Philosophy Events

October 2009Newsletter

Upcoming Departmental Lectures Series

    “Plato as Literary Author” presented by Dr. Geoff Bowe
     Wednesday, Oct 21st 3:30 IB 1015

The lecture examines both structural and symbolic tropes in Plato’s Republic, as well as the employment of the figure of Socrates as a touchstone for assessing the moral stances of interlocutors in Plato’s writing.

    "Luck and Knowledge” presented by Dr. Jenna Woodrow
     Thursday, Nov 5th 3:30

This paper begins by outlining the problems that luck poses for epistemic responsibility and critiquing current approaches for being unable to adequately characterize the discord raised by those problems. I diagnose epistemic luck as a conflict between two ordinarily consilient facets of evolved hybrid responsibility: the demand that agents hold true beliefs, and the demand that agents govern their beliefs with good reasoning. This diagnosis explains the paradoxical character of epistemic luck and grounds a solution to its problems.

    "Let's get lost: Gilles Deleuze on how to read” presented by Dr. Bruce Baugh
     Wednesday, Nov 18th 3:30

What is the point of reading? Deleuze claims that "the only end of writing is life." Life is all those forces connecting living beings and their environments, overflowing the confines of personal identity. We read, then, not to "find ourselves" but to lose ourselves: to enter into a process of becoming, a "line of flight" that has no destination. The aim of reading is to discover the fluxes and intensities that run through a literary work, and to use this "non-personal power" to find and to become something new and unforeseen.