Except where noted otherwise, audio recordings of past
events are available to Philsoc members via the
Events Archive page.
General events information
Unless stated otherwise, all listed events take
place in Rewley House
– click the link for a map.
Except for the Members'
Day event, which has its own booking form (available when
appropriate from the Members' Day page), all bookings
are done through OUDCE. For events which are still
pending, clicking on a course title will
take you to a page giving course details and offering a
link for electronic booking (and a link to a PDF form if
you prefer to apply by post).
A note concerning bookings. Most Rewley House weekends end up
in the large lecture room by Saturday evening. In some cases
it has already been decided where earlier lectures are
to take place and if so, this is indicated on the above list.
Please note that if the weekend is allocated
to Tawney or Sadler rooms you should assume limitations on the
number who can attend and book as early as possible. Here are
the room capacities:
Sadler 50
Tawney 40
Lecture room 115
Feedback
If you have any feedback comments about weekend schools,
weekly classes, online courses or summer schools please contact
Marianne
Talbot directly as she would be very happy to hear any
suggestions for improvement or for different topics.
Please also contact Marianne if you have any suggestions for
additional ways to publicise the courses.
Other OUDCE courses
Members may be also interested in courses being run by the
Oxford University Department for Continuing Education:
Catherine Osborne, UEA (Sadler Room)
Thales suggested that the earth floats on water.
Parmenides proposed that nothing changes and there is
only one thing. Primitive? No, the Presocratics were
already considering deep issues such as what there is,
why and how can we know about it? A lively exploration
of the beginnings of philosophy.
Marianne Talbot, Oxford University. (Lecture Theatre)
A series of six Monday lectures, all 14:00 - 15:30.
(recordings will not be available).
Reason is central to our lives as human beings. Without
reason we would never be able to know anything except
through our senses. But to be able to reason is to be
able to reason either well or badly. If we reason badly
we may form all sorts of false beliefs. If we reason well
our beliefs are far more likely to be true. During this
6 week course we will look at what it is to reason
critically, and at how we might enhance our ability to
reason well. The course is aimed at complete beginners.
Michael Scott, Manchester University and Dr Pamela
Anderson, Oxford. (Sadler Room)
If God is all powerful then can he create a stone too
heavy for him to lift? If he can't there is something
he cannot do, ie. create such a stone; if he can there
is something he cannot do, ie. lift the stone that he
has created. There are many other paradoxes generated
by the concept of God, and by religion in gerenal.
During this weekend we will look at some of them and ask
whether they can be solved.
Jan Westerhoff, Cambridge University and Brian
King, Oxford. (Tawney Room)
Many of us may have entertained the possibility that
moral values, or numbers, are not real. We might
even have considered the possibility that minds,
especially the minds of others, are not real. But
have you ever wondered whether the physical objects
we see around us are real or not? Or whether we are
ourselves real? Anti-Realism is a metaphysical
stance that can be taken with respect to categories
of the things we usually think of in our daily lives
as being real. During this weekend we will consider
the nature of Anti-Realism, and why someone might be
an Anti-Realist with respect to some category or
other.
2013
January 12 at 13:15
Philsoc AGM
The annual general meeting of the Philosophical Society.
(Lecture Theatre)
All members are encouraged to attend.
Luciano Floridi, Oxford. (Lecture Theatre)
A new philosophy of information has been derived from three
philosophical lessons suggested by Turingbs work. The first
tells us how important it is, when asking questions, to
specify the correct level of abstraction. The second
discusses the philosophical questions that are the most
pressing, and the third a new philosophical anthropology.
This last topic will be taken up in a discussion of the fact
that recent technological transformations in the life-cycle
of information have brought about a humbling, but exciting,
fourth revolution, in the process of reassessing humanitybs
fundamental nature and role in the universe. This will
enable us to develop a new ecological approach to reality.
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have
become environmental forces, creating and shaping our
reality, more and more pervasively, by bnvelopingb the
world. The technical concept of bnvelopingb will be
explained, along with the promise it holds out for our
futures. But we will not ignore the risks implicit in
transforming the world into a progressively ICT-friendly
environment, asking whether our technologies are going to
enable and empower us, or constrain our physical and
conceptual spaces so we are forced to adjust to them?
Nigel Warburton, Open University and Marianne
Talbot, Oxford. (Lecture Theatre)
Philosophy is for people who are intrigued by questions like
'what is truth?', 'do we have free will?', 'what is
justice?' and 'does space come to an end?'. It is one thing
to be intrigued by such questions, another to be equipped
with the skills to answer them. These skills are the skills
of philosophy. This weekend is an introduction to those
skills. Both speakers are very experienced in speaking to
complete beginners in philosophy.
Adam Swift, Balliol and Matthew Clayton, Warwick.
(Tawney Room)
The family has been thought of as the cornerstone of
society. But what exactly is a family? Why are families
considered so important? Is it always best for children to
be raised by their parents in a family? What are parents
obliged to provide for their children? Is 'a life worth
living' too little? If so is 'the best upbringing they can
provide' too demanding? Are parents morally justified in
bringing up children with religious affiliations? Is this
only so long as the children are not prevented from
reflecting on alternatives? Do parents have the right to
confer advantages on their own children? Any advantage?
What if such advantages come at the expense of creating
social inequality? During this weekend we shall be
addressing all these questions.
Emma Borg, Reading University and Robyn Carston,
UCL. (Lecture Theatre)
What is the relationship between the meaning of a sentence
and the meaning of an utterance of that sentence?
Intuitively they seem intimately related, yet we know they
canbWhat is the relationship betweent be identical (one can
utter 'It is a lovely day'and thereby mean that it is a
horrible day, if one is being ironic, but that's not what
the sentence 'It is a lovely day' means). So how should we
think about the relationship between sentences and the
contexts in which they are spoken? During this weekend we
shall be considering the nature of context-sensitvity in
natural languages and asking what kind of theory of meaning
can best handle the relationship between linguistic meaning
and context.
Prof Peter Lamarque, York and Dr Eileen John,
Warwick. (Sadler Room)
During this weekend we shall be considering some enduring
questions in the philosophy of literature. We shall
consider, for example, the peculiar alchemy that gives a
poem its special value, the question of whether great
literary works – tragedies, novels, epic poems, etc
– are valuable in part because of the truths they
reveal about human nature, and why we worry about the
choices made by fictional characters, experiencing them as
living, striving and suffering individuals, in whose
triumphs we rejoice, and whose downfalls we savour. We
shall also consider whether we want to be morally improved
by literature, and indeed whether we are morally improved by
it. Can we understand the emotional, cognitive, and
interpretive demands of literary works as morally
significant and valuable, even if we are typically not
absorbing moral truths from the works we read?
Past events
Audio recordings of most of the below listed past events are
available to Society members trough the
Events Archive page.
January 14-15:
Utilitarianism, Prohibitions, and Prerogatives
Brad Hooker, Reading Univ. (Lecture Theatre)
Utilitarians believe the right action is that which
(tends to) produce the greatest happiness of the
greatest number. Utilitarianism might reasonably be
called the ethics of modernity. These lectures
introduce utilitarianism, distinguish different versions,
discuss objections and outline what might be salvaged to
form a plausible moral theory.
February 18-19:
Wittgenstein's Influence on Science
John Preston, Reading University and
Chon Tejedor, Oxfrod University (Lecture Theatre)
We'll be looking at how Wittgenstein distinguished
philosophy and science, his beliefs about how they were
related, the 'net' metaphor of the Tractatus
Logico Philosophicus,and the kind of approach to
science that would result from taking it seriously.
Was Wittgenstein really hostile to science as many
have thought?
March 10-11:
What Is Mathematics About?
Dan Isaacson, Oxford and Richard Pettigrew, Bristol
(Tawney Room)
What (if anything) is mathematics about? How is it
possible to know any mathematics? The attempt to give
an account of mathematics that can answer both questions
has been a major catalyst to development in the
philosophy of mathematics over the past fifty years.
We'll be looking at both questions.
April 21-22: Hegel
Robert Stern, Sheffield and Stephen Houlgate, Warwick
(Lecture Theatre)
Our aim is to shed light on Hegel's idealism,
attitude to scepticism, his views on history, on ethics,
freedom, art and religion. We'll consider Hegel's most
difficult text, the Science of Logic, to explain
how and why it transforms our understanding of basic
categories, such as "being" and
"something".
Robert Stone, Ann Long, Peter Gibson and
Peter Ells (Lecture Theatre)
October 29-30:
The Aesthetics and Criticism of Music
Roger Allen, Oxford and Paul Harper-Scott,
Royal Holloway (Sadler Room)
This course considered issues in the Aesthetics of
Music from both historical and contemporary philosophical
perspectives. Roger Allen examined the
nineteenth-century debate between music as autonomous
object and expressive force as epxressed in the writings of,
inter alia, Wagner, Hanslick, Schopenhauer and Nietszche.
He aslo considered how ideas of the Sublime might impact
on issues of music analysis, with specific reference to
Bruckner. Paul Harper Scott continued the Wagnerian
theme in a contemporary context through engagement with
radical philosophical persepectives of sex and capitalism.
October 17 – November 21:
An Introduction to the Philosophy of the Emotions
Rachel Paine (Lecture Theatre)
A series of six Monday lectures, all 14:00 - 15:30
(no recordings available).
A new debate in the philosophy of emotion opposes
thought to feeling. The problem turns on clarifying
what is meant by 'thought' and 'feeling'. We will
consider historical and modern accounts of the
emotions from Aristotle to Heidigger.
October 17: Thought and feeling: Introducing the debate
October 24: Le coeur a ses raisons: The emotional life of human beings
October 31: The power of emotion to move us: Aristotle, Descartes, Malebranche and Hume
November 7: The felt qualities of experience: Nietzsche, Dewey, James and Langer
November 14: Emotional niches: Evolution and society
November 21: The emotional ground: Husserl and Heidegger
November 26-27:
A Romp Through the Philosophy of Mind
Marianne Talbot (Tawney Room)
Where would we be without the mind? But what is the
mind? Is it the brain? Descartes thought definitely
not. But don't we know better in our scientific
times? So why is dualism again attracting philosophers,
and what is it that science will never tell us
about the mind?
Steve Chinn, Rob Judges, Alan Bailey, Ann Long,
James Calvert, Peter Townsend.
MP3 recodrings of the individual contributions are available in the
Recordings Library
section of this site.
Debate on Dawkins' 'God Delusion'
Marianne and Stephen Law.
Marianne's slides are available as
Powerpoint or as
PDF.
The OUDCE website holds
an MP3 audio recording
of the complete talk.
Critical Reasoning for Beginners
Marianne Talbot No recording available.
The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre
Anthony Hatzimoys and Sorin Baiasu
War Torture and Terrorism:
Are they ever Justifiable?
