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)
• Week 8 , Sep 24
• Speaker: Nicholas Southwood, (Australian National University)
• Week 9 , Oct 8
• Speaker: Krisztina Orban, (Tübingen)
• Week 10 , Oct 15
• Speaker: Cristian Larroulet Philippi, (University of Melbourne)
• Week 11 , Oct 22
• Speaker: Chad Lee-Stronach, (Northeastern University)
• Week 12 , Oct 29
• Speaker: Emily Hulme, (University of Sydney)
• Week 13 , Nov 5
• Speaker: Daniel Bell, (University of Hong Kong)
• Week 14 , Nov 12
• Speaker: Francois Cusset, (University of Nanterre)
• Title: White Male Wokeness Strikes Back, The ideological assault on identity politics and the ensuing rise of the far right: a global perspective
• Abstract: One way of understanding the recent intensified assault on wokeness and the rise to power of regressive masculinists/supremacists (of the MAGA movement and beyond) worldwide is to view it as a reversed form of aggressive wokeness, demanding a gender backlash in favor of men and a racial/civilisational priviledge instead of keeping the previous neutral, « universalist », elitist standpoint. Anthropologists and political theorists trying to circumscribe the specificity of our political mutation would be well advised to go in this direction – some of them do it already
• Week 15 , Nov 19
• Speaker: Al Hajek, (Australian National University)
• Week 16 , Nov 26
• Speaker: David Plunkett, (Dartmouth)

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), …