Everyone (all genders, philosophers & non-philosophers) is welcome at our public events. Please contact us at swipanalytic@gmail.com to discuss possible accessibility accommodations if needed.
We are pleased to announce that the 2019 SWIP-Analytic Graduate Student Prize has been awarded to Hannah Kim for her excellent paper “Why it Might be True that an Abstract Artifact Smokes a Pipe: A Case for Representational Artifact Theory”. Thanks to everyone for their submissions!
Her talk can be found here, and the handout that accompanies the talk is below.
Schedule for Spring 2019
Hannah Kim (Stanford University), video presentation of “Why it Might be True that an Abstract Artifact Smokes a Pipe: A Case for Representational Artifact Theory” (Recipient: SWIP-Analytic Graduate Student Prize), April 29th.
Barbara Montero (CUNY Graduate Center and CSI), Pain Amnesia, April 4th, CUNY GC 53074:15-6:15 pm
Pain Amnesia
According to David Lewis, experience is the best teacher in the sense that from experience you can learn what a new experience is like. This may be true of the sorts of visual, auditory and gustatory experiences employed by Lewis and others to illuminate the nature of consciousness. But it?s not true of the experience of labor pain, since as soon as the sensation fades, women rapidly forget what the feeling was like. Here, I examine some phenomenological and empirical support for the existence of such pain amnesiaand argue that our failure to learn from the experience of pain both exposes a lacuna in standard philosophical accounts of experience and highlights a hitherto unrecognized distinction between two forms of memory?what I call qualitativeand nonqualitativememory. Beyond this, I argue that acknowledging this gap in our memory has implications for how we ought to understand rational choice and the sources of moral action.
Past Talks, Spring 2019
Susanna Schellenberg (Rutgers), March 28th, 4:00-6:00 pm GC 5307
Capacities First
Abstract: Despite their importance in the history of philosophy and in particular in the work of Aristotle and Kant, mental capacities have been neglected in recent philosophical work. By contrast, the notion of a capacity is deeply entrenched in psychology and the brain sciences. Driven by the idea that a cognitive system has the capacity it does in virtue of its internal components and their organization, it is standard to appeal to capacities in cognitive psychology. The main benefit of invoking capacities in an account of the mind is that it allows for an elegant counterfactual analysis of mental states: it allows us to analyze mental states on three distinct yet interrelated levels. A first level of analysis pertains to the function of mental capacities. A second level of analysis pertains to the mental capacities employed, irrespective of the context in which they are employed. A third level of analysis pertains to the mental capacities employed, taking into account the context in which they are employed. I show how an account on which perception is constitutively a matter of employing discriminatory capacities allows for a unified account of perceptual content, perceptual consciousness, and perceptual evidence.
Past Talks Fall 2018
Meghan Sullivan (Notre Dame), September 20, 4:00-6:00pm
Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth), October 18, 4:00-6:00pm
Jessica Wilson (Toronto), November 8, 4:00-6:00pm
