Philosophy at The University of Kansas

01/23/2024

We are very glad to announce that applications for the study abroad program Philosophy in Paris - PHIL 500 ; HIST 450 are now open. You can apply on the program's website: https://studyabroad.ku.edu/philosophy-paris . If you have questions, please contact Dr. Irina Symons at [email protected].

12/07/2023

Check out this article showing the great work of KU Philosophy!

https://news.ku.edu/2023/12/05/ku-undergraduate-ethics-bowl-team-concludes-successful-fall-semester

KU Undergraduate Ethics Bowl Team concludes successful fall semester Tue, 12/05/2023 LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas Undergraduate Ethics Bowl Team, based in the Department of Philosophy, achieved notable success in its second year. Competing at the Rocky Mountain Region Ethics Bowl hosted by ...

11/29/2023

We are pleased to announce that we will be hosting Phillip Bricker (University of Massachusetts Amherst), for a talk Friday, December 1 at 3:30 P.M. The event will take place in the Centennial Room at the Kansas Union. Please join us!

LECTURE TITLE: “The Size and Structure of Reality: A Humean Approach”

ABSTRACT: Cantorian paradoxes suggest that reality is indefinitely extensible: whatever size one says reality is, it can be argued that reality must be bigger than that, and so there can be no definite size to reality. One response has been to accept this conclusion, holding that reality is fundamentally modal. But as a staunch Humean, I reject all primitive modality. Instead, I defend a version of the doctrine of Limitation of Size against criticisms that it is unacceptably arbitrary because it cannot provide an answer to the question: why are these things too big to form a set but not those things? I argue that a Humean view about the structure of reality according to which reality is composed of absolutely isolated parts, can give a satisfying, if inevitably partial, answer to that question.

11/14/2023

We are pleased to announce that we will be hosting Rivka Weinberg (Scripps College), for a talk Thursday, November 16 at 3:30 P.M. The event will take place in the Jayhawk Room at the Kansas Union. Please join us!

LECTURE TITLE: “Timing is Everything: Time and the Meaning of Life”

ABSTRACT: I argue that time is necessary for meaning yet time also erodes meaning. Time allows for the dynamism central to meaningful lives. The arrow of time allows us to use our memory and our current state to project ourselves into the future, and engage meaningfully with our environment. But time also erodes meaning by eroding the impact, significance, and thereby the value of our meaningful engagements, efforts, and pursuits. We want the meaning but we don't want it to crumble. Yet it seems that time gives us both. A conundrum. I analyze several recommendations in the philosophical literature about how to deal with the tragic meaning losses time imposes on and us and argue that none can work. In fact, they will reduce meaning. I further argue that we have too little time in our short precarious lives for our meaningful aspirations. Finally, I offer suggestions for how we can tease out some insights from failed attempts to escape time's wounds and restrictions with our meaning intact, and thereby make progress toward coping with things as they are.

11/03/2023

We are pleased to announce that we will be hosting Samuel Newlands (University of Notre Dame), for a talk Friday, November 10 at 3:30 P.M. The event will take place in the Jay Room at the Kansas Union. Please join us!

LECTURE TITLE: “Early Modern Metaphysics of Evil”

ABSTRACT: What is the nature and causal structure of evils? For over a millennia in the Latin West, there was a stable and widely endorsed answer. During the early modern period, that traditional answer was so roundly rejected that even the question itself faded away. After surveying this demise, I propose an alternative metaphysics of evil using the metaphysical resources of the very early moderns most responsible for this eclipse.

11/02/2023

The KU Philosophy Department is pleased to announce that they will be hosting Susan Wolf (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), for a talk Wednesday, November 8 at 3:30 P.M. The event will take place in the Pine Room at the Kansas Union. Please join us!

LECTURE TITLE: “Criticizing Blame”

ABSTRACT: It is common to distinguish responsible agents from non-responsible individuals, understanding responsible agents as those individuals who are appropriate objects of punishment and reward, blame and credit, and reactive attitudes such as resentment, indignation and gratitude. Non-responsible individuals, by contrast, are never appropriate objects of these responses. The lecture will present reasons to question this distinction: By marking a difference between blame and criticism and the different conditions under which they are justified, we can see that the concepts of responsibility and blame are not as unified as we generally take them to be. This has implications for our understanding of responsibility, blame, punishment and the problem of free will.

10/26/2023

The KU Philosophy Department is pleased to announce that they will be hosting Professor John Sullins (Sonoma State University), for a talk Friday, November 3 at 3:30 P.M. The event will take place in Alderson Auditorium at the Kansas Union. Please join us!

LECTURE TITLE: “Building More Ethical Human Robot Teams: Artificial Phronesis, Robot Inner Dialog and Healthcare Robotics”

ABSTRACT: As humans begin to work closely with social robots to complete tasks the design of the technologies used will influence or nudge the outcomes towards various outcomes that may have ethical impacts. In this presentation we will look at how certain experiments at the robotics lab at the University of Palermo and Sonoma State University are helping to determine the best ways to build systems that will help machines and humans make the best ethical choices from those available. We will present the experiments taking place and some of the early results. These experiments utilize the concept of inner speech found in psychology that gives us a model for the inner dialog many of us experience as we accomplish tasks which we can then implement into a social robot. Giving users access to the inner dialog of the robot helps the users understand the programing of the machine as it reasons through decisions as well as brining to consciousness for the human users the ethical problems that must be attended to. I will further argue that this inner dialog also plays a role in skilled moral and ethical reasoning or as it is known in philosophy--phronesis. In earlier experiments it has been shown that robot inner dialog has resulted in systems that display more conscious and trustworthy actions as judged by their users. Here we will extend this work towards solving ethical problems and dilemmas that may occur as social robots are used to help in elder care facilities.

Keywords: Artificial Phronesis, Robot Consciousness, AI Ethics, Trust in AI, Trust in Robotics.

10/19/2023

Dear friends of KU Philosophy, we are excited to inform you about our Study Aboard program, Philosophy in Paris. This program debuted in the summer of 2023, and if you follow the link below, you will find student testimonials that speak to the importance the program had for them. We are committed to running this program every summer, and to making it affordable for all the students who are interested in studying abroad. For that purpose, we have created a fundraising campaign that we invite you to consider contributing to. We would also be very grateful if you shared this campaign with your friends. Thank you!

https://www.launchku.org/project/39660

Help LaunchKU raise $5,000 for the project: Support Student Cultural Experiences!. Your gift will make a difference!

10/02/2023

The KU Philosophy Department is pleased to announce that they will be hosting Brian Talbot (University of Colorado-Boulder), for a talk Friday, October 6 at 3:30 P.M. The event will take place in Forum D at the Burge Union. Please join us!

LECTURE TITLE: “The End of Epistemology As We Know It”

ABSTRACT: The epistemic norms should matter. The norms philosophers typically focus on do not, and so they should be replaced. Mainstream epistemology sees epistemic norms as oriented towards things such as knowledge, evidence, reliability, accuracy, or coherence. These rarely matter for their own sake. Yet standard accounts of epistemic norms forbid treating them as means to ends. In light of this, epistemic norms as standardly conceived are not really concerned with what matters. We can and should do better, but this will require completely rethinking epistemology.

09/07/2023

The KU Ethics Bowl Team begins its season tonight from 4-5:30pm in the Department of Philosophy. Join us!

08/14/2023

Check out PHIL 500, being offered this Fall!