been the principal investigator on a 5-year research project entitled “Who are We?” which is supported by the European Research Council and the Carlsberg Foundation. His writings have been translated into more than 30 languages.

������ Veroni Memorial Lectures in Philosophy and the Humanities

Cheshire Calhoun

Professor of Philosophy, Arizona State University

Kindnesses

Friday, February 2, 2024, 7 p.m.
Location: CVA 165
Dessert Reception to Follow

What kindness is seems both obvious and nonobvious. On the obvious side: We effortlessly use “kind” to describe actions and people and find familiarly meaningful occurrences of “kind” in polite missives, inspirational literature, novels, everyday conversation, and injunctions to “be kind” or to “practice random acts of kindness.” On the nonobvious side: The ease of generating examples of kindness is not matched by a similar ease in saying what they share in common.

What makes it difficult to define kindness is that everyday understandings of kindness spring from multiple sources. The result is that talk about kindness is shaped by three different conceptions of kindness: kindness as general, benevolently motivated beneficence, kindness as a set of social practices of micro benevolence/beneficence, and kindness as expression of kinship. Each conception gives us a different answer to the question “What is kindness?” What feature(s) of actions and persons does “kind” pick out and is being encouraged in injunctions to be kind? And each gives a different answer to the question “Where does kindness fit into the moral landscape?” Is kindness just another name for benevolently motivated beneficence? If so, kindness would be a pinnacle in the moral landscape, alongside respect for autonomy. Or does “kindness” require emotional warmth or personal caring? If so, it may be less clear where kindness sits in the moral landscape.   

Cheshire Calhoun is Professor of Philosophy at Arizona State University. She works in the areas of normative ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of emotion, feminist philosophy, and gay and lesbian philosophy. She has recently published a collection of previously published essays under the title Moral Aims: Essays on the Importance of Getting it Right and Practicing Morality with Others (OUP 2016), and a new book titled Doing Valuable Time: The Present, the Future, and Meaningful Living (OUP 2018). She is series editor for Oxford University Press’s Studies in Feminist Philosophy

������ Inaugural Brockett Lecture

Veroni Memorial Lectures in Philosophy and the Humanities

Conversations on Climate with

Stephen Markley

Author of The Deluge

Wednesday, October 25, 2023, 7 p.m.
KIVA
Dessert Reception and Book Signing to Follow

Stephen Markley is the author of The Deluge: A Novel, which is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in January of 2023. His previous books include the critically acclaimed bestseller Ohio: A Novel, as well as Publish This Book and Tales of Iceland. He has also written for the Hulu comedy "Only Murders in the Building." He is a graduate of the Iowa writers workshop.

This event is co-sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, Earth Sciences, English, and History.

������ Veroni Memorial Lectures in Philosophy and the Humanities

Lee A. McBride III

Professor of Philosophy, College of Wooster

Democracy, Ethics, and Insurrection

Tuesday, March 21, 2023 6 p.m.
CVA 165

On January 28, 2021, McBride published Ethics and Insurrection: A Pragmatism for the Oppressed. Three weeks earlier, an unruly mob had stormed the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington D.C., an event that many call an “insurrection.” McBride’s book was in press long before the January 6th event, and yet some people think of January 6th when they hear the term “insurrection.” In this paper, McBride discusses our democratic ideals in the United States and the insurrectionist ethics that arises out of a philosophy born of struggle. He contends that the “insurrection” that arises out of a philosophy born of struggle and the “insurrection” of the January 6th mob do not share the same referent.

Lee A. McBride III  specializes in American philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of race, but has additional interests in feminist philosophy, decolonial philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy, environmental ethics, and philosophy of food. He is the author of Ethics and Insurrection: A Pragmatism for the Oppressed (Bloomsbury, 2021). McBride is currently writing a short monograph on the philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois (under contract with Indiana University Press).

 will be giving a talk at 1pm on Friday, February 24th, 2023 to be held in Bowman Hall Room 315.

The title of his talk is “Quality-Space Functionalism about Color.” The abstract appears below, and the paper is attached. Light refreshments will be served after the talk.

The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required (so we can provide refreshments). Please register using . 

I motivate and defend a previously underdeveloped functionalist account of the metaphysics of color, a view that I call ‘quality-space functionalism’ about color. Although other theorists have proposed varieties of color functionalism, this view differs from such accounts insofar as it identifies and individuates colors by their relative locations within a particular kind of ‘quality space’ that reflects creatures’ capacities to discriminate visually among stimuli. My arguments for this view of color are abductive: I propose that quality-space functionalism best captures our commonsense conception of color, fits with many experimental findings, coheres with the phenomenology of color experience, and avoids many issues for standard theories of color, such as color physicalism and color relationalism.

Thanks to Dr. David Pereplyotchik for arranging Dr. Berger's visit.

������ Department of Philosophy and Brain Health Research Institute present

John Bickle

Departments of Philosophy and Psychology, Mississippi State University
Department of Neurobiology and Anatomical Sciences, University of Mississippi Medical Center

Tinkering in the Lab

January 22, 2020, 5:30 pm
137 Bowman Hall
 

Anglo-American philosophy of science has been theory-centric since at least the ascendance of scientific realism in the late 20th century. While more recent work has tended away from concerns about science “in general,” and more toward “foundational” questions specific to particular sciences, and has focused more on experimentation and actual scientific practices, the attitude that everything in science begins and ends with theory, its confirmation, and its progress, remains stubbornly recalcitrant (although it is now expressed more surreptitiously).

A recent focus on experimental tools and their patterns of development in laboratory-driven sciences like neurobiology challenges this theory-centrism. Tools that revolutionized neuroscience, at least in the eyes of neuroscientists, developed by way of atheoretical tinkering in the laboratory—by solving engineering and technological problems, by trial-and-error, and even by sheer serendipity—and not by the systematic application of theory. A common general pattern runs through these cases: laboratory tinkering ⮕ new experiment tools and designs ⮕ theory progress. I’ll argue for this pattern by way of some history of the development of a number of neurobiology’s most influential experiment tools: the metal microelectrode, the path clamp, gene targeting by homologous recombination, and optogenetics and DREADDs.

������ phi beta kappa Lecture in Philosophy

R. Jay Wallace

Judy Chandler Webb Distinguished Chair in Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley

Resentment and Power: On the Social Dynamics of Blame

November 14, 2019, 7:30 pm
Kent Student Center KIVA
 

Our practices of moral accountability involve reactive attitudes in the general key of anger, such as resentment and indignation. I argue that these attitudes involve forms of social power, and I consider the implications of this fact for the understanding and assessment of reactive blame. There are characteristic pathologies of blame that are intelligible when we see it as the exercise of social power. But the connection to power also helps us to see why it is important that we have these reactions in our emotional repertoire.

R. JAY WALLACE teaches in the Philosophy Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Judy Chandler Webb Distinguished Chair. He works in moral philosophy, and his interests extend to all parts of the subject (including its history), and to such allied areas as political philosophy, philosophy of law, and philosophy of action. His research has focused on responsibility, moral psychology, normative ethics, and the theory of practical reason. Recently he has written on promising, normativity, constructivism, resentment, hypocrisy, love, and regret and affirmation, among other topics. His newest book, The Moral Nexus, is a study of the relational structure of the moral domain. Other books include Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments, Normativity and the Will, and The View from Here: On Affirmation, Attachment, and the Limits of Regret. He has taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

������ Veroni Memorial Lectures in Philosophy and the Humanities

Mark Johnson

Professor Emeritus, University of Oregon

Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Thought

September 25, 2019, 7:00 pm
Center for Visual Arts 165
Dessert Reception to Follow

Humans are creatures of the flesh. Everything we can experience, think, know, and do arises from our bodily engagement with our physical and social environments. Recent research coming from the cognitive sciences showing how mind, meaning, and thought are intrinsically embodied challenges our inherited view of a mind or soul capable of transcending our bodily nature. I explore the ways that images, schemas, emotions, and values play a crucial role in our ability to experience, make, and communicate meaning. This embodied cognition theory of mind gives us a rich way to account for how body-based meaning is developed, not just in language, but also in art, music, dance, architecture, gesture, and ritual. What we call “abstract” thought involves metaphorical understanding that recruits these embodied meaning processes for abstract conceptualization and reasoning.

MARK JOHNSON received his Ph.D from University of Chicago in 1977. He has taught at Berkeley, the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and, since 1994, at the University of Oregon, where he was Philip H. Knight Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences. His areas of research include metaphor theory, philosophy of language, philosophy and cognitive science, and American philosophy. Publications include Philosophy in the Flesh (1999); The Meaning of the Body (2007); Morality for Humans (2014); and Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason (2017).

������ Veroni Memorial Lectures in Philosophy and the Humanities

David Carr

Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus, Emory University

Teleology and the Experience of History

April 26, 2018, 6:00 pm
Michael Schwartz Auditorium
Dessert Reception to Follow

History is the story of human progress. Or so many have thought. The teleological view of history reached the height of its influence in the work of Hegel, Marx, and early positivism, and then, after being attacked and rejected in many quarters, it seems to reappear in Husserl’s late work, in the 1930s, and surfaces once again in the 1990s in the work of Fukuyama. In spite of seemingly being refuted again and again by facts and arguments, this idea seems unwilling to relinquish its hold on us. Why is this so? That’s the question I want to consider in this paper. And in answer I want to suggest that something in the nature of our experience—our historical experience—inclines us toward this view. I begin by outlining the teleological view of history as it appeared in 19th and 20th century thought. The central section of the paper then develops what I mean by historical experience and how it relates to teleology. In the last section I want to suggest, by analogy with Kant, that the idea of historical progress constitutes something like a transcendental illusion we find it hard to overcome.

DAVID CARR received his Ph.D from Yale University in 1966. He has taught at Yale, the University of Ottawa (Canada) and, since 1991, at Emory University (Atlanta), where he was department chair and is now Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus. His areas of research are 20th century phenomenology, especially Husserl; theory of historical narrative; and philosophy of history. Publications include Phenomenology and the Problem of History (1974, reissued in 2009); Time, Narrative and History (1986); Interpreting Husserl (1987); and The Paradox of Subjectivity (1999).

Visiting Lecture

Naomi Zack

Professor of Philosophy, University of Oregon

Changes in the Categories of Race, Class, and Gender:
How Life has Outpaced Theory

February 26, 2018, 7:00 pm
KSU Student Center 310A
Dessert Reception to Follow

Recent events have culminated in fundamental changes in the nature of our progressive categories of race, class, gender, disaster, as well as disability, and democratic process. In this talk, I focus on changes in race and class with a concluding look at changes in feminism through the #MeToo movement: race or racism now exceed intersection theory because race is more like a junction that unpredictably takes off on a track of its own; for the electorate, class has become more a matter of culture and racial identity than economic interest; feminism now includes some of the most elite and powerful members of its foundational group, namely women.

Husserl In A New Generation Conference

September 15-17, 2017

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), the founder of phenomenology, was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20^th century, one whose influence can be seen in almost every area of philosophical research. In recent decades, central aspects of Husserlian phenomenology have played an important role in the evolution of fields as diverse as sociology, education, cognitive science, and architecture. The aim of this conference is to revisit Husserl’s important contributions, highlighting their relevance to the questions that philosophy faces today.

Husserl In A New Generation Conference

Visiting Lecture

Neil Sinhababu

PhD, National University of Singapore

Nietzsche's Humean (All-Too-Humean) Theory of Motivation

October 10, 2016, 7:00 pm
Kent Student Center Ballroom Balcony
Dessert Reception to Follow

Nietzsche and Hume both regard desire as driving all human action and practical reasoning. This shared view gave them an appreciation of the continuity between human and animal motivation, and set them against a long tradition of rationalist rivals including Kant and Plato. Kantians like Christine Korsgaard argue that how we reflectively endorse or reject options presented by desire demonstrates reason's ability to independently drive reasoning and action. In Daybreak 109, Nietzsche provides a simpler Humean explanation: reflective endorsement and rejection involve reflecting on one desire from the viewpoint of another.

Sellars In A New Generation Conference

April 30-May 2, 2015

The work of Wilfrid Sellars has touched nearly every area of philosophy, from traditional debates in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, to contemporary issues in philosophy of language and mind. The aim of this conference is to revisit Sellars’ important contributions, highlighting their relevance to the questions that philosophy faces today.

Sellars In A New Generation Conference