FACULTY OF HUMANITIES

Philosophy

Philosophy Department Speaker Series

The Department hosts visiting speakers most weeks during the teaching term. Students are welcome and are encouraged to attend. Please see below for a list of past speaker series talks. Please see the “Events” page on this website for further information about upcoming talks.

Upcoming Speaker Series Talks

Check our events listing for information on upcoming speaker series talks (schedule and abstracts) and check back frequently to learn about new additions to the schedule.

 

VIEW UPCOMING EVENTS

Winter Term Talks

Winter 2024

All Winter 2023 talks will be located in the Burke Science Building (BSB) B103 and begin at 3:30 p.m.

 

  • January 26: Scott Metzger (McMaster). “Continuous Relations: Peirce’s New Plan for Defeating Nominalism” (click here for abstract)

 

  • February 2: Ross Upshur (Toronto). “What can philosophy contribute to pandemic response and other public health emergencies? Reflections from a lapsed philosopher.” (*SPECIAL TIME* 4PM) (click here for abstract)
  • February 9: Luke Davies (Oxford University). “Aiding the impermissible: Kant and the Morality of Assisted Dying” (click here for abstract)

 

  • March 1: Myrto Mylopoulos (Carleton). “Motoric Format” (click here for abstract)
  • March 8: Alice Pinheiro-Walla (McMaster). “Kant on Property and International Law” (click here for abstract)
  • March 15: Katharina Stevens (Lethbridge). “The Function of Argumentation Is Moral”
  • March 22: Julie Brumberg-Chaumont (École Pratique des Hautes Études). “Pluralizing Logic: New Approaches to the History of Logic.”

 

 

Fall Term Talks

Fall 2023

 

  • September 15: Lightning talks with McMaster Faculty: Barry Allen, Allauren Forbes, Mark Johnstone, Alex Klein, Megan Stotts
  • September 22:  Dwight K Lewis, Jr. (Minnesota). “(Re)imagining the Margins: Anton Wilhelm Amo” (click here for abstract)
  • September 29: Peter Stewart-Kroeker (McMaster). “Divided and Deceived: Nietzsche’s Subversion of Sovereignty” (click here for abstract)

 

  • October 20: Brent Odland (McMaster). “A Logic of Epistemic Obligations and the Ethics of Belief” (click here for abstract)
  • October 27: Manuel Vasquez Villavicencio (McMaster). “A virtuous way of doing philosophy: the moderation of curiosity and Hume’s philosophical method in A Treatise of Human Nature” (click here for abstract)

 

  • November 3: Lidal Dror (Princeton). “Lived Experience, Theoretical Knowledge, and the Role of Allies in Social Movements” (click here for abstract)
  • November 10: Katharine O’Reilly (Toronto Metropolitan University). “Aspect and Illusion in the Account of Pleasure in Republic IX 583c-585a” (click here for abstract)
  • November 17: James Connelly (Trent/Visiting Russell Professor). “Wittgenstein and Russell’s 1913 Theory of Knowledge” (click here for abstract)
  • November 24: Margaret Moore (Queen’s). “Rectifying Historical Territorial Injustices” (click here for abstract)

Past Talks

2023

  • Giovanni Battista RattiProfessor of Jurisprudence at the Tarello Institute for Legal Philosophy and the Department of Law, University of Genoa, Italy, Visiting Professor at McMaster University) “Russell and Philosophy of Law” – January 20, 2023.
  • William Paris (University of Toronto) “Black Power and the Problem of Institutional Life: On James Boggs’s Materialist Theory of Rights” – January 27, 2023
  • Andrew Sepielli (University of Toronto) “How Should We Conceptualize the World for the Purposes of Moral Theory?” – February 3, 2023
  • Kerry O’Neill (McMaster University) T.B.A. – February 10, 2023
  • Céline Henne (University of Toronto) “Why Conceptual Engineering Needs Pragmatism” – February 17, 2023
  • Ryan Muldoon (State University of New York- Buffalo) “Toward a Theory of Dynamic Liberalism” – March 3, 2023
  • CANCELLED Brendan de Kenessey (University of Toronto) “Activity Over Achievement” – March 10, 2023
  • Julia Nefsky (University of Toronto) T.B.A. – March 17, 2023
  • Nick Stang (University of Toronto) T.B.A. – March 24, 2023

2022

  • Sander Verheagh (Tilburg, McMaster Visiting Russell Professor) “Exiled Empiricists: American Philosophy and the Great Intellectual Migration” – February 18, 2022
  • Megan Stotts, “A Behavioral Approach to Social Institutions”, Allauren Samantha Forbes, “Scudéry’s Portraits: Gender, agency, and genre”, Alice Pinheiro Walla, TBD, Johannes Steizinger, “Canonization and Gender: Images of Goethe in Friedrich Nietzsche and Hedwig Dohm”, Stefan Sciaraffa, TBD, Barry Allen, “All Our Relations: Indigenous Themes for Anthropocene Philosophy” – September 16, 2022
  • Alex Lefermann (McMaster University) “The Puzzle of Solidarity” – September 23, 2022
  • Stefan Sciaraffa (McMaster University): Pragmatic Inferentialism” – October 21, 2022
  • Rebekah Johnstons (Wilfrid Laurier University): “Relational Autonomy: Authenticity, Loneliness, and Self-determination” – November 4, 2022
  • Matthew Leisinger (York University): “Cudworth’s Conscious Self” – November 11, 2022
  • Ric Arthur (McMaster University): “Leibniz and Zeno’s Paradoxes” – November 18, 2022
  • Céline Henne (University of Toronto): “Why Conceptual Engineering Needs Pragmatism” – November 25, 2022 (Cancelled due to CUPE strike)

2021

  • Filippo Costantini (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice – visiting McMaster as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow) “The Role of Mereology in Leibniz’s Metaphysics” – November 26, 2021
  • Steven Levine (University of Massachusetts, Boston) “Dewey and the Ground of Social Critique” – November 19, 2021
  • Carmen Pavel (King’s College London) “Law Beyond the State” – November 12, 2021
  • Gordon Christie (University of British Columbia) “Critical Theory, Indigenous Peoples, and Relations Between Humans and the Natural World” – November 5, 2021
  • Sukaina Hirji (University of Pennsylvania) “White Blindness, and Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Alcibiades” – October 29, 2021
  • Lisa Herzog (University of Groningen) “Bodies at Work” – October 22, 2021
  • Katja Vogt (Columbia University) “Virtue is Knowledge” – October 1, 2021
  • Mathew Mercuri (McMaster University/ University of Toronto) “Informing Clinical Practice Through Evidence-Based Clinical Recommendations: Lessons from Philosophy of Science” – September 24, 2021
  • Meena Krishnamurthy (Queens) “Martin Luther King on Fearlessness and Faith” – September 17, 2021
  • Trevor Pearce (Charlotte) “Grace de Laguna’s Evolutionary Critique of Pragmatism” – March 12, 2021
  • Kathryn Tabb (Bard) “Charles Darwin and Medical Associationism” – March 19, 2021
  • Charles Pence (UC Louvain) “The Greatly Exaggerated Reports of the Death of Biometry” – March 26, 2021
  • George Yancy (Emory University) “Unmasking the Problem of White Innocence” – February 26, 2021
  • Chike Jeffers (Dalhousie University) “Voluntarism Around the Edges: The Place of Subjective Identification in the Metaphysics of Race.” – February 12, 2021

2020

  • Jaime Edwards  (St. Norbert College) “Everything is as It Seems, and All is for the Best!: The Origin of Ideological Belief in Cognitive and Motivated Biases” – December 4, 2020
  • Thimo Heisenberg (Bryn Mawr) “Hegel’s Market – A New Approach” – November 27, 2020
  • Johannes Steizinger (McMaster University) “Dehumanizing Strategies in Nazi Ideology and their Anthropological Context” – November 20, 2020
  • Helen McCabe (University of Nottingham) “J.S. Mill and Socialism” – November 6, 2020
  • David Enoch (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) “Oh, All the Wrongs I Could Have Performed” – October 30, 2020
  • Matt Bedke (University of British Columbia) “Moral Nonnaturalism as a Moral Liability” – October 23, 2020
  • Skye Cleary (Columbia University) “How to Love Authentically According to Simone de Beauvoir” – October 2, 2020
  • Carrie Jenkins (University of British Columbia) “Uninvited: Talking Back to Plato” – September 25, 2020
  • Paula Schwebel (Ryerson University) “Sovereign/ creature: Neostoicism in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel and his response to Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology” – March 6, 2020
  • Larissa Katz (University of Toronto) “Offices and Horror Vacui” – February 28, 2020
  • Jacqueline Feke (University of Waterloo) “Ancient Greek Mathematics as Philosophy,” – February 7, 2020

2019

  • Cheryl Misak (University of Toronto) “Moral Progress II: The Construction of Moral Norms” – November 29, 2019
  • Aaron Preston (McMaster University Postdoctoral Fellow) “The Philosophical Roots of Martin Luther King’s Moral Vision” – November 22, 2019
  • Kristin Gjesdal (Temple University) “An Unruly Woman: Hegel and Madame de Staël” – November 15, 2019
  • Gary Hatfield (University of Pennsylvania) “Phenomenally Converging Railway Tracks: A Misperception?” – November 8, 2019
  • Charlie Cooper-Simpson (University of Toronto) “Life, Individuality and Logic” – November 1, 2019
  • Ethan Meanor (McMaster University) “Nietzsche and Gorgias on Non-Being” – October 25, 2019
  • Sonia Sikka (University of Ottawa) “Should we abolish religious freedom” – October 4, 2019
  • Wil Waluchow (McMaster University) “The Misconceived Quest for the Elusive Right Answer Or Dedication to a Process, Not a Result” – September 27, 2019
  • Robert Stern (University of Sheffield) “A Moral Argument against Freedom” – September 20, 2019
  • Richard Healey (McMaster University Post Doctorate Fellow) “Immoral Promises” – September 13, 2019
  • Nicolas Fillion (Simon Fraser University) “Conceptual and Computational Mathematics” – April 5, 2019
  • Kit Wellman (Washington University of St. Louis) “Assisting Revolution” – April 4, 2019
  • Sergio Tenenbaum (University of Toronto) “Instrumental Virtues and Instrumental Rationality” – March 29, 2019
  • Violetta Igneski (McMaster University) “Fairness, Beneficence and Slack-taking” – March 22, 2019
  • Barry Allen (McMaster University) “Experience and Experiment: Themes from Empiricism” – March 15, 2019
  • Michael Giudice (York University) “The Idea of Legal System: One Thought Too Many?” – March 8, 2019
  • Jessica Gelber (University of Toronto) “Could Aristotle countenance cross-kind teleology?” – March 1, 2019

2018

  • Rich Neels (McMaster University) “Opposites and Explanation in Heraclitus” – November 30, 2018
  • Sandra Lapointe (McMaster University) “What Does It Mean For A Philosopher To Have Impact?” – November 23, 2018
  • Tony Reeves (Binghamton University) “Contractualism as Solidarity: Risk, Hope, and the Agential Stance” – November 16, 2018
  • Brad Shubert (McMaster University) “Fully Truth-Functional Modal Logic” – November 9, 2018
  • Nathan Adams (McMaster University Postdoctoral Fellow) “Social Accommodation” – November 26, 2018
  • Nicole Hassoun (Binghamton University) “The Human Right to Health and the Virtue of Creative Resolve” – October 19, 2018
  • Fabio Shecaira (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)“Methodological Deductivism in Argument Construction” – September 28, 2018
  • Waheed Hussain (University of Toronto) “Pitting People Against Each Other” – September 21, 2018
  • Katy Fulfer (University of Waterloo) “Welcoming Refugees? Rootlessness, In-Betweenness, and Belonging” – September 14, 2018
  • Candice Delmas (Northeastern University) “In Defense of Uncivil Disobedience.” – March 23, 2018
  • Michael O’Rourke (Michigan State University) “Talking over the fence: Dialogue and integration in interdisciplinary research.” – March 16, 2018
  • Dustin Olson (McMaster University Russell Visiting Professor) “Russell, Reflective Equilibrium, and the Analytic Method” – March 9, 2018
  • Alexis Shotwell (Carleton University) “Claiming bad kin: Responsibility for a suffering world” – March 2, 2018
  • Nick Stang (University of Toronto) “Is Kant’s Critique of Metaphysics Obsolete?” – February 9, 2018
  • David Enoch (Hebrew University of Jerusalem ) “Against Utopianism: Noncompliance and Multiple Agents” – February 5, 2018
  • Megan Stotts (McMaster University) “A Behavioural Metaphysics for Social Institutions” – February 2, 2018
  • Colleen Murphy (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) “Transitional Justice and the International Rule of Law” – January 26, 2018
  • Susan Mills (MacEwan University, Edmonton) “The ‘best system’: Descartes on natural sensory error and God’s goodness” – January 19, 2018
  • Stefan Sciaraffa (McMaster University) “On Architectonic Questions in Political Philosophy” – January 12, 2018

2017

  • François Tanguay-Renaud (York University) “Policing Necessity” – December 1, 2017
  • Georgia Mouroutsou (Western University) “Plato’s Phaedo: Are the Philosophers’ Pleasures of Learning Pure?” – November 24, 2017
  • Kirk Lougheed (McMaster University) “Disagreement, Deep Time, and Progress in Philosophy” – November 17, 2017
  • Lynne Tirrell (University of Connecticut) “Toxic Speech” – November 10, 2017
  • David DeVidi (University of Waterloo) “On what there is, what there isn’t, and none of the above” – November 3, 2017
  • Doreen Fraser (University of Waterloo) “The non-miraculous success of formal analogies in physics” – October 27, 2017
  • Claudine Verheggen (York University) “Davidson’s Treatment of Wittgenstein’s Rule-Following Paradox” – October 20, 2017
  • Richard T.W. Arthur (McMaster University) “Monads as Constituents of Bodies in Leibniz’s Metaphysics” – September 22, 2017
  • Ronald de Sousa (University of Toronto) “Muses, Fluffers, and the Curse of Satisfaction” – September 15, 2017
  • Carolyn Korsmeyer (SUNY Buffalo) “Relics, Remnants, and Scrap: In Pursuit of the Genuine” – March 31, 2017
  • Aude Bandini (University of Montreal) “Willful Ignorance and individual responsibility” – March 24, 2017
  • Jacqueline Anne Sullivan (University of Western Ontario) “Coordinated Pluralism as a Means to Facilitate Integrative Taxonomies of Cognition” – March 17, 2017
  • Erich Reck (University of California Riverside & McMaster University Visiting Russel Professor) “Frege, Cohen, and the Issue of Origins: An Early Parting of the Ways” – March 10, 2017
  • Kathy Behrendt (Wilfrid Laurier University) “Mortal Harm and Mortal Fear” – March 3, 2017
  • Jamie Tappenden (University of Michigan) “Frege, Carl Snell and Romanticism; Fruitful Concepts and the ‘Organic/Mechanical’ Distinction” – February 10, 2017
  • Joseph Heath (University of Toronto) “A Defence of Stigmatization” – February 3, 2017
  • Les Green (Oxford, Faculty of Law)  “The Normativity of Law: What’s the Problem?” – Januart 27, 2017

2016

  • Ronald Den Otter (Cal Tech) “A Feminist Argument in Defense of Polygamy” – December 2, 2016
  • Christoph Schuringa (New College of the Humanities, London) “Animal Phronesis” – November 25, 2016
  • Samantha Brennan (University of Western Ontario) “Ethics and our Early Years. Making Decisions for children as if childhood really mattered.” – November 18, 2016
  • Carla Fehr (University of Waterloo) “Exploitation, Flourishing, and Epistemic Diversity” – November 11, 2016
  • Henry Jackman (York University) “William James on Conceptual Pessimism the Ambiguity of Truth” – November 4, 2016
  • Matthew Grellette (McMaster University) “Law as Government by Warrant” – October 28, 2016
  • Joseph Carens (University of Toronto) “Irregular Migrants, Refugees and Open Borders. Three Issues in the Ethics of Immigration” – October 21, 2016
  • Stefan Sciaraffa (McMaster University) “The Referent of ‘Law’” – October 7, 2016
  • Donald C. Ainslie (University of Toronto) “Hume and the Sceptical Malady” – September 30, 2016
  • Phillip Ricks (University of Iowa) “How Was the Tractatus Meant to Be Read?” – Co-Sponsored with the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship – September 23, 2016
  • David Godden (Michigan State University) “Corroborative evidence” – April 8, 2016
  • David DeVidi (University of Waterloo) “Mathematical Pluralism, Disagreement and Translation” – April 1, 2016
  • Andrei Marmor (Cornell University) “Belief and Meaning in Constitutional Interpretation” – April 6, 2016
  • Josiah Ober (Stanford University) “Democratic legitimacy and human capacities” – March 18, 2016
  • Catherine Hundleby (University of Windsor) “Rehabilitating Scientific Objectivity” – March 11, 2016
  • Jorge Luis Fabra Zamora (McMaster University) “Hartian Jurisprudence Beyond the State: The argumentative conception of validity and officialdom” – March 9, 2016
  • Gillian Russell (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) “Logical Vice” – February 26, 2016
  • Grégoire Webber (Queen’s University) “Asking Why in the Study of Human Affairs” – February 9, 2016
  • Devin Henry (Western University) “Aristotle and Epigenesis” – February 5, 2016
  • Marleen Rozemond (University of Toronto) “Mind and Mechanism in Cudworth and Leibniz” – January 29, 2016
  • Heidi Hurd (University of Illinois) “Promising Schmomising” – January 26, 2016
  • Diane Enns (McMaster University) “Roberto Esposito on Immunity and Community: Or, How to Live With Risk” – January 22, 2016
  • Pat Bondy (SSHRC Postdoc Cornell University) “Having Reasons for False Beliefs” – January 15, 2016
  • David Hitchcock (McMaster University) “What is an Argument?” – January 8, 2016

2015

  • Jean Thomas (Queen’s University) “A Model of Rights” – November 27, 2015
  • Helen Fielding (Western University) “Open Future, Regaining Possibility” – November 20, 2015
  • Tilottama Rajan (Western University) “The Anthropological ‘Idea’: The (De)construction of Nature Between Schelling’s First Outline (1799) and his Freedom Essay (1809)” – November 13, 2015
  • Jeremy Heis (University of California, Irvine/McMaster University Visiting Russel Professor) “Should Kant have Thought that Logic Was Complete Since Aristotle?” – November 6, 2015
  • Howard Jones (McMaster University) “The Problem with Plato’s Myth of Er” – October 30, 2015
  • Radu Neculau (University of Windsor) “Making One Out of Many: Misrecognition and the Identity of Social Groups” – October 23, 2015
  • Katharina von Radziewsky (McMaster University) “Reasoning By Precedent” – October 9, 2015
  • Rebekah Johnston (Wilfrid Laurier University) “Aristotle on Wittiness: verbally abusing one’s friends in the right way” – October 2, 2015
  • John Caruana (Ryerson University) “Julia Kristeva on Nihilism and Faith: Our Late Modern Impasse” – September 25, 2015
  • Barry Allen (McMaster University) “Making Relativism True” – September 18, 2015
  • Peter Eardley (University of Guelph) “Rhetoric and the Question of Theology in the Later Middle Ages” – March 27, 2015
  • John Turri (University of Waterloo) “Knowledge and the Norm of Assertion” – March 20, 2015
  • Matt Bedke (University of British Columbia) “Intuitions, Competence with Meanings, and Normative Non-Descriptivism” – March 13, 2015
  • Douglas Husak (Rutgers University) “What Do Criminals Deserve?” – March 5, 2015
  • Vincenzo De Risi (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) “The Development of Euclidean Axiomatics in the Early Modern Age” – February 27, 2015
  • Mathieu Doucet (University of Waterloo) “Moral Responsibility and the Limits of Self-Assessment” – February 13, 2015
  • Christian Leduc (University of Montreal ) “Euler on Leibniz’s Theory of Monads” – February 6, 2015
  • Frederique Janssen-Lauret (University of Glasgow) “Two Conceptions of Ontological Commitment” – January 30, 2015
  • Timothy Endicott (Oxford University)”Comity Among Authorities” – January 23, 2015
  • Fraser MacBride (University of Glasgow) “Two Conceptions of Ontological Commitment” – January 16, 2015

2014

  • Matthew Kramer (University of Cambridge) “Torture, Morality, and Law” – November 28, 2014
  • Sophia Moreau (University of Toronto ) “A Freedom-Based Theory of Discrimination” – November 21, 2014
  • Nick Stang (University of Miami) “Kant’s Argument that Existence is not a Real Predicate” – November 14, 2014
  • Kathrin Koslicki (University of Alberta) ” The Causal Priority of Form in Aristotle” – November 7, 2014
  • David Braun (University at Buffalo) “Wondering about Witches” – October 24, 2014
  • John Hacker-Wright (University of Guelph) “Virtues and personality traits” – October 17, 2014
  • James Sikkema (McMaster University) “Power-Based Ontology and Dispositional Causality in Spinoza” – October 10, 2014
  • Karolina Hübner (University of Toronto) “Spinoza’s mind-body problems” – October 3, 2014
  • Karen Wendling (University of Guelph) “Changing the Subject of Ethics” – September 26, 2014
  • Shannon Dea (University of Waterloo) “Beyond Choice: An Ecological Approach to Abortion Access” – September 19, 2014
  • Judith Lichtenberg (Georgetown University) “Comparing the Moral Weight of Global Versus Domestic Poverty” – September 12, 2014
  • Clinton Tolley (University of California, San Diego) “The logical construction of the world of experience: reading Kant after Russell and Carnap” – March 28, 2014
  • Stefan Linquist (University of Guelph) “Functions in transposon biology: when causal roles are inferior to selected effects” – March 21, 2014
  • Dana Tulodziecki (Purdue University) “Epistemic virtues and scientific reasoning” – March 14, 2014
  • Alex Wellington (Ryerson University) “Theorizing Collective and Corporate Punishment: Hart’s Sea Captain Revisited” – March 7, 2014
  • Heather Douglas (University of Waterloo) “Responsible Science in Democratic Societies” – February 28, 2014
  • Verena Gottschling (York University) “A Multicomponent Perceptual Account of Pain” – February 14, 2014
  • Kevin Klement (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) “A Generic Russellian Elimination of Abstract Objects” – February 7, 2014
  • Monique Deveaux (University of Guelph) “Sufficiency, Priority, and the Harms of Inequality” – January 31, 2014
  • Jolen Galaugher (McMaster University Visiting Russel Professor) “Russell’s (A)historical Exposition of Leibniz” – January 24, 2014
  • Mike Bennett (McMaster University) “Deleuze’s (Mis)reading of Aristotle” – January 17, 2014
  • Joanna Zaslow (McMaster University) “Master/slave BDSM and Racism” – January 10, 2014

2013

  • Ben Hamby (McMaster University) “Critical Inquiry, the Toulmin Model, and Business Ethics: A Pedagogical Approach” – December 6, 2013
  • Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto) “Knowledge and Fallibility” – November 22, 2013
  • John Hacker-Wright (University of Guelph) “Virtue and Practical Knowledge” – November 15, 2013
  • Yussif Yakubu (Practice Job Talk) “Hume’s Moral Theory and the Darwinian Problem of Social Evolution” – October 18, 2013
  • Raffaella De Rosa (Rutgers University, Newark) “The Real Challenge of Locke’s Critique of Nativism” – October 11, 2013
  • Juhani Yli-Vakkuri (Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, Oslo) “Mirror Thoughts” – October 4, 2013
  • Louis-Philippe Hodgson (Glendon College) “Reproductive Choices and Distributive Justice: A Problem for Globalism” – September 27, 2013
  • Jennifer Primmer (Practice Job Talk) “Understanding the Dimensional Nature of Alexithymia” – September 20, 2013
  • Tim Kenyon (University of Waterloo) “Oral History and the Epistemology of Testimony” – September 13, 2013