Boole Lectures in Philosophy, 2025-26

In 2025-26, we are pleased to present the following series of lectures.

Second Semester:

• Wednesday 4th February, 1500-1700, CACSSS Seminar Room (O'Rahilly Building)
  • Samir Okasha (Bristol): Biological Essentialism Re-examined.
  • Abstract: Biological essentialism is the idea that species, and possibly other biological taxa, have essences: properties that all and only the members of a species exhibit, and in virtue of which they belong to that species. Despite its venerable Aristotelian pedigree, and its prevalence among lay people, the notion that species have "essences" has long been regarded as incompatible with both modern taxonomic practice and evolutionary theory. For this reason, philosophers of biology are virtually unanimous in rejecting biological essentialism. But in a recent book, Michael Devitt argues that this anti-essentialist consensus is fundamentally mistaken, since it arises from an inadvertent conflation between two questions.  The taxon question asks what makes an organism a member of one species rather than another; while the category question asks what all the different species taxa have in common. Devitt argues that these two questions are independent, and that a non-essentialist answer to the category question is compatible with an essentialist answer to the taxon question. I scrutinize this claim and find it to be untenable, on the basis of a logical analysis of the relationship between the two questions. This shows that the traditional anti-essentialist consensus was correct all along, though not for exactly the reasons that some philosophers have thought.

• Wednesday 11th February, 1500-1700, CACSSS Seminar Room (O'Rahilly Building)
  • István Aranyosi (Bilkent): Flashbacks
  • Abstract: Intrusive memories, informally known as flashbacks, play a central part as a subject matter in trauma theory, but have only incidentally been discussed in the more general and currently burgeoning philosophy of memory and remembering. The phenomenon of flashback is a disruption of the standard memory system, and it differs in many respects from voluntarily retrieved episodic memory. Though there is a temptation to dismiss it as marginal, I will argue that it is worth taking a closer philosophical look at this phenomenon, in that the way we are forced to analyze and interpret it might impact the way we should look at the standard cases of episodic remembering. The latter, in effect, involves a longstanding debate between realists (causalists, relationalists) and constructivists (simulationists, narrativists). I will address the question of whether my own, strongly realist view, which I dubbed “preteriception”, benefits from the discussion of flashbacks.

• Wednesday 25th February, 1530-1730, CACSSS Seminar Room (O'Rahilly Building)
  • Alba Montes Sánchez (Madrid), Title: The Phenomenology and Affective Politics of Belonging and Non-Belonging
  • Abstract: How do subjects experience (non-)belonging to social groups, and how are feelings of (non-)belonging socio-politically modulated? In this paper, we tackle these two questions by addressing both the phenomenology of experiencing and the affective politics of such experiences. Regarding phenomenology, we focus on cases of migration and pluri-culturality to show that feelings of belonging to social groups can often be unsettled or ambiguous and we analyse feelings of belonging and non-belonging as part of a continuum with different shades of grey. We argue that some of these shades are generated by a fundamental phenomenological feature of feelings of belonging: they are relational through and through. They are not just evaluations of how one experiences one fits into one’s social environment (how much perceived congruence there is between oneself and others) but they also evaluate the degree of recognition one receives from others. In other words, feelings of belonging respond to whether and to what extent one perceives one is esteemed by others. “Fitting in” and being esteemed are not binary, on/off states, and therefore neither are feelings of belonging. Stressing relationality thus helps us shed light on a crucial feature of in-between identities. Building on this relational account, in the second part of the paper, we focus on the socio-normative issues regarding the affective politics of (non-)belonging. Here, we will employ Young’s (1997) notion of “asymmetric reciprocity” and argue that any claim of “reciprocal recognition” (ibid.) that feelings of belonging articulate must be seen against the affectively relevant background of asymmetric sociocultural positions.

• Wednesday 18th March, 1500-1700, CACSSS Seminar Room (O'Rahilly Building)
  • Crescente Molina (Rutgers), Title: Normative Powers and Permissive Right.
  • Abstract: To have a normative power is to have a distinctive kind of ability, namely the ability to bring about a change in the normative world by an act of will. Some philosophers are comfortable maintaining that our set of moral entitlements includes normative powers. Others, however, resist this idea on grounds that stem from more general views about the structure of morality. In this article, I examine these reasons for doubt and defend the claim that morality does indeed make room for normative powers. I build on Joseph Raz’s influential account of normative powers, while ultimately proposing a different account of their foundations. I argue that the principle conferring normative powers is grounded in one of our most basic moral rights: a liberty-right to perform or omit any act whose performance or omission is morally unobjectionable. I call this right Permissive Right.
    
    I contend that if we have a Permissive Right, such a right must include a power-conferring moral principle. If an agent can bring about a certain normative change, or refrain from doing so, without violating others’ rights or moral requirements, then she is at moral liberty to bring about that change. And when certain conditions hold, from such moral liberty to effect a normative change at will, we may infer possession of the corresponding moral normative power to effect that change. This account vindicates a longstanding liberal claim: that the place of normative powers in morality lies within our entitlement to a sphere of interpersonal freedom as extensive as morality allows.

• Wednesday 25th March, 1500-1700, SHTEPPS (The Hub)
  • Denis Dzanic (Graz), Title: How to Husserl a Bayes
  • Abstract: Formal epistemology of broadly Bayesian persuasion and contemporary phenomenology have little to say to each other. This is a missed opportunity, I argue, for some dialogue could be healthy and beneficial to both. I first provide some general background and outline a few programmatic thoughts; in particular, I probe the question of normative and descriptive commitments of formal modeling. Despite initial appearances, it will be argued, the phenomenological focus on essential analysis and the formal-epistemological focus on idealized models are not entirely dissimilar or incompatible. I then target a specific problem: how should we articulate the core Bayesian notion of credence? Here, I suggest, phenomenological analysis provides useful input. I motivate and develop an experiential account of credence which frames it as a proto-doxastic attitude rooted in the experience of uncertainty. I conclude by briefly exploring the implications of this account for epistemology, phenomenology, and decision theory.

All are welcome!

For more details (including abstracts of the talks and other information), please check our Social Media channels: https://linktr.ee/ucc_philosophy