51社区黑料

Abstract: A standard feminist story tells us that men are the winners of patriarchy. But look around: The majority of men are economically exploited. Millions are made into targets or weapons of state violence. Sexual violence in prisons and combat zones is standard fare. Men kill themselves at four times the rate of women. I hope to convince you that these and many other devastating outcomes are not a bug in the patriarchal machinery, but rather a feature of it. Men may be told that manhood works in their favor, but for most men, it is a con.

Abstract: A central aim of psychiatry is to identify the properties of mental disorders to enable diagnosis and treatment. As a branch of both science and medicine, psychiatry draws on a variety of research practices to glean information about these properties, e.g., clinical drug trials, case studies. Recent work in philosophy of psychiatry has also drawn attention to the epistemic value of including first-person reports of individuals with mental disorders in investigating the properties of mental disorders and designing effective interventions. However, precisely how these standpoints will be reconciled with scientific and clinical perspectives remains underexplored. In this talk I present a model of the self (Multitudinous Self Model) that showcases how first-person reports can be integrated into research and clinical treatment in psychiatry. Engaging with the Multitudinous Self Model will also open doors for redefining and reimagining what kind of science psychiatry is and should be.

Abstract: We know this can happen. We encounter a painting, hear a song, read (and re-read) a passage, and in each case what we have encountered, what we have made contact with, seems as if it were made for us and us alone. This is about me. Yet no sooner are we giving in to this thought than are we pulling back from it. With Carly Simon echoing in our ears, we wonder: isn’t it vain to think this is about me? Say she’s right. Who cares? Is it really so bad to be a little vain in one’s aesthetic life? This paper illuminates and defends an acceptable form of aesthetic vanity, or the experience of thinking an artwork is about you. To do so, I attend to what I call the individualizing power of artworks, which I argue is their capacity to facilitate the exploration and discovery of our individuality. Set against this backdrop, aesthetic vanity becomes an important aspect of an expressionist view of aesthetic flourishing according to which aesthetic engagement helps a life go well by serving as a unique vehicle of self-clarification and self-understanding.

Abstract: We know this can happen. We encounter a painting, hear a song, read (and re-read) a passage, and in each case what we have encountered, what we have made contact with, seems as if it were made for us and us alone. This is about me. Yet no sooner are we giving in to this thought than are we pulling back from it. With Carly Simon echoing in our ears, we wonder: isn’t it vain to think this is about me? Say she’s right. Who cares? Is it really so bad to be a little vain in one’s aesthetic life? This paper illuminates and defends an acceptable form of aesthetic vanity, or the experience of thinking an artwork is about you. To do so, I attend to what I call the individualizing power of artworks, which I argue is their capacity to facilitate the exploration and discovery of our individuality. Set against this backdrop, aesthetic vanity becomes an important aspect of an expressionist view of aesthetic flourishing according to which aesthetic engagement helps a life go well by serving as a unique vehicle of self-clarification and self-understanding.

Abstract: Scholars nowadays say that Confucianism endorses “virtue politics.” A rough characterization of virtue politics is this: when a government succeeds in governing well, this is due mostly or most fundamentally to the good character of its leaders, and not to its institutional rules or procedures. Accordingly, if we want to improve governance in a non-ideal state, we should work primarily on improving the character of the leaders and treat institutional design or improvement as a secondary matter. In point of fact, this general claim about governance and good character was a contentious one, and many Confucian philosophers argued against it. The claim itself is also ambiguous and susceptible of multiple interpretations, only some of which were disputed. My presentation will attempt to reconstruct and clarify the Confucian debate, using Xunzi 荀子 and Zhu Xi 朱熹 as influential representatives of what I will call the “virtue-centered” position, and using Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲 as a sophisticated defender of the “institutionalist” position. 

This presentation will address three questions: (1) given that the rough characterization of virtue politics is ambiguous, what are the specific and meaningful points of contention between virtue-centrism and institutionalism? (2) what are the important Confucian arguments for virtue-centrism? (3) what are the important Confucian arguments for institutionalism? I will approach all three questions by closely analyzing competing views about Xunzi’s famous claim “there are people who create order, but no institutional rules that create order” (有治人，无治法).

Abstract: I will argue that objectivity is a normative notion. By this I don’t mean that objectivity has normative qualities such as being valuable or worth striving for. That may be true, but it’s not the claim defended here. Rather, the claim is that normativity is part of what objectivity is; that when we analyze objectivity we’ll find normativity built into it. Moreover, we’ll find primitive normativity—normative properties that are not identical or reducible to natural properties of the cosmos (or even super-natural properties of the divine, if there are such things). I have argued elsewhere that there is no such thing as primitive normativity, so for me the upshot is that there is no such thing as objectivity either. But your mileage may vary: if you’re wedded to objectivity, the upshot is that you’re wedded to primitive normativity too. 

Abstract: This paper explores the idea that forms of self-opacity—vicissitudes of self-consciousness, and disruptions of straightforward self-knowledge, registrations of dissonance and self-strangeness—need not be understood exclusively or necessarily as pathologies nor as brute psychological facts, but can be valued as part of a rich moral psychology and conception of selfhood.  I consider a prominent contemporary account of self-knowledge that situates self-knowledge in the context of philosophical moral psychology and analyzes self-knowledge as an achievement of “rational, responsible self-directed agency.”  While this model provides resources for understanding both self-knowledge and self-opacity, its broadly Kantian normative or axiological orientation means that forms of opacity tend to be framed as privations or pathologies of rational agency, in such a way as to leave us potentially cut off from the kinds of complexity, value, and significance that they might have for us.  I then turn to some suggestive remarks by Bernard Williams, Lionel Trilling, and a passage from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, that serve not only to indicate a way of thinking about the value of opacity, but suggest that attending to this value might call for imaginative and metaphorical forms of representation.  This is to say that attending to this particular topic—the significance of self-opacity—involves attending to questions of philosophical and aesthetic style.

Abstract: In contemporary analytic philosophical ethics, giving an account of moral ignorance nearly always means giving an account of moral responsibility for ignorance, that is, when, whether, and why we are blameworthy for our ignorance. But this is like giving an account of moral knowledge that only addresses when it is praiseworthy; there is much more to both topics than the framework of praise and blame can uncover. I argue that the disciplinary preoccupation blameworthiness for ignorance, though productive and insightful for understanding moral responsibility, comes with serious philosophical costs for understanding moral ignorance. I conclude by introducing a Buddhist-inspired model of moral ignorance that is not anchored to assignations of blame or moral responsibility.  

Abstract: There are increasing calls for the policies regulating academic communities, like those aimed at promoting equity and inclusion, to be based on evidence. There are both conceptual and practical questions to be addressed in response to these calls. What types of evidence should we gather? How do we combine multiple types of evidence into a single policy recommendation? And so on. This talk will discuss how simple mathematical models can help us incorporate various kinds of evidence relevant to equity and inclusion into the evidence base for our policies. I will discuss, as examples, models from my own previous work on citation practices, collaborations, and other facets of academic communities.

Abstract: Traditional (some would say na?ve) Inference to the Best Explanation  (IBE) infers a potential explanation of some explanandum from the comparative claim that this inferred  explanation is the best of the available potential explanations. In  response to philosophical objections to this inference form, IBE’s  defenders have put forward a host of hedges, alternately strengthening IBE’s premises and weakening its conclusion to make it more defensible.  Contemporary (some would say sophisticated) forms of IBE typically  integrate a combination of such hedges, effectively rendering them far  less applicable, powerful, and simple than the traditional version. This talk argues that a proper formal defense of  IBE has no need for such hedges. This is because classic objections to  “na?ve” IBE—along with the hedges put forward in response to these—are  founded on two deep misunderstandings. We offer a more plausible and charitable understanding of “best explanation”  along with a discussion of the nature and formal evaluation of  inference. Once these ideas are properly understood, “na?ve” IBE in its  simplest, traditional form turns out to be surprisingly defensible.

Abstract: According to objective consequentialism, a morally right action is one that has the best consequences. (These are not just the immediate consequences of the actions, but the long-term consequences, perhaps until the end of history.) I will argue that on one understanding this makes no sense, and on another understanding, it has a startling metaphysical presupposition concerning counterfactuals. Objective consequentialism has faced various objections, including the problem of “cluelessness”: we have no idea what most of the consequences of our actions will be. I think that on these understandings, objective consequentialism has a far worse problem: its very foundations are highly dubious. Even granting these foundations, a worse problem than cluelessness remains, which I call “clumsiness”. Moreover, I think that these problems quickly generalise to a number of other moral theories. But the point is most easily made for objective consequentialism, so I will focus largely on it.

Abstract: Many-body systems often display different behaviors at different scales. The behavior of a fluid flowing past an obstacle is adequately captured by the continuum Navier-Stokes equations.  But its behavior at molecular and atomic scales are not well-modeled using continuum equations. It is remarkable that the continuum equations work at all, as they posit no structure below the continuum scale. How can one explain the (relative) autonomy of the continuum equations from the "more fundamental" lowest scale physics?  I argue that to understand this autonomy, it is essential to appeal to mesoscale structures.  Various parameters appearing in continuum models are best understood as coding for such mesoscale structures.  I draw some philosophical lessons about how to think about natural properties and minimal model idealizations.