Past Lectures
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Trinity Term 2012
Professor Stephen Yablo, (MIT)
'Truth and Content'
Abstract
“Aboutness” is a grand-sounding name for something basically familiar. Books are on topics; portraits are of people; the 1812 Overture concerns the Battle of Borodino. Aboutness is the relation that meaningful items bear to whatever it is that they are on, or of, or that they address or concern.
Brentano made aboutness the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists have studied the aboutness-features of particular mental states. Materialists have sought to ground it in teleology or natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and the theory of information, to operationalize aboutness.
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Brentano made aboutness the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists have studied the aboutness-features of particular mental states. Materialists have sought to ground it in teleology or natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and the theory of information, to operationalize aboutness.
And yet the notion plays no serious role in philosophical semantics. This is surprising — sentences have aboutness properties, if anything does. One leading theory gives the meaning of a sentence by listing the scenarios in which it is true, or false. Nothing is said about the principle of selection, about how and why the sentence would be true, or false, in those scenarios. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned.
I will be asking, first, how we might go about making subject matter a separate factor in sentence meaning/content, and second, what “directed contents” can do for us in other parts of philosophy.
The 2012 John Locke Lecture series was held at 5 p.m. on Wednesdays in weeks 2 to 6 of Trinity Term 2012. The lectures were given at the T. S. Eliot Lecture Theatre, Merton College.
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Lecture 1 (2nd May) 'Semantic Excuses'
[Handout] [MP3]
Lecture 2 (9th May) 'The Truth and Something But the Truth'
[Handout] [MP3]
Lecture 3 (16th May) 'Extrapolation and its Limits'
[Handout] [MP3]
Lecture 4 (23rd May) 'Knowing About Things'
[Handout] [MP3]
Lecture 5 (30th May) 'Saying Things: Pretense and Presupposition'
[Handout] [MP3]
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Trinity Term 2011
John Cooper, (Princeton)
'Ancient Greek Philosophies as a Way of Life'
Abstract
Philosophy is a demanding intellectual discipline, with many facets: logic, epistemology, philosophy of nature and science, metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of art, rhetoric, philosophy of language and mind. But a long tradition of ancient Greek philosophers, beginning with Socrates, made their philosophies also complete ways of life. For them reason, perfected by philosophy—not religion, not cultural traditions and practices—constitutes the only legitimate authority for determining how one ought to live. They also thought philosophically informed reason should be the basis for all our practical attitudes, all our decisions, and in fact the whole of our lives. In these lectures we examine the development of this pagan tradition in philosophy, from its establishment by Socrates, through Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicurus, the Pyrrhonian Skeptics, and Plotinus and late ancient Platonism.
The 2011 John Locke Lecture series was held at 5 p.m. on Wednesdays in weeks 1 to 6 of Trinity Term 2011. The lectures were given at the Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre, St Cross Building, Manor Road. The classes took place at the Faculty of Philosophy, 10 Merton Street.
Lecture 1 (4th May): 'Philosophy in Antiquity as a Way of Life' [Handout] [MP3]
Lecture 2 (11th May): 'Aristotle's Philosophy as Two Ways of Life' [MP3]
Class/Seminar (18th May): 'The Epicurean and Pyrrhonian Ways of Life' (Texts and Discussion).
Lecture 3 (25th May): 'The Stoic Way of Life' [Handout] [MP3]
Lecture 4 (1st June): 'Platonism as a Way of Life' [Handout] [MP3]
Class/Seminar (8th June): 'Plotinus on the Human Person and the Virtues' (Texts and Discussion)
Trinity Term 2010
Professor David Chalmers (ANU)
'Constructing the World'
Abstract
In Der Logische Aufbau Der Welt, Carnap argued that all truths are definitionally entailed by a very limited class of truths. Most philosophers think that the project of the Aufbau is a failure and that nothing like it can succeed. I will investigate the prospects for an Aufbau-like project, centering around what I call the Scrutability Thesis: all truths are a priori entailed by a very limited class of truths. I will also discuss applications to Carnapian projects in epistemology, the philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and metaphilosophy.
The lectures took place on Wednesdays, Weeks 2 to 7, of Trinity Term 2010. They started at 5pm, and took place at the Gulbenkian Theatre, St Cross Building, Manor Road.
Lecture Schedule:
- Lecture 1 (5th May): A Scrutable World [Handout] [MP3] [Slides]
- Lecture 2 (12th May): The Cosmoscope Argument [Handout] [MP3] [Slides]
- Lecture 3 (19th May): The Case for A Priori Scrutability [Handout] [MP3] [Slides]
- Lecture 4 (26th May): Revisability and Conceptual Change: Carnap vs. Quine [Handout] [MP3] (No slides were used)
- Lecture 5 (2nd June): Hard Cases: Mathematics, Normativity, Ontology, Intentionality [Handout] [MP3] [Slides]
- Lecture 6 (9th June): Whither the Aufbau? [Handout] [MP3] [Slides]
The book manuscript can be found at http://consc.net/oxford/
Trinity 2009
Thomas M. Scanlon (Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, Harvard)
'Being Realistic about Reasons'
Abstract: The idea that there are irreducibly normative truths about reasons for action, which we can discover by thinking carefully about reasons in the usual way, has been thought to be subject to three kinds of objections: metaphysical, epistemological, and motivational or, as I would prefer to say, practical. Metaphysical objections claim that a belief in irreducibly normative truths would commit us to facts or entities that would be metaphysically odd—incompatible, it is sometimes said, with a scientific view of the world. Epistemological objections maintain that if there were such truths we would have not way of knowing what they are: we could “get in touch with” them only through some strange kind of intuition. Practical objections maintain that if conclusions about what we have reason to do were simply beliefs in a kind of fact, they could not have the practical significance that reasons are commonly supposed to have. This is often put by saying that beliefs alone cannot motivate an agent to act, but it is better put as the claim that beliefs cannot explain action, or make acting rational or irrational in the way that accepting conclusions about reasons is normally thought to do.
I will argue that all of these objections are mistaken. The idea that there are truths about are reasons for action does face serious problems. But these are normative problems—problems internal to the normative domain, whose solutions, if there are such, must themselves be normative.
The lectures took place on Wednesdays, Weeks 1 to 5, of Trinity Term 2009. They started at 5pm, and took place at the Gulbenkian Theatre, St Cross Building, Manor Road.
Lecture Schedule:
Trinity 2008
Professor Hartry Field (NYU), ‘Logic, Normativity, and Rational Revisability’ - Wednesdays at 5pm, Weeks One to Six (23rd April to 28th May 2008) was held in the Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre, St Cross Building, Manor Road, Oxford
(n.b., the Lecture in Fifth Week (21 May) took place in Lecture Theatre II of the St Cross Building, not the Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre)
Trinity 2007
| 2006-2007 |
Professor Robert Stalnaker |
| (TT2007) |
MIT |
| Our knowledge of the internal world |
Lecture One (Wednesday 2nd May):
Starting in the middle |
abstract (PDF) |
handout(PDF) |
lecture(MP3) |
Lecture Two (Wednesday 9th May):
Epistemic possibilities and the knowledge argument |
abstract (PDF) |
handout(PDF) |
lecture(MP3) |
Lecture Three (Wednesday 16th May):
Locating ourselves in the world |
abstract (PDF) |
handout(PDF) |
lecture(MP3) |
Lecture Four (Wednesday 23rd May):
Phenomenal and epistemic indistinguishability |
abstract (PDF) |
handout(PDF) |
lecture(MP3) |
Lecture Five (Wednesday 30th May):
Acquaintance and essence |
abstract (PDF) |
handout(PDF) |
lecture(MP3) |
Lecture Six (Wednesday 6th June):
Knowing what we are thinking |
abstract (PDF) |
handout(PDF) |
lecture(MP3) |
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Trinity 2006
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Professor Robert Brandom |
Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism |
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Pittsburgh University |
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Lecture 1 - Week 2 (3 May): “Extending the Project of Analysis”
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Handout(PDF)
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Text (PDF) |
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Lecture 2 - Week 3 (10 May): “Elaborating Abilities: The Expressive Role of Logic”
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Handout(PDF)
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Text (PDF) |
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Lecture 3 - Week 4 (17 May): “Artificial Intelligence and Analytic Pragmatism”
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Handout(PDF) |
Text (PDF) |
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Lecture 4 - Week 5 (24 May):“Modality and Normativity: From Hume and Quine to Kant and Sellars”
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Handout(PDF) |
Text (PDF) |
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Lecture 5 - Week 6 (31 May): “Incompatibility, Modal Semantics, and Intrinsic Logic”
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Handout(PDF) |
Text (PDF) |
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Lecture 6 - Week 7 (7 June): “Intentionality as a Pragmatically Mediated Semantic Relation”
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Handout(PDF) |
Text (PDF) |
2004-05
(TT2005) |
Professor Ernest Sosa
Brown University and Rutgers University |
Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge
Lecture 1 Dreams and the Cogito
Lecture 2 A Virtue Epistemology
Lecture 3 Intuitions
Lecture 4 Epistemic Normativity
Lecture 5 Virtue, Luck, and Credit
Lecture 6 Circularity and Easy Knowledge
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2003-04
(TT 2004) |
Professor J. Barnes
Paris-Sorbonne University |
Truth, etc. Some Topics in Ancient Logic
Lecture 1 Truth
Lecture 2 Predicates and Subjects
Lecture 3 What is a Connector?
Lecture 4 Forms of Argument
Lecture 5 How to Justify Deduction
Lecture 6 What is the Point of Logic?
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2002-03
(TT 2003) |
Professor K. Fine
New York University |
Reference, Relation and Meaning
Lecture handouts:
Lecture 1 Variables
Lecture 2 Frege's Puzzle
Lecture 3 Names
Lecture 4 Kripke's Puzzle
Lecture 5 Belief
Lecture 6 Moore's Paradox of Analysis
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2001-02 (TT 2002)
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Christine Korsgaard
Harvard |
Self-constitution: Action,Identity and Integrity
A copy of the lectures is held in the Philosophy Library, 10 Merton Street.
Lecture Handouts:
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| 2000-01 (TT 01) |
Bas van Fraassen
Princeton |
Structure and Perspective: An Empiricist View
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| 1997-98 (TT 98) |
Lawrence Sklar
University of Michigan |
Philosophy within Science |
| 1996-97 (TT 97) |
Robert Nozick
Harvard |
Invariance and Objectivity |
| 1996-97 (MT 96) |
Jerry Fodor
Rutgers University |
Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong |
| 1994-95 (TT 95) |
Frank Jackson
Australian National University |
Supervenience, Metaphysics, and Analysis |
| 1992-93 (TT 93) |
Tyler Burge
UCLA |
Sources and Resources of Reason |
| 1991-92 (TT 92) |
Jonathan Bennett
Syracuse University, NY |
Judging Behaviour: Analysis in Moral Theory |
| 1990-91 (TT 91) |
John McDowell
University of Pittsburgh |
Mind and World |
| 1989-90 (HT 90) |
Thomas Nagel
New York University |
Equality and Plurality |
| 1988-89 |
Professor Ernst Tugendhat
University of Berlin |
Withdrew due to illness |
| 1986-87 |
Barry G. Stroud
University of California, Berkeley |
The Quest for Reality |
| 1983-84 |
David Lewis
Princeton University |
On the Plurality of Worlds |
| 1982-83 |
Daniel C. Dennett
Tufts University, MA |
The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting |
| 1979-80 |
David B. Kaplan
UCLA |
This and D That: A History of Demonstratives (postponed) |
| 1978-79 |
Professor H.P. Grice
University of California, Berkeley |
Aspects of Reason |
| 1975-76 |
Hilary W. Putnam
Harvard University |
Meaning and Knowledge |
| 1974-75 |
Professor R.B. Brandt
University of Michigan |
Psychology and the Criticism of Desires and Morality |
| 1973-74 |
Saul Kripke
Rockefeller University, NY |
Reference and Existence
(Lectures available in the Philosophy Library) |
| 1971-72 |
Sydney S. Shoemaker
Cornell University |
Mind, Body and Behaviour |
| 1969-70 |
Donald Davidson
Princeton University |
The Structure of Truth |
| 1968-69 |
Noam Chomsky
M.I.T. |
Language and the Study of Mind |
| 1967-68 |
Paul Lorenzen
University of Erlangen |
Non-Empirical Truths |
| 1965-66 |
Wilfred S. Sellars
University of Pittsburgh |
Science & Metaphysics: Some Variations on Kantian Themes |
| 1963-64 |
Jaakko Hintikka
University of Helsinki |
Some Main Problems in the Philosophy of Logic |
| 1961-62 |
Nelson Goodman
University of Pennsylvania |
Languages of Art |
| 1959-60 |
Gregory Vlastos
Princeton University |
Mysticism & Logic in Heraclitus, Parmenides and Plato |
| 1957-58 |
A.C. Jackson
University of Melbourne |
Material Things |
| 1955-56 |
A.N. Prior
Canterbury University College, NZ |
Time and Modality |
| 1954-55 |
Hao Wang
Harvard University |
On Formalizing Mathematical Concepts |
| 1950-51 |
Oets Kolk Bouwsma
University of Nebraska |
The Flux
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Solomon Asch and his conformity experiments
