4-6pm
Dennes Room (Phil Hall 234)
Josefine Klingspor (Stanford)
4-6pm
Stroud Room (Phil Hall 302)
Pia Schneider (UC Berkeley)
4-6pm
Wheeler 330
Alison Peterman (Rochester)
Abstract: Margaret Cavendish claims that things like ferns and planets are 'perceptive and knowing' and that matter is 'sensitive and rational'. So she is usually described as a panpsychist, but as I will argue in this talk, she is not. Drawing on Cavendish's unique version of materialism, I offer an interpretation of her theory of human and other animal minds that reflects her resistance to human exceptionalism, capturing the distinctive features of minds while considering them as just some among the countless ways that different things have of interacting with the world around them. We have no reason to think that all of those ways are mind-like because we have no reason to think, as we like to, that minds provide a privileged window onto nature.
4-6pm
Dennes Room (Phil Hall 234)
Eve-Aline Dubois (UC Berkeley and Université de Namur)
Abstract: Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) is often portrayed as an enfant terrible in the history of science, though he saw himself first and foremost as a philosopher exercising his freedom of thought. This study explores his 1584 cosmological model, as developed in three works written during his time in England. Through this lens, we will examine his vision of the universe and his radical opposition to Aristotelian principles.
4-6pm
Dennes Room (Phil Hall 234)
Andrea Sangiacomo (Groningen)
Abstract: Spinoza has been accused of atheism since his own lifetime, and his views on God remain among the most debated aspects of his philosophy today. Discussions often center on whether Spinoza’s concept of ‘God’ can be reconciled with the dogmatic views of positive religion—identified in Spinoza’s historical context with Judaism, Protestant Christianity, or Catholicism. Rather than approaching this issue categorically by asking whether Spinoza was an atheist, this paper suggests a different path: examining the tensions between Spinoza’s ideas and those of his religious interlocutors to better understand the challenges and limitations on both sides. I focus on the brief epistolary exchange between Spinoza and his former friend Albert Burgh, who had converted to Catholicism. I argue that this exchange reveals an epistemic dimension of Spinoza’s stance on religion, highlighting both the normative role of reason in establishing truth and a deflationary view of the authority of positive, historical testimony. I further suggest that this perspective aligns with certain themes of the Protestant tradition while also reflecting Spinoza’s personal experience of excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam. From a philosophical standpoint, the Burgh exchange invites a shift of emphasis—from how God is conceived to who can enter into an authentic relationship with God. This concern was not invented by Spinoza; it was already central to the Protestant Reformation and becomes, through Spinoza’s philosophy, an enduring feature of modern thought.
3-5pm
Dennes Room (Phil Hall 234)
Katie Coyne (UC Berkeley)
3-5pm
Dennes Room (Phil Hall 234)
William Phillips (UC Berkeley)
3-5pm
Dennes Room (Phil Hall 234)
Megan Wu (UC Berkeley)
3-5pm
Dennes Room (Phil Hall 234)
Lawrence Nolan (California State University, Long Beach)
3-5 pm
Dennes Room (Phil Hall 234)
Jacob Sheehan (Yale)
Abstract: Although Descartes’s Fourth Meditation is titled “On Truth and Falsity,” Descartes is rarely thought of as giving a particularly interesting account of truth therein and only slightly more often seen as living up to its promise to “explain what the nature of falsity consists in” (CITE). The actual text of the Fourth Meditation centers around his conception of judgement, and in particular his account of the role of the freedom of the will in judgement. Nevertheless, I will argue in this talk that, seen in its proper context in the history of thinking about the natures of truth and falsity, Descartes’s Fourth Meditation should be seen as a revolutionary moment in the history of the normativity of truth. Truth plays the following normative role: certain kinds of thoughts—paradigmatically beliefs or judgements—are essentially such as to be correct or incorrect, depending on whether they are true. Nowadays, we often think of judgement as subject to a norm of truth because judgement is itself a commitment to something’s truth, or as holding something to be true. But for the bulk of the history of philosophy, the normativity of truth was understood in teleological terms—judgement ought to be true because truth is the proper end of the intellect.
Descartes, I will argue, plays a pivotal role in moving away from the teleological conception of the normativity of truth.We can see this by carefully distinguishing what is original in Descartes from the influential late 16th and early 17th century scholastics. The most important of these figures Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), whose direct influence on Descartes’s accounts of truth, falsity, and the will in judgement has unfortunately been virtually ignored in analyses of Descartes’s account of error. Descartes’s primary departure from Suarez, it turns out, is in re-conceiving the nature of judgement as no longer the product of a teleologically ordered intellect. Suarez and Descartes agree that the will is free, and the ultimate cause of our errors in judgement. But Suarez views the will’s role in error as turning the intellect away from its natural path, whereas Descartes sees our judgements themselves as free acts of the will. This volitional picture of judgement is a leap away from the teleological picture towards a commitment based view of the normativity of truth. Descartes does not himself endorse a commitment-based account of the normativity of truth, however. Instead, he tries to reconstrue the will as both free and essentially directed towards truth. This view, I argue, is at once appealing and philosophically unstable, pulling us in the direction of the modern view of the normativity of truth.
4-6 pm
Dennes Room (Phil Hall 234)
Antonieta Garcia Ruzo (visiting scholar at UC Berkeley)
3-5 pm
Dennes Room (Phil Hall 234)
Matthew Congdon (Vanderbilt)
Abstract: This paper reconstructs a line of criticism in Iris Murdoch’s thinking about existentialist philosophy and asks whether it might be fruitfully applied to a new strain of existentialist philosophy emerging today. Specifically, I focus on Murdoch’s critique of the notion of the will as the creator of value, showing how it connects with her views about death, art, nature, and the role of philosophy.
3-5 pm
Dennes Room (Phil Hall 234)
Warren Timothe (UC Berkeley)
3-5 pm
Dennes Room (Phil Hall 234)
Reid Kurashige (UC Berkeley)