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. Some talks are given in-person; others are via Zoom.
If you have questions about this speaker series, please contact this year's organizer, Dr. Pirachiula Chulamon (pirachula@torontomu.ca)
Winter 2023 Schedule
Title: "Weaving Politics"
Speaker: Jill Frank, external link (Cornell University)
When: Tuesday, January 31st, 3:00-5:00
Where: Arts and Letters Club, 14 Elm Street, 2nd floor boardroom.
Abstract: The weaving paradigm in Plato’s Statesman is often understood as underwriting a kingly (if not authoritarian) statesman and a statecraft of command and obedience. Taking the Eleatic xēnos’ paradigm of weaving as a provocation to interrogate the craft of weaving as it was actually practiced in ancient Greece, we draw on literary and archaeological evidence showing, contra the xenos’ representation, that weaving separates without cutting, combines without subordinating, and intertwines not by producing unanimity but by accommodating difference in unity. We argue that the dialogue as a whole endorses the statecraft for which actual weaving is a paradigm, one that rules not via kingly command and obedience, or by mastery and subordination, but through conjoint and cooperative practices of ordering that unfold, as does fabric, through the fabrication process itself.
Title: [CANCELLED] "Universality, Necessity, and Progress: Marx and the Problem of History"
Speaker: Amy Allen, external link (Penn State)
When: Tuesday, February 28th, 3:00-5:00
Where: Arts and Letters Club, 14 Elm Street, 2nd floor boardroom.
Abstract: In response to postcolonial critiques of the Eurocentrism of Marx's theory of history, a new wave of scholarship has questioned whether Marx held on to this theory in his late work. Scholars have argued that in Marx's late journalistic and ethnographic writings, his teleological and stadial theory of universal history gives way to a multilinear and non-Eurocentric view. In this lecture, I argue that the theory of history that is employed in Marx's early work has three distinct components: universality, necessity, and progress. Although all three of these elements are combined in Marx's early work, they can be disaggregated, and, importantly, rejecting one of them doesn't necessarily entail rejecting the other two. In Marx's late work, in fact, what we find is a multilinear view of the history that nevertheless remains committed to claims about historical necessity and progress.
Title: "The First Acts of Kantian Cognition"
Speaker: Thomas Pendlebury, external link (University of Pittsburgh)
When: Tuesday, March 21, 3:00-5:00
Where: Arts and Letters Club, 14 Elm Street, 2nd floor boardroom.
Abstract: When Kant seems to define capacities like sensibility and the understanding, he mentions only some of their representations, and not even the ones with which he is apparently most concerned. Many commentators have concluded, reasonably enough, that these characterizations aren’t definitions after all. I explain why they are definitions and why it’s important. Belonging to each Kantian capacity is a system of acts with a determinate structure, but the capacity is properly defined in terms of only one of them. I defend this claim in application to his definition of the understanding as the capacity to judge.
Fall 2022 Schedule
Title: "Metaontology and Temporality in Heidegger: Problems and Prospects"
Speaker: Tarek Dika, external link (University of Toronto
When: Wednesday, Nov. 30th, 3:00-5:00
Where: Arts and Letters Club, 14 Elm Street, 2nd floor boardroom.
Abstract: Much of the motivation behind Heidegger’s project in Being and Time stems from his thesis that temporality has played a neglected dual role in the history of ontology: an ontological or metaontological role, in which it determines how beings or entities are understood and distinguished from one another, and an ontical role, in which it is itself regarded simply as one being or entity among many others. This dual role, Heidegger argues, can be detected in everything from Aristotle’s concept of substance (ousia) up to Hegel’s concept of spirit (Geist). I argue that Heidegger’s interpretation of ancient and modern ontologies does not unambiguously demonstrate that temporality played the ontological or metaontological role he claims it does, and I explore other possible candidates that may have played this role. I conclude by arguing that the prioritization of temporality in post-Heideggerean philosophy is in part due to an uncritical acceptance of Heidegger’s thesis about the dual role played by temporality in the history of ontology.
Title: "Trauma's Empty Promise"
Speaker: Dian Million, external link (Washington)
When: Wednesday, Nov. 23rd, 3:00-5:00
Where: Online [Zoom link, external link]
Abstract: By the twenty-first century trauma had become a portmanteau—a catch-all concept that serves to read, diagnose, and ‘treat’ disparate bodily, psychological, and social harms to individuals and groups. I challenge us to look again at what trauma is. Here, I rework my earlier reading on our Indigenous encounter with trauma in my text Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights to extend my assessment of our intergenerational well-being in North America. Trauma articulates with globalized liberal humanitarianism as it ebbs and stalls in its logics of care. Trauma is inadequate as a theory for the scale of death and dissolution that racial capitalism occludes in programs for individual subjective healing. I contend that trauma as a concept masks a deeply embedded racial capitalist motive for settler colonialism operationalized against Black, immigrant, and Indigenous peoples.
Title: "Cohen and Heidegger on Principles and Anarchy"
Speaker: Miguel Vatter, external link (Deakin University)
When: Tuesday, Sept. 13th, 3:00-5:00
Where: Arts and Letters Club, 14 Elm Street, 2nd floor boardroom.
Abstract: In his book Le principe d’anarchie Reiner Schürmann put forward the hypothesis that Martin Heidegger’s “overcoming” of metaphysics was intended to emancipate action from its derivative status with regard to principles (arche), and in so doing render back to action its inherent relation to anarchy (an-arche). According to Schürmann, the latter insight was developed systematically by Hannah Arendt. In this paper I suggest that, strictly speaking, it is Hermann Cohen who first developed something like a “principle of anarchy”. In this sense, my paper picks up from Franz Rosenzweig’s paradoxical and controversial last philosophical pronouncement before his early death, according to which in his disputation against Cassirer at Davos, Heidegger adopted the “position of our new thinking that lies wholly in the line descending from that ‘last Cohen’.” I argue that in order to appreciate both the divergences and surprising affinities between Cohen and Heidegger, one is best served by focussing on their interpretations of Plato and Aristotle, rather than on their interpretations of Kant. In the first part of the paper I discuss how Cohen’s philosophical anarchism brings together Plato’s conception of the Idea with the Jewish elaboration of the Messianic idea. In the second part, I offer an analysis of Heidegger’s interpretation of The Sophist where he is most explicit in explaining the philosophical relation between Plato and Aristotle, and its political and theological implications.
Title: “Is this Me? A Story about Personal Identity from a 4th Century Mādhyamika Treatise”
Speaker: Jonardon Ganeri, external link (University of Toronto)
When: Tuesday, October 4th, 3:00-5:00
Where: Arts and Letters Club, 14 Elm Street, Great Hall (Main Floor)
Abstract: In a Buddhist Mādhyamika treatise from around the fourth century CE there is a very remarkable story which serves as a thought experiment calling us to question the nature of self and the identity of persons. Lost in Sanskrit, the passage is fortunately preserved in a Chinese translation, the Dà zhìdù lùn. I will discuss the philosophical significance of the story in its historical and literary context. I emphasise the philosophical importance of embedding the story in two framing narratives, and demonstrate that the story taps a range of intuitions, and indeed fears, about the survival of the self which have also played a large role in the history of the topic in the West, and which continue to be of great contemporary concern.
Archive of Previous Visiting Speakers
- Sept. 21, 3:10-5:00pm: Georgi Gardiner, external link (University of Tennessee) Title: "Trauma’s Trilemma: On Self-Deception, Distraction, and Self-Respect"
- Nov. 9, 3:10-5:00: Joachim Aufderheide, external link (King's College London). Title: "Dreaming and Idealism in Plato and Vasubandhu".
- Nov. 23, 3:10-5:00: Rauna Kuokkanen, external link (Lapland). Title: "Indigenous Self-determination and the Norm of Integrity."
- Dec. 7, 3:10-5:00: Dale Turner, external link (Toronto) "Listenening to Indigenous People In and On Their Own Terms."
- Mar. 8, 3:10-5:00: Katharina Nieswandt, external link (Concordia). Title: "Why are Women Less Likely than Men to Study Philosophy?" [VIDEO, external link]
- Mar. 22, 3:10-5:00: Donald Ainslie, external link (Toronto). Title: "Mundane or Sublime? Hume and Kant on Morality."
- Mar. 29, 3:10-5:00: Glen Sean Coulthard, external link (University of British Columbia). Title: "Once Were Maoists: Third World Currents in Fourth World Anti-Colonialism."
- Oct. 27, 3:10-5:00pm: Dr. Jason Kawall, external link, opens in new window (Colgate) Title: "“Of Carts and Horses: On the Explanation of Right Action in Virtue Ethics.
- Nov. 10, 3:10-5:00pm: Dr. Daniel Conway, external link, opens in new window (Texas A & M) Title: "When Philosophy Learns to Sing:The Case of Nietzsche’s Nachgesang"
- Nov. 24, 3:10-5:00pm: Dr. Michael Brady, external link, opens in new window (Glasgow) "Suffering and Meaning in Life."
- March 26, 3:10-5:00pm: Dr. Mary-Louise Gill, external link (Brown): “Exercise in Plato’s Parmenides”.
- April 13, 3:10-5:00pm: Dr. Katherine Dormandy, external link (Innsbruck), "The Loyalty of Religious Disagreement."
- April 21, 3:10-5:00pm: Dr. Gail Weiss, external link (George Washington): "Translating Lived Experiences Across Multiple ‘Worlds of Sense’: Decolonizing and Depathologizing the Clinical Encounter."
- “After Arendt: The Stakes of Narrative in the Age of Big Data”, Dr. Ewa Ziarek,, external link Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature, Tuesday, March 3rd, 3:00-5:00 Watch Video
- "The Role of Order in Kant’s Justification of Morality”, Dr. Timothy Rosenkoetter, external link (Philosophy, Dartmouth College), Tuesday, November 26, 3:00-5:00. Watch Video
- "Where the Living Live: New Questions for Phenomenology and Religion", Dr. Karl Hefty, external link (Theology, St. Paul's University), Tuesday, November 12, 3;00-5:00, Watch Video
- “Wampum Diplomacy in the Early and Middle Encounter Period”, Dr. Douglas Sanderson, external link (Faculty of Law, University of Toronto), Tuesday, October 22, 3:00-5:00pm.
- Tuesday, March 26, 3:00-5:00pm, Dr. Margrit Shildrick, external link (Stockholm), “Rethinking the Temporality and Imaginaries of Death - Some Philosophical Considerations.” Watch Video
- Tuesday, March 5, 3:00-5:00pm, Dr. Jeff Noonan, external link (Windsor), “Notes Towards a Humanism from Below.” Watch Video
- Tuesday, February 26, 3:00-5:00pm, Dr. Charles Goodman, external link (Binghamton), “The Unfolding of Empiricism in India.” Watch Video
- Tuesday, November 20, 3:00-5:00pm: Dr. Rohit Dalvi, external link (Brock), "Against Understanding, Or How to Refuse 'Planetary Thinking'."
- Tuesday, October 2, 3:00-5:00pm: Dr. William Clare Roberts, external link (McGill), "Marx's Politics of Freedom".
- Tuesday, September 25, 3:00-5:00pm: Dr. Eric Sanday, external link (Kentucky), "Myth and Concept in Ancient Greek Philosophy." Watch Video
- Tuesday, April 18, 3:30-5:00, Dominic Martin, external link (Université du Québec à Montréal), “Artificial Intelligence and Moral Decision-Making.”
- Tuesday, April 10, 3:30-5:00, David Barnett, external link (Toronto), "Higher-Order Evidence is the Wrong Kind of Reason."
- Tuesday, November 21, 3:00-5:00, Wolfram Gobsch, external link (University of Leipzig, Germany): "Kant’s Theory of Radical Evil".
- Friday, November 17, 11:00am-1:00pm, Eli Diamond, external link (Department of Classics, Dalhousie): “Goodness, Beauty, and the Tragedy of Language: How to Read Agathon’s Speech in Plato’s Symposium”. [VIDEO]
- Tuesday, October 17, 3:00-5:00pm: Catherine Chalier, external link (Universite Paris Nanterre): "The Invisible in Secular Society: Emmanuel Levinas".
- Friday, October 13, 3:00-5:00pm: Kelly Oliver, external link (Vanderbilt) "Detaining Refugees: Deconstructing Carceral Humanitarianism”. Watch video part 1 and part 2
- Peter van Inwagen, external link (Notre Dame / Duke): "What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Free Will?", Friday, April 28, 2017.
- Gabriel Citron, external link (University of Toronto): " ‘The Problem of Life’: Wittgenstein on the Difficulty of Honest Happiness", Wednesday, March 15, 2017.
- Tom Spector, external link (Oklahoma State): "When the Better it is, the Worse it is: On Architecture and Moral Agency", Tuesday, March 7, 2017. Watch video
- Graeme Nicholson, external link (Toronto): "The Essence of Truth", Tuesday, Feb 28, 2017. Watch video
- Joel Michael Reynolds, external link (Emory University): "The Future of Bioethics: Ableism and the Life Worth Living", Tuesday, Feb 7, 2017. Watch video
- Timothy Stock, external link (Salisbury): "(A Very) Weak Martyrdom: The Comic as Public Philosophy", Tuesday, Jan 24, 2017.
- Rebecca Comay, external link (Toronto) "'Our Heritage Was Left to us Without a Testament’ — or is it the Other Way Around?”, Tuesday November 15, 2016.
- Samantha Brennan, external link (UWO), “Ethics and Our Early Years: Making Decisions for Children as if Childhood Really Mattered", Thursday November 10, 2016. Watch video
- Eric Marcus, external link (Auburn), "Reconciling Practical Knowledge with Self-Deception", November 1, 2016.
- Matthias Fritsch, external link (Concordia), "Do Gifts Obligate a Return? Indirect Reciprocity in Deconstruction and Intergenerational Economics", October 4, 2016.
- Jonathan Parry, external link (Birmingham), "Consent and the Justification of Defensive Harm", March 24th, 2016. Watch video
- Jennifer Lackey, external link (Northwestern), "Experts and Peer Disagreement", March 22nd, 2016. Watch video
- Kirsten Jacobson, external link (Maine), “The Living Arena of Existential Health: Space, Autonomy, and Embodiment", March 15th, 2016. Watch video
- Francisco Gonzalez, external link (Ottawa), "The Other Plato: Heidegger's Reading of the Parmenides, the Phaedrus, and the Theatetus in the 1930s", February 9th, 2016. Watch video
- Allen Patten, external link (Princeton), "How to Justify Religious Accommodations: A Liberal Egalitarian Approach”, February 2nd, 2016. Watch video
- Frank Cunningham, external link (University of Toronto), “Public Space and Walter Benjamin's Philosophy of Cities”, December 1st, 2015. Watch video
- Emily Carson, external link (McGill), “The Mathematical Method from Leibniz to Kant”, November 24th, 2015.
- Alia Al-Saji, external link (McGill), “A Past that Lines the Present: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and the Politics of the Past”, November 18th, 2015.
- Daniel C. Russell, external link (Arizona), “Putting Ideals in Their Place”, November 3rd, 2015. Watch video
- Asaf Angermann (University of Toronto), "The Exile of Metaphysics: Adorno and the Language of Political Experience", April 7, 2015.
- VIDEO: John Caputo (Emeritus, Syracuse University), "Augustine, Derrida and (the) True Religion", March 10, 2015.
- VIDEO: Peter van Inwagen (University of Notre Dame / Duke University), Ronald de Sousa (University of Toronto), "What Difference Would (or Does) God’s Existence Make?", March 6 2015.
- Deborah Cook (University of Windsor), "Resistance and Freedom in Adorno and Foucault", March 3, 2015.
- VIDEO: Sarah Paul (University of Wisconsin, Madison), “Good Intentions and the Road to Hell”, November 18, 2014.
- VIDEO: Richard Swinburne (Emeritus, Oxford University), “Why 'There is a God' is Good News”, November 3, 2014.
- VIDEO: Matthew Ratcliffe (Durham University), “Verbal Hallucinations, Feelings, and Intersubjectivity”, October 21, 2014.
- VIDEO: Per Galle (Danish Design School, Copenhagen), “What never was and how it might be: Can creative designers know what they are talking about?”, April 1, 2014.
- David Rondel (University of Nevada, Reno), “Luck Egalitarianism and Deweyan Pragmatism”, March 18, 2014.
- VIDEO: Richard Davis (Tyndale University College), “Theism and the Counterpossible Consensus”, March 11, 2014.
- VIDEO: Raf De Clercq (Lingnan University), “The Lazy Man's Approach to Depiction”, February 4, 2014.
- Robert Mann (Physics, University of Waterloo), “Puzzled by Particularity”, November 26, 2013.
- Lisa Guenther (Vanderbilt University), “Social Death and Living Resistance: A Critical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement”, November 12, 2013.
- VIDEO: Robert Sinnerbrink (Macquarie University), “Cinematic Ethics: The Moral Melodrama”, October 31, 2013.
- VIDEO: Myron A. Penner (Trinity Western University), “Pro-Theism and the Added Value of Morally Good Agents”, October 22, 2013.
- Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck University of London), “On What's Intentionally Done”, April 16, 2013.
- Nathan Ballantyne (Fordham University), “Evidence We Don't Have”, April 9, 2013.
- VIDEO: Jennifer Uleman (Purchase College (SUNY)), “Occupy Reality: Hegel, Frankfurt, and Ontology at (and Beyond) Zuccotti Park”, March 26, 2013.
- VIDEO: Fanny Söderbäck (Siena College), “Time for Love: Plato and Irigaray on the Ethics of Erotic Relations”, February 22, 2013.
- VIDEO: Antonio Calcagno (University of Western Ontario), “Roberto Esposito and the Relation Between the Personal and the Impersonal”, February 13, 2013.
- VIDEO: Derek Matravers (The Open University), “Recent work on the Imagination”, November 6, 2012.
- Neera Badhwar (University of Oklahoma), “Is Realism Really Bad for You? A Realistic Response”, October 16, 2012.
- Joan Tronto (Political Science, University of Minnesota), “Democracy and Care”, March 13, 2012.
- John Lysaker (Emory University), “The Constellational Self: An Outline”, February 28, 2012.
- John Hacker-Wright (University of Guelph), “Human Nature, Virtue, and Rationality”, February 7, 2012.
- David Morris (Concordia University), “Sense, Development, and Passivity: Merleau-Ponty’s Transformations of Philosophy”, November 25, 2011.
- Adrian Haddock (Stirling University), “Self-Consciousness and Rule-Following”, November 22, 2011.
- John Turri (University of Waterloo), “Suberogatory Assertions”, October 18, 2011.
- Bruce Gilbert (Bishop’s University), “Contradiction and the Fluidity of Life: Case Studies from Logic and Ethics”, September 27, 2011.
- Sarah Stroud (McGill University), “They Can't Take That Away From Me: Restricting the Reach of Morality's Demands”, September 20, 2011.