As Christmas approaches, Reading philosophy staff continue to be busy! Here are some snippets of recent and forthcoming activity.
Dr James Andow has presented his research in Keele and Bochum (Germany) and working on revisions for a number of papers. This includes”Zebras, Intransigence & Semantic Apocalypse: Problems for Dispositional Metasemantics”, which has just been accepted for publication in Philosophia. He has also been organising a conference to take place in the new year. Sneaky plug: the joint Ratio Conference and annual Experimental Philosophy UK conference will take place 23-24 April (see the website for more details!).
Professor Emma Borg gave a Work in Progress talk at here at Reading in November, and is looking forward to giving a talk at Graveney Academy School in London at the start of January.
After a day at Edinburgh devoted to papers focused on his work in October, Professor Jonathan Dancy more recently gave a talk in London as part of the current Royal Institute of Philosophy series of lectures on Action. Having given the graduate class in the Autumn term, he is going to Tucson in Arizona in January to try to convince the Americans that they don’t understand instrumental reasoning – a tough call! After that he will be teaching at the University of Texas at Austin until May, when he returns to the UK and will be giving the final Masterclass of his 3-year appointment here at Reading.
Dr Nat Hansen gave a masterclass on context sensitivity on “Context Sensitivity: Evidence and Explanations”, and a talk to the Pervasive Context Conference on “Cross-Cultural Context Sensitivity” (both at Peking University in October). Three of his papers were published online: “A New Argument from Interpersonal Variation to Subjectivism about Color: A Response to Gómez-Torrente” was published in Noûs, “Linguistic Experiments and Ordinary Language Philosophy” (written with Emmanuel Chemla) was published in Ratio, and “Experimental Philosophy of Language” was published in Oxford Handbooks Online. In the spring, Nat will be giving invited talks at the Institute of Philosophy’s Logic, Epistemology, and Metaphysics Forum, to the Psychology department at City University London, and at the theoretical philosophy colloquium at the University of Zürich.
Professor David Oderberg spoke at Winchester College in November on ‘Why You Should be an Essentialist’. In December he was interviewed by the Bioethics blog BioEdge about the current state of bioethics.
Dr James Stazicker was in Paris in November, at a Sorbonne conference about Consciousness and Accessibility, where he gave a keynote talk on ‘Access, Consciousness and Higher-Order Inexactness’. In December he was at the Mind, Metaphysics and Psychology seminar at King’s College London to talk about his paper, ‘Self-Knowledge, Perceptual Evidence and the Significance of Consciousness’.
This term the Department hosted a successful fortnightly seminar, on Descartes’ Meditations, for PhD students from Chinese Universities on the UK/China Scholarship scheme.