UC Davis Philosophy Department

06/29/2018

2018 Barrall Family Philosophy Scholarship:Derek Dimond Philosophy Undergraduate Essay Contest: Winner: Samuel Kennedy Runners-up: Stephen An, Zachary Nemirovsky Departmental Citations for Outstanding Performance: Derek Montecalvo Kevin Klein Jonathan Fernandez Kai Yee Aaron Zheng Robert M...

06/19/2018

T-3 days until the 2018 Summer Solstice Ethics Conference. Check out our program below

Day 1 Friday June 22

Session 1 9:00-10:30am
Gary Watson, “The Moral Status of Psychopaths”

Session 2 10:45-12:15pm
Ishtiyaque Haji, “Ability and Obligation”

Lunch 12:15-1:45pm

Session 3 1:45pm-3:15pm
Wilson Mendonça, “Supervenience Arguments against Robust Realism”

Session 4 3:30pm-5:00pm
Mark van Roojen, “Thinking Again About the ‘Wishful Thinking’ Objection to Noncognitivism”
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Day 2 Saturday June 23

Session 1 9:00-10:30am
Shelly Kagan, “Death, Deprivation, and Rational Regret”

Session 2 10:45-12:15pm
Dale Jamieson, “Loving Nature”

Lunch 12:15-1:45pm

Session 3 1:45pm-3:15pm
Connie S. Rosati, “Meaningful Lives”

Session 4 3:30pm-5:00pm
Geoff Sayre-McCord, “On A Theory of a Better Morality”

05/17/2018

The Undergraduate Philosophically Oriented Women (uPOW) and UC Davis MAP Chapter are launching the Syllabus Diversity Initiative with a meeting to discuss strategies to diversify our philosophy curriculum.

04/30/2018

04/13/2018

Here's the flyer and schedule for tomorrow's 2018 Davis Undergraduate Philosophy Conference, hosted by the Philosophy Club.

03/20/2018

Since we're only one week away, here's the official poster for the DEX6 Philosophy Conference with a complete list of speakers, as well as dates, and location information.

03/20/2018

Colloquium Friday, March 23rd:
Justin Khoo will be presenting a talk titled "Language, Logic, and Triviality"

Abstract: "What should we do when there is a logical proof that our linguistic intuitions about certain natural language sentences cannot be correct? Focusing on indicative conditionals, I'll argue that we need to pay careful attention to the relationship between natural languages (like English) and the formal languages used to state such logical proofs. In particular, natural language indicative conditionals have a property that makes translating between these two languages not obvious. Once we have the relationship between these languages clearly in view, we can vindicate our natural language intuitions while avoiding the conclusion of the logical proof. I'll discuss the upshot of my strategy for two axiom schemas: modus ponens and import export."

The talk will be held 3:10 - 6 p.m. in the Philosophy Department Library (SSH 1231).
Hope to see you there!

03/13/2018

Colloquium Friday, March 16th:

Kevin T. Kelly (Carnegie Mellon University) will be presenting a Joint work with Konstantin Genin (Carnegie Mellon University) titled Ockham’s Razor and the Topology of Simplicity.

Abstract: "One of the most pressing questions in general philosophy of science is the nature of empirical simplicity and it’s connection to epistemic justification. We propose a topological concept of empirical simplicity, and we show that favoring only theories that are simplest in that sense is necessary for staying on the straightest (i.e., most deductive) course to the true answer to the question under discussion. Although Karl Popper did not mention topology explicitly, our ideas provide a fresh perspective on his proposal. We show how the idea extends from deterministic theories to statistical inference."

The talk will be held 3:10 - 6 p.m. in the Philosophy Department Library (SSH 1231).

Hope to see you there!

02/23/2018

Here's the poster and schedule for the upcoming event, "Diverse Voices in Philosophy" presented by MAP and the Stanford Department of Philosophy:

02/23/2018

Colloquium Friday, February 23rd:

Professor Jonathan Cohen (UCSD) will be presenting a talk titled "Coherence and Conversation"

Abstract: "The sentence 'The boss fired the employee who is always late' invites the defeasible inference that the speaker is attempting to convey that the lateness caused the firing (cf. 'The boss fired the employee who is from Philadelphia', which does not invite an analogous inference). We argue that, unlike more familiar processes for conveying extrasemantic content, such inferences do not arise in an attempt to rescue utterances from any kind of linguistic or communicative failure, such as from a violation of communicative norms based on principles of rationality/cooperativity, or the need to complete/expand a proposition so as to appropriately fix truth-conditional content. Rather, we argue that they arise from more basic, general cognitive strategies for building mental models of the world. Attention to such cases suggests that the forms of extrasemantic enrichment that have attracted the most theoretical attention to date (e.g., conversational implicature, impliciture) are in fact special cases of a more general, and more varied, phenomenon."

The talk will be held 3:10 - 5 p.m. in the Philosophy Department Library (SSH 1231).

Hope to see you there!

04/10/2017

DEthiX 2017 is underway! Hope to see you here!

04/03/2017

One week until DEthiX 2017! Check out the updated poster: