The annual KTS Center lecture is delivered each year by a distinguished academic who has made significant contributions to philosophical debates of concern to the KTS Center.
2024-2025
Learning vis-à-vis Habituation: A New Approach to the So-Called 'Continuity' Problem in Nicomachean Ethics II."
Antonio Ferro (Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg)
Abstract: Although habituation (ethos, ethismos) plays an important role in the acquisition of virtue, in the second book of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle only spends very few words on the process through which individual actions become stable dispositions, i.e. reliably good actions give rise to the corresponding virtues, and bad ones to the corresponding vices, respectively. As is well known, Aristotle’s answer to the question of how one can become morally good (and why such an acquisition process so often fails) is eminently plausible, but also deceptively simple: One becomes virtuous (e.g. generous) by being habituated from an early age to perform actions of the suitable kind in the given circumstances, that is the actions that the virtuous (e.g. generous) person would perform in the appropriate circumstances.
The aim of my contribution is twofold: Firstly, based on several central passages from Aristotle’s corpus (esp. Posterior Analytics I 1-2; Nicomachean Ethics II 1-5, VI 1-13; X 10; Physics VII 3), I would like to work out a number of essential differences between intellectual learning (dianoetikê mathêsis) and habituation (ethos) with regard to their respective metaphysical status, their role in Aristotle’s theory of the soul and the specific way they affect the agent. Secondly, I would like to explain in more detail the extent to which the success in learning is conditional upon success in habituation, such that the above-mentioned "continuity" problem cannot arise in the first place. My discussion should make it clear why, despite fundamental conceptual differences, humans must carry out both processes in tandem if they are to be successful.
2023-2024
Phenomenal Mismatch and Perceptual Justification
Martina Furst (University of Graz)
Abstract: On a popular view of perceptual justification, perceptual experiences provide prima facie justification for beliefs based upon them. This view, labelled phenomenal conservatism, is challenged by cases in which the experience has a bad basis. To explain the bad basis cases, some philosophers (e.g., Siegel 2017, McGrath 2013) develop anetiologically restricted conservatism. However, these accounts depart from the key tenets of phenomenal conservatism that etiology does not matter for an experience´s justificatory power. This motivates the search for a novel theory that explains the bad cases while staying true to the spirit of phenomenal conservatism. In this talk, I propose a novel version of a restricted conservatism that meets the desideratum of explaining the bad cases by focusing on intrinsic features of the experience, rather than on their etiology. I proceed as follows: Firstly, I provide an example of the bad case, namely a perceptual experience that has been shaped by racist prejudice. Secondly, I analyze the overall phenomenology of the target experiences in detail and I show that in the bad cases, the target experiences exhibit a mismatching overall phenomenology. Thirdly, I argue that phenomenal mismatch provides internal phenomenal defeat which explains why the target experience is epistemically deficient. I conclude that the resulting view, aphenomenally restricted conservatism, has the advantage of explaining the bad basis cases while staying true to the spirit of phenomenal conservatism.
2022-2023
Knowledge and Disinformation
Mona Simon
Abstract:
This paper develops a full account of the nature of disinformation as ignorance-generating content. The view, if correct, carries high stakes upshots, both theoretically and practically. First, it challenges several widely spread theoretical assumptions about disinformation – such as that it is a species of information, a species of misinformation, essentially false or misleading, essentially intended/aimed/having the function of generating false beliefs in/misleading hearers. Secondly, it shows that the challenges faced by disinformation tracking in practice go well beyond mere fact checking.
Mona Simion is professor of philosophy and Director of the COGITO Epistemology Research Center at the University Glasgow. She is the author of two monographs: Shifty Speech and Independent Thought (Oxford University Press, 2021), and Sharing Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
2020-21
Forgive me!” Why You Can’t Always Get What You Deserve
Miranda Fricker
ABSTRACT: There are many different kinds of reasons to forgive—that the wrongdoer has apologized, that not forgiving is destroying a valued friendship, that you don’t even want to be this angry person any more …-- and yet no matter how many such reasons may accumulate in a given case, and no matter how much the wrongdoer may deserve to be forgiven, still these reasons can never generate a rights-claim on their part that you forgive them. Why not? I compare the case of gratitude, and ultimately offer an explanation in terms of the pragmatic self-refutation involved in the very idea of being forgiven under requirement.
Miranda Fricker is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her publications include The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives (coeditor, 2016); Applied Epistemology, special issue of the Journal of Applied Philosophy (coeditor, 2016), Reading Ethics, (coauthor and editor, 2009), Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007), and the Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, (coeditor, 2000). She was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2014-16); and is currently finishing work on a book in moral philosophy, Blaming and Forgiving: The Work of Morality (forthcoming OUP).