What is the Ockham Society?

Michael Stocker famously argued that the values, or rational justifications for action, provided by 'modern ethical theories' diverge from motives that are required for important interpersonal relationships, such as friendship and love. Thus, he presented modern ethical theories with the following dilemma: their adherents must either forgo interpersonal relationships, or must forgo a psychological harmony of value and motive. The latter horn of the dilemma involves a moral psychology Stocker pejoratively termed 'moral schizophrenia'. However, the exact nature of this moral psychology, and why it is thought to be problematic, remain unclear. In this talk, I will explore different ways of characterising 'moral schizophrenia' and examine possible ways to buttress claims that it is problematic.

A minimal commitment of physicalism has long been thought to be "Necessitation": The thesis that any minimal physical duplicate of the actual world is a duplicate simpliciter of the actual world. However, in recent years, Necessitation has come under attack by "contingent physicalists" claiming that physicalism does not require the metaphysical necessitation of all facts about the world by the world's physical facts. In this paper, I argue that, without Necessitation, there is no principled and systematic way to distinguish between physicalism and anti-physicalism. I discuss, and ultimaltey reject, two proposals for how to distinguish contingent physicalism from anti-physicalism.

Throughout his critical engagement with Sellars, McDowell has endorsed and taken as central to Sellars's Myth of the Given a rejection of nonconceptual yet epistemologically significant sensory states. By way of finding problematic the attribution in contemporary epistemology to Sellars of what came to be known as 'the Sellarsian Dilemma', I bring out some apparent agreement between Sellars and McDowell: both view experiential states of rational, discursive beings as both sensory and conceptual yet non-discursive; both stress our rational openness to the world as mediated by experience. The concurrence is only superficial. I argue that Sellars's insistence on the conceptual involvement in sensory experience cannot be appreciated independently from a core aspect of his picture of our ongoing inquiry about the world, which concerns the revisability of the conceptual realm encompassing, for my purpose in particular, an open possibility for fundamental recategorizations. The deepest rejection in Sellars's Myth targets the thought that there can be states in which certain layer of reality is revealed to us as it is. From a Sellarsian perspective, McDowell's account of sensory experience as enabling worldly knowledge falls prey to the Myth in taking as revealing certain necessary categorial aspects of the world our transcendentally-enabled starting points for empirical thinking.

In his service conception of authority, Joseph Raz claims that an authority is justified if it is more likely than its subjects to make sound decisions in certain matters concerning them. Conversely, the democratic conception of authority claims that an authority is justified if its decisions are the outcome of a democratic process, i.e., a process in which the people have a measure of influence and control over the government. Although these justifications are not mutually exclusive, they are ultimately independent of one another and thereby generate an aporia [puzzle] when both sides assert that theirs is the primary justification of legitimate authority.

In my paper, I identify an underlying question framing the conflict between Razian and democratic authority: to what extent is the determination of the normal justification of a social institution dependent on empirical facts, and to what extent on normative reflection on the nature of the institution? After introducing the service conception and a recent democratic objection (Rondel 2012), I move into a direct examination of the aporia of normal justification. I conclude that, although the existence of certain social institutions is dependent on social practices, the justification of such institutions is a matter of normative reflection. This normative reflection, I argue, is best carried out in the presence of others, and democracy under the constraint of public reason provides unique conditions of discussion that facilitate this practice of collective reflection.

One of the most central concerns in Nietzsche's writings is (European) nihilism and its overcoming. As the values that have given structure, guidance, and meaning to the life of Europeans lose their normative authority in Nietzsche's time, the assumption that the world is hospitable to human striving is undermined. Concluding that life as it is cannot be justified, one turns against life, exhibiting a pathological life-negating attitude. To overcome nihilism, humans need to take artists and poets as guiding models, aiming to make an "aesthetic phenomenon" (BT 5) out of existence itself. In doing so, an individual enters the aesthetic state, a condition in which the world appears justified and one is freed from nihilist pathologies.

It is this paper's aim to explain how Nietzsche might have envisioned the aesthetic state to be meaningfully integrated into humans' everyday value-practices. For this purpose, I propose a reading of the relation between the overcoming of nihilism and aesthetics in Nietzsche that heavily benefits from a comparative perspective with the Chinese philosopher Xunzi (3rd century BCE). Even though we might initially think that this stern and conservative Confucian makes strange bedfellows with the "dynamite" that is Nietzsche, I seek to demonstrate that there are important insights to gain from this comparison.

First, I will present what I take to be an anthropological thesis, which Nietzsche espouses, about a fundamental tension of human existence, and I will explain how this tension can give rise to nihilism. Next, I suggest that the unravelling of Christian metaphysics and morality, which Nietzsche observes in his time, mirrors a crucial cultural-intellectual development that situates Xunzi's philosophy in the late Warring States period. On this basis, I seek to demonstrate that Xunzi's reinterpretation of ritual (li ?) indicates how said fundamental tension of human existence is properly addressed and beautified in ritual practice. This, I propose, can help us understand how Nietzsche might have envisioned the aesthetic state to arise from and be situated in a new understanding of those valued practices that have lost their authority and meaning-giving force in the course of European modernity.