Philosophy of Art

These are pictures from one of the seminars for the course “Philosophy of Art”; the seminar, on “Representation and Photography”, took place in the “Three Counties Photography Exhibition” that is organised every year at Keele University.

As part of their assessment for the course, each student had to choose one work of art (any genre, any time period in the history of art, the only condition being that it be of significance for the history of art), and to write for six weeks short portfolio pieces. Portfolio pieces reflected on that work of art from the perspective of various topics – definition of art, ontology, representation, expression, morality and perception.

Today, the final day of the course (and for many students, the final day of undergraduate studies, this being a 3rd-year module), students will given brief presentations about their chosen works of art.

Looking forward to this!

PS: I tried to take some pictures during the second seminar, but camera would not work (I think it went on strike after hearing Scruton’s argument that photography cannot be art!).

Philosophy events at Keele

Today, Tuesday, 12 March, we will have the final Royal Institute of Philosophy Invited Lecture for this academic year. The speaker will be Michelle Montague (Texas, Austin/Bristol) and details about the paper and speaker are below. Between my most recent post and this one, we had a busy schedule of events: Royal Institute of Philosophy lectures, meetings of the reading group on A. W. Moore’s The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, and a special lecture organised by the Forum for Philosophical Research.

Soon we will be able to announce the speaker for this year’s ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ Annual Lecture of the Keele Forum for Philosophical Research, as well as the theme for the annual conference. The meetings of the reading group will continue – on 20 March and 3 April. Other meetings of the group will be organised after the Easter break.

For those interested in joining the Philosophy Programme from 2013, the next Visit Day will be on 23 March 2013.

Michelle Montague (Texas, Austin/Bristol): The Intentionality and Phenomenology of Perception
CBA0.060, Chancellors’ Building, Keele University

Abstract: Many have argued that that there is a metaphysically intimate relationship between a mental state’s phenomenological properties, the properties it has in virtue of there being ‘something it is like’ to be in it, and its intentional properties, the properties it has in virtue of being about or of something. I will focus on the case of conscious perception. The central question of this paper is this: how do we specify this relationship in more detail? I will consider three competing theories, what I will call ‘Standard representationalism’, ‘Fregeanism’, and ‘Brentanianism’. What principally separates these theories—their main axis of disagreement—is their specification of the nature of the intentional content that co-varies with phenomenological content. I will argue in favour of the Brentanian view.

About the speaker: Michelle Montague received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2002.  She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol. Her primary interests are philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and metaphysics; recent publications include “The Access Problem” in U. Kriegel’s (ed) Phenomenal Intentionality (OUP), “The phenomenology of particularity” (2011) in T. Bayne and M. Montague (eds) Cognitive Phenomenology; “Recent work on Intentionality” (2011) in Analysis; “The Logic, Intentionality, and Phenomenology of Emotion” (2009) in Philosophical Studies; and “Against Propositionalism” (2007) in Nous.

5 February: RIP Lecture: Sam Coleman (Hertfordshire), Qualia and Awareness

6 February: Reading Group Meeting: Chapter 6 (on Kant) - presentation: Adnan Mihdin (audio recording will be posted here shortly)

12 February: RIP Lecture: Marcia Baron (St Andrews/Indiana, Bloomington), Reasonableness

20 February: Reading Group Meeting: Chapter 7 (On Fichte) – presentation: Sorin Baiasu (audio recording will be posted here shortly)

26 February: Special Forum Lecture: Artut Szutta (Gdnask), The Credibility of Moral Intuitions

26 February: RIP Lecture: Geoffrey Scarre (Durham), ‘Sapient Trouble-tombs’? Archeologists’ Moral Responsibilities Towards the Dead

6 March: Reading Group Meeting: Chapter 8 (on Hegel) - presentation: Stephen Leach (audio recording will be posted here shortly)

Final 2012 reading group meetings and RIP lecture

Credit: michellehenry.fr
/philo.htm

The fourth and fifth meetings of the reading group on A. W. Moore’s The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics took place on Monday, 25 November from 3.30 to 5pm and, respectively, on Wednesday, 12 December from 4.30 to 6pm, both in CM1.24 (Claus Moser Research Centre, Keele University).

As promised, I recorded the discussions and I post them here: Meeting 4, Part 1, 2 and 3, and Meeting 5, Part 1 and 2.

Meeting 4: The meeting began with a presentation of Chapter 3 (Leibniz: Metaphysics in the Service of Theodicy), given by Jonathan Head. In addition to Jonathan and me, participants included Victoria Door, Stephen Leach, Philippe Blenkiron and Lavinia Udrea.

Meeting 5: The meeting began with a presentation of Chapter 4 (Hume: Metaphysics Committed to the Flames?), which was offered by Lavinia Udrea. Other participants included Victoria Door, Stephen Leach, Philippe Blenkiron, Jonathan Head, Lavinia Udrea and Adnan Mhidin.

For the next meeting, we will focus on Chapter 5, Kant: The Possibility, Scope and Limits of Metaphysics. The day, time and place for the next meeting, as well as the name of the participant who will do the introductory presentation, will be posted here before long.

If you would like to join this reading group, either to attend meetings or to contribute virtually through this blog, email me at: s.baiasu[at]keele.ac.uk or simply post a comment.

The final 2012 Royal Institute of Philosophy Invited Lecture was given by Lilian O’Brien, from University College Cork, on 27 November. The title of her talk was ‘Beyond Psychologism and Anti-psychologism’ and an abstract follows:

Everyday action explanation – the explanation of action in terms of the agent’s reasons – is central to mutual understanding and our social life more generally. Two broad camps have emerged in the debate about how to characterise this kind of explanation: Psychologism and Anti-psychologism. Psychologists take reasons, and hence, what is referred to in the explanans of an action explanation, to be psychological states, such as desire-belief pairs. Anti-psychologists are a more inchoate group, but on one prominent view reasons are ‘normative states of affairs’ – states of affairs in the world such as a child’s hunger (explaining why I gave her food) or a beautiful painting (why I bought it, etc.). I take the dispute between Psychologists and Anti-psychologists over action explanation as my pivot: are psychological states or something like normative states of affairs doing the explanatory work in action explanation? My main claim is that neither kind of view is correct and that the contents of the psychological states of the agent explain – the contents are explanatory by being inputs to a simulated deliberation that the exapainer engages in.

The Royal Institute of Philosophy invited Lecture series will resume on 5 February 2013, Further information will be posted here in due course.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 2,300 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 4 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Reading Group: Meeting 4

Credit: www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/

The fourth meeting of the reading group on Adrian W. Moore’s The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics (CUP 2012) will take place today, Monday, the 26th of November, from 3.30 to 5pm, in room CM1.24 (in the Claus Moser Research  Centre).

We will discuss chapter 3 of the book, a chapter on Leibniz. The meeting will begin with an introductory presentation of the chapter, which will be given by Jonathan Head.

All welcome!