New Undergraduate Course Reps Elected

Following the recent elections, we are delighted to name the new undegraduate philosophy course reps:

Philosophy Year 1: JAZZ CROOK, ALEXANDER SPANNER
Philosophy Year 2: MATT NORRIS, KIM KOPEC
Philosophy Year 3: ALICE TILSTON

From the RUSU website: “Course Reps are elected students who represent you and your views on academic issues on your course. Course Reps act as the link between students and the Academic staff on each course, ensuring the student voice is being heard and positive changes are being made in every department.”

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Departmental News Update

It’s been a busy term so far for the philosophy department! Here is some of our recent news:

  • James Andow is headed to the 1st Experimental Philosophy Germany conference at the end of November to present some experimental results concerning moral intuitions. Shortly after that, he’ll be giving a Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture in Keele on ‘A Genealogy of Intuition-mongering’.
  • Professor Helen Beebee, of the University of Manchester, this week gave a talk to the department and Philosophy Society about women in philosophy: why are there so few, and what can be done to change this?
  • Emma Borg is hosting a masterclass at Peking University, on semantic minimalism and other theories, and presenting a paper at the ‘Pervasive Context’ conference also at Peking: ‘Explanatory roles for minimal content?’ She will also be giving a keynote talk at CONTEXT 2015: The Ninth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modelling and Using Context in Cyprus, on ‘minimal content, communication and acquisition’.
  • Jonathan Dancy will be running our graduate class this term (on practical reasoning), and will again hold an intensive two-day masterclass for graduate students during the coming Summer term.
  • Luke Elson presented a paper to the the Choice Group at the London School of Economics this week.
  • Maximilian de Gaynesford’s new book ‘The Rift in the Lute: Attuning Poetry and Philosophy’ will be published by Oxford University Press in 2016.
  • David Oderberg will be giving a talk at Winchester school in November on the topic of essentialism.
  • John Preston will be returning to China this November, to speak at a conference at Sun Yat-sen University, and to give a paper at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
  • We welcome Sami Rissanen, from Finland, who will be working for us as a Graduate Teaching Assistant while he does his PhD.
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Second Southampton and Reading Joint MA Masterclass and SWW DTP Information Session

Wednesday 4th November, 13:00-17:30

University of Reading, Whiteknights Campus, Palmer Building G01

Speakers: Philip Stratton-Lake (Reading) and Alex Gregory (Southampton)

There will be an information session on AHRC applications and PhD study in general. Staff will be available throughout the day to answer queries of prospective applicants.

Registration is now open

To register, please email j.andow@reading.ac.uk with your name and university. Registration is free.

Please also indicate in the email whether you would like to be considered to be an official respondent to either of the main talks (you can download the abstracts here). Respondents will receive a copy of the relevant paper a week in advance of the masterclass to read and prepare comments. Following the relevant talk, the respondent(s) will have 10 minutes to speak in response to the main talk. Following the respondent(s) the floor will be opened for questions. If you would like to express an interest in being a respondent, please email the above address saying which paper you would like to respond to by October 25th.

Provisional Schedule

  • 1300 Welcome
  • 1315 Speaker 1 – Philip Stratton-Lake, “Self-evidence, justification and intuition”(incl. Official respondents and open Questions)
  • 1445 Coffee
  • 1515 SWW Consortium Information
  • 1600 Speaker 2 – Alex Gregory, “Aversion To Second-Order Desires” (incl. Official respondents and open Questions)
  • 1730 Adjourn to pub
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Autumn 2015 Speaker Calendar

We have a packed programme of talks this term! All staff and students are welcome to all events. Updated 29 September.

Please email luke.elson@reading.ac.uk with any questions.

Week 1

  • Debate: Luke Elson and Philip Stratton-Lake, Must all Reasons Stem from Desires?
    Tuesday 2-4pm, in the Van Emden Lecture Theatre in HumSS

Week 2

  • Research Seminar: Elanor Taylor (Iowa State), Against Explanatory Realism.
    Tuesday 2-4pm, in the Van Emden Lecture Theatre in HumSS
  • Wittgenstein Forum: Harry Tomany, Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics: The Intermediate Period.
    Tuesday 4-6 pm, in URS 2n13.

Week 3 (note time change)

  • Work in Progress: Brad Hooker, A Theory of Fairness.
    Tuesday 4-6pm, in the Van Emden Lecture Theatre in HumSS

Week 4 (note special event)

  • Research Seminar: Helen Beebee (Manchester), Metaphysics.
    Tuesday 2-4pm, in the Van Emden Lecture Theatre in HumSS
    and: Special Event: Helen Beebee, Women in Philosophy. (4:30pm – 6pm in the same room)
  • Wittgenstein Forum: Felix Hagenström (Southampton), Wittgenstein, Grammar & Idealism.
    Tuesday 4-6 pm, in URS 2n13.

(Note that the Special Event and Wittgenstein Forum meeting clash.)

Week 5

  • Philosophy Society: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke), Contrastive Mental Causation.
    Tuesday 2-4pm, in the Van Emden Lecture Theatre in HumSS

Week 6

  • Wittgenstein Forum: Robert Rabinowitz (London), Why coherence is relative and logically impossible things can happen.
    Tuesday 4-6 pm, in URS 2n13.

Week 7

  • Research Seminar: Joanna Burch-Brown (Bristol), Invention in Action.
    Tuesday 2-4pm, in the Van Emden Lecture Theatre in HumSS

Week 8

  • Philosophy Society: Michel Le Du (Strasbourg), What is it Like to Be a Relativist?
    Tuesday 2-4pm, in the Van Emden Lecture Theatre in HumSS
  • Wittgenstein Forum: Michel Le Du, Secondary Meaning.
    Tuesday 4-6 pm, in URS 2n13.

Week 9

  • Work in Progress: Emma Borg, What is the basis of social cognition? On behaviour-reading, mindreading and nativism.
    Tuesday 2-4pm, in the Van Emden Lecture Theatre in HumSS

Week 10

  • Research Seminar: Simon Kirchin (Kent), Concepts, Action-Guidance and Motivation: Ethics, Aesthetics and Motivation.
    Tuesday 2-4pm, in the Van Emden Lecture Theatre in HumSS
  • Wittgenstein Forum: Severin Schroeder, Convention & Necessity.
    Tuesday 4-6 pm, in URS 2n13.

Week 11

  • Work in Progress: James Stazicker, Self-Knowledge, Perceptual Evidence, and the Significance of Consciousness.
    Tuesday 2-4pm, in the Van Emden Lecture Theatre in HumSS
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Mosquera awarded Doctoral Scholarship

We’re delighted to announce that Reading PhD student Julia Mosquera has been awarded one of two competitive Society for Applied Philosophy doctoral scholarships (worth £10,000) for the coming academic year.

This is a significant recognition of Julia’s work, and the competitive relief from teaching will allow her to focus more heavily on her PhD research.

Her primary research focuses is Disability and Egalitarianism: she explores the impact of new genetic and reproductive technologies on the moral duties of egalitarian societies towards people with disabilities.

Julia’s supervisors are Associate Professor Patrick Tomlin and Professor Brad Hooker.

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John Preston at the Philosophy Summer School in China

This Summer, Professor John Preston was Director of the Philosophy Summer School in China, which this year was on Philosophy of Science, and took place at Huaqiao University, in Xiamen, China.

Participants in the Summer School

Summer School Participants

The three other members of staff were Prof. Ashley Graham Kennedy (Florida Atlantic University, USA), Prof. Julian Reiss (Durham University, England), and Prof. Mauricio Suarez (Complutense University, Madrid).

The eighty-six Chinese students on the Summer School came from all over Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and several US and UK Universities (including a student from from Reading).

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Summer Research Activity

This Summer has been a busy one for Reading Philosophy’s academics! Here are the details of what just a couple of them have been up to.

Dr James Andow’s article ‘Expecting Moral Philosophers to be Reliable‘ was published in Dialectica in July.  Any day soon his ‘How Distinctive Is Philosophers’  Intuition Talk?‘ (in Metaphilosophy), ‘Why compatibilist intuitions are not mistaken’ (in Philosophical Psychology) and ‘Intuitions’ (a critical notice in Analysis) are going to be published online.  James also gave a talk on ‘Expressive Injustice’ at KCL at the UK Minorities and Philosophy Conference on ‘Identity and Underrepresentation’.

Professor Maximilian de Gaynesford presented several papers, including one on Speech Acts and Poetry to the SOPHA (a French-speaking Analytic Philosophy Society) conference in Montreal, and another on Integrity in Films to a conference on Philosophy and Film in Manchester. He’ll also soon travelling to Mumbai to present a paper at a conference on Hilary Putnam.

Dr Nat Hansen spent his summer revising two papers for publication (one on linguistic experiments and one on colour metaphysics), putting together two grant proposals (one on the psychology of thought experiments in collaboration with the psychologist Phil Beaman, and one on contemporary ordinary language philosophy), starting a new experimental paper on cross-cultural context sensitivity with the philosopher Jing Zhu at Sun Yat-sen University (China), and directing an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP) project on philosophical perspectives on the psychology of reasoning with Raul Ungureanu, a student from the psychology department at Reading. Before autumn term starts, he will present recent work at a conference on “J.L. Austin Today” (Oxford) and at the 3rd Philosophy of Language and Mind conference (Oslo).

Professor David Oderberg published his paper ‘Divine Premotion’ in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, and completed a paper on co-operation in immoral acts. He has also been working on a book about the metaphysics of good and evil, which he plans to finish next year.

Dr James Stazicker made several conference presentations, including: at a workshop with Ned Block, at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp: Determination is all you need; at a Workshop on Attention & Consciousness, at York University, Toronto, Canada: Action, Attention and Consciousness; and at the Mind Work in Progress group at Oxford: Partial Report, Consciousness and Self-Knowledge.

More updates to follow!

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PhD student Geraldine Ng’s conference presentation in Oxford

On Saturday, Reading philosophy PhD student Geraldine Ng presented her paper ‘Practical Agents and the Social World’ at a large conference in Oxford marking 30 years since the publication of Bernard Williams’s book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.

Ng presenting her paper

Please excuse the poor-quality photograph — I for one didn’t want to risk offending lots of eminent philosophers by getting in front of them to take a picture!

Ng joined a line-up of speakers including Simon Blackburn, Miranda Fricker, and Candace Vogler.

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Podcasts by Hooker and Oderberg

After publishing articles in the Journal of Practical Ethics, Reading’s Professors Brad Hooker and David Oderberg recently gave informal interviews about the content of their papers.

Brad’s paper is about The Elements of Well-Being, and David’s is about The Morality of Reputation and the Judgement of Others. You can listen to both podcasts (~10 minutes each) here.

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Updated profiles of our PhD students

Our departmental website is going through a Summer refresh, and you can see profiles of our PhD students and what they’re working on here.

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