AUB Philosophy Research Seminar brings together students, faculty members, and scholars interested in sharing and discussing work in progress. The seminar meets every two to three weeks on Tuesday evenings and is open to all members of the community.
Click here to download the Full Program
Fall 2024-2025
This event is postponed until further notice
Tuesday, October 1, 2024 at 6:30pm
Issam Fares Institute, Conference Room - 4th Floor
HOW WE BLAME:A THEORY OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY
Bana Bashour PhD - AUB
Moral responsibility judgments are central to our moral and social lives. In the philosophical literature on the subject, they have been discussed in relation to the metaphysical problem of free will, one of the trickiest issues in philosophy. While I remain neutral on metaphysical issues, I argue that if we restrict ourselves to the domain of the intentional stance, we will be able to make headway in our discussions on moral responsibility. On my view, agents are embodied sentient intentional systems capable of reciprocation, verbal communication and reflective evaluation. I argue that justified attributions of moral responsibility involve justified attributions of intentional states as well as justified perceptions of norm violation. In addition, justified attributions of moral responsibility only make sense when indexed to a particular judge, making judgements of moral responsibility 3-place predicates, a significantly distinctive feature of my account. I conclude by showing how recent empirical literature in moral psychology justifies my view.
Bana Bashour is Tenured Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of General Education at the American University of Beirut. She has published extensively in moral psychology and social epistemology, and collaborated in interdisciplinary works with economists, psychologists and sociologists. She co-edited with Hans Muller an anthology entitled Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implication (2013, Routledge). She is currently finishing a book manuscript (under contract with Routledge) entitled "How We Blame: A Theory of Moral Responsibility" in which she marries traditional philosophical texts with contemporary empirical work.
Tuesday, September 17, 2024 at 6:30pm
Issam Fares Institute, Conference Room - 4th Floor
Naming, Saying and Doing:
Brandom's Critique of Sellars' Metalinguistic Nominalism
Ray Brassier PhD - AUB
Sellars’s metalinguistic nominalism maintains that what we are doing in saying something about abstract entities (properties, relations, kinds, or propositions) is saying something about the function of linguistic expressions (predicates, singular terms, or sentences.) This function is not genuinely nominative, unlike the genuinely nominative role played by regular proper and common nouns. Brandom objects that Sellars relies here on a dubious metaphysical distinction between proper and improper nomination at the metalinguistic level. By Brandom's lights, what we are ultimately doing in saying is espousing or ascribing discursive commitments and entitlements to one another. Lacking the concept of pragmatic metavocabulary to catalogue the varieties of discursive activity, Sellars, according to Brandom, ends up conflating the doing involved in saying with the doing involved in naming. This talk will critically reconstruct Brandom's objections and mount a qualified defense of Sellars's account.
Ray Brassier is Professor of Philosophy at AUB. He is the author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan 2007). Over the past decade he has written several articles about the work of Wilfrid Sellars. He is currently completing a second book entitled Fatelessness: Freedom and Fatality between Marx and Adorno (MIT 2025). He is also preparing a collection of essays about Sellars, Brandom, and related thinkers.
Download Full Poster