Atelier : Les Traditions interprétatives du statut du politique chez Durkheim

Fairness, Participation and the Real Problem of Collective Harm (J. Nefsky)

Conférence | Talk

Julia Nefsky

(University of Toronto)

Fairness, Participation and the Real Problem of Collective Harm

Friday, February 28th, 2014

3:00pm

Carleton University

River Building

Room 3202

Colloque "L'Expérience esthétique" | "Aesthetic Experience" Conference

Aristotle on Levels of Explanation in Natural Science (C. Byrne)

Conférence | Talk

Christopher Byrne

(St. Francis Xavier University)

Aristotle on Levels of Explanation in Natural Science

Source : Wikipedia

Aristotle argues that, in addition to the common axioms that govern all of the sciences, every science has its own first principles that apply only to the subject matter of that science.  Aristotle also emphasizes that, in the case of perceptible objects, it is the job of scientific explanation to identify not only the causal agents, but also the causal powers that produce the effects to be explained.  Finally, Aristotle argues that individual perceptible objects are composed of distinct, mutually irreducible formal and material principles, each of which is responsible for some aspects of their behaviour.  Given this composite nature, several different sciences are required to explain the behaviour of any given perceptible object, and part of the difficulty in knowing which science to apply lies in determining at what level the behaviour in question is to be explained.  These principles are applied to Aristotle's views on reductive materialism and teleology.

Friday, January 24th, 2014

3:00pm

University of Ottawa

Desmarais Hall (55, Laurier East)

Room 8161

The Ethics of Expulsion (P. Lenard)

Conférence | Talk

Patti Lenard

(University of Ottawa)

The Ethics of Expulsion


Friday, January 24th, 2014

3:00pm

Carleton University

River Building

Room 3202

Intentional Objects and their properties : a critical appraisal of Meinongian Logics (B. Leclerq)

Conférence | Talk

Bruno Leclerq

(Université de Liège)

Intentional Objects and their properties : a critical appraisal of Meinongian Logics

Source : Wikipedia

According to Alexius Meinong, statements such as "The round square is round (and square)", "The golden mountain is made of gold", "Pegasus has big wings" or "Unicorns have a horn on their forehead" should be seen as talking about some genuine (yet inexistent or even impossible) objects, and should be considered as true or false whether these objects possess the properties that are here attributed to them or not. On the contrary, Frege and Russell's logical analyis tends to make these "objects" appear as concepts (or propositional functions) that can be meaningful eventhough they are not satisfied by any object at all. After a brief presentation of Meinongian logics as well as of their benefits and drawbacks compared to classical logic as well as to standard modal logics, we will show that Meinongian logics not only require a clear-cut distinction between two kinds of properties (nuclear and extranuclear) but also between two kinds of predications (encoding and exemplification) and, eventually, between two kinds of objects (those which encode and those which exemplify their properties), which somehow restores Frege's clear-cut distinction between concepts and objects as well as between first order and second order properties. 

Friday, January 17th, 2014

3:00pm

University of Ottawa

Desmarais Hall (55, Laurier East)

Room 8161

An Aristotelian Account of Induction (C. Byrne)

Conférence | Talk

Christopher Byrne

(St. Francis Xavier University)

An Aristotelian Account of Induction

Source : Wikipedia

According to a long interpretative tradition, Aristotle holds that the job of induction is to find the essential nature common to a set of individuals and that nature is captured solely by their shared formal cause. Against this view, I argue that Aristotle understands perceptible individuals to be irreducibly composite objects whose nature is constituted by both their formal and their material cause. As a result, when investigating perceptible objects, the job of induction is to discover their composite, formal and material nature. The process by which universal claims about this composite nature are justified, I argue, is similar to what we now know as mathematical induction. In particular, such claims are grounded in a non-enumerative, but replicable process in which things are resolved into their simplest components. As a result, the observation of past uniformities has, at most, a heuristic function in scientific inquiry. 

Friday, January 17th, 2014

4:00pm

Carleton University

River Building

Room 3202

Autonomy and Paternalism (A. Sneddon)

Conférence | Talk

Andrew Sneddon

(University of Ottawa)

Autonomy and Paternalism

In Autonomy (Bloomsbury 2013), I offer a theory of the nature of autonomy and an account of its significance. Two distinctions structure these accounts. One is between autonomy of choice and autonomy of persons. The other is between valuing something as a goal and valuing something as a constraint. I shall explain and show the power of these distinctions through an examination of paternalism, that is, of interfering with someone’s autonomy for their own good but without their agreement.

Friday, January 10th, 2014

3:00pm

University of Ottawa

Desmarais Hall (55, Laurier East)

Room 8161