2013

 
The relationship between children, parents and the state seem to be frequently in the news. Issues such as state education, child abuse and protection, tax and child benefit, abortion limits, costs of higher education, adoption, circumcision, forced marriage, ‘honour’ killing, are the subject of media and political discussion. Clarity over responsibilities – moral and legal – is not always obvious. What does it mean to promote the ‘best interests of the child’?

Plato proposed to remove the role of the family to achieve a just state. Aristotle compared the sovereignty of a man over his chattels to that of a father over his child. Locke thought that fathers had only limited rights over their children, and these diminished as the child grew to be more capable. Kant believed that those who have brought a child into the world thereby ‘incur an obligation to make the child content with his condition so far as they can’. Some contemporary philosophers have characterised children as, if not exactly things to be owned, then certainly mere extensions of their parents.

 We will consider some of the issues and some ideas from philosophy and ethics which could help us to understand them better.

‘It is often taken to be a defining feature of the notion of justice, that it requires respect for individual rights that are more or less inviolable. Political philosophers who take this view tend to regard utilitarianism as incompatible with justice, since justice would require society to put individual rights before the goal of maximising the aggregate welfare of society, and utilitarianism simply says that society’s goal should be to maximise the aggregate welfare of society, so can find no space for rights that would interfere with that goal. This posed a particular problem for John Stuart Mill who was a utilitarian who nevertheless accepted that justice was concerned primarily with the respecting of rights, and was acutely aware that our natural sentiments pointed to a clash between what is ‘just’ and what is ‘expedient’. His attempted solution was to justify rights in terms of moral rules that it was especially important to enforce for the long term utility of society. My talk will attempt to explain and evaluate his approach.’ 

Postmodernism is a difficult term to define uncontroversially, so I intend to discuss what
Modernism was, why it ended and therefore imply what Post Modernism might involve.  I will stick firmly to the arts rather than political ideas. Starting from Kant there are hints of Hegel, even Heidegger, and ideas stolen from people writing about twentieth century painting and music.

 
Wittgenstein’s philosophy is usually tied to the British tradition of philosophy which began in Cambridge with Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, but there is another story to tell which focuses on Wittgenstein’s part in the extraordinary cultural revolution that was taking place in Vienna where he grew up at the turn of the century, a revolution which had a major impact on the modern movement in literature and the arts as well as in philosophy.

 
I shall challenge the notion that when the biological functions standardly identified
with physical well-being cease then death of the person follows. There are three
strands to this argument. Firstly, our ideas about the cessation of another
person cannot be translated into a conception of our own death. Secondly, our
lived experience is not wholly causally explained by appeal to bodily integrity,
or a manifestation of it, but does enjoy conceptual autonomy. Third, the idea of
non-existence is not as scientific as its proponents would like to believe.

Philosophy has been at its most insightful when considering the human mind. This talk considers one faculty which has received less attention — the nature of memory. Beginning from a historical perspective, we ask what place memory has in our philosophical picture of ourselves.

The talk will focus on Kant’s account of transcendental self-consciousness and its (half realised) appeal to time and historicity. I shall challenge the ‘commonsense’ analysis of Kant’s account offered by Strawson in particular, in The Bounds of Sense. At the same time, Strawson gives a really superb introduction to these issues. I shall mainly concentrate on ‘The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories’, as Strawson does. Therefore I invite anyone interested to read the following:

1. Strawson The Bounds of Sense Part 2, II, Chapters 6 ‘Synthesis, self-consciousness, and Nature as made by the mind’, and Chapter 7, ‘Unity and Objectivity’. The very dedicated can also read Part III on the Analogies of Experience! 

2. Kant’s Critique (trans. Kemp Smith)

Transcendental Analytic – Book One Analytic of Concepts

Chapter 2, The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding, including the Transcendental Deduction in both the 1781 and the 1787 editions (A and B).

Again, for the bold: From the Analytic of Principles The Three ‘Analogies of Experience’

Looking forward to wrestling with Kant in your company.

The use of the word “science” has become ubiquitous in the media and in everyday conversation. But the use itself often seems to be somewhat broad and somewhat vague. 

Several speakers will offer their views on what science is and what it is not.

The talk covers a short history of human thought on the Earth’s place in the Cosmos, then it will focus on the 30 years of astronomical discoveries.

David was the Planetarium director of St Cloud State University in St Cloud, Minnesota, for five years. During this time he created planetarium programmes for the public, illustrating and educating on various topics in astronomy. In addition to his post as director he taught numerous courses in astronomy, his favourite being ‘Stars and Galaxies’, of which cosmology is a part. He has taught astronomy at various levels for over 40 years. He retired 4 years ago since when he has been teaching part-time.