Philosophy Day! Symposium SP23

CSULB’s biannual Philosophy Day! symposium will be held on Friday May 5th from 12:00pm–6:00pm in room LA2–120. Please join us for some talks and community.

Program:

• Abstract: In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle asserted that temperance and self-indulgence concern bodily, appetitive pleasures enjoyed through touch. While parts of his assertion are intuitive, other parts are strange and worth a second look. My presentation will examine each component of Aristotle’s assertion and will argue that his characterization of the type of pleasure associated with temperance and self-indulgence is too narrow: it excludes some of his own examples of self-indulgence as well as other examples that should be categorized as self-indulgence. Ultimately, I use Aristotle’s reasoning to propose an updated description of appetitive pleasure that includes such examples.

12:45pm–1:00pm: Short Break / Spillover Q&A

• Abstract: Aristotle argued that there are three types of friendship: pleasure-based, utility-based, and virtue-based friendships. He asserted that true friendship requires mutual goodwill for the friend’s own sake. However, this creates a conflict between goodwill and friendships of utility and pleasure. That is, if a person has goodwill toward her friend because of the utility or pleasure she receives from her friend, it seems that her goodwill to her friend is not for her friend’s own sake but only to get more utility or pleasure for herself. One view argues that goodwill exists even in these types of friendships: it can be retrospective and thus unselfish. I disagree. Instead, I propose that, according to Aristotle, friendships of pleasure and utility do not involve true goodwill and thus are not true friendships. I first distinguish true goodwill (Goodwill-F) from two types of apparent goodwill (Goodwill-S and Goodwill-J). I argue that retrospective goodwill is not true goodwill but rather apparent goodwill. Second, I contend that, according to Aristotle, friendships of pleasure and utility only involve apparent goodwill. In contrast, only virtue-based friendship involves goodwill that is based on the appreciation of this friend’s essential being: her virtues.

1:45pm–2:00pm: Short Break / Spillover Q&A

• Abstract: Perhaps no other doctrine is so intimately tangled up with the foundations of Descartes’s philosophical system than the ‘beast-machine’ doctrine, which names the view that nonhuman animals are mere automata devoid of all forms of consciousness. Descartes’s main argument for this doctrine relies on the premise that animals fail to display ‘real speech’—a sort of linguistic behavior that cannot be accounted for by mechanical explanations. The language argument is often characterized as hopelessly confused and patently flawed, constituting an embarrassment to the rest of Descartes’s philosophy. In this presentation, I aim to extricate Descartes from this situation by drawing on his most fundamental philosophical commitments—specifically, his views on God, thought, matter, and certainty. As I intend to show, Descartes’s language argument is best interpreted as abductive. Aside from textual evidence, I plan to support my reconstruction by showing how it resolves several purported inconsistencies and interpretative puzzles commonly attributed to Descartes’s language argument.

• Abstract: Leibniz notoriously argued that the fundamental constituents of the world are immaterial, partless, mind-like substances, which he calls monads. He ruled out the existence of material substances on the grounds that matter is divisible and, therefore, composed of many parts. As such, material objects do not have the unity needed to be substances. But what if the material world doesn’t have parts? What if the material world is just a single material object? This argument, call it the argument from material monism, threatened to stop Leibniz in his tracks. In this paper, I explore Leibniz’s attempts to defend his view against material monism. I suggest that, although Leibniz has some promising replies, none are without complications. Therefore, material monism highlights a crucial vulnerability in one of Leibniz’s main arguments for his theory of monads.

• Abstract: According to the innovative account of the structure of rational evaluation offered by Wittgenstein in his final notebooks, published as On Certainty, our rational practices necessarily presuppose arational hinge commitments. These are everyday, apparently mundane, commitments that we are optimally certain of, but which in virtue of the ‘hinge’ role that they play in our rational practices cannot themselves enjoy rational support. Granted that there are such hinge commitments, what is the nature of the propositional attitude in play? Many commentators have described this propositional attitude as a kind of trusting. In contrast, I want to push back against this way of thinking about hinge commitments and argue instead that it is crucial to our understanding of Wittgenstein’s proposal to realize that the propositional attitude involved in hinge commitments is not one of trusting at all.

6:00pm–8:00pm: Reception and Dinner
Speakers and participants invited! [If you would like to attend the dinner afterwards, please let organizers Larry Nolan & Charles Wallis know aforehand so that they have an accurate headcount.]