13th Annual Southern California Philosophy Conference
Cal Poly Pomona, Saturday November 6th 2010
All sessions will be held at the Collins School of Hospitality Management; MAP directions; WRITTEN DIRECTIONS; parking is free
Room 79B-1230(Conrad N. Hilton Foundation Great Room) / Room 79B-1243
(Panda Express Classroom) / Room 79B-1235, 1227, 1217
(Mary Alice & Richard N. Frank Classroom)
8:30-9:00
Registration
H. Amemiya Board Room, Collins School, Building 79B
9:00-10:20 / Chair: Gary Watson, USC
Coleen Macnamara, UC Riverside
“Reactive Attitudes: A Form of Moral Address" / Chair: Tony Roy, CSU San Bernardino
Robin Jeshion, USC
"The Truth about Slurs" / Chair: Michael Shim, Cal State LA
Steve Barbone, San Diego State University
"Queerly Spinoza"
10:30-11:50 / Author Meets Critics
Chair: David Adams, Cal Poly Pomona
Paul Hurley, Claremont McKenna College
Beyond Consequentialism
Critics: Richard Arneson, UCSD
Michael Cholbi, Cal Poly Pomona / Graduate Student Session
Chair: Masahiro Yamada, CGU
Joshua Crabill, USC,
"A Radical Invariantist Alternative to Expressivism about Epistemic Modals"
Commentator: Tim Black, CSUN / Chair: Gwendolyn Dolske, U of Louvain, Cal Poly
Christopher Lay, Pitzer College
"The Zero-Order Temporal Account of Consciousness Introduced"
Noon-1:20
Keynote
Debra Satz, Stanford
"Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale"
Room 79A-1263 (Wine Auditorium)
Overflow room: 79A-1335 (Hideo Amemiya Board Room)
1:30-2:50 / Chair: Kayley Vernalis, Cal State LA
Sandra Harding, UCLA
"Secularism, Democracy, and Philosophy of Science:Postcolonial and Feminist Issues" / Chair: Grant Marler, CGU/Cal Poly
Nellie Wieland, Cal State Long Beach
"Words and 'Words'" / Chair: Marcia Homiak, Occidental
Charles Young, CGU
“Platonic Moral Psychology without Reason, Spirit, Appetite, and Political Metaphors”
3:00-4:20 / Chair: Adam Swenson, CSUN
Jason Raibley, Cal State Long Beach
"On the Intrinsic Evil of Death" / Author Meets Critics
Chair: John Fischer, UC Riverside
Mark Balaguer, Cal State LA
Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem
Critics: Anthony Brueckner, UCSB
Robert Gressis, CSUN / Chair: Alex Klein, CSU Long Beach
Marius Stan, Caltech
"Leibniz and his Disciples on Action and Reaction: the Origins of Kant's Third Law of Mechanics"
4:30-5:50 / Graduate Student Session
Chair: Jeff Vanderpool, Fullerton College
Michael Tiboris, UC San Diego
"Risk, Heartedness, and Punishing Lucky Chancy Attempters"
Commentator: John Davis, Cal State Fullerton / Chair: Dion Scott-Kakures, Scripps College
Peter Graham, UC Riverside
"Truth Connections" / Graduate Student Session
Chair: Ericka Tucker, Cal Poly Pomona
Kenneth Pearce, USC
"A Leibnizian Theory of Miracles"
Commentator: Patricia Easton, CGU
Breakfast and lunch will be available in the Hideo Amemiya Board Room.
ABSTRACTS
KEYNOTE
Debra Satz, Stanford University, "Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale"
What's wrong with markets in everything? Markets today are widely recognized as the most efficient way in general to organize production and distribution in a complex economy. And with the collapse of communism and rise of globalization, it's no surprise that markets and the political theories supporting them have seen a considerable resurgence. For many, markets are an all-purpose remedy for the deadening effects of bureaucracy and state control. But what about those markets we might label noxious-markets in addictive drugs, say, or in sex, weapons, child labor, or human organs? Such markets arouse widespread discomfort and often revulsion.
In Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale, philosopher Debra Satz takes a penetrating look at those commodity exchanges that strike most of us as problematic. What considerations, she asks, ought to guide the debates about such markets? What is it about a market involving prostitution or the sale of kidneys that makes it morally objectionable? How is a market in weapons or pollution different than a market in soybeans or automobiles? Are laws and social policies banning the more noxious markets necessarily the best responses to them? Satz contends that categories previously used by philosophers and economists are of limited utility in addressing such questions because they have assumed markets to be homogenous. Accordingly, she offers a broader and more nuanced view of markets-one that goes beyond the usual discussions of efficiency and distributional equality--to show how markets shape our culture, foster or thwart human development, and create and support structures of power.
An accessibly written work that will engage not only philosophers but also political scientists, economists, legal scholars, and public policy experts, this book is a significant contribution to ongoing discussions about the place of markets in a democratic society.
AUTHOR MEETS CRITICS SESSIONS
Mark Balaguer, Cal State LA. Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem
Critics: Anthony Brueckner, UC Santa Barbara; Robert Gressis, Cal State Northridge
Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem: In this largely antimetaphysical treatment of free will and determinism, Mark Balaguer argues that the philosophical problem of free will boils down to an open scientific question about the causal histories of certain kinds of neural events. In the course of his argument, Balaguer provides a naturalistic defense of the libertarian view of free will.
Balaguer claims that the compatibilism debate (the question of whether free will is compatible with determinism) is essentially irrelevant to metaphysical questions about the nature of human freedom, most notably "Do humans have free will?" Likewise, the questions "What is free will?" and "Which kinds of freedom are required for moral responsibility?" are argued to be irrelevant to substantive questions about the metaphysics of human free will. The metaphysical component of the problem of free will, Balaguer argues, essentially boils down to the question of whether humans possess libertarian free will. Furthermore, he argues that, contrary to the traditional wisdom, the libertarian question reduces to a question about indeterminacy—in particular, to a straightforward empirical question about whether certain neural events in our heads are causally undetermined in a certain specific way. In other words, Balaguer argues that the right kind of indeterminacy would bring with it all of the other requirements for libertarian free will. Finally, he argues that because there is no good evidence as to whether or not the relevant neural events are undetermined in the way that's required, the question of whether human beings possess libertarian free will is a wide-open empirical question.
Notre Dame Philosophical Review by Joseph Keim Campbell
Paul Hurley, Claremont McKenna College, Beyond Consequentialism
Critics: Richard Arneson, UC San Diego; Michael Cholbi, Cal Poly Pomona
Beyond Consequentialism: Consequentialism, the theory that morality requires us to promote the best overall outcome, is the default alternative in contemporary moral philosophy, and is highly influential in public discourses beyond academic philosophy. Paul Hurley argues that current discussions of the challenge of consequentialism tend to overlook a fundamental challenge to consequentialism. The standard consequentialist account of the content of morality, he argues, cannot be reconciled to the authoritativeness of moral standards for rational agents. If rational agents typically have decisive reasons to do what morality requires, then consequentialism cannot be the correct account of moral standards. Hurley builds upon this challenge to argue that the consequentialist case for grounding the impartial evaluation of actions in the impartial evaluation of outcomes is built upon a set of subtle and mutually reinforcing mistakes. Through exposing these mistakes and misappropriations, he undermines consequentialist arguments against alternative approaches that recognize a conception of impartiality appropriate to the evaluation of actions which is distinct from the impartiality appropriate to the evaluation of outcomes. A moral theory that recognizes a fundamental role for such a distinct conception of impartiality can account for the rational authority of moral standards, but it does so, Hurley argues, by taking morality beyond consequentialism in both its standard and non-standard forms.
INVITED PAPERS
Steve Barbone, San Diego State University, "Queerly Spinoza"
ABSTRACT: While there has been continued active work on a metaphysicalaccount of individuation within Spinoza’s philosophy, much of this workhas more focused on whether the political state is an individual in anymetaphysical sense. This line of research does not so much treat the more
personal question of identity, that is, how individual people imagine orunderstand themselves to be and/or how they are imagined or understood to be by others. The issue has not been completely ignored, however, and somework – almost always from a feminist perspective – has already made some very important contributions to the question of personal identity inSpinoza. The issue of sexual identity has received some further attention,and there have been some insights for reading Spinoza through queerlenses. The present study suggests and argues, however, that such lensesare not needed since the only thing that has prevented our seeing thingsqueerly is the too straight and narrow vision due either/or to Lockeanlenses that are set within dualistic Cartesian frames. Spinoza’s theory ofpersonal identity already is robustly queer, and as such, it can betremendously freeing, certainly much more so than many other theoriesbased on Lockean “I-know-not-what” and/or Cartesian dualism.
Peter Graham, UC Riverside, "Truth Connections"
ABSTRACT: Positive epistemic statuses are goods, successes or achievements understoodinterms of promoting truth and avoiding error. In this paper I partlytaxonomize anumber of such statuses in order to distinguish justification (on the onehand)from two kinds of entitlement.
Sandra Harding, UCLA, "Secularism, Democracy, and Philosophy of Science:Postcolonial and Feminist Issues"
ABSTRACT:A certain kind of anti-democratic secularism createsobstacles for progressive intellectual and socialprojects, including postcolonial and feminist philosophiesof science. This particular offending kind of secularism,unfortunately the dominant one in the modern West, commitsphilosophies of science to racist and colonial stanceswhich most philosophers of science would abhor if theywere aware of them. It also positions women andindigenous knowers outside "the modern," wherein moral andpolitical goodness and scientific rationality areconventionally thought to be uniquely lodged. What are theremedies for this predicament?
Robin Jeshion, USC, "The Truth about Slurs"
ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the semantics of slurring words. My aim is to put forward a sketch of a semantic theory about slurs, with special attention to two issues, (1) whether sentences containing slurs can be true and (2) the way slurs can become appropriated.
Christopher Lay, Pitzer College, "The Zero-Order Temporal Account of Consciousness Introduced"
ABSTRACT: Consciousness includes an awareness of itself, or self-awareness, and a close analysis of the way in which subjects are conscious of time, motivated by Edmund Husserl's theorizing on time-consciousness, reveals a non-representational structure that accounts for that self-awareness. The structure of time-consciousness accounts for the way in which subjects are conscious of objects, and their own awareness, over time; at any moment of consciousness, subjects are non-representationally aware of not just what is going on at that instant, but are also aware of the immediate past and the immediate future. Occurrent consciousness takes place against a temporal background of past and future episodes of consciousness, and this accounts for the self-awareness ubiquitous to normal consciousness. Those who have looked to Husserl's notion of time-consciousness to account for the self-awareness in consciousness, most notably Dan Zahavi, have overlooked the importance of the temporal background. Understanding the role of the temporal background in time-consciousness helps us see how seemingly unconscious behaviors fit into the structure of time-consciousness. For instance, instead of attributing the entire structure of time-consciousness, and thereby self-awareness, to dreamless sleepwalkers, as Zahavi does, I argue that such sleepwalkers lack awareness of the temporal background, and thus do not have the type of self-awareness that consciousness normally has of its self. Irrespective of such attempts amongst contemporary Husserl scholars to account for self-awareness in consciousness in terms of time-consciousness, interest in accounting for the self-awareness in consciousness has grown over the past two decades. Many, like David Rosenthal and Uriah Kriegel, account for self-awareness in terms of representational content: whenever subjects consciously represent objects, they also represent themselves representing those objects. But all such answers fall to the misrepresentation objection, the objection that holds that self-representational explanations of self-awareness cannot coherently account for mismatches in representational contents. I will show how various attempts to defend Kriegel and Rosenthal's respective replies to this objection fail–and how the temporal account of self-awareness I offer is thereby superior.
Coleen Macnamara, UC Riverside, "Reactive Attitudes: A Form of Moral Address"
ABSTRACT:In "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil”, Gary Watson characterized both expressed and unexpressed reactive attitudes as forms of moral address. This claim has been widely endorsed – and indeed to such an extent that it is arguably one the most frequent claims made on behalf of the reactive attitudes. I am among those who champion Watson’s insight, but a puzzle remains.The claim that expressed reactive attitudes are forms of moral address seems clear enough. But what about resentment, indignation, gratitude, and approval that remain buried in one’s heart? If I bite my tongue and don’t express my resentment, I am in a very real sense refraining from addressing you. It therefore seems a bit odd--even unintelligible--to say that the reactive attitudes address their target even when they are not expressed, that is, when they do not address.The aim of this paper is to make sense of the claim that unexpressed reactive attitudes are forms of moral address. I do this by distinguishing three senses of 'address'. To address may mean: (1) to communicate to, (2) to direct at, or (3) to call for a reply. I argue that unexpressed reactive attitudes are like an unsent invitation, a dormant form of the third sense of address.
Jason Raibley, Cal State Long Beach, "On the Intrinsic Evil of Death"
ABSTRACT: This paper responds to two, related Epicurean arguments against the evil of death. The first argument is that, since death involves the absence of all sensation, dying never leads to any outcome that is non-instrumentally bad for the one who dies. Some philosophers have responded to this argument by expanding their conception of extrinsic value and arguing that dying is extrinsically bad because it deprives its victim of future pleasures. Instead, this paper argues that, using a more holistic conative theory of well-being, we can establish that the process of dying is directly bad for the one who dies, no matter how it feels. The paper then responds to a second Epicurean argument based on the idea that there is no time at which death is bad for the one who dies. It argues that, because the timing of one's death determines the length of one's life, using the holistic theory of well-being already described, we can also explain how this event might impact the welfare-value of one's life, even if (a) one cannot experience one's death, because (b) one does not exist at the moment of one's death.
Marius Stan, Caltech, "Leibniz and his Disciples on Action and Reaction: the Origins of Kant's Third Law of Mechanics"
ABSTRACT:In this paper, I examine Kant's early law of action and reaction, in his 1758New Doctrine of Motion and Rest. I argue that it is a version of a law that ultimately goes back to Leibniz. Kant's 1758 law of action and reaction takes over and improves this Leibnizian law, which he found in the metaphysical dynamics of Christian Wolff.I begin with an account of action and reaction in Leibniz’s dynamics (I). Next, I show how these two concepts migrated into the natural philosophy of his disciples Jacob Hermann and Christian Wolff (II). Part III explains how the young Kant takes over and transforms Wolff’s law of action and reaction. I show that my construal helps explain certain peculiar, non-Newtonian features of Kant's law of action and reaction in the Critical period. I end with a call to reassess the source and role of Kant’s laws of motion in his a priori mechanics of 1786.
Nellie Wieland, Cal State Long Beach, "Words and 'Words'"
ABSTRACT:There have been two debates concerning the ontology of words: the first is the debate on the nature of the type-token relationship between different linguistic entities (e.g., words and utterances, sentences and propositions, etc.). The second is the debate on the status of meta-linguistic discourse (e.g., using language to talk about language). Both of these debates relate (somewhat surprisingly) to recent debates on the extent of context-sensitivity and the semantics-pragmatics divide. In this talk I will discuss some of the problems facing an ontology of words and other linguistic entities. I will ask what a context-sensitive ontology for linguistic entities might look like, and provide some surprising answers.