Selected works by recent participants

Katherine Thomson-Jones, "Aesthetics and Film" (2008)

George Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (2012)

Mark Alfano, "Extending the Situationist Challenge to Responsibilist Virtue Epistemology" (forthcoming)

Abrol Fairweather, "Duhem-Quine Virtue Epistemology" (forthcoming)

Avram Hiller, "Duhem-Quine Virtue Epistemology" (forthcoming)

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, "It's Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations" (2005)

Christopher Gauker and Kathrin Glüer

Christopher Gauker (left) and Kathrin Glüer (right) on the contents of perception.

According to one view, perceptions have propositional content: they tell us that the world is a certain way, and what they tell us can be either true or false. In this debate, Glüer defends that view against Gauker’s attack. Glüer and Gauker also consider (starting at 23:11) whether and how perceptions might justify beliefs. And Glüer interrogates Gauker (starting at 40:08) about how perceptions can be either accurate or inaccurate without having propositional content.

Continue reading Christopher Gauker and Kathrin Glüer

Norman Daniels and Leslie Francis

Norman Daniels (left) and Leslie Francis (right) on justice and disability.

Daniels and Francis (starting at 5:43) distinguish between impairments, disabilities, and handicaps. They discuss the issue of special education (starting at 25:53) and consider what we owe to the disabled in a world of scarce resources. Then (starting at 50:34) they discuss problems of justice in health care and the allocation of so-called “disability-adjusted life-years” (DALYs). Finally (starting at 1:04:58) they discuss whether we disparage the disabled if we conceive disability as a departure from normal functioning.

Production note: Be forewarned that the audio quality in this episode is relatively low. It will sound better on some speakers than others.

Continue reading Norman Daniels and Leslie Francis

Richard Brown and Keith Frankish

Richard Brown (left) and Keith Frankish (right) on qualia.

Suppose you’re a physicalist and you want to include qualia in your ontology. Unfortunately, “classic qualia” (intrinsic, ineffable, private properties of experience) seem incompatible with physicalism, while “zero qualia” (mere dispositions to judge that we have