2026 programme seminar series
Seminars take place on Wednesdays from 3:30pm to 5:00pm, across the teaching weeks of both semesters, in Mellor Lab 2.02.
Please note the new start time (it used to be 3pm).
(Note: in addition to the programme seminar series, there is a regular postgraduate seminar series)
| Date | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 25 February | Gregory Currie (York) | Pictures: seeing and knowing |
| 4 March | Jen Nguyen (Bucknell) | Modernizing Descartes’s Algebra: Leibniz’s Calculus of Situations Revisited |
| 11 March | Charles Pigden (Otago) | No-Ought-From-Is, the Other Kantian Principle and the Deficiencies of Deontic Logic |
| 18 March | Postgraduate conference | |
| 25 March | Greg Dawes (Otago) | Knowledge as Knowing-How (or, Knowledge without Belief) |
| 1 April | Fernando Cano-Jorge (Otago) | “The title of this talk does not exist” |
| 8 April | Midsemester break – no seminar this week | |
| 15 April | Finn Butler (University of Melbourne) | Improvising musicians and the roles of rules |
| 22 April | Hitoshi Omori (Tohoku University) | Gentzen’s idea in view of non-deterministic semantics |
| 29 April | Zach Weber (Otago) | On the Outer Horizon |
| 6 May | Michael LeBuffe (Otago) | Human Motivation in Leviathan: Internalism and the Prospects for Agreement |
| 13 May | Jean Campos (Otago) | I Could Not Have Done Otherwise: A Case Against Possibilia |
| 20 May | Heather Dyke (Otago) | The Narrative Mind and the Block Universe: Narrative Architecture, Temporal Experience, and the Projective Error |
| 27 May | Joseph Burke (Otago) | Conceptual pluralism and the umbrella problem: a case study of Feldman’s Two Visions of Welfare |
| 15 July | Stuart Brock (Otago) | |
| 22 July | David Enoch (Oxford) | |
| 29 July | Ryan Hanley (Boston) | |
| 5 August | Postgraduate conference | |
| 12 August | ||
| 19 August | Andrew Richmond (Otago) | |
| 26 August | Elizabeth Stewart (Canterbury) | |
| 2 September | Midsemester break – no seminar this week | |
| 9 September | Lisa Ellis (Otago) | |
| 16 September | Tosh Stewart (Otago) | |
| 23 September | Daniel Halliday (University of Melbourne) | |
| 30 September | Jorge Fernandez (University of Adelaide) | Memory demonstratives |
| 7 October | Huub Brouwer (Tilburg University) | |
| 14 October | Alex Miller (Otago) | |
Programme seminar series: Abstracts
Pictures: Seeing and knowing
Gregory Currie (York)
There are better and worse ways to see pictures. We don’t usually want to see them from a mile away, through a distorting lens, in deep gloom. One should look with attention, from the right distance, in the right light and with (corrected-to-) normal vision. What counts as right will vary; rightness is vague and comes in degrees, and there will often be no uniquely right conditions. Suppose you are looking at a picture in a way which is clearly a right way for the purpose in hand. Are you then in as good a position as you could be to appreciate the picture? If the answer is yes, then looking is all that is needed for appreciation. I’ll call that idea Perceptualism. It makes appreciation entirely a matter of perception, in this case visual perception. Cognitivists say no; you also need knowledge: of the materials used in making the picture, of the conventions and practices at play in the work’s artistic and cultural environment, of certain intentions of the maker; lists vary. Cognitivists agree that we need to see pictures if we are to appreciate them, but we should see them in a suitable state of knowing. Putting it this way suggests a stark contrast between two positions. But is that contrast real? I will suggest a reconciliation. It draws on some controversial ideas about the relations between vision and cognition in which the idea of perceptual learning plays a key role.
Time and date: 3pm–4:30pm, Wednesday 25 February
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02
Modernizing Descartes’s Algebra: Leibniz’s Calculus of Situations Revisited
Jen Nguyen (Bucknell)
It is well-known that the symbols that we currently use in calculus—dy, ò—were devised by Leibniz. Less well-known is the fact that Leibniz devised another set of symbols that he hoped would be used in geometry, what he likes to call his “calculus of situations.” It is this calculus that will be the subject of my talk. In particular, I argue that his calculus of situations anticipates some key modern systems of notations like those of chemistry, economics and music. For I claim that Leibniz’s theory of expression convinced him that the best sort of expression for an object is one that represents it in terms of its ingredients, much like how the expression “H2O” represents water in terms of its ingredients. It is this sort of expression that Leibniz thinks geometers ought to use to represent the objects of their field and that he strove to create with his calculus of situations. To keep our discussion tidy, I concentrate on how Leibniz represents two fundamental objects in geometry: shapes and magnitudes. I will show how he represents both in terms of their most basic building blocks—the spatial relations among points or what Leibniz calls “situations”.
Time and date: 3pm–4:30pm, Wednesday 4 March
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02
No-Ought-From-Is, the Other Kantian Principle and the Deficiencies of Deontic Logic
Charles Pidgen (Otago)
My version of No-Ought-From-Is is an instance of the general thesis that logic is conservative; that you cannot get substantively X conclusions from non-X premises so long as ‘X’ not a logical expression. But what if ‘ought’ is a logical expression, and there is such a subject as deontic logic? In the past I have denied this, not because I am a modal sceptic (in fact I am deep down a modalist), but because I am suspicious of many of the principles internal to deontic logics. And I retain this suspicion down to the present day. (For example many deontic logics accept Kant’s plausible—but in my view mistaken—idea that Ought-implies-Can whilst rejecting his equally plausible claim that the Necessary is not Obligatory. Admit this and most deontic logics would be crippled.) But are there no principles of reasoning intrinsic to the concept of obligation? Perhaps there are some. In this paper, I develop a savagely-reduced conception of deontic logic, stripped of its many absurdities and revisit my result in the light of this diminished modal-deontic logic.
Time and date: 3pm–4:30pm, Wednesday 11 March
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02
Knowledge as Knowing-How (or, Knowledge without Belief)
Greg Dawes (Otago)
The traditional conception of knowledge as justified true belief faces many objections. As well as Gettier-style counterexamples, it makes it impossible to attribute knowledge to non-human animals, and risky to attribute knowledge to those whom we want to say possess it. (I want to say that physicists know about electromagnetism. But are our current theories of electromagnetism true?) My alternative is a 'practicalist' conception of knowledge. To know is to be able to employ the representations developed within a reliable practice so as to achieve the goal of that practice. What is required of such representations—truth, utility, or evocative power—will depend on what the practice in question is trying to achieve.
Time and date: new start time of 3:30pm–5pm, Wednesday 25 March
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02
“The title of this talk does not exist”
Fernando Cano-Jorge (Otago)
Richard Sylvan’s noneism is the thesis that something does not exist. Though seemingly uncontroversial, in order to show that the thesis is true one needs to provide an example of a non-existent thing. But how can we talk meaningfully about non-existents? We seem to do this all the time (in philosophy, science, storytelling, wishful thinking, and a large etc.) but the dominant Russellian account of meaning and denotation does not reflect this. In response, Sylvan proposed a theory of items, which builds on Meinong’s theory of objects, to accommodate such intensional phenomena and more. Item theory has been largely neglected but Graham Priest (2005/2016) has advanced an alternative semantics of intensionality based on Sylvan’s work. In this talk, I will argue that Priest’s semantical theory not only has some logically deficient features but also that his account of the characterization principle, according to which things have the properties they are characterized as having, and of existence entailing properties, impose unnecessary limitations on Sylvan’s original project.
Time and date: new start time of 3:30pm–5pm, Wednesday 1 April
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02
Improvising musicians and the roles of rules
Finn Butler (Melbourne)
There is growing interest in improvisation as a broadly instructive subject, theoretically fruitful beyond activities typically considered to be improvised. In this talk, I examine the characteristic normativity of improvised music performance (IMP), and sketch some prospective insights for the normativity of other activities. Improvisers characteristically negate the governance of musical works, drawing instead from a range of other normative structures, such as the rules associated with their styles, intentions, and skills. I begin with a challenge: if these structures issue constraints for performance behaviours, how does IMP normatively differ from the performance of a work-like complex of styles, intentions, and skills? The widespread view of IMP as live composition offers a promising direction: improvisers exhibit characteristic creative agency, such that may be rule-makers, and not only rule-followers. This motivates attention to variety in how normative structures are involved in the performance, rather than hunting-down whatever structures might fill the explanatory roles filled elsewhere by musical works. Developing critically from the live composition view, I argue that improvisers characteristically play with normative structures as contingent resources. I close by sketching a generalisable framework through which IMP may help us to recognise—and perhaps to ameliorate—our relations with normativity in other domains, playful or otherwise.
Time and date: new start time of 3:30pm–5pm, Wednesday 15 April
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02
Gentzen’s idea in view of non-deterministic semantic
Hitoshi Omori (Tohoku University)
In the dissertation "Investigations into Logical Deduction", Gentzen introduced systems for logic based on ‘introduction’ and ‘elimination’ rules, and left a remark: "introductions represent the ‘definitions’ of the symbols concerned, and eliminations are no more than the consequences of these definitions." This idea of Gentzen was developed further by Prawitz who added that the introduction rule "may now be taken as the ‘meaning’ of the logical constant," and also explicitly acknowledged that the question arises how to make Gentzen's idea precise since the idea is quite vague. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to have a fresh look at Gentzen's idea from the perspective of non-deterministic semantics, an elegant and natural generalization of many-valued semantics. This is a project with a strong exploratory nature, with interesting implications for both proof-theoretic and model-theoretic semanticists, and I will try to present them without assuming any familiarity with non-deterministic semantics. [Ongoing joint work with Sara Ayhan]
Time and date: new start time of 3:30pm–5pm, Wednesday 22 April
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02
On the Outer Horizon
Zach Weber (Otago)
We can see that there are things we do not see, possibilities beyond us. Husserl describes this in terms of horizons, and distinguishes an object's inner horizon from its outer horizon. This prompts the question: what is the outer horizon of all possibilities, the limit? In this talk, I will discuss Husserl's view of objects in terms of horizons, and then consider some formal tools for making this more precise.
Time and date: new start time of 3:30pm–5pm, Wednesday 29 April
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02
Human Motivation in Leviathan: Internalism and the Prospects for Agreement
Michael LeBuffe (Otago)
This account of motivation in Leviathan focuses on deliberation, the thought process that, on Hobbes's account, leads to voluntary motion. An analysis of the components of deliberation—endeavor, the judgement of good and evil, and the passions—suggests that Hobbes endorses a strict motivational internalism on which I desire a given end if and only if I find that end good, and I am averse to a given end if and only if I find that end evil. Deliberation can be further understood by a comparison of it to other sorts of thought processes that Hobbes's introduces: trains of thought, reckoning, and reason. Analysis of these concepts shows that, on Hobbes’s account, we cannot straightforwardly seek general goods as a product of deliberation, which only ever concerns one thing. The laws of nature, such as peace are, however, general goods. This result pushes Hobbes to revise his strict motivational internalism: in some circumstances, we may find peace good even as we do not desire it at all. I argue that avoiding such circumstances, and bringing agents' natural desires to aim, even if indirectly, at the goods of the laws of nature is the principal problem of coordination in Leviathan.
Time and date: 3:30pm–5pm, Wednesday 6 May
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02
I Could Not Have Done Otherwise: A Case Against Possibilia
Jean Campos De Souza Junior (Otago)
It seems to us that the world might have been otherwise than it in fact is; I refer to this as the Modal Intuition. Lewis (1968, 1986) analyses possibilia in terms of relations of similarity between counterparts in distinct concrete worlds. For instance, the claim ‘I could have won the lottery’ is true because there exists a possible world, W, in which I, or, more precisely, my counterpart, to whom I bear a relation of similarity, win the lottery. In this talk, however, I challenge the notion of possibilia as an objective aspect of reality. I propose that the Modal Intuition can be fully explained by our cognitive capacities for counterfactual reasoning, a view I call the Conceivability Theory of Modality. On this account, the seeming that reality might have been otherwise refers merely to a mind-dependent aspect of reality. If this is correct, it suggests there is no need to posit possible worlds in the first place to account for possibilia, as possibilia are not part of objective reality. This position, therefore, appears to support actualism, which, when combined with eternalism, leads to necessitarianism.
Time and date: 3:30pm–5pm, Wednesday 13 May
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02
The Narrative Mind and the Block Universe: Narrative Architecture, Temporal Experience, and the Projective Error
Heather Dyke (Head of Philosophy, Otago)
Human beings are storytelling creatures. We do not merely tell stories about our lives, we experience the world through a narrative cognitive architecture that is built into us before language, before culture, before conscious reflection. I argue that this deep fact about the human mind transforms our understanding of why time feels the way it does. We experience time as tensed: there is a vivid, living present, a fixed past we remember, and an open future we anticipate. I argue that this felt structure is generated by our narrative minds, implemented at the sub-personal level by the predictive processing system; a forward-running, anticipatory mechanism that constructs experience from the top down and cannot, by its very design, represent the world as tenseless. The consequences for the philosophy of time are significant. When A-theorists infer from the tensed character of temporal experience that time itself is tensed, they commit what I call the projective error: mistaking a feature of our cognitive architecture for a feature of reality. The B-theoretic block universe, far from struggling to explain temporal experience, turns out to be precisely what a world inhabited by narrative-predictive minds would feel like from the inside.
Time and date: 3:30pm–5pm, Wednesday 20 May
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02
Conceptual pluralism and the umbrella problem: a case study of Feldman’s Two Visions of Welfare
Joe Burke (Otago)
In his 2019 paper Two Visions of Welfare, Fred Feldman defends Attitudinal Hedonism about welfare by positing a conceptually pluralist account of welfare. Feldman argues that there are two concepts of welfare: Pure Welfare Narrowly Conceived and Enhanced Welfare Broadly Conceived. In this talk I appraise Feldman’s move to pluralism and his subsequent account of welfare. I proceed in four parts. First, I introduce the idea of moves (such as ‘going pluralist’), how moves might come about, and the benefits that we can get by employing them. Next, I introduce Feldman’s use of a move to conceptual pluralism. Then, I argue that Feldman’s attempt merely collapses into a case of conceptual gerrymandering, a case of artificially shifting the bounds of a concept to rule out one’s less-preferred theories of that concept on conceptual grounds. Finally, I argue that we can learn at least two things from Feldman’s unsuccessful move to pluralism. First, there is a problem that all conceptual pluralist accounts will face: the umbrella problem. Second, there is a plausible solve for the umbrella problem in the case of the concept of welfare: a move to functionalism.
Time and date: 3:30pm–5pm, Wednesday 27 May
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02
Memory demonstratives
Jorge Fernandez (Adelaide; Taylor Lecturer 2026)
Sometimes our memories allow us to make demonstrative reference to the past. This happens when, on the basis of our memories, we make certain claims about the past, claims that involve indexicals. It is unclear, however, how the content of those claims should be understood. On the one hand, those claims seem to be about the objects that we are remembering. This suggests that the truth-conditions of those claims involve specific objects in the past. On the other hand, those claims seem to be about the fact that, in the past, we had certain kinds of perceptual experiences. This suggests that the truth-conditions of those claims involve general facts. But how can the truth-conditions of indexical claims be specific and general at the same time? I propose a way of dissolving this puzzle by using a distinction borrowed from two-dimensionalist semantics. This is the distinction between two kinds of truth-conditions for indexical claims. I apply the distinction to indexical claims based on memories, and suggest that such claims do have truth-conditions that involve specific objects, and they do have truth-conditions that involve general facts. However, there is no tension between the two, because the relevant truth-conditions are of different types.
Time and date: 3:30pm–5pm, Wednesday 30 September
Location: Mellor Lab 2.02
Lectures
Dan and Gwen Taylor Lecturers
- 2026: Jorge Fernandez (Adelaide)
- 2024: Kristie Miller (Sydney); David Braddon-Mitchell (Sydney)
- 2023: Tim Mulgan (Auckland; St Andrews)
- 2019: Tim Dare (Auckland)
- 2018: Gillian Russell (UNC)
- 2017: Julia Driver (Washington University St. Louis)
- 2016: Sally Haslanger (MIT)
- 2015: Jeremy Waldron (NYU)
- 2014: Philip Pettit (Princeton, ANU)
- 2013: Brian Leiter (Chicago)
- 2012: Derek Matravers (Open University)
- 2011: Tim Mulgan (St Andrews)
- 2010: Annette Baier (Otago, Pittsburgh)
Recordings of selected lectures are available on the Division of Humanities podcasts page, and the history of The Dan and Gwen Taylor Fellowship page tells how these lectures were started.