Philosophy Talks 2025-26

Fall 2025 Speaker Series

David Builes (Princeton University)

Department Colloquium: Four Views of the First-Person
Friday, September 19th, 3PM

HUMA 264

Abstract: I will argue that there is a close parallel between metaphysical debates about consciousness (with respect to whether facts about consciousness are reducible to physical facts) and a corresponding metaphysical debate about “indexical" or "first-personal" facts (with respect to whether first-personal facts are reducible to third-personal facts). In response to this parallel, I develop four different views about the metaphysics of the first-person, which parallel four different views about the metaphysics of consciousness. Along the way, I tentatively argue against existing views about the metaphysics of the first-person, and I defend a radical alternative view, according to which all first-personal conscious perspectives are equally mine (and equally yours).

Manuel Vargas (University of California, San Diego)

Department Colloquium: Reconsidering the Free Will Debate
Friday, October 17th, TBA

HUMA 264

Abstract: This talk advances a cluster of distinctive theses about what is sometimes called “the” free will debate. Among them: pluralism about the subjects under dispute; a case for non-error theoretic eliminativism about free will; the virtues of focusing on culpable agency as one regimentation of concerns about free will, and methodological caveats about how to frame the stakes; and last, consideration of a thesis I call “socio-normative insulationism,” according to which some subset of concerns oftentimes associated with free will seem relatively insulated from skeptical concerns.

Hannah Kim (University of Arizona)

Department Colloquium:  Fiction without Mimesis: A Comparative Philosophy of Fiction (tentative)
Friday, November 14th, TBA

HUMA 264

Abstract (tentative):  Is “fiction” a transhistorical and transcultural concept? Currie (2014) says yes.  In this talk, I argue that an imagination or pretense-based theory of fiction won’t account for classical Chinese conceptions of fiction, and more generally, that we ought to be skeptical of a universal notion of fiction because fiction is a concept that responds to a philosophical culture’s given background framework. Observing how classical Chinese (Daoist) metaphysics affected Chinese theories (and practice) of fiction, for instance, shows us how considerations other than imagination, make-believe, or mimesis can be the basis of a concept of fiction. More broadly, the comparative approach to fiction shows what the existing assumptions of analytic philosophy of fiction had been, and how it might reconceptualize its aims and methods.  

 

Spring 2025 Speaker Series

TBA