University of California, Santa Barbara | Department of Philosophy

Colloquia [See also: Grad Student Colloquia] Unless otherwise noted, all colloquia events begin at 4:00pm in South Hall 5617

Sept. 23,
Andy Clark (University of Edinburgh), "Whatever Next? Predictive Brains for Perceiving Agents".
Oct. 21, Gila Sher (UCSD), "Composite Correspondence"
Oct. 28, Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge), "Injury, injustice, and the involuntary: Plato's theory in the Laws"
Nov. 4, Peter Ludlow (Northwestern), "Linguistic Rules and Individual Norms"
Jeff McMahon (Rutgers)
Jan 23
Lecture: "What Rights May be Defended by Means of War?"

Jan 24
Seminar: "Proportionality in Self-Defense and War"

Jan 26
Seminar: "Causing People to Exist and Saving People's Lives"

Jan 27
Lecture: "Targeted Killing: Murder, Combat, or Law Enforcement?"
Feb. 2, John Mikhail (Georgetown)
Mar. 9th, John Bigelow (Monash University), "Time Travel is Logically Impossible"
Apr. 3, Ray Monk, "'How can I be a logician before I'm a human being?' The life and work of Ludwig Wittgenstein"
Apr. 20, Jesse Prinz (CUNY Graduate Center)
Apr. 27, Kenny Easwaran (USC), "Dr Truthlove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bayesian Probability"
May 11, Sharon Lloyd (USC)
May 18, Hans Donald Muller (American University of Beirut)

Sept. 10, Anja Karnein (Goethe-University Frankfurt), "The Moral Status of Future Persons".
Oct. 2, Peter Vanderschraaf (UC Merced), "The Invisible Foole"
Oct. 6, Hartry Field (New York University), "How, if at all, can we rationally revise our logic and inductive methods? Lecture I: The Problem".
Oct. 8, Hartry Field (New York University), "How, if at all, can we rationally revise our logic and inductive methods? Lecture II: The Solution" (Sponsored by the Steven Humphrey Distinguished Visiting Scholar Fund)
Oct. 15: Teresa Robertson (University of Kansas), "A Puzzle About Kinds".
Nov. 5, Mark Schroeder (University of Southern California) "Attitudes and Epistemics".
Dec. 3, Sonny Elizondo (UCSB), "More Than a Feeling: Kant on the Pleasure of Moral Activity".
Jan. 21, John Campbell (UC Berkeley), 4PM, "Perceiving the Intended Model".
Feb. 4, Aldo Antonelli (UC Davis), 4PM, "Life on the Range: First-order Quantifiers and Second-order Domains".

Oct. 2, Peter Vanderschraaf (UC Merced), "The Invisible Foole"
Note: This colloquium will be held at 4:00pm in SH 1431
Oct. 16, A. J. Julius (UC Los Angeles), "Wrongness, the fourth dimension"
Nov. 6, Robert May (UC Davis), "From Inhalt to Bedeutung: The Road to Sense and Reference"
Jan. 8, Josh Dever (The University of Texas at Austin), "Revenge of the Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction: A Disjunctive Case Study"
Feb. 26, Agustín Rayo (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), "Identity and Possibility"
May 14, James Woodward (California Institute of Technology), "TBA

Oct. 17, Michael Gill (University of Arizona), "Moral Conflict and Moral Pluralism"
Oct. 24, Jason Stanley (Rutgers University, New Brunswick), "Knowing (How)"
Nov. 21, George Wilson (University of Southern California), "Love and Bullshit in Santa Rosa: On the Coen Brother's 'The Man Who Wasn't There'"
Mar. 2, Seminar by Thomas M. Scanlon, Jr. (Harvard University), "Metaphysics and Normativity"
Mar. 4, Seminar by Thomas M. Scanlon, Jr. (Harvard University), "Motivation and the Appeal of Expressivism"
Mar. 6, Lecture by Thomas M. Scanlon, Jr. (Harvard University), "Reasons and Rationality" (Sponsored by the Steven Humphrey Distinguished Visiting Scholar Fund), South Hall 1431
May 1, Paul Boghossian (New York University), "Relativism: Old and New"
May 15, Ned Block (New York University), "Ways of Perceiving"
May 22, Sherrilyn Roush (University of California, Berkeley), "Optimism about the Pessimistic Induction"

Oct. 5th, Jose Luis Bermudez (Washington University, St. Louis), "The Sense of 'I'"
Oct. 29th, John Bigelow (Monash University), "Time is a Vector: A Defense of the Passage of Time"
Nov. 30th, Murat Aydede (University of British Columbia), "What Feeling Pain is Not"
March 7th, Allan Silverman (Ohio State University), "Divine Mind: Practical or Theoretical Reason? Or why does Aristotle, but not Plato, distinguish Phronesis from Theoria?"
April 4th, Ted Sider (New York University), "Ontological Realism"
May 9th, David Brink (University of California, San Diego), "Mill's Ambivalence about Rights"
June 6th, Peter Vranas (University of Wisconsin - Madison), "New foundations for imperative logic II: Pure imperative inference"

Sept. 29, Brian Skyrms (University of California, Irvine), "Signals: Evolution, Learning and Convention"
Nov. 3, Gideon Yaffe (University of Southern California), "Excusing Legal Mistakes"
Nov. 6-17, Series of Lectures by Hilary W. Putnam (Sponsored by the Steven Humphrey Distinguished Visiting Scholar Fund)
- Nov. 6th, 3:30-5:30pm, "Indispensability Arguments in the Philosophy of Mathematics" (South Hall 1430)
- Nov. 13th, 3:30-5:30pm, "The Goedel Theorem and Human Nature" (South Hall 1430)
- Nov. 17th, 3:00-5:00pm, "Pragmatism and the Future of Philosophy" (UCSB MultiCultural Center)
Jan. 24, Saul Kripke (Distinguished Professor at CUNY Graduate Center), "The Road to Gödel"
(This special event will begin at 5:00pm in HSSB 1174 and is sponsored by the The Steven Humphrey Excellence in Philosophy Fund and the UCSB Department of Philosophy.)
Feb. 23, Adriana Silva Graca (University of Lisbon), "Why I couldn't Possibly Have Had Dinner With Michael Corleone"
March 9, Jonathan Adler (City University of New York, Brooklyn College), "Resisting the Force for Argument"
March 16, Terence Horgan (University of Arizona), "Mental Causation and the Agent-Exclusion Problem"
April 11, Maria Adamos (Georgia Southern University), "The Ancients, The Vulgar and Hume's Skepticism"
(This special presentation will begin at 4:30pm in South Hall 5705.)
April 13, Richard Creath (Arizona State University), "The Gentle Strength of Tolerance: The Logical Syntax of Language and Carnap's Philosophic Program"
(This event is sponsored by the Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine; the Departments of History and Philosophy, and the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.)
May 18, Anthony Long (University of California, Berkeley), "Plotinus (Ennead 1.4) as a Critic of the Preceding Eudaimonist Tradition"
(This special event will be held in HSSB 1173 at 4:00pm.)
May 21-25, Alan Code (University of California, Berkeley), "Relationships Between Natural Philosophy and Aristotelian Metaphysics"
Special Series of Lectures by Alan Code (sponsored by the Steven Humphrey Distinguished Visiting Scholar Fund).

Oct. 7, Alan Nelson (University of California, Irvine), "Division and Distinction in Cartesian Extension"
Nov. 18, Elizabeth Harman (New York University), "The Mistake in "I'll Be Glad I Did It" Reasoning: The Significance of Future Desires"
Jan. 20, Peter Graham (University of California, Riverside), "Justification and Reliability"
Apr. 14, Richard Fumerton (University of Iowa), "The Epistemic Role of Testimony: Internalist and Externalist Perspectives"
May 5, Thomas Hofweber (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), "Logicism without Logic"
May 12, Sam Rickless (University of California, San Diego), "Berkeley's Argument for Idealism"
Jun. 12, Ben Caplan (University of Manitoba), "Sets and Sandwiches"

Apr. 8, Fiona Cowie (California Institute of Technology), "Linguistic Nativism: The State of the Evidence"
Apr. 22, Kent Bach (San Francisco State University), "Knowledge, Wine, and Taste"
Apr. 29, Brad Inwood (University of Toronto), "Rich Man, Poor Man: The Problems of Letter 87 of Seneca"
May 20, Jeff King (University of Southern California), "Semantics for Monists"

Jul. 23 - Josh May, "Humeanism, Internalism, and Moral Fetishism" (3pm, SH 5617)

Nov. 13 - Dan Dolson, "On the Dilemma of Miracles and Laws of Nature" (3pm, SH 5617)
Jan. 12 - Tim Lewis, "The Multiple-Designation Problem for Kind Terms" (4pm , SH 5617)
Jan. 29 - Alex Bundy, "Evaluating Closure of Knowledge-Conditions" (4pm, SH 5617)
Feb. 19 - Josh May, "What in the World Is Weakness of Will?" (4pm, SH 5617)
Apr. 9 - Phil Atkins, "Two Varieties of Conservativism" (TBA)
Apr. 16 - John Plimpton, "TBA" (TBA)
Apr. 23 - Wally Siewert, "TBA" (TBA)

2008-2009 Academic Year

Sept. 12 - Josh May, "Empirical Evidence against Psychological Egoism"
Mar. 13 - Tim Lewis & Chris Noffsinger, "Why Natural Kinds Can't Be Intensions"
Apr. 17 - Josh May "Practical Interests, Relevant Alternatives, and Knowledge Attributions: An Empirical Study"
Apr. 24 - Luke Manning "Fictionalism about Fictional Entities"

2007-2008 Academic Year

Oct. 19 - Jonny Way, "Defending the Wide-Scope Account of Instrumental Reason"
Oct. 26 - Huiyuhl Yi, "Parfit's 'R'"
Nov. 16 - Wally Siewert, "Internalism, Access and Justification"

2006-2007 Academic Year

Oct. 20 - Josh May, "Altruism, Egoism and Negative-State Content"
Oct. 27 - Carl Barnes, "Expressivism and Negation"
Jan. 19 - Jonny Way, "Is the Instrumental Principle a Principle of Theoretical Reason?"
Feb. 9 - Huiyuhl Yi, "Mitsis, Brueckner and Fischer on Death's Badness"
Jun. 1 - Jason Newman, "Frege Cases and Psychology"

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Conferences

Recent Conferences

Debating Darwin: Philosophical Issues in Evolution and Natural Selection (2011)
Program | Photos | Video (comin soon)
Themes from Burge (2010)
Program | Flyer
Reason and Value (2008)
Program | Photos (unavailable)
Advances in the Theory of Meaning (2006)
Program | Photos
The Most Important Issues in the Philosophy of Science (2005)
Program | Photos
Content and Concepts (2004)
Program | Photos

The Steven Humphrey Fund for Excellence in Philosophy supports a number of prestigious conferences which explore the frontiers and borders of philosophy by bringing together rigorous philosophers to discuss and debate the problems that are central to the discipline’s future directions. This fund has had a dramatic impact on the pedagogical and research program of the Philosophy Department at UCSB. The Department of Philosophy at University of California, Santa Barbara is very grateful to Steven Humphrey for his generous support in making these conferences possible. Dr. Humphrey has given the Department of Philosophy an opportunity to invite speakers of national prominence and to promote a philosophical exchange at the highest level of professionalism.

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Reading Groups & Discussion Forums

Misc. Reading Groups
Reading groups are often started by various grad students and faculty, especially during the summer. Information about those groups will be posted here as they come up.

The Santa Barbarians
The department's main, on-going philosophical discussion/reading group is the Santa Barbarians. The main purpose of the group is to provide a place where faculty and graduate students can try out papers that are in progress. However, we very often end up discussing recent articles from philosophical journals. Topics tend to be in philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, but we have been known to discuss papers in ethics. Discussions of papers by colleagues and students tend to be very gentle and discussions of papers by others who are not there to defend themselves are vicious. One colleague has described the Santa Barbarians as "the WWF of philosophy.” We don’t mind, although we do not actually throw chairs. The venue is always the same (Tony A.'s place) but the time changes each quarter. Announcements are by e-mail. Contact Tony Anderson if you want to be on the list: caanders@philosophy.ucsb.edu. All interested parties are welcome.

The Undergraduate Philosophy Club and Phi Sigma Tau
The Undergraduate Philosophy Club and Phi Sigma Tau, the National Honor Sociey for Philosophy, will meet every Tuesday at 4:00pm, in the Department of Philosophy's Conference Room, South Hall 5617. For additional details, please join the Facebook group "UCSB Philosophy Club."

The UCSB Philosophy Blog
Check out our blog for informal philosophical discussion, department news, reading group updates, and anything else that fits to print. Participation by all is welcome, and viewers can comment on posts. If you would like to post your own items, contact Luke Manning so that he can add you to the list of "Philblog" members. http://ucsbphilosophy.blogspot.com/

The Guerrilla Radio Show
The Guerrilla Radio Show is an informal philosophy talk show. Committed to ‘waging war against idiocy’ and ‘bringing philosophy to the masses’, the Guerrilla Radio Show offers its listeners a unique perspective on important philosophical issues. Jam-packed with thought provoking topics, great guests, cool music and a sarcastic sense of humor, the Guerrilla Radio Show is definitely a one-of-a-kind philosophy talk show. Monthly broadcasts are available from the GRS website via (manual) online download or (automatically) through a free podcast subscription.

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Social Events

Fall 2006 Faculty and Graduate Student Party @ Voula Tsouna's House [See the Photo Gallery]