Past Colloquia (Spring of 2009 and earlier)
Colloquia for Spring of 2009
Friday, May 8, 4:10 p.m.
Finitary Provability and Epistemic Justification
Alexei Angelides
Department of Philosophy, Stanford University
Abstract:
The concept of finitary provability, like that of an algorithm, is an
informal concept that admits of different analyses. But unlike the
concept of an algorithm, whose analysis via Church's Thesis has
converged on a number of different, but equivalent formal notions
(Turing-computability, lambda-definability, etc.), the analysis of the
concept of finitary provability has engendered a number of different
and logically distinct analyses. Thus, for example, Tait (1981) argues
that finitary provability coincides with reasoning in Primitive
Recursive Arithmetic. Parsons (1998), on the other hand, argues that
finitary provability coincides with reasoning in Peano Arithmetic.
Tait argues for his thesis based on his analysis of our "basic" grasp
of the concept of number, while Parsons' analysis is based on his
analysis of finitary intuition. In this talk, I'll present an analysis
of finitary provability based neither on our grasp of the number
concept nor on the kinds of intuitions that might support such
reasoning, but based on a notion of epistemic justification, or
acceptability. After presenting some historical evidence for this
view, I present a neutrality condition (essentially, if we can avoid
basing the analysis on notions like intuition or our basic grasp of a
concept, we should), and then spell out some of its main features. On
my analysis, it turns out that finitary provability coincides with a
certain class of extensions of Robinson's Arithmetic, and that, one
consequence of the view is that finitary proofs are not effective.
Bio:
Alexei entered Stanford in Fall 2004 after obtaining a graduate degree in philosophy at the New School for Social Research. Once upon a time, he drunk fine wines and whiskeys, trained wild horses in Southern California, and was a professional chef in London and New York City. Nowadays the action is mostly logical and philosophical. Alexei is one of the several superb young philosophical logicians who is working on reviving philosophical interest in proof theory in general and the work of David Hilbert and his students in particular.Alexei is working on developing an anti-foundationalist epistemology for Hilbert's Program by isolating then magnifying central, but neglected, features of his early and later work. Some of its core ideas dovetail with more general work in epistemology on a priori knowledge, epistemic justification, and the relation between logic and rational belief. Both dovetail with the history of analytic, and all of it feeds a mild obsession with Q and some of its less austere extensions.
Trivia: Alexei's uncle Phil Angelides run as a Democratic challenger for Governor of California against the Republican incumbent Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2004.
For more info and sample papers, see: http://philosophy.stanford.edu/profile/Alexei+Angelides/
Lory Student Center, Room LSC 220-222, 4:10 pm
April 3 , 2009
Epistemic Landscape Models of Cognitive Labor
Michael Weisberg
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania
Abstract:
Bio:
Michael Weisberg is a philosophy professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the philosophy of science, especially the role of idealization in biological and chemical modeling. Much of this work focuses on models drawn from evolutionary ecology and structural chemistry.
Besides his primary affiliation in philosophy, Professor Weisberg is also a faculty fellow at Fisher-Hassenfeld College House and a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.
Michael is one of the most promising young philosophers of science and one of the most creative philosophers of chemistry. He has been called the "most promising and deepest technical philosopher of his generation" by the likes of Peter Godfrey-Smith.
For more info and sample papers, see: http://www.phil.upenn.edu/~weisberg/Homepage/Home.html
Lory Student Center, Room LSC TBA, 4:10 pm
March 13, 2009
New kind of eliminative Inference
Patrick Forber
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Tufts University, Medford, Mass.
Abstract:
Eliminative reasoning plays an important inferential role in the sciences, but only a minority take it to be part of our best theory of science. Those that do defend eliminative reasoning see this inference tool as important for theory choices: evidence rules out all but one of a set of alternative theories. Whichever theory remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Yet statistical evidence does not fit into an eliminative framework well at all. And the prevalence of statistical evidence in the sciences, especially in evolutionary biology, suggests that elimination has an inconsequential role to play. This majority view relies on probabilistic theories of confirmation to understand almost all reasoning about evidence. Here I will review the standard picture of eliminative inference and its problems. I want to suggest that eliminative reasoning has an important and different role to play in science, a role that is compatible with probabilistic approaches to evidence. The new kind of eliminative inference is a crucial part of case building, a scientific activity that determines the context for evaluating statistical evidence. I will illustrate the process of case building with examples taken from molecular evolutionary biology.
Bio:
Prof. Forber is a philosopher of science specializing in philosophy of biology and philosophy of probability. He has received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and has since acquired a bit of a superstar status in his field. He has collaborated with E. Sober (Wisconsin/Stanford), B. Skyrms (UCI), M. Friedman (Stanford), K. Sterelney (ANU), P. Godfrey-Smith (Harvard), P. Suppes (CSLI), and P. Kitcher (Columbia) among others. He is currently working on issues in confirmation in science.For more, see: http://ase.tufts.edu/philosophy/people/forber.shtml
Lory Student Center, Room LSC 213-215, 4:10 pm
Thursday, February 19, 5p.m.
What is the spatial logic of fractals: dreaming up the Coastline of Britain
Darko Sarenac
Department of Philosophy, Colorado State University
Abstract:
In the talk, I will connect some of the work that I have done on the logic of space and the standard metric topological spaces, to the work on fractal geometry. Fractal geometry has been labelled the geometry of the real world by its proponents. The thought is that the broken, imperfect, irregular but self similar objects of fractal geometry resemble the real space a lot closer than the idealized spheres, cubes, and other perfect gadgets of Euclid. I find it a strange coincidence that my logic of space, conceived completely independently of any fractal considerations ends up being best suited for thinking about fractals. In fact the logic was made up to fit the products of perfectly symmetric world of standard topological spaces. I have no deep theoretical explanation of this phenomenon, just some pictures, intuitions, and lots of seemingly deep puzzles. (Some theorems, of course.)
Please don't be scared away by all the technical jargon. My goal is to make the main points intelligible without any technical detail. I really want to make the talk as intuitive as possible. I will try to present some philosophical and some mathematico-philosophical oddities. The hope is that we can leave with a deeper understanding of the role of space in reasoning, but more specifically the role of fractal objects in reasoning about everyday things. But we may be stuck with more pretty pictures after all!
Eddy, Room 10, 5:00 pm
February 27, 2009
The Scope and Limits of Private Rule-Following
Michael Losonsky
Graduate Studies Director
Department of Philosophy, Colorado State University
Abstract
This paper examines the assumption that language and rule-following
require a distinction between apparent and real correctness. This
requirement is subject to different formulations and this paper shows
which formulation a private speaker or rule-follower is able to satisfy.
While there are senses of this requirement that solitary individuals are
able to satisfy, there is nevertheless an important disanalogy between
private and public cases that has been ignored by those defending the
view that individuals can satisfy this requirement as well as
communities can satisfy it. This difference between public and private
cases clarifies the limits of private rule-following.
Bio:
Losonsky specializes in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and the history of modern philosophy. He has published in many leading journals, including the Philosophical Review, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, Minds and Machines, and Brain and Behavioral Sciences. He is coeditor and co-author with Heimir Geirsson of Readings in Language and Mind (Blackwell 1996) and Beginning Metaphysics (Blackwell 1998), and he edited and wrote the introduction to Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language (Cambridge University Press, 1999). He is author of Enlightenment and Action from Descartes to Kant: Passionate Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Linguistic Turns in Modern Philosophy (Cambridge University Press 2005).For more info, http://lamar.colostate.edu/~losonsky/
Lory Student Center, Room LSC 224-226, 4:10 pm
Friday, April 24, 4:10 p.m.
Uncertain Utility and Intransitive Indifference
James Norris
Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas
Abstract:
The rational choice literature often presents preferences as primary or primitive and utilities as secondary or derivative. I suggest this is not the case, i.e. that the most plausible interpretation is that utilities are generally primary or primitive (though I would not argue that this is always the case), and that one's preference for A over B is generally derived from a comparison of one's subjective utilities for A and B. Furthermore, choice theorists often appeal to examples wherein they claim there are infinitely many choices, but as every physical measurement has a necessary uncertainty, it is never the case that there are infinite choices of a physical quantity that can actually be made when there is an upper bound for the quantity. Understanding why this is suggests that utilities ought to be likewise considered as quantities with unavoidable and necessary uncertainties, i.e. not as a single, sharp value, but instead as a range of possible and equally likely values. These uncertainties include in every case a systematic component, e.g. any cardinal ranking is necessarily to some 'nearest' order, to the nearest whole number, the nearest integer, nearest half whole number/integer, etc. – this 'rounding' results necessarily in a systematic uncertainty, while there may be many other sources of systematic uncertainty. Furthermore, if one considers one's utility for something over a number of occasions, variation in this utility can be naturally interpreted as a statistical uncertainty. Given that utilities are primary and have necessary uncertainties, it is natural to interpret indifference between A and B as meaning they have consistent utilities, i.e. one is indifferent between A and B not if one's utilities for A and B are equal, as is the case in the extant literature, but instead if the range of possible utility values for A and B overlap. Under this interpretation the transitivity conditions involving indifference generally required to regard preference orderings as rational:
If xPy and xIz, then zIy.
If xPy and yIz, then zPz.
If xIy and yIz, then xIz.
are not valid as consistency is not a transitive relation. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem (AIT), which relies on transitivity conditions involving indifference, is of particular interest for social and political theorists as it proves that given the ostensibly reasonable conditions of unrestricted domain, nonimposition, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives, no voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals for three or more discrete options into a community-wide ranking. But if utilities ought to be treated as quantities with necessary uncertainties, proofs like AIT are, in general, not valid, and require further, possibly unrealistic, constraints to regain validity. This is not a claim resulting from philosophical skepticism, but instead from an epistemologically realistic claim about the necessity of uncertainty in measured quantities. If AIT and rational choice theory are meant to say meaningful things about the real world, we must take account of the epistemic restrictions placed upon us in the real world.
Find out more about James: http://home.wamego.net/jnorris/vita
Lory Student Center, Room LSC TBA, 4:10 pm
TBA Fall , 2009
Folk Epistemology: its natue and future prospects
Prof. RICHARD KITCHENER
Professor, Department of Philosophy, Colorado State University
Abstract: TBA
Bio:
Kitchener is interested primarily in problems in the philosophy of science, especially psychology. He is the editor of New Ideas in Psychology and author of Piaget's Theory of Knowledge (1986). He is the editor of The World View of Contemporary Physics: Does it Need a New Metaphysics? (1988), Psychology and Philosophy (1994) and The Encyclopedia of Behaviorism (1999). His most recent interests include psychological epistemology, and he is a prominent proponent of genetic epistemology. He enjoys skiing, back-packing and singing in barbershop quartets.Lory Student Center, Room LSC TBA, 4:10 pm
Fall 2008
December 5, 2008
A Particularist Reading of the Nicomachean Ethics
Uri Leibowitz
Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado at Boulder
Abstract:
In this talk I offer a particularist interpretation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. My goal, however, is not merely interpretative-although I do argue that a particularist reading of Nicomachean Ethics resolves several interpretative puzzles that commentators have grappled with. I also claim that the particularist theory I attribute to Aristotle is an interesting and plausible moral theory in its own right.Lory Student Center, Room LSC 213-215, 4:10 pm
November 20, 2008
Enacting the Self: Buddhist and enactivist approaches to the emergence of the self
Matt MacKenzie
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Colorado State University
Abstract:
This talk will take up the problem of the self and attempt to find a middle way between substantialist and reductionist theories of the self and personal identity. To do so, the discussion will focus on accounts of the self developed in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and enactivist cognitive science. Drawing from both traditions, it will be suggested that the self should be understood in terms of dynamic self-organizing processes that emerge from the on-going interaction between a sentient organism and its (natural and social) environment.Lory Student Center, Room TBA, 4:10 pm (Note the Thursday date!)
The 2008 Eddy Lecture
Thursday, September 18, 2008, 7:30 p.m., Plant Science, Room C101
Holmes Rolston, III
University Distinguished Professor and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado
Three Big Bangs: Matter-Energy, Life, Mind
Scientific natural history discovers “three big bangs,” each marking a serendipitous singularity.1. At the primordial big bang, matter-energy appears, initially in simpler forms, but with the remarkable capacity to generate heavier elements, without which life would not be possible.
2. Life explodes on Earth with DNA discovering, storing, and transferring information. Across a singular natural history, life persists in the midst of its perpetual perishing, generating and regenerating billions of species. These increase biodiversity, with trajectories escalating biocomplexity.
3. The human genius, a massive singularity, crosses a trans-genetic threshold, generating language and making possible cumulative transmissible cultures, radically novel in kind and in scale. Life becomes ideational; ideas pass from mind to mind. Ideas generate ideals.
The nature of matter-energy, the nature of genes and their genesis, invites those at the center of complex caring intelligence to wonder where they are, who they are, and what they ought to do. Is there sacred Logos in, with, and under a cybernetic system with such breakthrough creativity?Afternoon Seminar
Evolution in the Twenty-First Century: Philosophical Reflections
Thursday, September 18, 2008, 2- 4 p.m., Lory Student Center Room 230
Both events are free and open to the public.October 3 , 2008
Title: “Brain and Religion: Recent findings & future prospects”
Nina P. Azari, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hilo, Hawaii
Abstract:
A critical question in the study of religion is: What makes an experience specifically religious? In so far as all human experience is embodied, neuroscience may provide new insight into this question. Recent developments in functional neuroimaging technologies afford the study of brain correlates of a wide variety of human mental phenomena in normal healthy individuals. Now there are neuroimaging reports on two very different kinds of religious experience (Azari et al. 2001; Newberg et al. 2001). Discussed in this talk will be how the results of these two recent studies lead to a view of religious experience as a cognitively structured phenomenon, for which thought and belief (i.e., cognitivity) are central. Correspondingly, these functional imaging findings challenge a hitherto dominant and highly popularized notion that religious experience is a matter of a non-cognitive brain reflex-response, necessarily ‘marked’ by activity in the limbic system.Lory Student Center, Room TBA, 4:10 pm
Spring 2008
April 18, 2008
Topic: Can Special Relations Justify the Privileged Moral Status of Humans Over Animals?
Robert C. Jones
Director of the Center for Applied and Professional Ethics
California State University, Chico
and
Visiting researcher at The Ethics in Society Project, Wesleyan University
Lory Student Center, Room 230, 4:10 pm
April 11-13, 2008
A Mini Conference: War, Development and Global Justice
Organizer: Nigel Dower
William E. Morgan Endowed Chair in Liberal Arts at CSU, and
Professor Emeritus, Aberdeen
Since the small conference Nigel Dower organized two years ago on 'global ethics' proved successful, he is organizing a similar one this year.
It is proposed to hold a small inter-disciplinary conference on the above theme. Presentations will be given by some outside invited speakers (including David Crocker who was a Faculty member at CSU for many years) and a number of faculty/students on campus. The conference will run from Friday evening to Sunday lunch-time/afternoon.
Speakers will give presentations on various aspects of the theme. They can speak on any one of the themes or on the interconnections between any two or all of the themes. Ideally the range of papers should include a number of papers looking at the connections. If colleagues in the College/University wish to have more information or are interested in offering a paper, please contact Nigel Dower.
Professor Nigel Dower,
William E. Morgan Endowed Chair in Liberal Arts,
Room 234, Eddy Building,
Department of Philosophy,
CSU,
Fort Collins,
CO 80523-1781
970-491-6734
ndower@mail.colostate.edu or n.dower@abdn.ac.uk
Guggenheim Hall (off Laurel)
For more details click here.Wednesday, March 12, 2008, 4:30-6:00 pm
A Public Lecture: Development, Peace and Global Citizenship
Nigel Dower
William E. Morgan Endowed Chair in Liberal Arts at CSU, and
Professor Emeritus, Aberdeen
University Center for the Arts, William E. Runyan Music Room, 1400 Remington Street, Fort Collins, CO
Monday, February 18, 2008
Topic: Ethical Revaluation in the Thought of Śāntideva.
Ahmed Lele
Visiting Assistant Professor, Religion Department
Colorado College
Lory Student Center, Room Virginia Dale Room, 4:10 pm
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Topic: Some comments on Pathañjali’s Yoga Sutra
Shyam Ranganatham
Department of Philosophy
York University
Lory Student Center, Room 211E, 4:10 pm
Monday, February 11, 2008
Topic: Enacting Selves, Enacting Worlds: Reflections on the Buddhist Theory of Karma
Matthew MacKenzie
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy
Muhlenberg College
Lory Student Center, 211E, 4:10 pm
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Topic: William James and Environmental Philosophy: Beyond Dewey-Eyed Managerialism
Piers H. G. Stephens
Visiting Assistant Professor
Lyman Briggs College
Michigan State University
Lory Student Center, Room Virginia Dale Room, 4:10 pm
Wednesday, January 30 to Friday, February 1, 2008
Focus the Nation: A Mini conference
Our Environmental Future: Many Perspectives
Art/Micro Brew/Ecology/Economics/Policy/Philosophy/ Science/Spirituality
Lory Student Center 228 (Room A) and 230 (Room B)
This conference is geared towards a student activist, conscious citizen, public intellectual, ...Friday, February 1, 2008
Topic: Nature, Awe, and Value
Katie McShane
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy and Religion
North Carolina State University
Eddy 10, 5:00 pm
Katie McShane hanging out with graduate students before her CSU talk
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Topic: A Theory of Stability
James Justus
Department of Philosophy
University of Texas at Austin
Lory Student Center, Room 203, 5:00 pm
Dinner with Justus following the talk
Fall 2007
Willard O. Eddy Lecture
Daniel C. Dennett
Director, Center for Cognitive Studies
University Professor
Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy
Tufts University
Medford, Massachusetts
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Daniel Dennett during Eddy Lectures at Colorado State University.
September 14, 2007
“CONSERVATISM, STABILITY AND SELF-TRUST”
Mark Moffett, Assistant Professor of Philosophy University of Wyoming
Lory Student Center, Room 214-216, 4:10 pm
October 12, 2007
“SEEKING THE SUPREME PRINCIPLE IN KANT’S GROUNDWORK”
Rod Adams, Adjunct in Philosophy Colorado State University
Lory Student Center, Room 214-216, 4:10 pm
November 9, 2007
"THE ENVIRONMENTAL ARGUMENT FOR REDUCING IMMIGRATION INTO THE UNITED STATES"
Philip Cafaro, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Winthrop Staples, Wildlife Biologist and Masters Candidate in Philosophy Colorado State University
Lory Student Center, Room 214-216, 4:10 pm
Past Eddy Lecturers Included: Rebecca Goldstein, Alvin Goldman, Robert Holmes, Arthur Danto, Martha Nussbaum
