Philosophy Department at Kansas State University

01/08/2025

KSU Philosophy Emeritus has the number one aesthetics paper! Jim Hamilton's " 'Illusion' an the Distrust of Theatre" is the all-time most read article from JAAC, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (https://cdn.ymaws.com/aesthetics-online.org/resource/resmgr/Newsletters/newsletter.pdf) Congratulations Jim!

02/16/2024

Logicians in the Beehive celebrate the new screen. Proofs can now be checked collaboratively—happy days. Underwritten by the Tilghman fund; thank you to all our supporters!

02/15/2024

This year marks the 90th anniversary of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (KazGU) in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The university promotes international partnerships, including foreign faculty advising. Professor Mahoney currently advises graduate students and has made several trips to KazGU for seminars and mentoring. We are hoping some KazGU students will visit KSU for training in the near term. Information about KazGU can be found here: https://www.kaznu.kz/en/

02/09/2024

Sander Beckers is presenting Monday Feb. 19th at 4pm in Dickens 203 on "A Causal Analysis of Harm." Abstract: As autonomous systems rapidly become ubiquitous, there is a growing need for a legal and regulatory framework that addresses when and how such a system harms someone. There have been several attempts within the philosophy literature to define harm, but none of them has proven capable of dealing with the many examples that have been presented, leading some to suggest that the notion of harm should be abandoned and “replaced by more well-behaved notions”. As harm is generally something that is caused, most of these definitions have involved causality at some level. Yet surprisingly, none of them makes use of causal models and the definitions of actual causality that they can express. In this talk I formally define a qualitative notion of harm that uses causal models and is based on a well-known definition of actual causality. Given that we often need to quantify harm, I also offer a quantitative definition that builds on the qualitative one.

02/09/2024

Stephanie Hoffman will present "Mechanisms of Moral Encroachment in Science: S*x as a Case Study" on Friday Feb. 16th at 3:30 pm in Dickens 203. Abstract: According to s*x contextualism, what researchers mean by s*x depends on the context. While scientists often assume a male-female binary, and thus operationalize s*x accordingly, there are in fact multiple ways of understanding and operationalizing s*x. Furthermore, the male-female binary concept of s*x which relies on s*x assigned at birth is often unhelpful and epistemically unjustified. Some authors have requested that researchers justify their choice of s*x concept. I develop this request further, and explore what it means for a choice of s*x concept to be justified. Using the moral encroachment framework in which moral considerations “encroach” on epistemic considerations, I outline possibilities for how moral considerations may change what counts as an acceptable justification. I conclude that threshold-raising (also known as inductive risk) and direct evidence alone cannot provide guidance as to how researchers may choose a concept and operationalization of s*x. Instead, I propose that, in the case of s*x, while moral considerations do raise the threshold of required evidence, moral considerations also call for a different type of evidence and may sometimes act as direct evidence themselves.

02/05/2024

The Philosophy department will host a talk by Christian Tarsney on aspects of moral theory "Against Anti-Fanaticism" on Thursday Feb. 8th at 4 pm in Dickens 203. Abstract: Should you be willing to forego any good, no matter how great, for a tiny probability of some vastly greater good? Fanatics say you should, anti-fanatics say you should not. Anti-fanaticism has great intuitive appeal. But, I argue, these intuitions are untenable, because satisfying them in their full generality is incompatible with three very plausible principles: acyclicity, a minimal dominance principle, and the principle that any outcome can be made better or worse. This argument against anti-fanaticism can be turned into a positive argument for a weak form of fanaticism, but only from significantly more contentious premises. In combination, these facts suggest that those who find fanaticism counterintuitive should favor not anti-fanaticism, but an intermediate position that permits agents to have incomplete preferences that are neither fanatical nor anti-fanatical.

11/13/2023

Professor Amelia Hicks has a new podcast NeuroDiving https://neurodiving.substack.com/ . Season 1 we're calling "Autism Mind-Myths." The first episode is about the current contentious state of autism research, featuring a delightful interview with Dr. Chloe Farahar. Then, the following four episodes focus on the myth that autism is a "theory of mind deficit." We investigate where the concept of "theory of mind" came from, how the "theory of mind deficit" view of autism has affected autistic people, what went wrong with the scientific research that was used to support this myth, and how we can improve autism research by reflecting on the values that drive scientific practice. Other Season 1 guests include Daniel Dennett, Tobi Abubakare, Travis LaCroix, Joe Gough, Heidi Maibom, and Ryan Althaus.

We'll release an episode per week for the next five weeks. Then we'll take a little break, and return in the New Year with a couple more episodes to finish up Season 1.

Episode 1 can be found here: https://neurodiving.substack.com/p/episode-1-a-productive-irritant

Listen now (24 mins) | what the heck is going on in autism research?

11/07/2023

AI symposium panel "AI and Data Ownership: Navigating the Ethical Labyrinth" with (left-right) Jack Himelright, Camila Hernandez-Flowerman, Roger McHaney and JT Laverty October 16, 2023

11/07/2023

University of North Dakota Law Professor Dan Lewerenz, K-State Philosophy '96, discusses Indian Law with Philosophy and GWSS students November 3, 2023.

11/07/2023

University of North Dakota Law Professor Dan Lewerenz, K-State Philosophy '96, discusses Indian Law with Philosophy and GWSS students