Professor Derek Matravers has been named the 2017 Wollheim Lecturer by the American Society for Aesthetics. Derek will give his lectures at their 75th Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA., November 15-18, 2017.
Richard Wollheim (pictured above) was a British philosopher specialising in Philosophy of Mind and Aesthetics. He served as the president for the British Society of Aesthetics from 1992 until his death in 2003.
More info about the lectures can be found here.
Conceptual Artist Robert’s Good’s new piece, “A New Dictionary of Art” is out now. The Foreword to this is by our very own Derek Matravers.
More info can be found here.
Derek Matravers has been awarded AHRC funding for a project protecting cultural heritage in war:
The UK government has expressed its intention to ratify the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict; it is the only major military power not to have done so. The Convention (which has become part of the Law of War, hence rendering ratification largely symbolic) obliges countries to ‘refraining from any use of the property and its immediate surroundings or of the appliances in use for its protection for purposes which are likely to expose it to destruction or damage in the event of armed conflict; and by refraining from any act of hostility, directed against such property.’ This obligation can be put aside if the property is being used by the other side for military purposes, or for acts of ‘military necessity’.
This raises significant problems for current thinking about the conduct of war, which is couched almost exclusively in terms of human goods and harms. This now has to be re-thought, so as to include consideration of goods and harms to cultural property.
We aim to answer three questions:
1. Under what circumstances may we intentionally or foreseeably damage sites of cultural property in war?
2. What, if anything, ought we to do to protect cultural property in conflict zones and at what cost?
3. What is the appropriate response to damaged sites of cultural property?
The project will result an academic monograph; a collection of papers; a ‘Framework Document’ outlining policy on Cultural Property Protection (CPP) and providing ‘Codes of Conduct’ for the military; and a MOOC for use by members of the military, NGOs, and other interested parties.
In addition to academic partners, the project team includes members of the British, US, and Norwegian Armed Forces; an international lawyer with extensive experience of working on UN Conventions; politicians (Baroness Andrews, who was instrumental in pushing for the UK ratification of the Convention); the British Museum ‘Iraq Scheme’; and the International Committee of the Blue Shield (the only organisation created and mandated under international law to protect cultural heritage in war zones).
More information about the project can be found here
Congrats to our Jon Pike who will be a Visiting Scholar at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford in 2018.
More information about the activities of the centre can be found here: http://www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/home
Gaston Bachelard’s Dialectic of Duration, first published in French in 1950, has been published again in English translation by a new publisher, Rowman & Littlefield. It comes with an updated Introduction to the first English translation by our own Cristina Chimisso.
Cristina Chimisso has published a book chapter, entitled ‘Gaston Bachelard’s Places of the Imagination and Images of Space’, in Bruce Janz (ed.), Place, Space and Hermeneutics, Springer 2017 (Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol. 5).
In it, she looks at Bachelard’s hermeneutics of place, or ‘topoanalysis’, in the context of his philosophy of the imagination, and of his wider philosophical project. By going beyond the relatively narrow focus on his The Poetics of Space, she argues, we can achieve a better understanding of Bachelard’s approach to the analysis of space.
Congratulations to PhD candidate Christopher Yorke for the appearance of a publication in Journal for the Philosophy of Sport, the foremost journal in its field.
He considers a thought experiment due to Bernard Suits. Suits imagines a technological utopia, in which all our instrumental needs are satisfied (it’s only a matter of time!) and claims that in this world we would need to play games – which he famously defines as the ‘voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’. This fact, says Suits, tells us something important: that game playing is the ‘ideal of human existence’. Chris, in ‘Endless summer: What kinds of games will Suits’ utopians play?’, is sceptical.
On March 24th 2017, we held a Research Day on the theme of perception. In the morning, our own Derek Matravers spoke on ‘Visualising Representations’…
Summary: When we visualise a tree, do we imagine seeing a tree, or just imagine the visual appearance of a tree? This esoteric question (the ‘dependency thesis’) has been much debated to the neglect of another possibility: that sometimes, although certainly not all the time, when we visualise a tree we imagine (or imagine seeing) a visual representation of a tree. This paper considers the motivation for making this suggestion, and its plausibility.
…and in the afternoon, Louise Richardson (University of York) gave a talk on ‘Smelling Sweetness’…
Summary: There are a number of obstacles to thinking that we can smell – olfactorily perceive – properties such as sweetness and saltiness. The most serious of these is the role of learning in their aetiology, which has suggested to some that what we might think of as ‘smelling sweetness’ is in fact a form of smell-taste synaesthesia. I argue that the claim that sweetness can be smelled is defensible, and that accepting it does not require taking on any controversial assumptions.
All are welcome to the following Philosophy Research Seminar.
Neil Sinhababu, National University of Singapore
‘A Reliable Route from Is to Ought’
Time: 5th April, 2.00pm to 4.00pm
Place: Meeting Room 5, Wilson A, Open University (Walton Hall Campus)
Contact: Derek Matravers
Abstract: I present a strategy by which moral knowledge can be derived from non-moral knowledge, using insights from reliabilist epistemology. The strategy begins by discovering which cognitive processes generate which moral and nonmoral beliefs. We can then assess the reliability of these cognitive processes for moral belief formation by considering to what extent they produce true belief on non-moral issues, and by checking whether they produce contradictory moral beliefs in different people. By retaining reliably caused beliefs and abandoning unreliably caused ones, we can move closer to moral truth. No normative ethical assumptions are required.
David Roden (Associate Lecturer and Honorary Associate) is giving a number of talks in the UK and beyond this spring. As well as talks delivered to the Dundee Philosophy Department on 17 Feb 2017 and the Sonic Acts festival in Amsterdam on 25 Feb 2017, he gave a public lecture and masterclass in Aarhus, Denmark, 9-10 March 2017.
It’s not too late to see him if you are anywhere near Stockholm in 1-2 April 2017, where he is participating at “The Other Thing” arts event organised by the choreographer Siegmar Zacaharias.
