91福利

Every semester, our department invites several guest speakers to lecture on various topics. All lectures are free, and are open to all members of the community and to the general public.

They will take place at the Layton Room, Oakham House, from 3:00-5:00 on the dates listed below.

If you have questions about our speaker series, please contact this year's organizer, Dr. Pirachula Chulanon (pirachula@torontomu.ca).

Winter 2026

March 5, 3-5 p.m.
(Virginia)
The Corruption of Salience: The True Digital Threat to Autonomy (Co-authored with Blake Harris)

Abstract: Digital technologies overwhelm our attention in ways that are ethically harmful. Philosophers and tech activists have converged on an account of these ethical harms, which we call the 鈥淩eflective View鈥�. Developers and AI-based recommender systems make apps as salient as possible, which undermines our capacity to control attention through reflective deliberation and choice. We provide the most rigorous empirical basis for this picture to date, grounding it in how hyper-salient smartphones interfere with executive control. Yet these same empirical details betray that the Reflective View rests on a false assumption: that salience is not reasons-responsive. In contrast, salience results from implicit learning mechanisms that track what we have reason to find relevant, given our values, emotions, and experience. This raises problems for arguments that digital distractions manipulate us or undermine our autonomy, which assume that salience is sub-rational. Worse, it hands tech an escape hatch: developers can (and do) argue that their apps are salient because they track our values. We defend an alternative view: hyper-salient distractions are harmful not because salience is sub-rational, but rather because they corrupt the reasons-responsiveness of salience. Digital distractions pose more dire problems than the literature recognizes, undermining our autonomy from top to bottom: they undermine (1) our capacity to regulate attention in response to deliberative reasons (as previous philosophers argue), (2) the synchronic capacity for salience to track our values, and (3) the diachronic capacity for implicit learning systems to update salience in a way that tracks our reasons to attend.

March 26, 2026, 3-5 p.m.
(Northwestern)
Kant鈥檚 Cosmological Sublime

Abstract: In a famous passage, Kant writes that the 鈥渟tarry heavens鈥� arouse awe and admiration 鈥� suggesting that they are, in the terms of his later aesthetics, sublime. Many in Kant鈥檚 time, and ours, agree. In this talk, however, I suggest that the experience of the starry heavens is somewhat difficult to account for, according to Kant鈥檚 theory of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment. I propose that in a little-discussed passage (CJ 5:254-6), Kant is in effect attempting to address this challenge, by suggesting a different, 鈥渃osmological鈥� version of the sublime. This alternative conception, I propose, not only suggests a different phenomenology of sublime experience 鈥� an imaginative 鈥渇light鈥� across the universe (the cosmos), prompted by and intertwined with scientific inquiry 鈥� but also promises a different way for the Kantian subject to experience her place in nature, not as superior to it, but as part of it as a metaphysical whole.

April 2, 2026, 3-5 p.m.
(Cardiff)
The Axiological Foundations of Taste (and the Aesthetic Foundations of Axiology)

Abstract: This paper explores a sorely neglected fact: throughout the history of aesthetics, the notion of (good) taste has been ineliminably underpinned by ethical assumptions. Specifically, ethical perspectives (including moral perspectives) have been taken as axiomatic. The paper discusses three ways in which this appears to be the case, discusses the implications of these assumptions, and argues that the best explanation of this is that taste is, primarily, an ethical notion that is prior to, and formative of, all of our other aesthetic experiences, evaluations, etc. This account suggests an objectivist basis for taste, to the extent that it鈥檚 plausible to think that at least some ethical outlooks are clearly better than others, and a qualified universalism, to the extent that it鈥檚 plausible that some features of acceptable ethical outlooks are universal鈥撯�搒uch as are captured, for instance, in notions like 鈥榟uman nature鈥�, 鈥榗ommon humanity鈥�, 鈥榟uman capabilities鈥�, etc. Not only does this account emerge as the best explanation for the facts explored at the outset; it also neatly explains why pluralism and cosmopolitanism are becoming increasingly popular in aesthetics, and offers a cautionary tale against them.

April 9, 2026, 3-5 p.m.
(Rutgers)
The Problem of Perfectly Natural Change

Abstract: David Lewis鈥檚 problem of temporary intrinsics assumes a forced choice:  one must either accept the A-theory of time (and a particular version of it, presentism), or treat seemingly intrinsic properties as really relations to times, or admit that things persist by means of temporal parts. The foundations of Lewis鈥檚 argument are shaky.  But perhaps something can be built in the vicinity 鈥� an argument that resembles Lewis鈥檚 in some ways, but that shifts the focus from the intrinsic to what Lewis called 鈥減erfectly natural properties鈥� (a category that includes relations), and that looks at what change would require in certain possible scenarios.  Given some assumptions about change, the possibility of endurance, and the contingency of space-time (assumptions that seem plausible to me, and to which Lewis himself seems to be sympathetic), an argument for the possible truth of the A-theory emerges.  How should a B-theorist, like Lewis, react to this conclusion?  Perhaps one could maintain that the B-theory is only contingently true.  I suspect, however, that the A-theory is, if false, necessarily false; and I shall offer some reason to think so.  

Fall 2025

October 9, 2025, 3:00-5:00pm 
 (Concordia University)
Judgment and Interpretation in Johann Clauberg鈥檚 Logica vetus et nova (1654)

Abstract: Assuming that logic is a normative enterprise, what is logic normative for? Does it prescribe rules for thinking, for reasoning, for asserting, for interpreting assertions, or for something else? In this talk, I reconstruct Johann Clauberg鈥檚 position on this question in his Logica vetus et nova (1654), perhaps the first text to be labeled a 鈥淐artesian鈥� logic, in light of contemporaneous debates on the aims and nature of logic. Clauberg鈥檚 logic seeks to reconcile an internalist view of logic as concerned with the correctness of an individual agent鈥檚 thoughts or reasonings, characteristic of Descartes and the Augustinian tradition, with an externalist view of logic as dealing with norms for socially situated uses of language, characteristic of the humanist tradition. Clauberg identifies four motives for the study of logic, which give rise to a fourfold division of his treatise: 1) to correctly form one鈥檚 own thoughts; 2) to effectively teach others; 3) to interpret charitably what is said by others; and 4) to judge what is said. This organization results from overlaying two sets of distinctions, one between interior and exterior discourse, and the other between genesis (or composition) and analysis (or resolution) of thought or language. With this scheme, Clauberg attempts to weave together several roles that were traditionally or more recently ascribed to the instruments of philosophy: to elucidate good cognitive habits, pedagogical techniques, a theory of text interpretation, as well as rules of logical consequence. Just how tightly Clauberg is able to unify the various aims of logic remains an open question. 
 

October 30, 2025, 3:00-5:00pm
(Arizona State University)
Bad Faith Arguments

Abstract: Arguing is a social activity in which people exchange reasons and information with the aim of changing each other鈥檚 minds. One common accusation in a conflict is that the other side 鈥渁rgues in bad faith鈥� or gives 鈥渂ad faith arguments.鈥� The phenomenon of arguing in bad faith and attributing bad faith to opponents is fascinating but there is no sustained investigation of it. In this essay, we explore several questions: What is arguing in bad faith? When should we believe someone is arguing in bad faith? How often are we justified to believe that others argue in bad faith?

 
November 6, 2025, 3:00-5:00pm 
(University of Texas at Austin)
Music and the Regulation of Existential Feelings in Grief

Abstract: Listening to music is a popular means of regulating emotion, which is usually aimed at influencing the experience of relatively short-lived emotions and moods. Focusing on grief, I will suggest that listening can also help regulate more temporally extended emotional conditions, including what Matthew Ratcliffe has termed 鈥渆xistential feelings.鈥� I will indicate some of the changes to existential feeling that are typical of grief, such as world-distancing and a diminished sense of personal agency, and then explain how music can counteract these debilitating effects. I will also consider the possible objections that using music for regulation trivializes music; that music facilitates maladaptive regulation strategies; and the virtual character of what is presented in music severely restricts its impact on feelings related to being in the actual world. I conclude that listening to music can help to counteract disturbing changes to existential feelings in grief and that it can bolster a sense of agency without producing the unpalatable impression of leaving the dead behind, which accompanies most future-oriented displays of agency in grief.

 
November 13, 2025, 3:00-5:00pm
Nikolas Kompridis (Adjunct Faculty Member, 91福利). 
Critical Theory and the Meaning of the Blues.

Abstract: In this paper drawn from a forthcoming book chapter, I offer multiple elaborations of the 鈥渢he meaning of the blues鈥� to make sense of our present historical moment and to consider whether our inherited traditions of critical thought are adequately responsive to it, particularly the tradition of critical theory represented by the Frankfurt School. I begin with a discussion of the 鈥渂lues鈥� as a musical tradition, looking at how and why its reciprocal, mutually informing relationship to black political thought is historically unique. Although such a relationship is absent from the Frankfurt School critical theory, as it is in almost all traditions of critical thought, I point to a possible point of convergence with the 鈥渂lues鈥� in a curiously undeveloped assertion in Adorno鈥檚 Negative Dialektik: 鈥淭he need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth.鈥� My discussion will then focus on how to comprehend and develop this intriguing but rather opaque assertion, which Adorno left stranded in his major philosophical text. The remaining part of my presentation turns Adorno鈥檚 sentence into a sketch of an alternative conception of critical theory that departs radically from its Habermasian and post-Habermasian variants. I then connect my alternative conception to some extra-musical  and time-diagnostic ways of understanding the 鈥渕eaning of the blues,鈥� to show they can together illuminate our present moment and not too distant future.

 
November 27, 2025, 3:00-5:00pm 
(Simon Fraser University)
Myth, Fascism and the Dialectic

Abstract: In the work undertaken by Theodor W. Adorno and several of his colleagues in the Institute for Social Research during World War II the question of myth plays a salient if distinctly ambivalent role. Myth is both a constituent feature of fascist thought and a prism through which we fascism鈥檚 emergence can be philosophically articulated within the historical dialectic of bourgeois reason. The talk will focus especially Adorno鈥檚 1943 鈥楬istorical-Philosophical Excursus on the Odyssey鈥�, the longer first version of the 鈥極dysseus鈥� chapter from Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno鈥檚 use of myth will be related to other reflections on the dialectic of fascism and myth, namely Ernst Cassirer鈥檚 Myth of the State, Furio Jesi鈥檚 writings on right-wing culture and the mythological machine, and Adorno鈥檚 own collaboration with Thomas Mann on Doktor Faustus.