Tuesday, April 9th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
View the recording here.
Nardos Tecle
Framing Refugees: Invasion or a Humanitarian Crisis
Nardos is a student at the University of Calgary completing a combined degree in psychology and philosophy. Academic interests lie in applied political and legal philosophy, as well as psychological dynamics of social justice. Outside of academia I am on a board of a non-for-profit Umoja community mosaic which specializes in helping newcomers build community through sport and other activities. And President of our beloved department affiliated club: philosophia.
Anders Madsen
Why Thought is Social
After years doing odd jobs ranging from sales to construction, I eventually ended up at University where I fell in love with philosophy and sociology. I hope to someday earn my Ph.D. in philosophy to become a professor.
Tuesday, March 19th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
View the recording here (starts part way through the talk).
Stan Hall
The Continuing Search for Hidden Truth and Understanding of Nature with Carlo Rovelli
Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who has made significant contributions to the physics of space and time. He is Director of the Quantum Gravity research group at the Centre de Physique Theorique in Marseille France. He has worked in Italy, the United States and France and currently resides in Canada acting as adjunct professor at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University. Interests listed include quantum mechanics and the history of science and philosophy. Ancient insight's with relevance to modern theoretical physics seem to be a recurring theme.
Several of his books have appeared on the New York Times list of best seller and have been translated into more than 50 languages. His books are always thoughtfully written in plain language, avoiding specialist jargon despite complex subject matter and thus feature unusual clarity, and pleasurable reading.
PhD Chemistry, UBC, 1966. Continued study and work in organic and biochemistry at U. Liverpool, National Institute of Mental Health (USA), U.Calgary-Chemistry, U. Calgary-Chemical and Petroleum Engineering Laboratory of Environmental Engineering and Akrilon Industries. Projects were generally, in some way, related to health or environment. He retired in 2006 with the plan to read and travel to enhance personal understanding of other cultures, climate zones, ecosystems and just enjoy faraway places lands and seas. He is very interested in “science based” information to improve probabilities of continuing good health, for instance, food choices and lifestyle.
Stan is a member of the Apeiron Society for the Practice of Philosophy.
Tuesday, February 27th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
View the recording here.
Tyler Wark
On Pseudo-Inquiry
We desire to avoid engaging in ‘pseudo-inquiry’ in favour of engaging in the genuine article. Yet there
has been little reflection on the difference between pseudo and genuine inquiry. To rectify this, I will
answer two questions in this paper: first, what makes a purported inquiry a pseudo-inquiry rather than a
genuine inquiry? Second, why do we desire to avoid pseudo-inquiring? I begin to answer the first
question by outlining several conditions for when a purported inquiry is a pseudo-inquiry. These
conditions take pseudo and genuine inquiry to share a subject-object structure. It is the content of this
subject-object structure which distinguishes pseudo-inquiry from genuine inquiry. I list several candidate
conditions. Next, I derive an answer to the second question from the list of conditions. I argue that
pseudo-inquiry is untrustworthy—the results of a complete pseudo-inquiry should not be trusted.
Pseudo-inquiries fail to meet at least one of two conditions on trustworthiness: an inquiry is trustworthy
when 1) the inquirer is sincerely committed to finding the truth and 2) the inquirer is competent enough
to find the true answer to the question they are inquiring into (these conditions are a variation of
conditions in Barnes 2023, 10 and Hawley 2019, chapter 4). Pseudo-inquirers do not sincerely commit
themselves to finding the truth, or else their object of ‘inquiry’ is such that we have no reason to think
they would or could find the truth even if they were sincere. Thus, the reason we desire to avoid
pseudo-inquiring because we desire to avoid being untrustworthy.
Tyler Wark is currently a 2nd year PhD in philosophy at the University of Calgary. He begun his education
in philosophy as an undergraduate at Trent University where he earned a BA with honours in
philosophy. He then completed an MA in philosophy at the University of Calgary and has continued as a
PhD student.
His initial interests were in philosophy of science and metaphysics. Then early in his graduate career, he
began researching epistemology and the history of epistemology. This interest has evolved into his
current interest in inquiry. He intends to continue his research into the nature of inquiry for the
remained of his PhD. Not, however, at the University of Calgary, which he is currently transferring out of
into one of several possible programs.
Tuesday, February 13th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
View the recording here.
Arthur Frank
Arthur Frank on Foucault
Dr. Frank will guide us on a deep dive into Foucault’s analysis and interpretation of power. The exercise of power by us and “others” is a daily reality which we have little awareness or understanding of. Foucault showed us how we, as subjects of power, participate in relations of power, thereby affirming those relations. Specifically, Dr. Frank will examine health as a discourse of power relations that depend on subjects engaging practices that produce the self as object of those practices, thus validating the truth game that depends on surveillance.
Tuesday, January 23rd, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
View the recording here.
Réal Fillion
Réal Fillion on Foucault
Réal Fillion, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sudbury, will lead our second of three sessions on Michel Foucault. Réal approaches this session in a discussion-based format that will enhance participants' consideration of Foucault's contribution to the field of philosophy. Various discussion points include a general theory of social institutions including further discussion about voluntary/involuntary institutions, the role of resistance in manifestations of power, and if historiography matters.
Réal Fillion is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sudbury, where he taught for over twenty-five years . Born in St. Boniface, Manitoba, he studied at the University of Winnipeg, Trent University, and the University of Ottawa and is interested in the intersection of historical and philosophical studies. He is the author of Multicultural Dynamics and the Ends of History: Exploring Kant, Hegel. and Marx (2008), Foucault and the Indefinite Work of Freedom (2012), and The Elective Mind: Philosophy and the Undergraduate Degree (2021), all published by the University of Ottawa Press.
Tuesday, December 12th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
View the recording here.
Siranat Thamtrachai
The Aesthetic Connection: Conceptual Art's Paradoxical Transcendence and the Nature of Platonic Beauty
and
Andrew Allison
Every Man Has His Price...And His Dignity: Value Pluralism and a Price for Everything
Tuesday, November 28th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
View the recording here.
David Liebesman
Repeatable Artworks and Mixed-Level Property Ascriptions
Repeatable artworks can have a multitude of realizations: we can play a song many times and print multiple copies of a book. This puts pressure on us to treat them as abstract. After all, their very repeatability means that they cannot be identified with particular realizations. However, repeatable artworks also seem to have properties we ascribe to familiar concrete objects, such as being heard, and put on shelves. Both abstract and concrete views of repeatable artworks must explain how it is that we can ascribe concrete-seeming properties to abstract-seeming entities. This is the problem of mixed-level property ascriptions. After introducing the problem we’ll consider solutions for a variety of views of repeatable artworks, as well as some potential lessons for how we should think of the abstract/concrete distinction
David Liebesman is a Professor of philosophy and linguistics at the University of Calgary. Prior to that he was an assistant professor at Boston University, and prior to that he received his Ph.D. at Cornell University. He works on a variety of topics at the intersection of philosophy of language and metaphysics.
Tuesday, November 14th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
Foucault Scrum led by Mark Migotti & Meghan Reid
View the recording here.
Tuesday, October 24th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
View the recording here.
Bob Ware
Some Thoughts on Thinking Together
The focus will be on intellectual partnerships. What are they? How are they formed? How do they best work? How can they be improved?
The discussion will range over physicists, philosophers, and political theorists, with special attention to Frederick Engels and Karl Marx. They were adept and open about thinking together over their lifetime.
Bob Ware (BA, Cornell; D.Phil, Oxford; Prof. Emeritus, Univ. of Calgary) taught philosophy at Calgary, until retirement, and at four universities in China, at Carleton University, and elsewhere. Besides edited books and articles and reviews on language, democratic theory, and collective responsibility, he is the author of Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals.
Tuesday, October 10th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
Sorry, no recording.
View talk PowerPoint here.
Agnes Tam
Taking Narrative Politics Seriously
How do we keep our political community in good form? Liberal political philosophers believe that democracy is key. Here, democracy does not mean brute majoritarian power game, although, sadly, that may be our reality. Rather, liberals have in mind a more idealized form of democracy in which citizens justify to one another the rules which they author and are governed by. At the core of this normative model of democracy is the beliefs (a) that a political community is constitutive of its rules, and (b) that the process of mutual justification makes good or legitimate rules, because it embodies collective intelligence and expresses respect to citizens as rational autonomous agents.
In this talk, I challenge this deliberative model of democracy because it misunderstands the ontology of political community. I will argue that a political community is constitutive of the story it tells itself. This in fact is an ontological claim that many liberal political philosophers already explicitly or implicitly accept. What they have overlooked, however, is that stories are works of art. As such, the making, the appreciation, and the expressions of our political stories are subject to aesthetic norms. This creates a big problem for the deliberative model because aesthetic norms can come into tension with norms of rational deliberation. In this talk, I will identify some of these tensions. If my argument succeeds, to forge a better community, it is not enough that we have more reasoned debates about rules, but rather, we must learn to aestheticize political experiences properly.
Agnes Tam is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary. Her core research interest is group agency, including its nature and roles in our political life. She has published a fair bit on the role of groups in enabling progressive social change, notwithstanding their parochial and conformist nature. This year, she is also a Resident Fellow in Applied Ethics at the Calgary Institute for Humanities, starting her new project titled “Telling a better story of who we are”. As a hybrid of a political philosopher and a political theorist, she thrives at the intersection between theory and practice, and between the normative and the empirical.
View the recording here.
Nardos Tecle
Framing Refugees: Invasion or a Humanitarian Crisis
Nardos is a student at the University of Calgary completing a combined degree in psychology and philosophy. Academic interests lie in applied political and legal philosophy, as well as psychological dynamics of social justice. Outside of academia I am on a board of a non-for-profit Umoja community mosaic which specializes in helping newcomers build community through sport and other activities. And President of our beloved department affiliated club: philosophia.
Anders Madsen
Why Thought is Social
After years doing odd jobs ranging from sales to construction, I eventually ended up at University where I fell in love with philosophy and sociology. I hope to someday earn my Ph.D. in philosophy to become a professor.
Tuesday, March 19th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
View the recording here (starts part way through the talk).
Stan Hall
The Continuing Search for Hidden Truth and Understanding of Nature with Carlo Rovelli
Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who has made significant contributions to the physics of space and time. He is Director of the Quantum Gravity research group at the Centre de Physique Theorique in Marseille France. He has worked in Italy, the United States and France and currently resides in Canada acting as adjunct professor at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University. Interests listed include quantum mechanics and the history of science and philosophy. Ancient insight's with relevance to modern theoretical physics seem to be a recurring theme.
Several of his books have appeared on the New York Times list of best seller and have been translated into more than 50 languages. His books are always thoughtfully written in plain language, avoiding specialist jargon despite complex subject matter and thus feature unusual clarity, and pleasurable reading.
PhD Chemistry, UBC, 1966. Continued study and work in organic and biochemistry at U. Liverpool, National Institute of Mental Health (USA), U.Calgary-Chemistry, U. Calgary-Chemical and Petroleum Engineering Laboratory of Environmental Engineering and Akrilon Industries. Projects were generally, in some way, related to health or environment. He retired in 2006 with the plan to read and travel to enhance personal understanding of other cultures, climate zones, ecosystems and just enjoy faraway places lands and seas. He is very interested in “science based” information to improve probabilities of continuing good health, for instance, food choices and lifestyle.
Stan is a member of the Apeiron Society for the Practice of Philosophy.
Tuesday, February 27th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
View the recording here.
Tyler Wark
On Pseudo-Inquiry
We desire to avoid engaging in ‘pseudo-inquiry’ in favour of engaging in the genuine article. Yet there
has been little reflection on the difference between pseudo and genuine inquiry. To rectify this, I will
answer two questions in this paper: first, what makes a purported inquiry a pseudo-inquiry rather than a
genuine inquiry? Second, why do we desire to avoid pseudo-inquiring? I begin to answer the first
question by outlining several conditions for when a purported inquiry is a pseudo-inquiry. These
conditions take pseudo and genuine inquiry to share a subject-object structure. It is the content of this
subject-object structure which distinguishes pseudo-inquiry from genuine inquiry. I list several candidate
conditions. Next, I derive an answer to the second question from the list of conditions. I argue that
pseudo-inquiry is untrustworthy—the results of a complete pseudo-inquiry should not be trusted.
Pseudo-inquiries fail to meet at least one of two conditions on trustworthiness: an inquiry is trustworthy
when 1) the inquirer is sincerely committed to finding the truth and 2) the inquirer is competent enough
to find the true answer to the question they are inquiring into (these conditions are a variation of
conditions in Barnes 2023, 10 and Hawley 2019, chapter 4). Pseudo-inquirers do not sincerely commit
themselves to finding the truth, or else their object of ‘inquiry’ is such that we have no reason to think
they would or could find the truth even if they were sincere. Thus, the reason we desire to avoid
pseudo-inquiring because we desire to avoid being untrustworthy.
Tyler Wark is currently a 2nd year PhD in philosophy at the University of Calgary. He begun his education
in philosophy as an undergraduate at Trent University where he earned a BA with honours in
philosophy. He then completed an MA in philosophy at the University of Calgary and has continued as a
PhD student.
His initial interests were in philosophy of science and metaphysics. Then early in his graduate career, he
began researching epistemology and the history of epistemology. This interest has evolved into his
current interest in inquiry. He intends to continue his research into the nature of inquiry for the
remained of his PhD. Not, however, at the University of Calgary, which he is currently transferring out of
into one of several possible programs.
Tuesday, February 13th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
View the recording here.
Arthur Frank
Arthur Frank on Foucault
Dr. Frank will guide us on a deep dive into Foucault’s analysis and interpretation of power. The exercise of power by us and “others” is a daily reality which we have little awareness or understanding of. Foucault showed us how we, as subjects of power, participate in relations of power, thereby affirming those relations. Specifically, Dr. Frank will examine health as a discourse of power relations that depend on subjects engaging practices that produce the self as object of those practices, thus validating the truth game that depends on surveillance.
Tuesday, January 23rd, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
View the recording here.
Réal Fillion
Réal Fillion on Foucault
Réal Fillion, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sudbury, will lead our second of three sessions on Michel Foucault. Réal approaches this session in a discussion-based format that will enhance participants' consideration of Foucault's contribution to the field of philosophy. Various discussion points include a general theory of social institutions including further discussion about voluntary/involuntary institutions, the role of resistance in manifestations of power, and if historiography matters.
Réal Fillion is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sudbury, where he taught for over twenty-five years . Born in St. Boniface, Manitoba, he studied at the University of Winnipeg, Trent University, and the University of Ottawa and is interested in the intersection of historical and philosophical studies. He is the author of Multicultural Dynamics and the Ends of History: Exploring Kant, Hegel. and Marx (2008), Foucault and the Indefinite Work of Freedom (2012), and The Elective Mind: Philosophy and the Undergraduate Degree (2021), all published by the University of Ottawa Press.
Tuesday, December 12th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
View the recording here.
Siranat Thamtrachai
The Aesthetic Connection: Conceptual Art's Paradoxical Transcendence and the Nature of Platonic Beauty
and
Andrew Allison
Every Man Has His Price...And His Dignity: Value Pluralism and a Price for Everything
Tuesday, November 28th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
View the recording here.
David Liebesman
Repeatable Artworks and Mixed-Level Property Ascriptions
Repeatable artworks can have a multitude of realizations: we can play a song many times and print multiple copies of a book. This puts pressure on us to treat them as abstract. After all, their very repeatability means that they cannot be identified with particular realizations. However, repeatable artworks also seem to have properties we ascribe to familiar concrete objects, such as being heard, and put on shelves. Both abstract and concrete views of repeatable artworks must explain how it is that we can ascribe concrete-seeming properties to abstract-seeming entities. This is the problem of mixed-level property ascriptions. After introducing the problem we’ll consider solutions for a variety of views of repeatable artworks, as well as some potential lessons for how we should think of the abstract/concrete distinction
David Liebesman is a Professor of philosophy and linguistics at the University of Calgary. Prior to that he was an assistant professor at Boston University, and prior to that he received his Ph.D. at Cornell University. He works on a variety of topics at the intersection of philosophy of language and metaphysics.
Tuesday, November 14th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
Foucault Scrum led by Mark Migotti & Meghan Reid
View the recording here.
Tuesday, October 24th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
View the recording here.
Bob Ware
Some Thoughts on Thinking Together
The focus will be on intellectual partnerships. What are they? How are they formed? How do they best work? How can they be improved?
The discussion will range over physicists, philosophers, and political theorists, with special attention to Frederick Engels and Karl Marx. They were adept and open about thinking together over their lifetime.
Bob Ware (BA, Cornell; D.Phil, Oxford; Prof. Emeritus, Univ. of Calgary) taught philosophy at Calgary, until retirement, and at four universities in China, at Carleton University, and elsewhere. Besides edited books and articles and reviews on language, democratic theory, and collective responsibility, he is the author of Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals.
Tuesday, October 10th, at 7:00 pm at the Scandinavian Centre and via Zoom.
Sorry, no recording.
View talk PowerPoint here.
Agnes Tam
Taking Narrative Politics Seriously
How do we keep our political community in good form? Liberal political philosophers believe that democracy is key. Here, democracy does not mean brute majoritarian power game, although, sadly, that may be our reality. Rather, liberals have in mind a more idealized form of democracy in which citizens justify to one another the rules which they author and are governed by. At the core of this normative model of democracy is the beliefs (a) that a political community is constitutive of its rules, and (b) that the process of mutual justification makes good or legitimate rules, because it embodies collective intelligence and expresses respect to citizens as rational autonomous agents.
In this talk, I challenge this deliberative model of democracy because it misunderstands the ontology of political community. I will argue that a political community is constitutive of the story it tells itself. This in fact is an ontological claim that many liberal political philosophers already explicitly or implicitly accept. What they have overlooked, however, is that stories are works of art. As such, the making, the appreciation, and the expressions of our political stories are subject to aesthetic norms. This creates a big problem for the deliberative model because aesthetic norms can come into tension with norms of rational deliberation. In this talk, I will identify some of these tensions. If my argument succeeds, to forge a better community, it is not enough that we have more reasoned debates about rules, but rather, we must learn to aestheticize political experiences properly.
Agnes Tam is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary. Her core research interest is group agency, including its nature and roles in our political life. She has published a fair bit on the role of groups in enabling progressive social change, notwithstanding their parochial and conformist nature. This year, she is also a Resident Fellow in Applied Ethics at the Calgary Institute for Humanities, starting her new project titled “Telling a better story of who we are”. As a hybrid of a political philosopher and a political theorist, she thrives at the intersection between theory and practice, and between the normative and the empirical.