Sem 1, 2025

• Week 0 , July 30
• Speaker: Stephen White, (Tufts)
• Title: Transcendental Arguments
• Abstract: Transcendental arguments purport to specify necessary conditions, either for our having conscious experience or our having a meaningful language. And they have long been thought useful in addressing the most radical skeptical doubts about our knowledge of the external world. In recent years, however, critics have questioned how any argument could take us from premises about internal mental states, appropriately conceived, to conclusions about the external world. I argue that these doubts about transcendental arguments are misplaced. Far from having to provide a bridge between the internal and the external as conceived by the skeptic, the proponent of a transcendental argument need only deny that any such bridge is necessary. In their linguistically oriented forms, transcendental arguments allow us to question the capacity of the skeptic's conception of experience to ground and explain our possession of a meaningful language. If, as I argue, a transcendental argument works, the skeptic's claim is not unanswerable but unstatable.
• Week 1 , Aug 06
• Speaker: Naomi Scheman, (Minnesota)
• Title: Wittgenstein, Lugones, and the Politics of Intelligibility
• Abstract: One way of understanding Wittgenstein's notion of forms of life is through the Argentinian-American Lesbian philosopher María Lugones's notion of "worlds"--inhabited communities of sense-making. "World"-travel involves the realization that who and what one is can shift, often disconcertingly, as one moves from one to another world of sense and sees oneself reflected in different eyes. Such travel can be mandatory for those who are variously marginalized and who thereby acquire skills that the more privileged may lack, including the communal crafting of livable, intelligible identities within alternative, counter-normative "worlds". Following Wittgenstein's injunction that learning a language is learning a form of life, I want to explore responses to the linguistic innovations arising from within trans communities, such as the singular 'they' and the prefix 'cis' for non-trans women and men. As such innovations spread into the dominant "world", I will argue that we ought not to trivialize the resistance with which they are met. These shifts in "what we say" deeply challenge and change the dominant world of sense, undermining a form of life in which there are, for example, only two genders and which one we are is determined by how we are assigned at birth. Such a shift (one I think we have conclusive reason to undertake) is and ought to be seriously disconcerting.
• Week 2 , Aug 13
• Speaker: Waldemar Brys, (University of Notre Dame, Australia)
• Title: Early Confucianism and Knowledge-to
• Abstract: I argue that early Confucian philosophical texts offer us a view on which a person’s knowing to φ---that is, her *knowledge-to*---is a distinct kind of knowledge irreducible to more familiar kinds, such as knowing-that, knowing-how, or knowing-by-acquaintance. Unlike knowing-that, knowing-to is non-propositional, and unlike knowing-how and knowing-by-acquaintance, knowing-to is present only when the agent is performing a corresponding action. I defend such an early Confucian account of knowledge-to by arguing that it offers us an attractive conceptual alternative to standard ways of thinking about the relation between knowledge and action.
• Week 3 , Aug 20
• Speaker: Luara Ferracoili, (University of Sydney)
• Title: Depopulation: an ethical perspective
• Abstract: Two-thirds of humanity now live in states where fertility rates have fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman (Madgavkar et al. 2025, 3). Even states with high standards of living, where one would expect citizens to be optimistic about the prospects of their children such as France, Australia, and Japan have found themselves with fewer than two children per woman—with France at 1.9, Australia at 1.5, and Japan at 1.4. With current trends, some countries could see their populations shrink by up to 50% by the turn of the century (Ibid). How should liberal states respond, given that these changes will significantly disrupt retirement systems and government services like healthcare and aged care? In this talk, I will explore the ethical complexities around potential solutions like boosting fertility, delaying retirement, improving productivity, and increasing skilled migration.
• Week 4 , Aug 27
• Speaker: Tim Bayne, (Monash University)
• Title: Babies, Bots and the Birth of Consciousness
• Abstract: When does consciousness first emerge in human development? I develop one answer to this question, and suggest that that answer has interesting implications for the question of artificial consciousness.
• Week 5 , Sep 3
• Speaker: Christopher Lean, (Macquarie University)
• Title: Maintaining an ethical asymmetry between conserving and creating biodiversity
• Abstract: Environmental conservation as a practice and philosophy has been implicitly and explicitly backward-looking. It is the act of preserving, conserving, restoring, and maintaining the features of the biotic world we inherit. Increasingly, this bias has been confronted by anthropogenic environmental change and increasing capacity to address existential environmental risk with technology. There has been a call to re-evaluate and support the practice of creating novel ecological arrangements (novel ecosystems) and to incorporate the value of engineered biotic novelty (novel biodiversity). This paper confronts the question of what, in principle, could justify a bias in value towards preserving biodiversity over creating biodiversity. I present two related, but ultimately independent, arguments for this position. First, I will consider methodological reasons towards preserving environmental value from axiology. There are a range of reasons that value conserved has been considered preferable to value created, beyond an unguided dispositional status quo bias (Cohen 2011; Brennan & Hamlin 2016). I argue the processes and products of deep history instantiate features that warrant asymmetrical valuation. Second, I present a reconsidered version of ‘authenticity’ as a justification for preserving biodiversity (Katz 2022). Under my presentation, authenticity refers to the evolved entanglement and interdependency of lineages and gene lineages. These interdependencies should be valued epistemologically and aesthetically.
• Week 7 , Sep 17
• Speaker: Melissa Merritt, (University of New South Wales)
• Title: Murdoch on Moral Activity and the Gospels as Art
• Abstract: This paper examines two theses from the philosophy of Iris Murdoch. The first is her view (developed especially in *The Sovereignty of Good*) that moral activity is centrally a matter of *love*, conceived as infinitely perfectible “knowledge of the individual”. What is philosophically distinctive in her thesis, I suggest, turns on her conception of the singularity of the activity itself — that it can only ever be done “alone and differently” (61). The second is Murdoch’s claim that “art is … a case of morals” with respect to the discipline of attention, or love, that it properly involves (58). These ideas remain difficult and provocative, despite their role in reshaping ethics in what have become familiar, even mainstream, ways. I re-examine them in light of Murdoch’s avowed debt to “the Christian ethic, whose centre is an individual” (28). The Gospels narrate the life of Jesus, an individual who loved individuals: so do the Gospels present moral activity as Murdoch understands this – and if so, how? I suggest that the answer is tied to the question of whether we can read them as art. I draw on Murdoch’s conception of moral activity to consider the aesthetically and theologically delicate status of the Gospels as art. I conclude by looking more closely at the representation of love in the Gospels as a way to bring to light what might justify Murdoch’s placement of love at the centre of human goodness.
• Week 8 , Sep 24
• Speaker: Nicholas Southwood, (Australian National University)
• Title: Feasibility Beyond ‘Ought’ Implies ‘Can’
• Abstract: Many of us are tempted by the idea that there is a Feasibility Requirement on the correctness or validity of certain normative claims about politics: claims about the laws and policies states ought to implement, the obligations we have regarding the organisation of social and political life, the institutional arrangements that justice requires us to bring about, and so on. But how exactly should we interpret this idea of a Feasibility Requirement? The standard interpretation treats it as a particular instance of the principle that “Ought” Implies “Can.” I argue that this is a mistake. The problem with the standard interpretation is that it cannot make sense of certain central feasibility-involving inferences. I propose a non-standard interpretation according to which the Feasibility Requirement is instead a specific instance of a stronger principle that I call the Feasible Demands Thesis. This holds that claims about what we ought to do, in order to be correct or valid, must not make infeasible explicit or implicit demands. Interpreting the Feasibility Requirement in terms of the Feasible Demands Thesis helps to undermine the primary motivation for embracing a kind of Revisionary Realism, according to which feasibility’s primary normative significance is not adequately captured by the idea of a Feasibility Requirement. We do not need to go beyond a Feasibility Requirement so long as it is correctly interpreted, or so I argue.
• Week 9 , Oct 8
• Speaker: Krisztina Orbán, (University of Tübingen)
• Title: On Referring: The Beginning
• Abstract: When does referential behavior emerge in ontogeny and phylogeny? The standard answer is that referring requires language. A different answer is that referring already appears in non-human animal communication. I argue that referential behavior is uniquely human but that it emerges prior to the development of language, both in ontogeny and in phylogeny. In this talk, I examine the strongest candidates for non-human referential behavior, drawing partly on existing literature and partly on novel cases. I discuss behaviors such as beckoning, honeyguide interactions, begging, and even pointing among non-human primates, in comparison with human pointing behavior. I compare human and non-human primate pointing and elaborate on the relevant differences (Leavens 2004). To clarify these differences, I propose to compare begging, showing, and pointing gestures. Non-human primates readily understand begging and showing gestures, such as lifting an object to display it (e.g., Grice’s example of presenting St. John’s head on a plate). However, pointing is cognitively and communicatively more complex. Research suggests that showing emerges earlier than pointing in human development (Ruether & Liszkowski 2024), reinforcing the idea that pointing requires distinct cognitive and social abilities that only develop later. I explain the advantages of pointing over showing or simply looking when used for referring—behaviors already displayed by chimpanzees and bonobos. In this discussion, I use pointing to encompass not only Referential Pointing but also to other forms of non-referential pointing that serve different communicative or cognitive functions. When pointing is discussed in the philosophy of language (Kaplan 1978; Stojnić et al. 2013; Dickie 2015), it is usually restricted to pointing that fixes or shows the referent of a demonstrative expression such as this or that. I argue, however, that there are multiple forms of pointing, and this is only one among them. Most discussions—including those by Augustine, Wittgenstein, Kaplan, and Stojnić—focus only on a special use of pointing, such as pointing in language acquisition or for demonstratives, yet their general claims are often treated as if they are applicable to pointing in general. I argue that infants between 9 and 15 months of age already demonstrate referential behavior through their use of referential pointing (Tomasello et al. 2007; Liszkowski & Tomasello 2011; Carpenter et al. 1998; Liszkowski et al. 2007; Tomasello 2010; Leavens et al. 1996; Shatz & O’Reilly 1990; Leavens et al. 2005; Shwe & Markman 1997; Orbán 2025). By this stage, infants are capable of employing pointing gestures to express themselves. In the literature, referential pointing is often treated merely as proto-referential behavior rather than as genuine referring, or else referring itself is treated as exclusively linguistic behavior (cf. Davidson 1977, 1979; Bates et al. 1975; Strawson 1959). Referential pointing, in particular, involves joint attention to indicate a referent, either declaratively (e.g., “This is interesting”) or imperatively (e.g., “Give me that”). An incorrect response typically prompts corrective behavior from the signaller until the intended action occurs. I employ several strategies to argue that referential pointing qualifies as genuine referring, including showing that it passes the standard tests for reference.
• Week 10 , Oct 15
• Speaker: Cristian Larroulet Philippi, (University of Melbourne)
• Title: Assessing the Bayesian picture of scientific advice: On the political division of labour. (Joint work with Ahmad Elabbar (HPS, University of Cambridge))
• Abstract: Richard Jeffrey (1956) famously articulated an internal critique to Richard Rudner’s (1953) argument from inductive risk and offered an alternative view of scientific advice, which we call “the Bayesian picture of scientific advice” (BPSA). It involves two essential commitments: scientists should communicate their subjective probabilities (vs. outright beliefs) in hypotheses and doing so upholds a political division of labour (i.e., scientists bring the epistemic input; policy-makers bring the evaluative judgments). We argue that communicating credences doesn’t deliver the division of labour—the idea that such a prize is secured by the Bayesian picture is an artifact of the idealizations behind the debate around the inductive risk debate. Basically: scientists’ role in policy advice goes well beyond reporting credences (or outright beliefs for that matter) for a hypotheses previously specified by policy makers. Scientists are necessarily involved in the framing of policy (decision) problems, i.e., in the curation of the policy actions, the states-of-nature, and outcomes that are worth considering. (They are even needed to come up with utility numbers!) And these tasks cannot be done without making value-judgments. This is easy to see when looking at well-studied cases of scientific advice such as large-scale environmental assessments—we focus on the IPCC reports in the talk—but the point generalizes.
• Week 11 , Oct 22
• Speaker: Chad Lee-Stronach, (Northeastern University)
• Title: The Tragedy of the Conventions (co-authored with Rory Smead)
• Abstract: Many pressing social problems require coordinated changes across multiple interconnected domains. Climate action, for instance, requires simultaneous transitions in energy, transportation, agriculture, and consumer behavior, where success in each domain depends on progress in others. We ask: under what conditions can socially optimal coordination across domains emerge and persist? We formalize this challenge as the "problem of interdependent conventions'' using evolutionary game theory. Our analysis reveals a deeper challenge than previously recognized: interdependence creates qualitatively different coordination challenges than independent domains. Rather than converging to optimal or suboptimal outcomes, interdependent systems can become trapped in stable partial coordination—some domains succeed while other remain permanently stuck—or fail to coordinate at all. We show that conditional cooperation mechanisms---contingent agreements, signaling platforms, and staged protocols—can work under special conditions. But three structural problems prevent their general implementation: (1) Heterogeneity Trap: domains starting below critical cooperation thresholds remain trapped while others succeed; (2) Bootstrap Paradox: implementing the coordination mechanism requires the very coordination capacity it is meant to create; and (3) Temporal Gap: threshold-crossing requires substantially stronger interdependence than static analysis predicts, as committed actors erode before coordination emerges. These results suggest that the tragedy of the conventions is not that solutions do not exist, but that implementing them requires the very coordination capacity that interdependences make unattainable.
• Week 12 , Oct 29
• Speaker: Emily Hulme, (University of Sydney)
• Title: Evil techne?: Plato, craft and value
• Abstract: Techne (craft, skill, expertise) plays a central role in Plato’s philosophy, including in his celebrated “skill analogy for virtue,” wherein the crafts are the model for the kind of practical rationality employed in moral activity. This talk concerns a debate in the interpretation of this analogy: are the crafts, as such, defined as having good ends? I’ll argue they are not—in other words, the crafts of the pirate and the influencer are just as much crafts as those of the engineer and the doctor. The focus will be on Plato, but the topic will give us material for reflecting on rationality, work, and normativity more generally.
• Week 12 , Oct 31
• Speaker: Lucy Allais, (Johns Hopkins University & University of the Witwatersrand)
• Title: The role of rational capacities in free agency
• Abstract: My topic for this talk is rational agency. This is based on a work-in-progress book project; I will present an outline of the relation between the first two parts of a three-part book project on human free agency. The idea of the project as a whole is to think about human free agency through thinking about the metaphysical, rational/moral and political aspects of freedom in relation to each other, as parts of one picture. The talk will sketch the project as a whole and then present an account of the role rational capacities play in the kind of agency that makes a certain sort of responsibility attribution apt. In the contemporary literature, rational abilities views commonly see agency as compatible with its being the case that at the time the agent acted the only metaphysical possibility was for them to ‘act’ the way they did. One reason for this is the idea that actions ‘determined’ by reasons or mental states of recognizing reasons don’t require alternative possibilities. I argue against this. I argue that agency, including the agency of other animals, is not consistent with the idea that, when the agent acts, there is only one possible way for the course of events in the world to unfold, and only one thing the agent can do. Rather, in a world in which there are agents, some of what happens – the way events unfold in the world – is up to what agents do. This does not require indeterministic laws of nature, or funny gaps in the laws of nature into which agents insert their causality, or breaking laws of nature, or supernatural or non-natural powers, or generally giving us powers that exempt us from the natural world. And it does not require that actions are caused or otherwise determined by acts of recognizing or judging what you have all-things-considered reason to do. It does require animals with reflexive and meta-cognitive abilities that they exercise with a non-optional commitment to non-instrumental rational constraints.
• Week 13 , Nov 5
• Speaker: Daniel Bell, (University of Hong Kong)
• Week 15 , Nov 19
• Speaker: Al Hájek, (Australian National University)
• Title: A Chancy Theory of Counterfactuals
• Abstract: I have long argued against the Stalnaker/Lewis ‘similarity’ accounts of counterfactuals. Roughly, they say that the counterfactual if p were the case, q would be the case is true if and only if at the most similar p-worlds, q is true. Most philosophers agree with this. I disagree. I will summarise my main arguments against this entire approach and add some new ones. I will offer a paradigm shift based on conditional chances. The counterfactual is true iff the chance of q, given p, equals 1 at a time shortly, but not too shortly, before the truth value of p was settled. I will argue that this account has many advantages over the similarity accounts. What are the chances? I will present my version of a propensity account, and I will argue that it avoids the main objections that have been levelled against propensities. In short, I offer a conditional propensity account of counterfactuals.
• Week 16 , Nov 26
• Speaker: David Plunkett, (Dartmouth)
• Title: Topic Continuity, Realism, and The Objects of Philosophical Inquiry
• Abstract: Some philosophical inquiry is directed at our thought and talk about a subject matter (e.g. how to understand the nature of moral thought, or our concept of consciousness), while other philosophical inquiry is directed towards understanding the “things themselves” (e.g. the nature of moral facts and properties, or of consciousness itself). This paper considers the methodology of the latter, “object-level” type of inquiry. We introduce a contrast between two ways of structuring this kind of inquiry. One alternative structures inquiry by focusing on those entities picked out by our existing concepts. For example, on this approach, moral inquiry would be inquiry into the parts of reality (if any) that are picked out by our actual moral concepts. We motivate an alternative approach, where object-level inquiry is directed at those explanatorily and/or normatively important kinds which are “in the topical vicinity” of our actual concepts. One way to see the usefulness of this approach is to contrast the differing significance of two “nihilist” hypotheses: nihilism about the stuff picked out by our actual moral concepts, vs. nihilism about explanatorily and/or normatively important kinds in the topical vicinity of “morality.” We then draw on the account of topic continuity we developed in our paper “Topic Continuity in Conceptual Engineering and Beyond,” to argue that whether a given kind counts as being in the “topical vicinity” of (e.g.) “morality” is a context-sensitive matter, which rests in large part on a certain set of priorities for inquiry of the conversational participants. We conclude by explaining how the methodology we develop here smoothly motivates a range of inquiries in conceptual ethics.

Previous Speakers

Finnur Dellsén (University of Iceland), Benjamin McKean (Ohio State University), Tyler Paytas (Australian Catholic University, Sydney), Chris Cousens (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hammerton (Singapore Management University), Philippe Chuard (Southern Methodist University, Dallas), Ryan Cox (University of Sydney), Stephanie Sheintul (University of Adelaide), Richard Bett (Johns Hopkins University), Peter Godfrey-Smith (University of Sydney), Markus Pantsar (RWTH Aachen University, Germany), Mircea Dumitru (University of Bucharest), Melina Tsapos (Lund University, Sweden), Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval (University of California, Davis), Jessica Isserow (University of Notre Dame), Hong Yu Wong (Tübingen), Sean Donahue (ANU), Ulrik Nissen (Aarhus University, Denmark), David Plunkett (Dartmouth), David Bronstein (University of Notre Dame (Sydney)), David Glick (University of California, Davis), Stephen Finlay, Caleb Perl (Australian Catholic University (Melbourne)), Lok-Chi Chan (joint work with Shawn Standefer) (National Taiwan University), Hannah Tierney (University of California, Davis), Holly Lawford-Smith (University of Melbourne), Anca Gheaus (Central European University), David Enoch (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Sukaina Hirji (University of Pennsylvania), Neil Mehta (Yale-NUS College), Luara Ferracioli (University of Sydney), Thomas Corbin (Macquarie University), Alex Lefebvre (University of Sydney), Inês Hipólito (Macquarie University), Glen Pettigrove (University of Glasgow), Jordi Fernandez (University of Adelaide), Alex Kocurek (Cornell), Sam Shpall (University of Sydney), Brian Epstein (Tufts), Anna Smajdor (University of Oslo), Peter Millican (Oxford University and National University of Singapore), Kyle Blumberg (University of Melbourne), Emanuel Viebahn (FU Berlin), Matthew Slater (Bucknell University), A. C. Grayling (Northeastern University London), Natalja Deng (Yonsei University), Teresa Baron (University of Nottingham), Kristin Gjesdal (Temple University), Brian Hedden (Australian National University), Supriya Subramani (University of Sydney), Michael Nielsen (University of Sydney), Michael Devitt (CUNY), Caroline West (University of Sydney), Alex Horne (University of Sydney), Joseph Rouse (Wesleyan University), Tom Davies (University of Melbourne), Arash Abizadeh (McGill University), Tom Dougherty (University of North Carolina), Michaela Manson (Monash), …