Seminar series

PROFOUND seminar series

profound

The PROFOUND project is running a seminar seires during their stay at the Centre. 

Every other week, fellows and colleagues meet up at CAS to listen to talks held by their peers. 

All segments of the series will mainly be held on Thursdays, and mainly in the Turret room at CAS. But please see the specific segment for any deviations.

Speaker, title, and abstract for each segment will be announced below.

Upcoming segments

Buridan’s Buck-Passing Account of Goodness

Held by Frans Svensson, Department of Philosophy, University of Gothenburg.

Past segments

Demarcating Moral Reasons through Practicing Grief

Held by Ying Yao, Department of Philosophy, University of Oslo.

In this presentation, I examine how grief, when evoked as a proactive practice through envisioning hypothetical losses (such as the death of another subject, the termination of a relationship, or the irrecoverable deterioration of one’s living environment, etc.), calibrates ethical discernment and conduces moral progress. Proactive grief confronts an individual with the contingency and vulnerability inherent in actions, subjects, and relationships. In so doing, it reveals moral significances that are intertemporal (discovered only retrospectively yet projected forward), modalized (predicated on potential rather than actuality), and interpersonal (dependent on the perspectives of subjects) — features that distinguish moral considerations. Proactive grief hence grants epistemic insight into moral reasons in situations where prudential concerns might eclipse them, and provides motivational access towards moral ideals, which are often obscured by personal biases and egoistic concerns when one's viewpoint is limited to the present, the actual, and the personal.

Does AI Design Rest on a Mistake?

Held by professor Ruth Chang, University of Oxford.

Two notorious problems plague the development of technology, the alignment and control problems. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in trying to solve them, but technologists, it is fair to say, have made little progress. Might philosophers help? In this talk, I sketch a conceptual framework for thinking about technological design that has its roots in philosophical study of values and normativity. This alternative framework puts humans in the loop right where they belong, namely, in 'hard cases'. This framework may go some way in solving both the alignment and control problems.

The Zombie Argument for Hedonism

Held by Ivar Labukt, Institute of Philosophy, UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

PROFOUND seminar: Title TBA

Held by David Copp, Philosophy Department, University of California, Davis.

Natural Normativity: An Aristotelian Account of Reasons

Held by Paal F. S. Kvarberg, Department of Philosophy, University of Oslo.

What Was Plato’s View of Sidgwick’s Dualism?

Held by Andrew Reisner, Department of Philosophy, Uppsala University.

Title TBA

Held by Sarah Stroud, Philosophy Department, University of North Carolina.