Departmental Research Seminars 2009-2010

All seminars take place from 4.00 pm - 6.00 pm on Fridays in the Common Room, 9 Woodland Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1TB.

Autumn 2009

Spring Term 2010

Summer Term 2010

 

Abstracts

Speaker

Title

Abstract

Helen Steward

Top-Down Causation

 The paper considers the question how best to understand the claim that there is (or is not) such a thing as top-down causation. After having attempted to clarify what the issue might amount to, the paper argues that some things which have sometimes been regarded as unacceptable consequences of the claim that there might be top-down causation either are not in fact consequences of it; or else are consequences about which we do not need to be concerned. I end, however, by conceding that it is genuinely exceedingly difficult for us to make conceptual sense of top-down causation (understood in the way suggested); and I offer an explanation of why this might be so, based on the interesting ideas about the neurological basis of our concept of causation presented by Lakoff and Johnson (1999). My hope is that the explanation might allow us to understand our aversion to top-down causation without having to insist that the aversion amounts to a genuine perception of the impossibility of the phenomenon.

Jonathan Dancy

Practical Reasoning and Inference

 One way of capturing the force of practical reasoning, or deliberation, is to think of it as inference (e.g. the practical syllogism). I reject this inferential model, and offer another, under which the force of reasoning is of a rather different sort. The conclusion of a process of deliberation can, on this new model, be an action, and such deliberation can have a structure, but it is not inferential structure.

Kati Farkas

The objects of smell and touch

 The question of whether olfactory experiences have objects, and if they do, what these objects are, divides philosophers of perception. According to one view, olfactory experiences are mere non-intentional sensations; on another view, olfactory experiences represent odours, that is quantities of odorous gases in the air; and on yet another view, olfactory experiences represent physical objects like roses, cheese or coffee, which are the sources of odours. I argue that none of these answers is entirely right, because olfactory experiences do not have proper or primary objects. Depending on further factors – cognitive states or experiences through other sensory modalities – the objects of olfactory experiences, if there are any, can be found at different points of the causal chain leading to the experience. I shall then attempt to see whether a similar view can be held for the tactile sensory modality: the suggestion is that the object of a tactile experience is sometimes the surface of the body, sometimes the object touching the body, and sometimes a further explored object (for example in the case of using a tactile-visual sensory substitution system).

David Sedley

Plato's theory of change (Phaedo 70-1)

 The 'Cyclical Argument' is the first of a cumulative series of arguments for the immortality of the soul in Plato's Phaedo, and it has not won many admirers. But it is centred on what could claim to be the first general (topic-neutral) analysis of change in the Western canon, and this analysis deserves more sympathetic consideration than it has typically received. Among the rewards on offer is an understanding of what Plato means by 'opposites'.

 

Seminars from previous years

2008-2009

2007-2008

2006-2007

2005-2006

2004-2005

2003-2004

2002-2003

2001-2002