Past Events

Talks are held every other Wednesday from 12:00pm - 1:30pm in Kresge Hall, Room 2-345. Participation is open to members of Northwestern's philosophical community and epistemologists in the Chicago area. For more information contact Matthew Mullins.

Talks are held every other Wednesday from 12:00pm - 1:30pm in Kresge Hall, Room 2-345. Participation is open to members of Northwestern's philosophical community and epistemologists in the Chicago area. For more information contact Matthew Mullins.

Talks are held every other Wednesday from 12:00pm - 1:30pm in Kresge Hall, Room 2-345. Participation is open to members of Northwestern's philosophical community and epistemologists in the Chicago area. For more information contact Matthew Mullins.

The NU Department of Philosophy presents a talk by Robin Jeshion from the University of California Riverside: Thinking of Things Jeshion's upcoming paper will draw on material from a book she is currently writing on singular thought. For more information, visit her website: (http://faculty.ucr.edu/~robinj/research/index.html); Two of Jeshion's papers - "The Significance of Names" and "Singular Thought: Acquaintance, Semantic Instrumentalism, and Cognitivism" - would be most closely related to this talk. Abstracts for these two papers are listed below: Singular Thought: Acquaintance, Semantic Instrumentalism, and Cognitivism Forthcoming in New Essays on Singular Thought, Robin Jeshion, ed. Oxford University Press (2010). NOTE: This paper is in press, but not yet published. Please do not cite without permission. Here I clarify three positions about conditions on singular thought, offering an intuitive but theoretically supported case against Acquaintance theories and Semantic Instrumentalism (the view that one can produce singular thoughts at will by introducing into the language descriptively-fixed directly referential terms). The bulk of the paper is devoted to articulating how my own view, Cognitivism, differs from Semantic Instrumentalism, and what I see as its main problems, which differ from criticisms of others. I begin to underwrite Cognitivism with empirical support from vision science and object file theory. The Significance of Names Forthcoming in Mind and Language, August 2009, vol. 24, no. 4, 372-405. NOTE: These are the page proofs, which required numerous not-insignificant changes. Please check with publisher for final version. I argue in favor of a thesis -- mundane to non-philosophers, neglected by philosophers: as a class of terms and mental representations, proper names and mental names possess an important function that outstrips their semantic and psycho-semantic functions as common, rigid devices of direct reference and singular mental representation of their referents, respectively. They also function as abstract linguistic markers that signal and underscore their referents' individuality. I promote this thesis to explain why we give proper names to certain particulars but not to others; to account for the transfer of singular thought via communication with proper names; and, more generally, to support a cognitivist, not acquaintance or instrumentalist, theory of singular thought.

We will be discussing faculty work in progress. On October 10, our topic will be "Aristotle's Copernican Turn" by Agnes Callard of the University of Chicago.

The German Consortium and the NU Department of Philosophy present a talk by Rolf-Peter Horstmann.

Talks are held every other Wednesday from 12:00pm - 1:30pm in Kresge Hall, Room 2-345. Participation is open to members of Northwestern's philosophical community and epistemologists in the Chicago area. For more information contact Matthew Mullins.

A meeting of the Philosophy and Linguistics Group. Lee Goldsmith will present his paper titled, "Articles, Particles, Syntax."

"The Epistemological Significance of Disagreement" June 26th-27th Times, Location, and Speakers TBA Co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Please contact Prof. Jennifer Lackey for registration: j-lackey@northwestern.edu

"The Epistemological Significance of Disagreement" June 26th-27th Times, Location, and Speakers TBA Co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Please contact Prof. Jennifer Lackey for registration: j-lackey@northwestern.edu

The Department of Philosophy present a talk by Thomas Pogge from Yale University.

The Department of Philosophy presents a talk by Peter Graham from the University of California-Riverside on May 8th at 4 P.M. in University Hall, Room 102.

The Department of Philosophy and the Undergraduate Philosophy Society present a talk by Theordore Gracyk from Minnesota State University - Moorhead.

The Department of Philosophy presents the 3rd Annual Society for Ethical Theory and Political Philosophy conference. Samuel Scheffler (NYU) and Seana Shiffrin (UCLA) will serve as keynote speakers.

The Department of Philosophy presents the 3rd Annual Society for Ethical Theory and Political Philosophy conference. Samuel Scheffler (NYU) and Seana Shiffrin (UCLA) will serve as keynote speakers.

The Department of Philosophy presents the 3rd Annual Society for Ethical Theory and Political Philosophy conference. Samuel Scheffler (NYU) and Seana Shiffrin (UCLA) will serve as keynote speakers.

University of California - Berkeley Professor, Judith Butler is featured in a public lecture and round-table discussion entitled "Keeping Company with Oneself".

Peg Birmingham from DePaul University discusses Hannah Arendt in preparation for the Judith Butler discussion.

The Chicago Area Consortium in German Philosophy presents a workshop with Robert Pippin (University of Chicago), Ardis Collins (Loyola University) and Karl Ameriks (The University of Notre Dame). The event will be held at the University of Chicago Institute for the Humanities.

The Departments of Philosophy and African American Studies present a talk by Tommie Shelby from Harvard University on March 13th at 4 P.M. in Kresge Hall, room 2-345.

The Department of Philosophy presents a talk by Sarah Buss from the University of Michigan on March 6th at 4 P.M. in Kresge Hall, room 2-345.

The Department of Philosophy presents a talk by David Ebrey incoming Professor of Northwestern University.