2023-2024 Events Archive

Fall 2023

Wednesday, September 27, 12:00-1:50, SWIP-NYC Colloquium with Katherine Brading (Duke University) who gave a talk at NYU entitled “Du Châtelet on the epistemology and metaphysics of motion.”

Abstract: There is a “Received View” of Du Châtelet’s Foundations according to which it presents a “marriage between Leibnizian metaphysics and Newtonian science”, with Leibnizian metaphysics providing “the metaphysical foundation which in her view was an essential pre-requisite for scientific thinking.” This interpretation persists into current scholarship. However, in my view it subtlely misunderstands Du Châtelet’s own philosophical goals and preoccupations in ways that are important for how we read and engage with her philosophy. The basic foundational issue addressed by Du Châtelet is the lack of an epistemically secure basis for physics. Time and again in the Foundations we see her turning our attention away from metaphysics and toward epistemology. The example I will use to illustrate this is her treatment of motion. I present her definitions of absolute, common relative, and proper relative motion and ask whether this account is adequate to respond to the conceptual, epistemological, and ontological challenges posed for the theory of motion by Newton’s Principia. I suggest that Du Châtelet’s account of motion enables her to meet the first two of these challenges, and that she rejected the third.

Friday, October 20, 3:30-5:30, SWIP-NYC Colloquium with Katja Vogt (Columbia University) who gave a talk at NYU entitled “The Flaw of Generics.”

Abstract: The truth of generics such as “ducks lay eggs” is often taken to be intuitive. For the Stoics, this intuition is flawed. Qua thoughts, they argue, generics are neither true nor false. Qua linguistic items, generics are not bivalently truth-apt. The Stoics ascribe the following flaw to generics: generics predicate something of a kind that is only true of some instances of the kind and that can only be predicated of “somethings.” Given the Stoic rejection of Forms, forms, and essences, kinds are not somethings. The paper explicates this proposal by comparison with some of today’s widely held premises and defends the Stoic concern with generics as a domain of flawed reasoning.

Spring 2024

Wed, May 8, 3:30-5:30, SWIP-NYC Colloquium with the co-winners of the 2024 SWIP-NYC Graduate Student Essay Prize, Eleanor Jerome (City University of New York, Graduate Center) and Audrey Powers (Rutgers University). Eleanor’s paper is entitled “Where Ethics and Aesthetics Diverge: Reconsidering the Objection from Creepiness,” and Audrey’s paper is entitled “Supervenience Objections to Moral Contingentism.”

Abstract of Eleanor’s paper: In ‘Where Ethics and Aesthetics Meet: Titian’s Rape of Europa’ (2003), A.W. Eaton conducts an in-depth analysis of Titian’s Rape of Europa, presenting the painting as an example of a work which is ethically defective—namely because it eroticizes rape—and whose ethical defect diminishes the work aesthetically. She concludes that an ethical defect in a work of art can sometimes constitute an aesthetic defect in that work. In this paper, I argue that while Eaton convincingly shows that Rape of Europa is ethically defective, she fails to show that it is thereby aesthetically defective. My argument against Eaton’s ethicist view revives what she calls the “Objection from Creepiness” (2003, 177), which appeals to the existence of relevantly ethically flawed people (“creeps”) for whom the ethical defect in a work does not block the prescribed aesthetic response. I argue that Eaton’s dismissal of the objection is too quick, and that a reconsideration of the Objection from Creepiness shows it to be particularly powerful in cases where 1) creeps are the target audience of a work; and 2) the ethical defects of the work concern the erotic.

Abstract of Audrey’s paper: If we’re talking about the modal status of the moral laws – the true, universal, exceptionless moral principles or generalizations – we generally think that these laws are metaphysically necessary. That is, if e.g., act utilitarianism is true, it’s necessarily true. Often, this assumption is backed up moral supervenience-related intuitions about how difficult it is to imagine our moral obligations as being different than they actually are. I argue that these intuitions, while strong, don’t serve to establish the claim that the moral laws are metaphysically necessary. So we’re on the hook to give different arguments for necessitarianism about the moral laws, or we’ll have to accept the contingency of the moral laws, with all the weird consequences that follow.