Philosophy@Western

From Eros to Agape: Love in Ancient and Medieval Times

Oct 28: Henrik Lagerlund “From Eros to Agape: Love in Ancient and Medieval Times”

There have been different views of love through the ages. The contrast between eros or sexual/passionate love and agape or unconditional/self-less love have long dominated Western society. In this presentation I will trace some of the more important views developed in Greek thought and transmitted into the Christianity through the Bible and the Church Fathers. I will discuss what use these traditional views of love still have in our modern fragmented society.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 7-9:00pm

Centre Branch Library, Galleria Mall

Gorgias' Defense: Plato and His Opponents on Rhetoric and the Good

The Department of Philosophy presents

Rachel Barney
University of Toronto

"Gorgias' Defense:  Plato and His Opponents on Rhetoric and the Good"

Friday, October 30th - 3:30 pm

Room 342,  Talbot College

Solipsism: A Truth I Alone Can Know

Wednesday, October 28th. The talk will be in Talbot College, Room 310, at 5:30.

Rodney Parker

Solipsism: A Truth I Alone Can Know

 
Abstract:  Solipsism is a philosophical position that traces back to at least the early Greek philosopher Gorgias and is traditionally viewed as a challenge faced by all forms of philosophical idealism. It is the one position that almost every thinker tries to avoid falling into when setting up their philosophical system. Yet, there is very little philosophical literature that takes solipsism seriously, that is, as more than just a skeptical hypothesis. This is in part due to the fact that in the history of philosophy, very few thinkers have endorsed solipsism as a positive position. In this presentation, we will give a brief sketch of what solipsism, as a sophisticated philosophical problem, really looks like, how Edmund Husserl understood it as the “one truly disturbing thought” that might be entailed by transcendental idealism, how he sought to deal with this, and why he fails. However, I will argue that this is not a shortcoming of Husserl's phenomenology, but the discovery of an interesting an important tension that phenomenology brings to our attention.

 

Note to faculty members: We hope you will join us, particularly when the student's research lies in your area of specialty. The PGSA series aims to develop the presenter's oratory confidence, a part of which consists in the defense of his or her research before both specialists and non-specialists.

Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, New York, October 16-18

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy held its main annual meeting at Fordham University, in New York city, over the weekend October 16-18. Some 200 people were in attendance.

On the program were two papers from the UWO department:

Kris Biniek, "Unity and Partition in Plato's Souls", and

John Thorp, "Aristotle on Natural Law".

Kris's paper argues that, despite first appearances to the contrary, the tripartite model of the soul that Plato presents in Republic IV and in the Timaeus is not at odds with the tripartite model presented in the Phaedo. The apparent discrepancy arises from the different argumentative motivations in the different dialogues; the theories, however, are ultimately compatible.

John's paper argues that Aristotle has been wrongly pegged as a founder or early proponent of the Natural Law school of ethics. Illuminating a very crabbed and difficult text of the Nicomachean Ethics by reference to a text in the Magna Moralia, he argues that Aristotle's real position is that we can, and sometimes should, alter and improve our "moral hard-wiring".

What We Do When We Testify, and Why it Matters in Epistemology

Wednesday, October 21st. The talk will be in Talbot College, Room 310, at 5:30.

Jennifer Epp

What We Do When We Testify, and Why it Matters in Epistemology

 
Abstract:  Epistemologists of testimony ask questions like "On what basis are we justified in believing what others tell us?" and “How do we gain knowledge from being told?” They regularly do this without making use of a robust understanding of testimony itself.  I will argue that epistemologists ought to make use of accounts of testimony that treat it as a contextualized activity with a broad range of social functions – functions that are not purely epistemic.  They ought to do so, I suggest, both to find better answers to current questions in the field and to open up new avenues of investigation. Since this is not a paper, but a conversational presentation, come prepared to talk about what you think epistemology is and should be!

 
Note to faculty members: We hope you will join us, particularly when the student's research lies in your area of specialty. The PGSA series aims to develop the presenter's oratory confidence, a part of which consists in the defense of his or her research before both specialists and non-specialists.

Looking forward to seeing everyone Wednesday!

Lori, Lucien and Emerson

UWO Almuni Speaks at Waterloo

Department of Philosophy Colloquium talk will be this coming Fri., Oct. 23, 2009 at 3:30 p.m. in Hagey Hall - HH 373:

"A Principled Approach to Damage Awards for Wrongful Pregnancy"
Marc Ramsay,
Acadia University

Wrongful pregnancy cases involve unwanted pregnancies and births that are caused by a tort-feasor’s negligence. The negligence in question often concerns a failed sterilization procedure. In many cases of these cases, the mother is the subject of the failed sterilization procedure, but negligently performed vasectomies have resulted in wrongful pregnancy suits as well. Moreover, wrongful pregnancy cases may also result from negligence in the preparation or dispensing of contraceptives; in one such case, a pharmacist was found liable in negligence because he mistakenly filled a prescription for contraceptives with sleeping pills. The key point here is that in all wrongful pregnancy cases, the child is unplanned, and the physician’s (or other healthcare professional) services were sought for the purpose of preventing pregnancy and childbirth.

Courts have recognized the legitimacy of these suits in both tort and contract, but claims are usually advanced in tort. However, in cases involving the birth of healthy children, most courts have restricted damage awards to losses and costs associated with pregnancy; most courts have refused to award damages for the financial costs of raising an unplanned healthy child to the age of majority. This approach, often referred to as “limited recovery”, is endorsed by Justice Judith Lax in Kealey v. Berezowski (1996), which remains the leading Canadian case on wrongful pregnancy. The Kealey decision’s reasoning has influenced both House of Lords majority decision on wrongful pregnancy and the High Court of Australia’s dissenting opinion on this subject. Kealey maintains that the denial of damages for child-rearing costs is justified by appeal to traditional tort principles, not appeals to extrinsic considerations of social policy. The argument here is that child rearing-costs should be treated as non-compensable pure-economic loss, and this view is reinforced by the notion that the law should not treat the birth of a healthy child as a form of injury. To provide parents with child-rearing costs in these cases would, in effect, provide them a windfall that exceeds compensation for their losses. Moreover, according to Justice Lax, responsibilities for raising a child must fall to its parents, so unless the tort-feasor’s negligence somehow interferes with the parents’ abilities to meet these responsibilities, no damages for child-rearing costs should be provided.

I argue that a principled approach to wrongful pregnancy requires full recovery of both pregnancy costs and the financial costs of child-rearing. While the birth of a healthy child may not be an injury in the strict sense, pure economic loss is still a poor model for understanding the nature of wrongful pregnancy cases. Whatever the benefits of a healthy child may be, it is not fair to allow the tort-feasor to use these benefits to off-set or eliminate costs and losses that arise from his negligence. Likewise, while parents are responsible for their children, this in no way affects parents’ claims against the tort-feasor. Even if parents should be understood as choosing to take on duties to unplanned children (by refusing either to put them up for adoption or terminate pregnancy through abortion), it is the children, not the tort-feasor, that may hold them responsible for such a choice.

Marc received his PhD from Western in 2002 and his thesis title was "The Pluralist Critique of Liberalism," supervised by Michael Milde.

 

 

Our new space in progress

new building
Originally uploaded by uwophilosophy

Reason and the Passionate Mind

Philosophy and the Emotions
Lecture Series

7:00 pm
Wednesday, October 21st
Stevenson & Hunt - Room A
Central Library - 251 Dundas Street


"Reason and the Passionate Mind"

Katharina Paxman

Academic Skepticism and its influence

THE WESTERN ONTARIO COLLOQUIUM

IN ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY

October 16-17, 2009

Friday, Oct. 16, 2009 Location: Talbot College, Rm 341

4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Tom Lennon (The University of Western Ontario)

“Descartes, Arcesilaus, and the

Structure of Epoche”

6:30 p.m. — Dinner

Saturday, Oct. 17, 2009 Location: North Campus Building-NCB 293

9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.

Casey Perin (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

“Making Sense of Arcesilaus”

Commentator: Karen Margrethe Nielsen

(The University of Western Ontario)

Chair: Sarah Hogarth (The University of Western Ontario)

10:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. — Coffee

11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Peter King (University of Toronto)

“Augustine’s About-Face:

De Trinitate 15.21”

Commentator: Scott McDonald (Cornell University)

Chair: Julie Walsh (The University of Western Ontario)

12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. — Lunch

2:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.

Henrik Lagerlund (The University of Western Ontario)

“John Buridan’s Empiricism and the

Knowledge of Substances”

Commentator: Gyula Klima (Fordham University)

Chair: Riin Sirkel (The University of Western Ontario)

3:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. — Coffee

4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Benjamin Hill (The University of Western Ontario)

“Early Modern Probabilistic

Epistemology and Academic

Skepticism”

Commentator: Jon Miller

(Queen’s University)

Chair: Alain Ducharme

(The University of Western Ontario)

6:30 p.m. — Dinner

For more information, contact: Karen M. Nielsen – [email protected] or

Henrik Lagerlund – [email protected] or see department website at

www.uwo.ca/philosophy

Tom Lennon's talk

THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM SERIES, 2009-2010

Tom Lennon

"Descartes, Arcesilaus, and the Structure of Epoche"

Friday, October 16, 2009

4:30 pm - 6:00 pm,  Room 342, Talbot College

Everyone Welcome