ABOUT Pauline Kleingeld is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen. Earlier she taught at Leiden University and at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Kant and Cosmopolitanism (CUP 2012), Fortschritt und Vernunft: Zur Geschichtsphilosophie Kants (Königshausen und Neumann 1995) and numerous articles. Her academic interests are in ethics and political philosophy, with a special focus on Kant and Kantian theory. ABSTRACT In the first section of his Groundwork for...
Jun 02, 2025•57 min
ABOUT Léa Salje is an associate professor at the University of Leeds. She joined Leeds in 2015 on a postdoc, and has been there ever since. Before that she did a PhD at UCL. She works in Philosophy of Mind, mostly on issues around self-knowledge and first person thought. Her first monograph Saying What One Thinks (forthcoming with OUP), is about the special form of self-knowledge we get by putting our thoughts into words.
Jun 02, 2025•51 min
ABOUT Eric Schliesser is professor of Political Science, with a focus on Political Theory, at the University of Amsterdam. He was previously affiliated with Syracuse University, Leiden University, and Ghent University among others. Schliesser has published on early modern philosophy, philosophy of economics, the history of analytic philosophy, the history of feminism, and metaphilosophy. His publications include his monograph, Adam Smith: Systematic philosopher and Public Thinker (OUP, 2017). He...
May 30, 2025•46 min
ABOUT Christopher Cowie is Associate Professor at the University of Durham. He was previously Junior Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and has held visiting fellowships at Harvard and Stanford. He is originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is currently working on the implications of axiological paradox, and, unrelatedly, the philosophy of the search for alien life.
May 30, 2025•53 min
ABSTRACT To act rightly is to act in accordance with moral demands. But what grounds moral demands? Much contemporary moral philosophy tends to take a non-relational approach to answering this question. According to non-relational moral theories, to act rightly is to act in a way that honours or promotes the (non-relational) moral properties of individuals, for example their well-being or their rights. According to relational moral theories, by contrast, at least some moral demands are grounded ...
May 30, 2025•1 hr 5 min
ABSTRACT Many of our practices presuppose moral responsibility. Arguably, agents can only be morally responsible if they are able to act otherwise than they do. Compatibilists and incompatibilists traditionally disagree about whether determinism precludes the ability to do otherwise, often reaching an impasse because they endorse different readings of “able to do otherwise”. I argue that the correct reading of “able to do otherwise” depends on the purposes of our responsibility-entailing practic...
May 30, 2025•1 hr 4 min
ABSTRACT Christine Korsgaard famously argued that even if we accept the metaphysical theory that there are no selves or persons, the practical standpoint requires us to think of ourselves as unified over time. It is the ability to choose and deliberate, make plans and act that requires me to construct an identity for myself. This practical requirement is antithetical to the Buddhist no-self view. Buddhists argue that it is primarily ignorance about our identity that is responsible for suffering,...
Jan 14, 2025•55 min
In this podcast, Aristotelian Society officers Dr Jess Leech and Dr Ellie Robson talk to Peter Momtchiloff - commissioning editor for philosophy at Oxford University Press from 1993-2023. Following three decades in this role, we get Peter's thoughts on what he has seen and learned from his time at OUP including questions like: What are some of your most memorable encounters in the job? What are some of the biggest changes you’ve witnessed over 30 years – for good and for bad – in philosophy? Are...
Jan 03, 2025•54 min
The partiality we display, insofar as we form and sustain personal attachments, is not normatively fundamental. It is a byproduct of the deference and responsiveness that are essential to our engagement with the world. We cannot form and sustain valuable personal relationships without seeing ourselves as answerable to the other participants in those relationships. And we cannot develop and sustain valuable projects without responding to the constraints imposed on our activities by the nature and...
Jun 27, 2022•52 min
At a climactic—and, indeed, incendiary—moment in Bernard Williams’ classic essay, “Internal and External Reasons,” Williams says that those who advance moral criticisms by appealing to so-called external reasons are engaging in “bluff”. Williams thus alleges that condemning certain actions of others as somehow not only immoral, but also irrational or contrary to reason is nothing more than a kind of pretense. To say that a favorite pastime that so many of us happily engage in is empty, well—to u...
Jun 14, 2022•56 min
When we doubt a belief, we examine how things look from a perspective in which that belief is set aside. Sometimes we care about what that perspective recommends and, as a result, we abandon the belief we've been doubting. Other times we don't: we recognize that a perspective in which a certain belief is set aside recommends abandoning it, but we go on believing it anyway. Why is this? In this paper, I'll consider and then reject some proposals concerning when to defer to the perspective of doub...
Jun 07, 2022•54 min
In the interpretation of Parmenides of Elea, there is a certain vulgate, one widely represented in general histories of philosophy and indeed assumed by philosophers broadly. The metaphysical tenor and thrust of the philosophy of Parmenides, according to this vulgate, is holistic monism: "all things are one," in Greek, hen to pan. As it may be recalled, Parmenides reached his metaphysical conclusions by initially reflecting on the language of to mē on or to ouk on (either of which may be transla...
May 30, 2022•1 hr 13 min
In this paper I give answers to two apparently unrelated questions and aim to convince you that these different concerns are, in fact, intertwined. The first question is, why is dualism so tenacious? The second is, what is really at issue in the debate between Burge and McDowell? Regarding the first question, various contemporary philosophers have cast Descartes as the originator of a pernicious idea about the radical difference between mind and body, an idea with weed-like tenacity, that many h...
May 16, 2022•46 min
Common-sense (or folk) psychology holds that (generally) we do what we do for the reasons we have. This common-sense approach is embodied in claims like “I went to the kitchen because I wanted a drink” or “She took a coat because she thought it might rain and she hoped to stay dry”. However, the veracity of these common-sense psychological explanations has been challenged by experimental evidence (primarily from behavioural economics and social psychology) which appears to show that individuals ...
May 02, 2022•55 min
This paper is about whether it is rational to intrinsically desire the vague. A proposition is inconsequential if neither it, nor its negation is rational to intrinsically desire. The objects of intrinsic desire are propositions, and the contradictory of propositional vagueness is propositional precision. Every vague proposition is not precise, and every precise proposition is not vague. The question to be pursued thus can be posed as follows: is every consequential proposition precise? Jack Spe...
Mar 23, 2022•55 min
Photography is highly valued as a recording medium. Traditionally it has been claimed that photography is fundamentally a causal recording process, and that every photograph is the causal imprint of the world in front of the camera. In this paper I seek to challenge that traditional view. I claim that it is based on a ‘single-stage’ misconception of the process that defines photographs as mind-independent images and leaves no room for photographic depiction. I explain my objections to that view ...
Mar 14, 2022•53 min
Aesthetic beautification is a familiar artistic phenomenon: Even as they face death, heroes and heroines in operas still sing glorious music. Characters in Shakespearean tragedies still deliver beautifully eloquent speeches in the throes of despair. Even depicting suffering and horror, paintings can still remain a transfixing delight for the eyes. In such cases, the work of art represents or expresses something we would, in ordinary life, attribute a negative valence (suffering, horror, death, a...
Feb 28, 2022•53 min
Nietzsche’s attitude toward science is ambivalent: he remarks approvingly on its rigorous methodology and adventurous spirit, but also points out its limitations and rebukes scientists for encroaching onto philosophers’ territory. What does Nietzsche think is science’s proper role and relationship with philosophy? I argue that, according to Nietzsche, philosophy should set goals for science. Philosophers’ distinctive task is to ‘create values’, which involves two steps: (1) envisioning ideals fo...
Feb 14, 2022•50 min
Metaphysicians are in the business of making and defending modal claims – claims about how things must be or cannot be. Wittgenstein’s opposition to necessity claims, along with his various negative remarks about ‘metaphysical’ uses of language, makes it seem almost a truism that Wittgenstein was opposed to metaphysics. In this paper I want to make a case for rejecting that apparent truism. My thesis is that it is illuminating to characterise what Wittgenstein and Anscombe are doing in their phi...
Jan 24, 2022•56 min
According to the doxastic wrongs thesis, merely entertaining certain beliefs about others can wrong them, even if one does not act on those beliefs. Beliefs based on socially salient characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc., and which turn out to be false and are negatively valenced are prime candidates for the charge of doxastic wronging. My aim, in this paper, is to show that a plausible, Kantian argument for the thesis licences extending the latter to cases i...
Nov 26, 2021•48 min
Heather Widdows is the John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics and Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research and Knowledge Exchange) at the University of Birmingham. She is Deputy Chair of the Philosophy sub-panel for REF 2021 and was a member of the 2014 sub-panel. Her most recent book, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal (2018), was described by Vogue as “ground-breaking” and listed by The Atlantic as one of the best books of 2018. She is author of The Connected Self: The Ethics and Governance of the ...
Nov 04, 2021•41 min
As the first talk for the 2021-22 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year’s Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Robert Stern (University of Sheffield) as the 114th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society’s President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy. The 114th Presidential Address was chaired by Bill Brewer (KCL), the 113th President of the Aristotelian Society. Robert Stern is Professor of Philosophy at the Univ...
Oct 07, 2021•54 min
Julia Borcherding is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Before moving to Cambridge, she was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow at New York University. Julia specializes in early modern philosophy, focusing on moral, epistemological and metaphysical themes and their intriguing interconnections. She has published on the philosophy of Leibniz, Conway, Cavendish, Arnauld and Spinoza. Her current book project The Metaphysics of Emotion investigates the underappreciated metaphysical dimensio...
Jul 02, 2021•57 min
Michael Beaney (毕明安) is Regius Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen, Professor of the History of Analytic Philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Recent books include The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy (edited, OUP, 2013) and Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2017). While the main focus of his work has been on the history of analytic philosophy (especially the wr...
Jun 25, 2021•47 min
Corine Besson is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. She did her undergraduate degree in Philosophy and French Literature at the University of Geneva. She went to Oxford for her postgraduate studies, to first do a B.Phil, and then write a D.Phil. on the relation of second-order logic to the theory of meaning. Her research interests are in the philosophy of logic, epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy. Her current work focuses mo...
Jun 11, 2021•1 hr
Kenny Easwaran is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. He did his PhD in the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at UC Berkeley, and then worked at the Australian National University and the University of Southern California before moving to Texas A&M. He has done work on the foundations of probability and decision theory, as well as on the social epistemology of axioms and proofs in mathematical reasoning. His current work focuses on analogies between dif...
May 28, 2021•58 min
Joseph Chan is Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at The University of Hong Kong. He is Global Scholar and Visiting Professor at the University Center for Human Values of Princeton University in 2019-2021 spring semesters. His recent research interests span Confucian political philosophy, comparative political theory, democratic theory, social and political equality, and popular sovereignty. He is the author of Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Mo...
May 17, 2021•51 min
Ralf M. Bader is a professor of philosophy at the Université de Fribourg in Switzerland, where he holds the chair for ethics and political philosophy. His research focuses on ethics, meta-ethics, metaphysics, Kant, political philosophy and decision theory. He is also interested in neo-Kantian and early analytic philosophy, as well as the history of political thought. Previously, he was a Fellow of Merton College and an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Oxford,...
Apr 30, 2021•54 min
Helga Varden is Professor of Philosophy and Gender and Women Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of St. Andrews, and she is an executive editor of the Journal of Canadian Philosophy. Her main research interests are Kant’s practical philosophy, legal-political philosophy and its history, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of sex and love. In addition to her Sex, Lo...
Mar 29, 2021•55 min
Nicolas Cornell is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He works in normative ethics, contract law, and private law theory. His writing has appeared both in philosophy journals — including “The Possibility of Preemptive Forgiving” (Philosophical Review, 2017) and “Wrongs, Rights, and Third Parties” (Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2015) — and in law reviews — including “Competition Wrongs” (Yale Law Journal, 2020), and “A Complainant-Oriented Approach to Unconscionability ...
Mar 15, 2021•43 min
