What is the Ockham Society?

The Ockham Society provides a forum in which graduate students in philosophy (particularly BPhil, MSt, and PRS students) may present their ideas to their peers at the University of Oxford. Our aim is to provide every Oxford graduate student with the opportunity to present their ideas in a friendly environment at least once during their time in Oxford. It is an ideal opportunity to gain feedback on your essays, and to gain first experiences in academic presenting. Small, experimental and unfinished papers are just as welcome as more advanced ones.

If you would like to present a paper to the society please send a title and abstract of 150 words maximum to Sean Costello (firstname.lastname(at)philosophy.ox.ac.uk). Oxford DPhil Philosophy students are highly encouraged to present at the DPhil seminar.

Programme for Michaelmas 2019

Important change: We meet Fridays 1:30 - 2:30 pm in the Radcliffe Humanities Building, Ryle Room.

Week 1
18 October
Chair: Sean M. Costello
Kacper Kowalczyk (St. Anne’s)
Transfinite transitivity

In this talk I will explain an infinite generalization of the transitivity property. I will then use it to argue that it is always good to create lives worth living and bad to create lives not worth living (thereby answering the main question of variable population ethics) and that infinite ethics is impossible. I will also provide an account of the procreation asymmetry at the level of choice.

Irina Starikova (National University HSE, Moscow)
Beyond diagrams: mathematical thought experiments

In empirical science, the value of thought experiments (TEs) has been widely acknowledged. However, in an abstract domain like pure mathematics, thought experiments (MTEs) can also be valuable. A more careful look at mathematical practice suggests that MTEs actually extend the limits of rule-governed uses of diagrams and in certain cases they can be more effective than diagrams.

Through analyzing examples, I will show what advantages MTEs may have over standard diagram uses, with the aim of contributing to understanding how mathematical practices develop, in particular, how experimental they can be and how their empirical factors can be valuable.

Week 2
25 October
Chair: Steven Diggin
Abigail Whalen (Magdalen)
Locke’s Characterization of Consciousness in His Essay

In John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke’s discussion of consciousness, while integral to his larger projects concerning personal identity, proceeds without a clear definition of what he takes consciousness to be. In this paper, I identify this apparent ambiguity and evaluate several prominent theories for what Locke means by ‘consciousness’. I first consider two variations of a higher order of perception (HOP) theory whereby consciousness is identified with reflection or where it is still a HOP process distinct from reflection. I dismiss both of these possibilities as this thesis, held in conjunction with Locke’s explicit commitment to the consciousness of all mental states yields an infinite regress of mental states. I then proceed to argue that Locke’s description of consciousness is best interpreted as a single order theory of perception (SOP), specifically where consciousness is a reflexive and immediate constituent of perception. In the final section of the paper, I present textual evidence, appeal to the principle of charitable interpretation, and indicate the fit of this reading within Locke’s larger philosophical commitments to support my claim that my reading of Locke is not only the most sound reading of the Essay, but also that it is the interpretation actually intended by Locke.

Week 3
1 November
Chair: Denis Kazankov
Steven Diggin (Merton)
Creeping Normativism

Support for traditional metanormative non-naturalism has stubbornly flourished in recent years. Moreover, the recent explosion of work on a peculiarly ‘normative’ explanatory/dependence relation appears to give new hope to such an account, especially in explaining the supervenience of the normative on the natural. This paper argues that this hope is illusory. Normativism (about explanatory/dependence relations) creeps. Non-naturalist theories which embrace normativism are in danger of becoming indistinguishable from paradigmatic metanormative naturalism.

Week 4
8 November
Chair: Lucas Haugeberg
Denis Kazankov (St. Cross)
Context and Quantifier Domain Restriction

Any theory of quantification has to attend to the following question: How does the domain of quantifying expressions gets restricted? While there is an agreement among theorists that it gets restricted by means of context, it remains a matter of dispute how exactly context contributes to this process. In my talk, I will discuss three analyses (syntactic analysis, semantic analysis, pragmatic analysis) of the role of context in domain restriction that have been surveyed by Stanley and Szabo (2000) with a particular focus on the domain restriction of plural and singular definite descriptions. I will assess these analyses based on how well they account for the role that context plays in the interpretation of a Japanese sentence that lacks definite/indefinite determiners and plurality markers. My conclusion will be that each of these analyses fails.

My talk will proceed as follows: Firstly, I will argue that the syntactic analysis struggles with the fact that sentences into which context is supposed to insert an elliptical expression do not meet a necessary condition for being elliptical sentences. Next, it will be shown that the semantic analysis places a too heavy burden on context in its role in domain restriction of a sentence in comparison to sentential expressions. Then, I will argue that the main challenge for the standard pragmatic analysis is to give a coherent explanation of what so-called ‘default’ propositions with minimal domain restriction are supposed to be and that, without this explanation, the distinction between expressed and communicated propositions can be hardly maintained. Lastly, I will present my own version of pragmatic analysis which differs from the standard pragmatic analysis in that it construes the role of context only as supplementary in the sense that it enters the scene only when explicit resources of a sentence for identifying its domain get exhausted.

Week 5
15 November
Chair: Sean M. Costello
John Fan (St. Cross)
Eudaimonism Without Egoism: The Transformation of Practical Reason in Plato’s Republic

The main claim of the defense of justice in Plato’s Republic seems to be the following eudaimonistic thesis: the life of a just person is the happiest life one can live. However, some scholars (e.g. Irwin 1995, Gentzler 2012) further hold that Plato is an egoist, and they ascribe to him the claim that we should be just because and only because justice promotes our own interests (i.e. happiness). However, the egoistic interpretation seems to be contradicted by Plato’s claim that the philosopher should return to the cave to rule instead of indulging in contemplative happiness. The demand of justice seems to conflict with self-interest in this case. I discuss in this paper Gentzler’s recent attempt to rescue the egoistic interpretation. According to Gentzler, Plato’s egoism is indirect: it is in our interest to develop pro-social dispositions that allow us to be moved to action by reasons beyond our self-interest (2012, p. 55). This view is still a form of rational egoism because ultimately what we have reason to do is grounded in facts about our own interest (ibid., p. 40). I argue that this view is philosophically unattractive for exactly the reason that Socrates’s interlocutor Glaucon identifies at 519d: namely, that indirect egoism collapses into direct egoism (rejected by Socrates) under self-reflection. Merely asking oneself the question of whether the just action maximizes self-interest would often convince the egoist not to do the right thing, and the indirect egoist cannot rule this question out in principle. Therefore, if Plato does not accept direct egoism, he does not accept indirect egoism either since he recognizes the force of this objection. I further attack the assumption that Plato must be a rational egoist at all and argue that eudaimonism is compatible with anti-egoism. The philosopher-ruler’s practical reason is no longer egoistic at the end of her education, but this transformation is compatible with the claim that her life is still the happiest among all possible types of lives.

Week 6
22 November
Chair: Richard Roth
Aglaia von Götz (Merton)
How to count with partial oranges

On first sight, it seems as if it is quite easy to give the semantics for counting sentences such as “Exactly two oranges are on the table”. On the simple account, this sentence is true iff there are two things, which are both on the table, both oranges and not identical, and everything else is either not on the table or not an orange. However, this simple account becomes problematic when partial objects are considered.

Imagine there are three oranges on a table. Roman eats half of one of the three oranges and puts the remaining half back on the table. If one asked somebody, how many oranges are on the table now, this person would probably confidently reply “Two and a half oranges are on the table”. This is problematic for the simple account. By law of the excluded middle, the half orange either is an orange or it is not an orange. If on the one hand it is an orange, the simple account predicts that “There are exactly three oranges on the table” is true, for there are three different things, which are oranges and on the table (the first orange, the second orange and the orange half) and everything else is either not an orange or not on the table. If on the other hand the orange half is not an orange, the simple account predicts that “There are exactly two oranges on the table” is true, for there are two different things, which are oranges and on the table (the first orange, the second orange) and everything else is either not an orange or not on the table. Both predictions are not compatible with the intuitively correct reply “Two and a half oranges are on the table”.

What makes this even more problematic is that the difficulty of getting the right semantics for counting sentences involving fractions carries over to counting sentences that only involve natural numbers.

Salmon provides a tentative solution for the problem and Liebesman provides a more detailed solution (Liebesman 2015 & 2016, Salmon 1997). However, both Liebesman and Salmon assume that half oranges are not oranges, i.e. that half oranges are not in the extension of “orange”. While this does not make a difference to whether the problem arises, it makes a difference for what kinds of solutions can be given. I will argue that half oranges are in the extension of “orange”. This is because of observations regarding how we use “orange” and “half orange”. I will then give a different account of counting which deals with the problem for counting sentences and is compatible with the assumption that half oranges are in the extension of “orange”.

Week 7
29 November
Chair: Maurice Grüter
Pietro Cibinel (Jesus)
Parity and Neighbourhoods of Value

Ruth Chang has argued that items in so-called hard cases are “on a par”, where parity is understood as a fourth positive value relation of comparability beyond “better than”, “worse than”, and “as good as”. Central to Chang’s argument for parity is the notion of neighbourhoods of value. In this talk, I explore different proposals about how to characterise neighbourhoods of value on Chang’s behalf, and present problems for each. I briefly conclude by noting that some other theories about hard cases face similar problems as Chang’s, while others do not.

Week 8
6 December
Chair: John Fan
Richard Roth (New)
Hierarchies of senses in Frege’s semantics for attitude ascriptions

Frege thought that words usually denote their reference and express their sense. However, when expressions are embedded under attitude verbs such as „believe“ or „fear“, Frege thought that expressions denote what is usually their sense. But what do words express when they are embedded under an attitude verb? Their normal sense, or some second-order sense? And what happens in multiply embedded environments such as “Sara believes that Fred thinks that …”? In my talk, I will consider these questions from a historical and systematic perspective. In particular, I want to consider how they relate to Mates’ puzzle: Assuming that ‘drink’ and ‘beverage’ are synonymous, how can it be that ‘Peter thinks that some drinks aren’t beverages’ seems to mean something else than ‘Peter thinks that some drinks aren’t drinks’?

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