Thursday, April 10, 2008

Topics of Lawyerly Interest at the upcoming APA Conference

(Here are Saturday's events for now. I'll create another post for the events on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

SATURDAY:

IV-B. Symposium: Privacy, Community and Culture
9:00 a.m.-Noon
Chair: Scott A. Anderson (University of British Columbia)
Speakers: Anita L. Allen (University of Pennsylvania Law School)
Leslie Francis (University of Utah)
Geoffrey Brennan (Australian National University)
Chandran Kukathas (London School of Economics)

IV-G. Colloquium: Epistemology III

9:00 a.m.-Noon
9:00-10:00 a.m.
Chair: Sarah Black Jones (Northern Michigan University)
Speaker: Michael A. Rescorla (University of California–Santa Barbara)
“The Dialectical Regress of Justifications”
Commentator: Juan ComesaƱa (University of Wisconsin–Madison)
10:00-11:00 a.m.
Chair: Matthew Mullins (Northwestern University)
Speaker: E.J. Coffman (University of Tennessee)
“Reliability and Warranted Assertion”
Commentator: Patrick Rysiew (University of Victoria)
11:00 a.m.-Noon
Chair: A. Minh Nguyen (Eastern Kentucky University)
Speaker: Ted L. Poston (University of South Alabama)
“Know How to Be Gettiered?”
Commentator: Marc A. Alspector-Kelly (Western Michigan University)

IV-H. Colloquium: Virtue Ethics
9:00 a.m.-Noon
9:00-10:00 a.m.
Chair: William O. Stephens (Creighton University)
Speaker: Mark Piper (Saint Louis University)
“Hursthouse’s Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, the Slide into Consequentialism, and the Problem of Instrumentally Successful Vice”
**Graduate Student Travel Stipend Winner**
Commentator: John Elia (Wilson College)
10:00-11:00 a.m.
Chair: Larry J. Waggle (Illinois State University)
Speaker: Luke Gelinas (University of Toronto)
“Is Agent-Based Virtue Ethics Circular?”
**Graduate Student Travel Stipend Winner**
Commentator: Jason R. Kawall (Colgate University)
11:00 a.m.-Noon
Chair: Thomas M. Tuozzo (University of Kansas)
Speaker: Macalester C. Bell (Columbia University)
“Globalist Attitudes and Special Relations”
Commentator: Amy Coplan (California State University–Fullerton)

IV-K. Colloquium: Moral Realism and Moral Responsibility
9:00 a.m.-Noon
9:00-10:00 a.m.
Chair: B. Scot Rousse (Northwestern University)
Speaker: William Rehg (Saint Louis University)
“Moral Realism and Autonomy in Discourse Ethics”
Commentator: Cristina Lafont (Northwestern University)
10:00-11:00 a.m.
Chair: Mark P. Jenkins (Johns Hopkins University)
Speaker: Matthew Pianalto (University of Arkansas)
“Moral Realism and Ways of Life”
**Graduate Student Travel Stipend Winner**
Commentator: Andrew M. Cullison (State University of New York–Fredonia)
11:00 a.m.-Noon
Chair: Katie Padgett Walsh (Northwestern University)
Speaker: Matthew Brophy (Minnesota State University–Mankato)
“Moral Judgments: Etiologies and Credibility”
**Graduate Student Travel Stipend Winner**
Commentator: Michael W. Austin (Eastern Kentucky University)

V-F. Colloquium: Epistemology II
2:30-5:30 p.m.
2:30-3:30 p.m.
Chair: Anthony Gillies (University of Michigan–Ann Arbor)
Speaker: Nicholaos Jones (The Ohio State University)
“Belief Revision and Coherence without Foundations”
Commentator: Joseph Moore (Amherst College)
3:30-4:30 p.m.
Chair: Michael B. Horton (University of South Alabama–Mobile)
Speaker: Jay M. Newhard (John Carroll University)
“Circularity in Ordinary Language Arguments for Epistemic Contextualism”
Commentator: Baron Reed (Northwestern University)
4:30-5:30 p.m.
Chair: Jennifer Woodward (University of Kentucky)
Speaker: Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto)
“Knowledge Ascriptions and the Psychological Consequences of Thinking about Error”
Commentator: Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern University)

V-H. Colloquium: Issues in Ethical Theory
2:30-5:30 p.m.
2:30-3:30 p.m.
Chair: Julie McDonald (Saint Joseph’s University)
Speaker: Lisa S. Rivera (University of Massachusetts–Boston)
“Worthy Lives”
Commentator: Susanne E. Foster (Marquette University)
3:30-4:30 p.m.
Chair: Monica L. Gerrek (University of Kansas)
Speaker: Daniel J. Callcut (University of North Florida)
“Mill, Sentimentalism, and the Problem of Moral Authority”
Commentator: Margaret A. Crouch (Eastern Michigan University)
4:30-5:30 p.m.
Chair: Anthony J. Rudd (St. Olaf College)
Speaker: Charles Huenemann (Utah State University)
“Valuing from Life’s Perspective”
Commentator: Daw-Nay Evans (DePaul University)


V-I. Colloquium: Kant

2:30-5:30 p.m.
2:30-3:30 p.m.
Chair: Adrian Switzer (Emory University)
Speaker: Brett Fulkerson-Smith (University of Kentucky)
“On the Apodictic Proof of Kant’s Revolutionary Hypothesis”
**Graduate Student Travel Stipend Winner**
Commentator: Claudia Schmidt (Marquette University)
3:30-4:30 p.m.
Chair: Russell Ford (Elmhurst College)
Speaker: Bryan Hall (Indiana University Southeast)
“A Dilemma for Kant’s Theory of Substance”
Commentator: Clinton Tolley (University of California–San Diego)
4:30-5:30 p.m.
Chair: Christopher Johns (Saint Xavier University (Chicago))
Speaker: Helga Varden (University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign)
“Kant’s Non-Absolutist Conception of Political Legitimacy”
Commentator: Kyla Ebels Duggan (Northwestern University)

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Harvard Conference on Law and Mind Sciences

OK, this seems really interesting! Unfortunately, it's this Saturday. I am going to look for plane tickets and see if I can find cheap ones. If anyone's interested in attending, let me know.

This conference looks like it will dovetail nicely with some of the recent work Professor Ronald Allen has been doing on the role of normative theorizing in legal academia.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Reading Group

More information here. This book is really good and Professor Appiah writes very clearly.

Upcoming Events

From April 17-19 in Chicago there will be a really interesting conference by the Society for Empirical Ethics.

Just a few weeks later in Chicago from May 9-10 is a conference entitled Emotion in Context - Exploring the Interaction between Emotions and Legal Institutions.

For you folks working on the east coast this summer, the Society for Philosophy and Psychology is having a Workshop on Experimental Philosophy taking place at U Penn from June 26-29.

In September there's the Metaethics Workshop at Wisconsin.

I've RSVP'ed at most of these already, and the organizers have without exception been very welcoming of us lawyerly types. I wonder if lawyers would be so welcoming of philosophers at their conferences.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Information for Professor Avraham's talk.

Anyone who has taken a class with Professor Avraham knows he relies heavily on the ex-ante/ex-post distinction. Here is a good article that really fleshes out the philosophical significance of the ex-ante/ex-post distinction. Professor Avraham gave me his take on the distinction recently: "If something is fair ex-ante and unfair ex-post, it is fair, I argue."

This is not the paper Professor Avraham will be discussing at the upcoming meeting, but I found it really eye-opening and it is the reason I invited him to come speak. I'm posting it here in case anyone wants to discuss it.