Sapientia Lecture Series
The Sapientia Lecture Series is underwritten by the Mark J. Byrne 1985 Fund in Philosophy, which is an endowment established in 1996 to help support the study of philosophy at Dartmouth College.
Upcoming Sapientia Lectures
Friday, September 19, 2025
Kieran Setiya, MIT
Talk title: "Explaining the Joke"
Abstract: "This talk will argue for a sentimentalist theory of humour that gives a special place to the violation of norms or expectations as sufficient reason to be amused. This theory implies that unethical jokes cannot be funny and that every joke is a tacit explanation of itself."
3:30pm
Location: 105 Dartmouth Hall
Tuesday, October 7, 2025
Hannah Kim, University of Arizona
Talk title: "Fiction without Mimesis: a Comparative Philosophy of Fiction"
Abstract: "Is "fiction" a transhistorical and transcultural concept? Currie (2014) says yes. In this talk, I argue that an imagination or pretense-based theory of fiction won't account for classical Chinese conceptions of fiction, and more generally, that we ought to be skeptical of a universal notion of fiction because fiction is a concept that responds to a philosophical culture's given background framework. Observing how classical Chinese (Daoist) metaphysics affected Chinese theories (and practice) of fiction (xiaoshuo), for instance, shows us how considerations other than imagination, make-believe, or mimesis can be the basis of a concept of fiction. More broadly, the comparative approach to fiction shows what the existing assumptions of analytic philosophy of fiction had been, and how it might reconceptualize its aims and methods."
4:30pm
Location: Rocky 209
Friday, April 10, 2026
Cheryl Misak, University of Toronto
Talk title: "Rules, Like Birds, Must Live Before They are Stuffed"
Abstract: "This paper explores and defends the pragmatist account of rules or laws, as articulated by F.P. Ramsey, Margaret Macdonald, and Gilbert Ryle. Rules, to use Ryle's lovely phrase, are living things, not bits of code: they must live before they are stuffed. They are also in principle malleable. Some conclusions are then drawn about whether there are constitutive rules and about the nature of legal rules. Along the way, the traditional sceptical problems about rule-following and induction are shown to be pieces of misguided metaphysics rightly abandoned by the pragmatist."
3:30pm
Location: TBA
Thursday, May 14, 2026
Jessica Moss, NYU
Talk title: TBA
Abstract: TBA
4:30pm
Location: TBA
Series History
| Term | Speaker | Title | Date | Co-Sponsor(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25X | Michael Gill, Edinburgh University | Humean Constructivism and the Authoritative Ought | Monday, July 28, 2025 | |
| 25S | Keshav Singh, University of Alabama, Birmingham | The Injustices of Coarse-Grained Racial Categories | Wednesday, May 7, 2025 | Ethics Institute at Dartmouth |
| 25S | Kevin Richardson, Duke University | Sexual Orientation: What is it? What do we want it to be? | Friday, April 4, 2025 | Office of Pluralism and Leadership |
| 25W | George Sher, Rice University | On Speaking One's Mind | Tuesday, March 4, 2025 | Ethics Institute at Dartmouth |
| 25W | Nina Emery, Mount Holyoke | Explanation As a Guide to What There Is and What It's Like | Friday, January 17, 2025 | |
| 24F | Keren Gorodeisky, Auburn College | Understanding Each Other | Friday, November 15, 2024 | |
| 24S | Martin Jonsson, Lund University | What We Mean as What We Say or Would Have Said | Wednesday, April 10, 2024 | |
| 23F | Nandi Theunissen, University of Pittsburgh | Is Good Fundamental? | Friday, November 10, 2023 | |
| 23X | Michael Cholbi, University of Edinburgh | Love, Identity, and the Duty to Grieve | Friday, August 11, 2023 | |
| 23S | Aaron Meskin, University of Georgia | "Let's go see that together!": Going Out as a Core Aesthetic Activity | Friday, May 5, 2023 | |
| 23S | Jenny Saul, University of Waterloo | Saying the Quiet Part Loud: How Figleaves Facilitate the Spread of Blatant Racism and Obvious Falsehood | Monday, April 17, 2023 | |
| 23W | Colin Allen, University of Pittsburgh | How Much are Large Language Models narrowing the Gap to Human Intelligence? | Friday, January 20, 2023 | |
| 22F | Takaaki Matsui, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Hitotsubashi University | Inferentialism, Conceptual Engineering, and Path-Dependence of Topic Continuity | Tuesday, October 11, 2022 | |
| 22X | Dave Ward, University of Edinburgh | Perceptual Knowledge and Embodied Skill | Friday, August 19, 2022 | |
| 22S | Alex Horne, Cambridge | Agential Plasticity | Thursday, March 31, 2022 | |
| 22W | E. Hande Tuna, UC Santa Cruz | Modes of Imagining: Selective and Reflective Imagining | Friday, February 4, 2022 | |
| 21F | Chad Hansen, University of Hong Kong | Believing in Dao | Monday, September 27, 2021 | |
| 20W | Shen-yi Liao, University of Puget Sound | Memorials and Memories | Friday, February 7, 2020 | |
| 20W | Gabriel Rabin, NYU Abu Dhabi | The Structure of Analog Representation | Friday, January 17, 2020 | |
| 19F | Eric Campbell, University of Maryland, Baltimore | Pragmatic Naturalism: A New Methodology for Metaethics and Metamorals | Wednesday, October 30, 2019 | |
| 19X | Elinor Mason, University of Edinburgh | Sexual Refusal and the Fragility of Women's Authority | Monday, August 9, 2019 | |
| 19W | Alejandro Pérez Carballo, UMass-Amherst | New Boundary Lines | Friday, February 22, 2019 | |
| 18F | Sybren Heyndels, KU Leuven | Strawson's Method in Freedom and Resentment (Work-in-Progress) | Monday, November 19, 2018 | |
| 18F | Ned Markosian, University of Massachusetts, Amherst | The Open Future | Friday, October 19, 2018 | |
| 18F | Takaaki Matsui, University of Tokyo (Visiting Scholar, Dartmouth) | Ontological Pluralism and Deflationism (Work-in-Progress) | Tuesday, October 9, 2018 | |
| 18F | Adam Hosein, Northeastern | Gender Libertarianism in the Workplace | Friday, September 28, 2018 | |
| 18F | Lambert Wiesing, Friedrich Schiller University | Luxury: The Dadaism of Possession | Wednesday, Septem | |
| 18X | Mario de Caro, Universitå Rome Tre & Tufts | Naturalism and Nature | Friday, August 17, 2018 | |
| 18X | Robert Stecker, Central Michigan University | Moral Norms and Nature Appreciation | Friday, August 10, 2018 | |
| 18X | Martin Seel, Goethe University, Frankfurt | Two Dimensions of Language | Friday, August 3, 2018 | |
| 18X | Patrick Todd, Edinburgh | The Open Past, Classical Style | Friday, July 17, 2018 | |
| 18S | Richard Moran, Harvard | Speech as Expression and as "Social Act of Mind" | Friday, May 11, 2018 | |
| 18S | Daniel J. Singer, University of Pennsylvania | Polarization, Forgetting, and a Computational Approach to Social Epistemology | Friday, April 27, 2018 | |
| 18S | Branden Fitelson, Northeastern | p is true, but S ought not to believe/assert p | Wednesday, April 18, 2018 | |
| 18S | David Woodruff Smith, UC-Irvine | The Inner Liar Paradox: As Logic Meets Phenomenology | Wednesday, April 10, 2018 | |
| 18W | Agostín Rayo, MI | On the Open-Endedness of Logical Space | Friday, March 2, 2018 | |
| 18W | Robin Dembroff, Yale | Oppressive Categories | Friday, February 23, 2018 | |
| 18W | Michael Silberstein, Elizabethtown College | Contextual Emergence | Friday, February 9, 2018 | |
| 17F | Anna Christina Soy Ribeiro, Texas Tech | The Musical Protolanguage Hypothesis and the Origins of Poetry | Friday, November 10, 2017 | |
| 17F | Monique L. Wonderly, Priceton and UCSD | Attachment and Felt Necessity: Engaging with Value in Love and Addiction | Friday, September 29, 2017 | |
| 17X | Kris McDaniel, Syracuse University | The Essence of Being | Friday, August 25, 2017 | |
| 17X | Brian Rabern, Universty of Edinburgh | Future Contingents and Temporal Omniscience | Tuesday, August 8, 2017 | |
| 17S | Shaun Nichols, Arizona | Self as Primitive: The View from Lexical Semantics | Friday, May 19, 2017 | |
| 17S | Daniel Smyth, Wesleyan | Kant's Infinities | Wednesday, May 12, 2017 | |
| 17S | Evan Thompson, British Columbia | Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep? | Wednesday, April 26, 2017 | |
| 17W | Michael Bukoski, Dartmouth | Some Ethical Implications of Moral Uncertainty | Friday, February 17, 2017 | |
| 17W | Scott Jenkins, University of Kansas | Nietzsche's Psychology of Metaphysics (or, Metaphysics as Revenge) | Friday, January 27, 2017 | |
| 16F | Stephen Darwall, Yale | What Are Moral Reasons | Friday, November 4, 2016 | |
| 16X | Anders J. Schoubye, Visiting Edinburgh Professor | Type Ambiguous Names | Friday, August 24, 2016 | |
| 16S | Nina Emery, Brown | Actualism without Presentism? Not by Way of the Relativity Objection | Friday, April 22, 2016 | |
| 15F | Melissa Merritt, University of New South Wales | Attention, Perception, Experience | Friday, November 13, 2015 | |
| 15F | Daniel Sutherland, University of Illinois, Chicago | The Place of Measurement in Kant's Philosophy of Mathematics | Friday, October 23, 2015 | |
| 15F | Russ Shafer-Landau, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | Categorical Moral Reasons | Friday, October 16, 2015 | |
| 15F | Sarah Buss, Michigan | Personal ideals, Moral Requirements, and the Ideal of Rational Agency | Friday, October 2, 2015 | |
| 14S | Alfred Mele, Florida State University | Two Libertarian Theories: or Why Event-causal Libertarians Should Prefer My Daring Libertarian View to Robert Kane's View | Friday, April 24, 2015 | |
| 14S | Kristie Dotson, Michigan State | A Road to Oblivion, or Joe Scarborough on Ferguson | Tuesday, April 7, 2015 | Women's and Gender Studies Program, Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth, Ferguson Teaching Collective at Dartmouth |
| 14W | Kieran Setiya, MIT | The Problem of Akrasia | Friday, March 13, 2015 | |
| 14F | Elisabeth Camp, Rutgers University | Why Metaphors Make Good Insults | Friday, October 10, 2014 | |
| 14X | Houston Smit, University of Arizona | Kant on Unity of Apperception and the Spontaneity of Cognition | Thursday, July 24, 2014 | |
| 14X | Jesper Kallestrup, Visiting Edinburgh Professor | Extended Knowledge | Extended Knowledge | |
| 14S | Tom Hill, Jr., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | Tom Hill, Jr., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | Friday, May 9, 2014 | |
| 14W | Ken Baynes, Syracuse | Autonomy, Social Oppression, and Adaptive Preference Formation | Friday, March 7, 2014 | |
| 14W | Karen Ng, Siena College/Vanderbilt | From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Ideology: On the Relation Between Life and Consciousness from Hegel to Critical Theory | Friday, January 31, 2014 | |
| 14W | Smaranda Aldea, Dartmouth | Beyond the Eidetic Method - Transcendental Phenomenology, the Sciences, and the Everyday | Friday, December 10, 2014 | |
| 13F | Josh Schechter, Brown | Does Expressivism Have an Epistemological Advantage Over Realism? | Friday, November 8, 2013 | |
| 13F | Sharon Street, NYU | Normativity and Water: The Analogy and its Limits | Friday, October 25, 2013 | |
| 13F | Colin Koopman, Oregon | Critique and Judgment in Political Theory: Foucault and Butler on the Politics of Sex | Thursday, October 10, 2013 | |
| 13X | Mark Budolfson, Stanford | Individual Freedom, the Tragedy of the Commons, and the Perils of Social Engineering: The Case for Modest Libertarianism | Wednesday, August 14, 2013 | |
| 13X | James Van Cleve, USC | Reid on Direct Realism and Nonexistent Objects of Conception | Wednesday, August 7, 2013 | |
| 13X | Elinor Mason, Edinburgh | Responsibility for Moral Ignorance | Wednesday, July 31, 2013 | |
| 13S | Amie Thomasson, University of Miami | Easy Ontology and its Consequences | Tuesday, May 14, 2013 | |
| 13S | Brian Cantwell Smith, University of Toronto | Creatures Made of Clay | Wednesday, April 17, 2013 | |
| 13S | Daniel Loick, Goethe University and Harvard | The Young Hegel as a Critic of Juridicism | Friday, April 5, 2013 | |
| 13S | Katharine Gelber, University of Queensland (Australia) | Universalism, Freedom of Speech, and the Capabilities Approach | Friday, March 29, 2013 | |
| 13W | Neil Sinhababu, National University of Singapore | Emotional Perception of Morality | Friday, March 8, 2013 | |
| 13W | Smaranda Aldea, Mellon Research Fellow, Dartmouth College | Phenomenology and the Problem of Content | Friday, February 15, 2013 | |
| 13W | Paul Taylor, Warburg Institute | Dead Deities in Western Art | Friday, February 8, 2013 | Co-sponsored by Art History, the Leslie Center for the Humanities, and the Dickey Center for International Understanding |
| 13W | Shamik Dasgupta, Princeton University | The Possibility of Physicalism | Friday, January 18, 2013 | |
| 12F | Catherine Elgin, Harvard University | The Commonwealth of Epistemic Ends | Friday, November 9, 2012 | |
| 12F | Dominic McIver Lopes, University of British Columbia | Photography, Plugged and Unplugged | Friday, October 19, 2012 | Co-Sponsored by Digital Humanities and Studio Art |
| 12F | Corey Anton, Valley State University | Natural Guilt, Death Acceptance, and the Meaning of Transcendence | Wednesday, October 10, 2012 | Co-Sponsored by the Geisel School of Medicine |
| 12F | Robert Hopkins, University of Sheffield | Sculpting in Time? | Friday, October 5, 2012 | |
| 12X | Tillman Vierkant, Edinburgh | Mental Muscles and the Extended Will | Wednesday, August 15, 2012 | |
| 12S | Alan Kim, Dartmouth | The Becoming of Being: A Historical Fragment | Friday, May 11, 2012 | |
| 12S | Sam Kerstein, Maryland | The Dignity of Persons: An Unorthodox Kantian Approach | Friday, May 4, 2012 | |
| 12S | Nancy Sherman, Georgetown | Recovering Lost Goodness: Guilt, Shame, and Self-Empathy | Monday, April 2, 2012 | |
| 12S | Eleni Manis, Franklin & Marshall | A Floor for Democratic Distributive Justice | Friday, March 2, 2012 | |
| 12W | Ann Bumpus, Dartmouth | Reply to Marquis | Friday, February 17, 2012 | |
| 12W | Smaranda Aldea, Mellon Teaching Fellow | Husserlian Phenomenology Rethought: Phantasie and the Path to Eidetic Knowledge | Friday, February 3, 2012 | |
| 12W | Rusty Jones, Harvard University | Friends of the Gods in the Republic | Wednesday, January 25, 2012 | |
| 11F | Alice Phillips Walden, Dartmouth College | Failures of Courage in Ancient Philosophy | Friday, November 18 | |
| 11F | Julia Markovits, MIT | Saints, Heroes, Sages, and Villains | Friday, October 7, 2011 | |
| 11X | Robert Fogelin, Emeritus, Dartmouth College | Hume's Role in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion | Friday, July 29, 2011 | |
| 10X | Anat Biletzki, Tel Aviv | De-transcendentizing Religion with Hobbes and Wittgenstein | Tuesday, August 10, 2010 | Co-Sponsored by the Religion Department |
| 10S | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein | 36 Arguments for the Existence of God | Tuesday, April 27, 2010 | Co-Sponsored by the Religion Department, and Leslie Humanities Center |
| 10S | Lawrence Crocker | Hope to God | Wednesday, April 28, 2010 | Co-Sponsored by the Religion Department |
| 10S | Helen Nissenbaum, NYU | What's Wrong with Behavioral Advertising? | Tuesday, May 18, 2010 | |
| 09F | Peter Graham, University of Massachusetts, Amherst | In Defense of Objectivism About Moral Obligation | Friday, November 6, 2009 | |
| 09F | Ishani Maitra, Rutgers University | Subordinating Speech | Tuesday, October 13, 2009 | |
| 09X | Mario De Caro, Tufts/Roma Tre University | Davidson and Naturalism | Friday, July 31, 09 | |
| 09X | Rainer Forst, University of Frankfurt | Two Pictures of Justice | August 12, 2009 | |
| 09S | Martin Lin, Rutgers University | Friday, May 29, 09 | ||
| 09S | Robert Plotnik, MIT alumnus, patent attorney | The Future of Inventing | Friday, April 24, 09 | |
| 09W | Barbara Fultner, Denison University | Why Philosophers of Language Need (a) Social Theory | Friday, January 16, 09 | |
| 09W | Bernhard Nickel, Harvard University | What Ravens and Rivers Teach Us about Theorizing: Laws in the Special Sciences | Friday, January 23, 09 | |
| 09W | Larry Crocker, Dartmouth College | Any Possible Alternative for Consequentialists | Friday, February 6, 09 | |
| 09W | Elizabeth V. Spelman, Smith College | Desire and Disposability | February 11, 2009 | |
| 08X | Bob Fogelin, Dartmouth College | Inapprehensability | Wednesday, July 2, 2008 | |
| 08X | John Roberts, University of North Carolina | Why do laws of nature support counterfactual conditionals? | Friday, July 25, 2008 | |
| 08X | Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame | Friday, August 1, 2008 | ||
| 08W | Bob Fogelin, Dartmouth College | Hume's Skeptical Crisis | Friday, January 11, 2008 | |
| 08W | John Kulvicki, Dartmouth College | The Nature of Noise | Friday, February 8, 2008 | |
| 08W | Penelope Maddy, UC Irvine | How Applied Mathematics Became Pure | Friday, February 15, 2008 | Co-Sponsored by the Math Dept |
| 08W | David Estlund, Brown University | Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework | Friday, February 29, 2008 | |
| 08W | Adam Kolber, Princeton University | The Subjective Experience of Punishment | Tuesday, March 25, 2008 | Co-Sponsored by Legal Studies |
| 08S | Alan Hajek, Australian National University | Most Counterfactuals are False | Monday, March 31, 2008 | |
| 08F | Patricia Curd, Purdue University | Thought and Body in Heraclitus and Anaxagoras | Thursday, October 09, 2008 | BACAP |
| 08F | Oliver Rauprich, Institute for Medical Ethics and History of Medicine, Ruhr-University Bochum | Who Should Pay for ART? Conceptual and Ethical Considerations on the Medical Significance of Infertility | October 15, 2008 | |
| 08F | Thomas McCarthy, Yale University | Liberal Universalism and the Dilemma of Development | Friday, November 14, 08 | |
| 08F | Jonathan Vogel, Amherst College | The Luminosity of the Mental | Friday, November 21, 08 | |
| 07X | James Harold, Mt. Holyoke College | The Cognitive Link Between Moral and Aesthetic Value | Friday, June 29, 2007 | |
| 07X | Heidi Maibom, Carleton University | The Descent of Shame | Friday, July 27, 2007 | |
| 07W | Jeremy Avigad, Carnegie Mellon | Understanding Proofs | Friday, January 5, 07 | Co-sponsored by Math Dept |
| 07W | Matti Eklund, Cornell | Carnap and Ontological Pluralism | Friday, January 26, 07 | |
| 07S | Maeve Cooke, University College Dublin | Friday, April 27, 07 | ||
| 07S | Charlotte Witt, University of New Hampshire | Humans, Persons and Social Individuals | Friday, May 11, 07 | |
| 07S | Sigrun Svavarsdottir, Ohio State University | The Virtue of Practical Rationality | Wednesday, May 16, 2007 | |
| 07S | Mary Louise Gill, Brown University | Parmenides in Plato's Theaetetus and Sophist | Friday, May 25, 07 | |
| 07F | Jana Sawicki, Williams College | Foucault and Sexual Freedom: Why Embrace an Ethics of Pleasure | Friday, November 2 | |
| 07F | Eugene Marshall, Dartmouth College | A Spinozist Solution to the Problem of Weakness of Will | Wednesday, December 5, 2007 | |
| 06X | Matthew Slater, U of Idaho | Why the Long Face? Biological Natural Kinds Without Tears | Friday, June 30, 2006 | |
| 06X | John Roberts, U North Carolina | The Meta-Theoretic Conception of Laws | Friday, July 7, 2006 | |
| 06X | Jeffrey Ketland, U of Edinburgh | TBA | Friday, July 21, 2006 | |
| 06X | Paul Audi | Friday, August 4, 2006 | ||
| 06X | Michael Smith, Princeton | The Explanatory Role of Being Rational | Thursday, August 24, 2006 | |
| 06W | Nishi Shah, Amherst College | TBA | Friday, January 20, 2006 | |
| 06W | David Velleman, NYU | TBA | Friday, Feb. 3, 2006 | |
| 06W | Sally Haslanger, MIT | TBA | Friday, March 3, 2006 | |
| 06S | Elizabeth Ashford, St. Andrews (visiting Harvard) | The Separateness of Persons Objection to Utilitarianism | Friday, April 7, 2006 | |
| 06S | Tom Kelly, Princeton | Disagreement, Dogmatism, and Belief Polarization | Friday, April 21, 2006 | |
| 06S | Gordon Belot, Pittsburgh | Gödel on Dust, Time, and Symmetry | Friday, May 12, 2006 | |
| 06F | LIVIA GUIMARAES, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais | Skeptical Tranquility and Hume's Manner of Death | Friday, September 22, 2006 | |
| 06F | THOMAS HURKA, University of Toronto | Asymmetries in Value | Friday, September 29, 2006 | |
| 06F | DIANA MEYERS, University of Connecticut at Storrs | Affect, Corporeity, and Practical Intelligence | Friday, October 6, 06 | |
| 06F | JONATHAN WESTPHAL, Idaho State University | TBA | Thursday, October 26, 2006 | |
| 05X | Bill Pollard, University of Edinburgh | Identification and Habits | Friday, July 8, 2005 | |
| 05X | Roberta Millstein, California State University, East Bay | The Determinism/Indeterminism Question in the Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology | Friday, July 29, 2005 | |
| 05X | Soran Reader, University of Durham, England | Need, Capability, and Equality | Friday, Aug. 5, 2005 | |
| 05W | TIMOTHY ROSENKOETTER, Dartmouth College | A Geometrical Ethics: Kant on Constructing the Moral Law | Friday, January 14, 2005 | |
| 05W | ROBERT C. SCHARFF, University of New Hampshire | Thinking' Technoscience as Consummatory Event: Comte's Pleasure, Heidegger's Problem" | Friday, February 25, 2005 | |
| 05W | SUSAN STUART, University of Glasgow, Scotland | Extended Body, Extended Mind: The Self As Prosthesis | Friday, March 4, 2005 | |
| 05S | LARRY CROCKER, Dartmouth College | To Have a Justifying Reason | Friday, April 1, 2005 | |
| 05S | CASEY O'CALLAGHAN, Bates College | Constructing a Theory of Sounds | Friday, May 6, 2005 | |
| 05F | Aki Kanamori, Math, Boston University | Set-Theoretic Knowledge: Beyond True and False | Friday, October 7, 2005 | Co-sponsored by Math Dept |
| 05F | Don Garrett, NYU | The First Virtuous Motives to Justice and Fidelity: Hume's Circle Argument Squared | Friday, October 14, 2005 | |
| 05F | Johanna Meehan, Grinnell College | Trauma and Subjectivity | Thursday, November 3, 2005 | |
| 05F | Hiedi Maibom, Carlton University | Patriotic Virtue | Friday, December 2, 2005 | |
| 04X | David Sanford, Duke University | Questions about Persistence | Friday, July 2, 2004 | |
| 04X | Mike Ridge, University of Edinburgh | Fairness and Non-compliance | Friday, July 16, 2004 | |
| 04X | Sean McKeever, Cornell University | How to Object to a Talking Principle | Friday, August 6, 2004 | |
| 04W | ||||
| 04S | Alex Byrne, MIT | Transparency and Self-Knowledge | Friday, April 2, 2004 | |
| 04S | Luciano Floridi, Oxford | On the Morality of Artificial Agents | Monday, April 19, 2004 | Co-sponsored by Ethics Institute |
| 04S | Helen Nissenbaum, New York University | Contextual Integrity: A Cultural Approach to Protecting Privacy | Friday, May 7, 2004 |
25X
Michael Gill, Edinburgh University
Humean Constructivism and the Authoritative Ought
Monday, July 28, 2025
25S
Keshav Singh, University of Alabama, Birmingham
The Injustices of Coarse-Grained Racial Categories
Wednesday, May 7, 2025
Ethics Institute at Dartmouth
25S
Kevin Richardson, Duke University
Sexual Orientation: What is it? What do we want it to be?
Friday, April 4, 2025
Office of Pluralism and Leadership
25W
George Sher, Rice University
On Speaking One's Mind
Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Ethics Institute at Dartmouth
25W
Nina Emery, Mount Holyoke
Explanation As a Guide to What There Is and What It's Like
Friday, January 17, 2025
24F
Keren Gorodeisky, Auburn College
Understanding Each Other
Friday, November 15, 2024
24S
Martin Jonsson, Lund University
What We Mean as What We Say or Would Have Said
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
23F
Nandi Theunissen, University of Pittsburgh
Is Good Fundamental?
Friday, November 10, 2023
23X
Michael Cholbi, University of Edinburgh
Love, Identity, and the Duty to Grieve
Friday, August 11, 2023
23S
Aaron Meskin, University of Georgia
"Let's go see that together!": Going Out as a Core Aesthetic Activity
Friday, May 5, 2023
23S
Jenny Saul, University of Waterloo
Saying the Quiet Part Loud: How Figleaves Facilitate the Spread of Blatant Racism and Obvious Falsehood
Monday, April 17, 2023
23W
Colin Allen, University of Pittsburgh
How Much are Large Language Models narrowing the Gap to Human Intelligence?
Friday, January 20, 2023
22F
Takaaki Matsui, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Hitotsubashi University
Inferentialism, Conceptual Engineering, and Path-Dependence of Topic Continuity
Tuesday, October 11, 2022
22X
Dave Ward, University of Edinburgh
Perceptual Knowledge and Embodied Skill
Friday, August 19, 2022
22S
Alex Horne, Cambridge
Agential Plasticity
Thursday, March 31, 2022
22W
E. Hande Tuna, UC Santa Cruz
Modes of Imagining: Selective and Reflective Imagining
Friday, February 4, 2022
21F
Chad Hansen, University of Hong Kong
Believing in Dao
Monday, September 27, 2021
20W
Shen-yi Liao, University of Puget Sound
Memorials and Memories
Friday, February 7, 2020
20W
Gabriel Rabin, NYU Abu Dhabi
The Structure of Analog Representation
Friday, January 17, 2020
19F
Eric Campbell, University of Maryland, Baltimore
Pragmatic Naturalism: A New Methodology for Metaethics and Metamorals
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
19X
Elinor Mason, University of Edinburgh
Sexual Refusal and the Fragility of Women's Authority
Monday, August 9, 2019
19W
Alejandro Pérez Carballo, UMass-Amherst
New Boundary Lines
Friday, February 22, 2019
18F
Sybren Heyndels, KU Leuven
Strawson's Method in Freedom and Resentment (Work-in-Progress)
Monday, November 19, 2018
18F
Ned Markosian, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
The Open Future
Friday, October 19, 2018
18F
Takaaki Matsui, University of Tokyo (Visiting Scholar, Dartmouth)
Ontological Pluralism and Deflationism (Work-in-Progress)
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
18F
Adam Hosein, Northeastern
Gender Libertarianism in the Workplace
Friday, September 28, 2018
18F
Lambert Wiesing, Friedrich Schiller University
Luxury: The Dadaism of Possession
Wednesday, Septem
18X
Mario de Caro, Universitå Rome Tre & Tufts
Naturalism and Nature
Friday, August 17, 2018
18X
Robert Stecker, Central Michigan University
Moral Norms and Nature Appreciation
Friday, August 10, 2018
18X
Martin Seel, Goethe University, Frankfurt
Two Dimensions of Language
Friday, August 3, 2018
18X
Patrick Todd, Edinburgh
The Open Past, Classical Style
Friday, July 17, 2018
18S
Richard Moran, Harvard
Speech as Expression and as "Social Act of Mind"
Friday, May 11, 2018
18S
Daniel J. Singer, University of Pennsylvania
Polarization, Forgetting, and a Computational Approach to Social Epistemology
Friday, April 27, 2018
18S
Branden Fitelson, Northeastern
p is true, but S ought not to believe/assert p
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
18S
David Woodruff Smith, UC-Irvine
The Inner Liar Paradox: As Logic Meets Phenomenology
Wednesday, April 10, 2018
18W
Agostín Rayo, MI
On the Open-Endedness of Logical Space
Friday, March 2, 2018
18W
Robin Dembroff, Yale
Oppressive Categories
Friday, February 23, 2018
18W
Michael Silberstein, Elizabethtown College
Contextual Emergence
Friday, February 9, 2018
17F
Anna Christina Soy Ribeiro, Texas Tech
The Musical Protolanguage Hypothesis and the Origins of Poetry
Friday, November 10, 2017
17F
Monique L. Wonderly, Priceton and UCSD
Attachment and Felt Necessity: Engaging with Value in Love and Addiction
Friday, September 29, 2017
17X
Kris McDaniel, Syracuse University
The Essence of Being
Friday, August 25, 2017
17X
Brian Rabern, Universty of Edinburgh
Future Contingents and Temporal Omniscience
Tuesday, August 8, 2017
17S
Shaun Nichols, Arizona
Self as Primitive: The View from Lexical Semantics
Friday, May 19, 2017
17S
Daniel Smyth, Wesleyan
Kant's Infinities
Wednesday, May 12, 2017
17S
Evan Thompson, British Columbia
Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
17W
Michael Bukoski, Dartmouth
Some Ethical Implications of Moral Uncertainty
Friday, February 17, 2017
17W
Scott Jenkins, University of Kansas
Nietzsche's Psychology of Metaphysics (or, Metaphysics as Revenge)
Friday, January 27, 2017
16F
Stephen Darwall, Yale
What Are Moral Reasons
Friday, November 4, 2016
16X
Anders J. Schoubye, Visiting Edinburgh Professor
Type Ambiguous Names
Friday, August 24, 2016
16S
Nina Emery, Brown
Actualism without Presentism? Not by Way of the Relativity Objection
Friday, April 22, 2016
15F
Melissa Merritt, University of New South Wales
Attention, Perception, Experience
Friday, November 13, 2015
15F
Daniel Sutherland, University of Illinois, Chicago
The Place of Measurement in Kant's Philosophy of Mathematics
Friday, October 23, 2015
15F
Russ Shafer-Landau, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Categorical Moral Reasons
Friday, October 16, 2015
15F
Sarah Buss, Michigan
Personal ideals, Moral Requirements, and the Ideal of Rational Agency
Friday, October 2, 2015
14S
Alfred Mele, Florida State University
Two Libertarian Theories: or Why Event-causal Libertarians Should Prefer My Daring Libertarian View to Robert Kane's View
Friday, April 24, 2015
14S
Kristie Dotson, Michigan State
A Road to Oblivion, or Joe Scarborough on Ferguson
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Women's and Gender Studies Program, Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth, Ferguson Teaching Collective at Dartmouth
14W
Kieran Setiya, MIT
The Problem of Akrasia
Friday, March 13, 2015
14F
Elisabeth Camp, Rutgers University
Why Metaphors Make Good Insults
Friday, October 10, 2014
14X
Houston Smit, University of Arizona
Kant on Unity of Apperception and the Spontaneity of Cognition
Thursday, July 24, 2014
14X
Jesper Kallestrup, Visiting Edinburgh Professor
Extended Knowledge
Extended Knowledge
14S
Tom Hill, Jr., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Tom Hill, Jr., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Friday, May 9, 2014
14W
Ken Baynes, Syracuse
Autonomy, Social Oppression, and Adaptive Preference Formation
Friday, March 7, 2014
14W
Karen Ng, Siena College/Vanderbilt
From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Ideology: On the Relation Between Life and Consciousness from Hegel to Critical Theory
Friday, January 31, 2014
14W
Smaranda Aldea, Dartmouth
Beyond the Eidetic Method - Transcendental Phenomenology, the Sciences, and the Everyday
Friday, December 10, 2014
13F
Josh Schechter, Brown
Does Expressivism Have an Epistemological Advantage Over Realism?
Friday, November 8, 2013
13F
Sharon Street, NYU
Normativity and Water: The Analogy and its Limits
Friday, October 25, 2013
13F
Colin Koopman, Oregon
Critique and Judgment in Political Theory: Foucault and Butler on the Politics of Sex
Thursday, October 10, 2013
13X
Mark Budolfson, Stanford
Individual Freedom, the Tragedy of the Commons, and the Perils of Social Engineering: The Case for Modest Libertarianism
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
13X
James Van Cleve, USC
Reid on Direct Realism and Nonexistent Objects of Conception
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
13X
Elinor Mason, Edinburgh
Responsibility for Moral Ignorance
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
13S
Amie Thomasson, University of Miami
Easy Ontology and its Consequences
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
13S
Brian Cantwell Smith, University of Toronto
Creatures Made of Clay
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
13S
Daniel Loick, Goethe University and Harvard
The Young Hegel as a Critic of Juridicism
Friday, April 5, 2013
13S
Katharine Gelber, University of Queensland (Australia)
Universalism, Freedom of Speech, and the Capabilities Approach
Friday, March 29, 2013
13W
Neil Sinhababu, National University of Singapore
Emotional Perception of Morality
Friday, March 8, 2013
13W
Smaranda Aldea, Mellon Research Fellow, Dartmouth College
Phenomenology and the Problem of Content
Friday, February 15, 2013
13W
Paul Taylor, Warburg Institute
Dead Deities in Western Art
Friday, February 8, 2013
Co-sponsored by Art History, the Leslie Center for the Humanities, and the Dickey Center for International Understanding
13W
Shamik Dasgupta, Princeton University
The Possibility of Physicalism
Friday, January 18, 2013
12F
Catherine Elgin, Harvard University
The Commonwealth of Epistemic Ends
Friday, November 9, 2012
12F
Dominic McIver Lopes, University of British Columbia
Photography, Plugged and Unplugged
Friday, October 19, 2012
Co-Sponsored by Digital Humanities and Studio Art
12F
Corey Anton, Valley State University
Natural Guilt, Death Acceptance, and the Meaning of Transcendence
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Co-Sponsored by the Geisel School of Medicine
12F
Robert Hopkins, University of Sheffield
Sculpting in Time?
Friday, October 5, 2012
12X
Tillman Vierkant, Edinburgh
Mental Muscles and the Extended Will
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
12S
Alan Kim, Dartmouth
The Becoming of Being: A Historical Fragment
Friday, May 11, 2012
12S
Sam Kerstein, Maryland
The Dignity of Persons: An Unorthodox Kantian Approach
Friday, May 4, 2012
12S
Nancy Sherman, Georgetown
Recovering Lost Goodness: Guilt, Shame, and Self-Empathy
Monday, April 2, 2012
12S
Eleni Manis, Franklin & Marshall
A Floor for Democratic Distributive Justice
Friday, March 2, 2012
12W
Ann Bumpus, Dartmouth
Reply to Marquis
Friday, February 17, 2012
12W
Smaranda Aldea, Mellon Teaching Fellow
Husserlian Phenomenology Rethought: Phantasie and the Path to Eidetic Knowledge
Friday, February 3, 2012
12W
Rusty Jones, Harvard University
Friends of the Gods in the Republic
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
11F
Alice Phillips Walden, Dartmouth College
Failures of Courage in Ancient Philosophy
Friday, November 18
11F
Julia Markovits, MIT
Saints, Heroes, Sages, and Villains
Friday, October 7, 2011
11X
Robert Fogelin, Emeritus, Dartmouth College
Hume's Role in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Friday, July 29, 2011
10X
Anat Biletzki, Tel Aviv
De-transcendentizing Religion with Hobbes and Wittgenstein
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Co-Sponsored by the Religion Department
10S
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
36 Arguments for the Existence of God
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Co-Sponsored by the Religion Department, and Leslie Humanities Center
10S
Lawrence Crocker
Hope to God
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Co-Sponsored by the Religion Department
10S
Helen Nissenbaum, NYU
What's Wrong with Behavioral Advertising?
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
09F
Peter Graham, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
In Defense of Objectivism About Moral Obligation
Friday, November 6, 2009
09F
Ishani Maitra, Rutgers University
Subordinating Speech
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
09X
Mario De Caro, Tufts/Roma Tre University
Davidson and Naturalism
Friday, July 31, 09
09X
Rainer Forst, University of Frankfurt
Two Pictures of Justice
August 12, 2009
09S
Martin Lin, Rutgers University
Friday, May 29, 09
09S
Robert Plotnik, MIT alumnus, patent attorney
The Future of Inventing
Friday, April 24, 09
09W
Barbara Fultner, Denison University
Why Philosophers of Language Need (a) Social Theory
Friday, January 16, 09
09W
Bernhard Nickel, Harvard University
What Ravens and Rivers Teach Us about Theorizing: Laws in the Special Sciences
Friday, January 23, 09
09W
Larry Crocker, Dartmouth College
Any Possible Alternative for Consequentialists
Friday, February 6, 09
09W
Elizabeth V. Spelman, Smith College
Desire and Disposability
February 11, 2009
08X
Bob Fogelin, Dartmouth College
Inapprehensability
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
08X
John Roberts, University of North Carolina
Why do laws of nature support counterfactual conditionals?
Friday, July 25, 2008
08X
Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame
Friday, August 1, 2008
08W
Bob Fogelin, Dartmouth College
Hume's Skeptical Crisis
Friday, January 11, 2008
08W
John Kulvicki, Dartmouth College
The Nature of Noise
Friday, February 8, 2008
08W
Penelope Maddy, UC Irvine
How Applied Mathematics Became Pure
Friday, February 15, 2008
Co-Sponsored by the Math Dept
08W
David Estlund, Brown University
Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework
Friday, February 29, 2008
08W
Adam Kolber, Princeton University
The Subjective Experience of Punishment
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Co-Sponsored by Legal Studies
08S
Alan Hajek, Australian National University
Most Counterfactuals are False
Monday, March 31, 2008
08F
Patricia Curd, Purdue University
Thought and Body in Heraclitus and Anaxagoras
Thursday, October 09, 2008
BACAP
08F
Oliver Rauprich, Institute for Medical Ethics and History of Medicine, Ruhr-University Bochum
Who Should Pay for ART? Conceptual and Ethical Considerations on the Medical Significance of Infertility
October 15, 2008
08F
Thomas McCarthy, Yale University
Liberal Universalism and the Dilemma of Development
Friday, November 14, 08
08F
Jonathan Vogel, Amherst College
The Luminosity of the Mental
Friday, November 21, 08
07X
James Harold, Mt. Holyoke College
The Cognitive Link Between Moral and Aesthetic Value
Friday, June 29, 2007
07X
Heidi Maibom, Carleton University
The Descent of Shame
Friday, July 27, 2007
07W
Jeremy Avigad, Carnegie Mellon
Understanding Proofs
Friday, January 5, 07
Co-sponsored by Math Dept
07W
Matti Eklund, Cornell
Carnap and Ontological Pluralism
Friday, January 26, 07
07S
Maeve Cooke, University College Dublin
Friday, April 27, 07
07S
Charlotte Witt, University of New Hampshire
Humans, Persons and Social Individuals
Friday, May 11, 07
07S
Sigrun Svavarsdottir, Ohio State University
The Virtue of Practical Rationality
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
07S
Mary Louise Gill, Brown University
Parmenides in Plato's Theaetetus and Sophist
Friday, May 25, 07
07F
Jana Sawicki, Williams College
Foucault and Sexual Freedom: Why Embrace an Ethics of Pleasure
Friday, November 2
07F
Eugene Marshall, Dartmouth College
A Spinozist Solution to the Problem of Weakness of Will
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
06X
Matthew Slater, U of Idaho
Why the Long Face? Biological Natural Kinds Without Tears
Friday, June 30, 2006
06X
John Roberts, U North Carolina
The Meta-Theoretic Conception of Laws
Friday, July 7, 2006
06X
Jeffrey Ketland, U of Edinburgh
TBA
Friday, July 21, 2006
06X
Paul Audi
Friday, August 4, 2006
06X
Michael Smith, Princeton
The Explanatory Role of Being Rational
Thursday, August 24, 2006
06W
Nishi Shah, Amherst College
TBA
Friday, January 20, 2006
06W
David Velleman, NYU
TBA
Friday, Feb. 3, 2006
06W
Sally Haslanger, MIT
TBA
Friday, March 3, 2006
06S
Elizabeth Ashford, St. Andrews (visiting Harvard)
The Separateness of Persons Objection to Utilitarianism
Friday, April 7, 2006
06S
Tom Kelly, Princeton
Disagreement, Dogmatism, and Belief Polarization
Friday, April 21, 2006
06S
Gordon Belot, Pittsburgh
Gödel on Dust, Time, and Symmetry
Friday, May 12, 2006
06F
LIVIA GUIMARAES, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Skeptical Tranquility and Hume's Manner of Death
Friday, September 22, 2006
06F
THOMAS HURKA, University of Toronto
Asymmetries in Value
Friday, September 29, 2006
06F
DIANA MEYERS, University of Connecticut at Storrs
Affect, Corporeity, and Practical Intelligence
Friday, October 6, 06
06F
JONATHAN WESTPHAL, Idaho State University
TBA
Thursday, October 26, 2006
05X
Bill Pollard, University of Edinburgh
Identification and Habits
Friday, July 8, 2005
05X
Roberta Millstein, California State University, East Bay
The Determinism/Indeterminism Question in the Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology
Friday, July 29, 2005
05X
Soran Reader, University of Durham, England
Need, Capability, and Equality
Friday, Aug. 5, 2005
05W
TIMOTHY ROSENKOETTER, Dartmouth College
A Geometrical Ethics: Kant on Constructing the Moral Law
Friday, January 14, 2005
05W
ROBERT C. SCHARFF, University of New Hampshire
Thinking' Technoscience as Consummatory Event: Comte's Pleasure, Heidegger's Problem"
Friday, February 25, 2005
05W
SUSAN STUART, University of Glasgow, Scotland
Extended Body, Extended Mind: The Self As Prosthesis
Friday, March 4, 2005
05S
LARRY CROCKER, Dartmouth College
To Have a Justifying Reason
Friday, April 1, 2005
05S
CASEY O'CALLAGHAN, Bates College
Constructing a Theory of Sounds
Friday, May 6, 2005
05F
Aki Kanamori, Math, Boston University
Set-Theoretic Knowledge: Beyond True and False
Friday, October 7, 2005
Co-sponsored by Math Dept
05F
Don Garrett, NYU
The First Virtuous Motives to Justice and Fidelity: Hume's Circle Argument Squared
Friday, October 14, 2005
05F
Johanna Meehan, Grinnell College
Trauma and Subjectivity
Thursday, November 3, 2005
05F
Hiedi Maibom, Carlton University
Patriotic Virtue
Friday, December 2, 2005
04X
David Sanford, Duke University
Questions about Persistence
Friday, July 2, 2004
04X
Mike Ridge, University of Edinburgh
Fairness and Non-compliance
Friday, July 16, 2004
04X
Sean McKeever, Cornell University
How to Object to a Talking Principle
Friday, August 6, 2004
04W
04S
Alex Byrne, MIT
Transparency and Self-Knowledge
Friday, April 2, 2004
04S
Luciano Floridi, Oxford
On the Morality of Artificial Agents
Monday, April 19, 2004
Co-sponsored by Ethics Institute
04S
Helen Nissenbaum, New York University
Contextual Integrity: A Cultural Approach to Protecting Privacy
Friday, May 7, 2004