Archives Colloquium de philosophie de Jean Nicod

David Velleman (NYU)

"The two normativities"

Vendredi 12 mars 2021 de 19h à 21h

Two kinds of normativity have been identified by moral philosophers. One is the normativity of action- or attitude-guiding language ; the other is the normativity of reasons for actions or attitudes. I am going to argue that the normativity of language and the normativity of reasons have much less to do with each other than is generally supposed. My suggestion is that Hume’s argument about ‘is’ and ‘ought’, which is an argument about language, has very little to do with his argument about reason and the passions, which is an argument about reasons.

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Ian Philips (Johns Hopkins University)

"Are We All Animals"

Vendredi 12 février 2021 de 19h à 21h

Animalism is standardly articulated as the thesis that we are animals. So understood, cases of dicephalus conjoined twins are widely regarded as posing a serious challenge to the view. For such twins would appear to be numerically distinct individuals associated with a single animal (e.g., Campbell and McMahan 2016). In reply, animalists have claimed either that such twins are two animals (e.g., Liao 2006, Snowdon 2014), or that they are not numerically distinct (e.g., Olson 2014, Boyle 2020). Both approaches face serious objections. This motivates a neglected response on which whilst “we” (in a sense to be made precise) are animals, dicephalus conjoined twins are not. Supposing that each twin is instead a distinct proper part of an animal, this proposal quickly encounters an especially severe version of the “thinking parts” objection to animalism. For if the twins are thinking parts of animals, what prevents “our” having proper parts which think in their own right (Olson 2014). By combining Madden’s (2016) reply to the traditional “thinking parts” objection with a more sophisticated, pluralist account of function, I show how this objection can be defused. What emerges is a principled basis for holding that, quite consistent with animalism, dicephalus conjoined twins are a real-world example of non- animal persons. Time allowing, I’ll draw one striking consequence of this view, and explore whether it applies in any other clinical cases.

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Gabriel Greenberg (UCLA) "The Iconic-Symbolic Spectrum"

Vendredi 9 octobre 2020

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Victoria McGeer (Princeton/ANU) "Empathy internalized"

Vendredi 13 novembre 2020

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Pepa Toribio (ICREA-UB) "Biases and Vices"

Vendredi 11 décembre 2020