Here's just a sampling of the amazing lectures from 2024:
Roy Sorensen
In February 2024, we welcomed Professor Roy Sorensen of the University of Texas at Austin as part of our Distinguished Undergraduate Lecture Series. The Distinguished Undergraduate Lecturer visits for several days to provide a series of events specifically aimed at bringing philosophy to a wide undergraduate audience. One of our alums, Ellis Lindsey (IU Philosophy BA, 2010), helped create this lecture series out of his conviction that studying philosophy is excellent preparation for a flourishing life, and in the hope of enabling other students to discover the joys and benefits of philosophy. The department is grateful for the lecture series and the continued support of its benefactor, The Chisholm Foundation.
Sorensen’s visit included two public lectures, the first titled “Kant Risk a Lie!” and the second titled “Perceiving Holes – Without Perceiving What They Are Holes In”. He described these lectures as follows:
“Kant Risk a Lie!”
Immanuel Kant says, “lying is the chief sin against others, alongside robbery, murder and stuproviolatio”. Kant never risks robbery, murder, or rape. But Kant does risk telling intentionally deceptive falsehoods. Instead of being a man a few words, Kant is a man of three million words. Equally revealing is the scale of Augustine’s corpus: He wrote five million words before he died in 403 at age 75. Augustine was surpassed by Thomas Aquinas: eight million words before reporting a divine revelation to stop writing, a few months before his death in 1274 at age 48. Each of these three proponents of `Never lie’ take several innovative measures to lower the risk of lying. But their precautions are at the same scale as those who have an average aversion to lying. Accordingly, all of those famed for their absolute opposition to lying drastically overstate the degree to which they abhor lying. Instead of being irrational fanatics, the never-liars are moderate men speaking immoderately.
“Perceiving Holes – Without Perceiving What They Are Holes In”
One can see a hole by seeing what it is a hole in (the hole’s “host”). Perhaps one can also see a hole by seeing what fills the hole (the hole’s “guest”). That has been generally assumed to exhaust all the ways of seeing a hole. But consider a pair of identical rings, the first placed exactly atop the second. Looking directly down, only the first ring is visible. Despite concealment of the second ring, one can still see its hole. Thus, one sees a hole by seeing another hole’s host. Ditto for touch. One can feel a hole without feeling its host. A surrogate host suffices. Variations of this double ring scenario have general implications for the perception of absences and the metaphysics of absences.
Prior to joining the UT Austin faculty in 2019, Roy Sorensen taught at University of Delaware, New York University, Dartmouth College, and Washington University in St. Louis. From 2020 to 2024, he is a Professorial Fellow at St. Andrews University in Scotland. Professor Sorensen has published over two hundred articles on topics ranging from the aesthetics of mirror imagery to the metaphysics of shadows. He is the author of eight books: Nothing: A Philosophical History (2022), A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities (2016), Seeing Dark Things (2008), A Brief History of the Paradox (2003), Vagueness and Contradiction (2001), Pseudo-Problems (1993), Thought Experiments (1992), and Blindspots (1988). Roy Sorensen plans to co-author a book with Ian Proops entitled Kant Lied.
If you are interested in viewing Sorenson’s full lecture, it can be viewed on the Philosophy department’s Youtube page.
Roy Sorensen, “Kant Risk a Lie!” full speech.
Clark Memorial Lecture: James Van Cleve
On September 27th, 2024 we welcomed James Van Cleve of USC for the annual Clark Lecture. Van Cleve’s talk, “QUA-talk and Other Forms of Quackery,” explored the uses of ‘qua’ in philosophy. Some ordinary uses are unobjectionable, as when we say “I spoke for the tax qua citizen.” Here ‘qua’ signifies a social role with associated rights and duties. One can advocate for some policy as member of one committee but not advocate for it as a member of another, and we can use qua-talk to capture this.
Van Cleve argued, however, that trouble often arises when this form of talk is pressed into service in philosophy. The talk looked at uses of ‘qua’ in contemporary discussions in metaphysics for the distinctness of objects and at two historical examples in Spinoza and Kant. To provide the flavor of the discussion, let’s consider the qua version of the argument that a statue is not identical with the clay out of which is made. The original argument goes as follows: the statue is necessarily G-shaped (where that is the shape of that particular statue) but the clay is not. Therefore the statue is not identical with the clay. The idea behind using ‘qua’ to state the argument is that it will allow us to acknowledge that the statue is the clay but also acknowledge that the statue/clay qua statue is necessarily G-shaped (where that is the shape of the particular statue) while the statue/clay qua clay is not necessarily G-shaped. This seems to get us new qua-objects. This may seem superficially plausible, but the trouble is that any property of the statue may be inserted into the ‘qua’ slot and the result is that there are as many objects in any place as there are properties of the object.
Turning to the history of philosophy, Spinoza attempted to keep his thesis of non-interactionism between the mental and physical while maintaining that mental states and physical states were identical by treating causation as qua mental/physical. Here there may be something that makes sense given that Spinoza thought of causation as entailment, for that something has one description may entail something, does not mean that its other descriptions entail the same thing. Qua-talk also arises in interpretations of Kant’s category of things-in-themselves: if appearances and things-in-themselves are the same (the one world interpretation) how can we make sense of the former being in space and the latter not? One one-worlder move: appeal to the one world qua appearances, on the one hand, which are in space, and qua things-in-themselves, on the other, which are not in space. As for most cases of the use of ‘qua’ to solve philosophical problems, it often seems only to raise more problems.
If you are interested in viewing Van Cleve’s lecture, it can be viewed on the Philosophy department’s Youtube page.
The Clark Memorial Lecture honors Romane “Bo” Clark, who was a member of the IU Philosophy Department from 1970 until his retirement in 1991 and who served as department chair from 1972-74. Clark was interested in a wide range of topics, including issues in philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language, logic, and ontology. The Clark Lecture features a distinguished speaker on a topic in Clark’s areas of interest. The department is grateful to the Clark family for its generous support of this annual lecture.
The College of Arts