Philosophy Talks 2025-26

Fall 2026 Speaker Series

Bar Luzon (MIT)

Department Colloquium: Source Causes
Friday, September 18th, 3PM

HUMA 264

Abstract: Imagine you wanted to give a causal theory of some phenomenon P. You’re then likely to face (at least) one of the following two problems: indeterminacy and deviant causal chains. Issues with indeterminacy arise when there are too many causes that can play a certain role in one’s theory. Issues with deviant causal chains arise when there are different ways in which a cause can be connected to its effect. These problems have been historically treated independently. In this talk, I suggest that we can solve both at once. In a nutshell, what is needed to solve these problems is an objective, worldly distinction between the cause of our target phenomenon P which starts the causal process leading to P and controls all downstream causes, and those causes that merely participate in causal chains leading to P.

Ethan Nowak (Stanford)

Department Colloquium: Aesthetic Responsibility in Ordinary Language
Friday, October 16th, 3PM

HUMA 264

Abstract: There is a growing philosophical literature that aims to explain the sense in which artists, musicians, filmmakers, and other sorts of creative agents are responsible for the aesthetic virtues of their work. One of the many reasons this project has attracted attention is that a wide range of familiar social practices seem to presuppose that creators are indeed aesthetically responsible in some fairly deep way.

My aim in the present paper will be to show that an analogous question arises in everyday speech — we take the things our interlocutors say to be funny, poignant, beautiful, and so on, and our assessments of one another in this space deeply shape our social world. I’ll argue that some of the leading candidates for a solution to the problem of creative conception in the case of capital-A art don’t extend very well to ordinary conversation, and I’ll sketch a view that I think is both philosophically satisfactory and psychologically plausible. 

Spring 2026 Speaker Series

TBA