Visiting Speaker Series

Every semester, our department invites several guest speakers to lecture on various topics. All lectures are free, and are open to all members of the community and to the general public.

They will take place at the Arts and Letters Club, 14 Elm Street, from 3:00-5:00 on the dates listed below.

If you have questions about our speaker series, please contact this year's organizer, Dr. Pirachula Chulanon (pirachula@torontomu.ca).

Fall 2025

October 9, 2025, 3:00-5:00pm 
Nabeel Hamid (external link)  (Concordia University)
Judgment and Interpretation in Johann Clauberg’s Logica vetus et nova (1654)

Abstract: Assuming that logic is a normative enterprise, what is logic normative for? Does it prescribe rules for thinking, for reasoning, for asserting, for interpreting assertions, or for something else? In this talk, I reconstruct Johann Clauberg’s position on this question in his Logica vetus et nova (1654), perhaps the first text to be labeled a “Cartesian” logic, in light of contemporaneous debates on the aims and nature of logic. Clauberg’s logic seeks to reconcile an internalist view of logic as concerned with the correctness of an individual agent’s thoughts or reasonings, characteristic of Descartes and the Augustinian tradition, with an externalist view of logic as dealing with norms for socially situated uses of language, characteristic of the humanist tradition. Clauberg identifies four motives for the study of logic, which give rise to a fourfold division of his treatise: 1) to correctly form one’s own thoughts; 2) to effectively teach others; 3) to interpret charitably what is said by others; and 4) to judge what is said. This organization results from overlaying two sets of distinctions, one between interior and exterior discourse, and the other between genesis (or composition) and analysis (or resolution) of thought or language. With this scheme, Clauberg attempts to weave together several roles that were traditionally or more recently ascribed to the instruments of philosophy: to elucidate good cognitive habits, pedagogical techniques, a theory of text interpretation, as well as rules of logical consequence. Just how tightly Clauberg is able to unify the various aims of logic remains an open question. 
 

October 30, 2025, 3:00-5:00pm
Nathan Ballantyne (external link)  (Arizona State University)
Bad Faith Arguments

Abstract: Arguing is a social activity in which people exchange reasons and information with the aim of changing each other’s minds. One common accusation in a conflict is that the other side “argues in bad faith” or gives “bad faith arguments.” The phenomenon of arguing in bad faith and attributing bad faith to opponents is fascinating but there is no sustained investigation of it. In this essay, we explore several questions: What is arguing in bad faith? When should we believe someone is arguing in bad faith? How often are we justified to believe that others argue in bad faith?

 
November 6, 2025, 3:00-5:00pm 
Kathleen Higgins (external link)  (University of Texas at Austin)
Music and the Regulation of Existential Feelings in Grief

Abstract: Listening to music is a popular means of regulating emotion, which is usually aimed at influencing the experience of relatively short-lived emotions and moods. Focusing on grief, I will suggest that listening can also help regulate more temporally extended emotional conditions, including what Matthew Ratcliffe has termed “existential feelings.” I will indicate some of the changes to existential feeling that are typical of grief, such as world-distancing and a diminished sense of personal agency, and then explain how music can counteract these debilitating effects. I will also consider the possible objections that using music for regulation trivializes music; that music facilitates maladaptive regulation strategies; and the virtual character of what is presented in music severely restricts its impact on feelings related to being in the actual world. I conclude that listening to music can help to counteract disturbing changes to existential feelings in grief and that it can bolster a sense of agency without producing the unpalatable impression of leaving the dead behind, which accompanies most future-oriented displays of agency in grief.

 
November 13, 2025, 3:00-5:00pm
Nikolas Kompridis (Adjunct Faculty Member, TMU). 
Critical Theory and the Meaning of the Blues.

Abstract: In this paper drawn from a forthcoming book chapter, I offer multiple elaborations of the “the meaning of the blues” to make sense of our present historical moment and to consider whether our inherited traditions of critical thought are adequately responsive to it, particularly the tradition of critical theory represented by the Frankfurt School. I begin with a discussion of the “blues” as a musical tradition, looking at how and why its reciprocal, mutually informing relationship to black political thought is historically unique. Although such a relationship is absent from the Frankfurt School critical theory, as it is in almost all traditions of critical thought, I point to a possible point of convergence with the “blues” in a curiously undeveloped assertion in Adorno’s Negative Dialektik: “The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth.” My discussion will then focus on how to comprehend and develop this intriguing but rather opaque assertion, which Adorno left stranded in his major philosophical text. The remaining part of my presentation turns Adorno’s sentence into a sketch of an alternative conception of critical theory that departs radically from its Habermasian and post-Habermasian variants. I then connect my alternative conception to some extra-musical  and time-diagnostic ways of understanding the “meaning of the blues,” to show they can together illuminate our present moment and not too distant future.

 
November 27, 2025, 3:00-5:00pm 
Alberto Toscano (external link)  (Simon Fraser University)
Myth, Fascism and the Dialectic

Abstract: In the work undertaken by Theodor W. Adorno and several of his colleagues in the Institute for Social Research during World War II the question of myth plays a salient if distinctly ambivalent role. Myth is both a constituent feature of fascist thought and a prism through which we fascism’s emergence can be philosophically articulated within the historical dialectic of bourgeois reason. The talk will focus especially Adorno’s 1943 ‘Historical-Philosophical Excursus on the Odyssey’, the longer first version of the ‘Odysseus’ chapter from Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno’s use of myth will be related to other reflections on the dialectic of fascism and myth, namely Ernst Cassirer’s Myth of the State, Furio Jesi’s writings on right-wing culture and the mythological machine, and Adorno’s own collaboration with Thomas Mann on Doktor Faustus.