Past Lectures
Trinity Term 2015
| Professor Rae Langton (Cambridge) 'Accommodating Injustice' The Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford is pleased to announce the 2015 John Locke Lectures, to be given by Professor Rae Langton. The lectures will take place at 5pm on Wednesdays in weeks 1 to 6 of Trinity Term, or 29th April to 3rd June inclusive, and will be given at the Grove Auditorium in Magdalen College, Oxford. (Please note: admissions to the Auditorium will be strictly limited to the seating capacity, without exception.) There will be a drinks reception after the first lecture. | ![]() |
Abstract
Lecture 1 (29th April) 'Accommodating Authority' [Handout] [MP3]
Lecture 2 (6th May) 'Accommodating Norms' [Handout] [MP3]
Lecture 3 (13th May) 'Accommodating Knowledge' [Handout] [MP3]
Lecture 4 (20th May) 'Silence as Accommodation Failure' [Handout] [MP3]
Lecture 5 (27th May) 'Accommodating Attitudes' [Handout] [MP3]
Lecture 6 (3rd June) 'How to undo things with words' [Handout] [MP3]

Trinity Term 2014Professor Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago) 'Anger and Forgiveness' The 2014 John Locke Lecture series were held at 5 p.m. on Wednesdays in weeks 2 to 6 of Trinity Term 2014. The lectures were given at the Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College. In addition to the lectures, there were two discussion seminars, in the Seminar Room at the Radcliffe Humanities Building (Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6GG). The first seminar was on 19 May, from 2pm to 5pm, and at this seminar chapters 2 and 3 of the manuscript (see below) were discussed. The second seminar was on 2 June, from 3pm to 6pm. The first half of that seminar was on chapters 4 and 5; the second half, on chapters 6 and 7. |
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Abstracts
Lecture 1 (7th May) 'Furies into Eumenides'
Anger is not just ubiquitous, it is also popular – even among philosophers. Many people think it is impossible to care sufficiently for justice without anger at injustice. Many also believe that it is impossible for individuals to vindicate their own self-respect adequately without anger. These lectures will argue that anger is conceptually confused and normatively pernicious. It is neither normatively appropriate nor productive in either the personal or the political life. The first lecture introduces the core ideas, using as a metaphor the end of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, in which goddesses of retribution are transformed into guardians of social welfare. It also introduces a sub-argument concerning forgiveness: rather than being the normatively benign alternative to anger that many people believe it to be, forgiveness (at least as standardly defined) all too often proves a covert form of anger, extracting humiliation as a condition of forgoing angry attitudes.
Lecture 2 (14th May) 'Anger: Down-ranking, Weakness, Payback'
This lecture (a very short form of the chapter 2 available on the website) analyzes the cognitive content of anger, starting from, but not totally agreeing with, Aristotle’s definition. With the help of an example, I argue that anger is almost always normatively flawed in one of two ways. Either it wrongly supposes that punishing the aggressor could make good a past damage – an idea of cosmic balance with deep roots in the human psyche but nonsensical – or, in the case where the angry person focuses exclusively on offense to relative status, it may possibly make sense (a relative lowering of the offender does effect a relative raising of the victim), but the exclusive focus on status is normatively problematic. Although anger may still be useful as a signal, a motivation, and/or a deterrent, its flaws compromise even this instrumental role. I then discuss a concept that I call the Transition: a constructive segue from backward-looking anger to constructive thought about the future. And I identify one species of anger that I do consider normatively unproblematic, which I call Transition-Anger. I also discuss the connection between anger and a displaced sense of helplessness, and examine a possible role for empathy in extricating oneself from the trap of anger.
Lecture 3 (21st May) 'Anger in the Personal Realm'
It is commonly thought that people who have been wronged by intimates ought to be angry, because they owe it to their self-respect so to react. This lecture (a very short form of chapter 4 on the website) contests that claim, discussing anger between intimate partners and anger between adult children and their parents (but focusing on the latter for reasons of time). I end with a discussion of self-anger. In all cases I pursue my sub-theme of forgiveness, arguing that generosity, and not the extraction of apologies, Is what we need.
Lecture 4 (28th May) 'The Political Realm: Everyday Justice'
Many people think that the institutions of the legal system ought to embody the spirit of (justified) anger, and they defend a picture of criminal punishment along these lines. In keeping with the forward-looking and constructive attitude I have defended previously, I criticized criminal law retributivism and defend a Millean (not exactly Benthamite) form of welfarism, looking at the implications of these ideas for several specific aspects of the criminal justice system (victim impact statements, shame-based penalties, juvenile justice conferencing, mercy at the sentencing phase). I insist, however, that the ex post focus of the criminal justice system is actually a narrow part of the task of a good society in dealing with crime. Forward-looking strategies should focus above all on education, health care, nutrition, and inclusion in the political process. (This lecture is a short form of chapter 6 on the website.)
Lecture 5 (4th June) 'The Political Realm: Revolutionary Justice'
When there is great injustice, it is very tempting to think that righteous anger is the best response, and even a necessary response. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that the three most successful revolutionary freedom movements in the past century have been conducted in a spirit of non-anger (distinct from, though sometimes joined to, non-violence): Gandhi’s independence movement, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s role in the U. S. civil rights movement, and Nelson Mandela’s freedom movement in South Africa. Studying the thought and practice of these three leaders, I argue that non-anger is both normatively and practically superior to anger. (This lecture is a short form of chapter 7 from the website.)
Manuscript
The manuscript supporting these lectures is scheduled to be published in Autumn 2015.
Trinity Term 2013Professor Ned Block, (NYU) 'Attention and Perception' Abstract How philosophical issues about perception are transformed in the light of the science of perception |
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Does conscious perception have representational content? Or are the representations involved in perception all sub-personal underpinnings of perception rather than partly constitutive of perception itself? Is “unconscious perception” really perception? Is seeing always seeing-as? Is seeing-as always conceptual? Do we see things only as having colors, shapes and textures? Or do we see things as being CD players or baseball bats? Is perception a form of judgment? Must conscious perception be cognitively accessible to the subject? Is attention required for object perception or knowledge of the reference of perceptual demonstratives? These lectures argue that these and other related philosophical issues are transformed by taking into account the science of perception.

The 2013 John Locke Lecture series were held at 5 p.m. on Wednesdays in weeks 2 to 7 of Trinity Term 2013. The lectures were given at the T. S. Eliot Lecture Theatre, Merton College (enter by Rose Lane).
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Lecture 1 (1st May) 'Attention, representationism and direct realism' Facts about attention and its relation to the phenomenology of perception are problematic for the major philosophical approaches to perception. Lecture 2 (8th May) 'The grain of seeing vs attending and the de re thought condition on seeing an object' There is a minimal resolution of object-seeing that is finer than a corresponding minimal resolution of object-attention, so object-attention is not required for object-seeing. No reasonable version of a de re thought potential requirement on seeing conflicts with this grain difference. These ideas solve a version of the speckled hen problem. Lecture 3 (15th May) 'Seeing-As: How can we find out whether seeing is representational, and if so, what representations are involved?' Some say that seeing is always seeing-as and that seeing-as involves conceptualization. Some say that not only can we see things as having certain colors, shapes and textures; we can see things as being a table or a car. A framework is proposed for distinguishing high level perceptual representations from recognitionally equivalent color, shape and texture representations, and for distinguishing perceptual representations from cognitive representations. Lecture 4 (22nd May) 'Consciousness and cognition: the power of unconscious perception' One of the most important issues concerning the foundations of conscious perception centers on the question of whether perceptual consciousness is rich or sparse. The “overflow” argument uses a form of “iconic memory” to argue that perceptual consciousness is richer (i.e., has a higher capacity) than cognitive access: when observing a complex scene we are conscious of more than it is possible to report or think about. Recently, the overflow argument has been challenged both empirically and conceptually. This lecture reviews the controversy, focusing on the power of unconscious processes and arguing that what we know about unconscious processing suggests that consciousness does overflow cognition. Lecture 5 (29th May) 'Conscious, preconscious, unconscious' There are reliably reproducible states that have little or no reportability but do not have many of the signature properties of unconscious states. This lecture discusses whether these states might be phenomenally conscious in the light of the close conceptual tie between conscious perception and first person authority. Lecture 6 (5th June) 'Does the physical basis of consciousness include anything outside the head?' Clark and Chalmers famously argued that the cognitive mind extends beyond the brain into the body and the world. If I can fluidly access the phone number from a suitable source outside my body, we should allow that I know it now. Others have argued that this “vehicle externalist” point of view applies to consciousness: the minimal constitutive supervenience base of conscious experience extends outside the brain into the rest of the body and into the world. This lecture argues that there is an established empirical framework for resolving such issues and we have overwhelming grounds to doubt the externalist point of view applied to consciousness. |
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Trinity Term 2012 Professor Stephen Yablo, (MIT) 'Truth and Content' Abstract “Aboutness” is a grand-sounding name for something basically familiar. Books are on topics; portraits are of people; the 1812 Overture concerns the Battle of Borodino. Aboutness is the relation that meaningful items bear to whatever it is that they are on, or of, or that they address or concern. Brentano made aboutness the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists have studied the aboutness-features of particular mental states. Materialists have sought to ground it in teleology or natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and the theory of information, to operationalize aboutness. |
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And yet the notion plays no serious role in philosophical semantics. This is surprising — sentences have aboutness properties, if anything does. One leading theory gives the meaning of a sentence by listing the scenarios in which it is true, or false. Nothing is said about the principle of selection, about how and why the sentence would be true, or false, in those scenarios. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned.
I will be asking, first, how we might go about making subject matter a separate factor in sentence meaning/content, and second, what “directed contents” can do for us in other parts of philosophy.
The 2012 John Locke Lecture series was held at 5 p.m. on Wednesdays in weeks 2 to 6 of Trinity Term 2012. The lectures were given at the T. S. Eliot Lecture Theatre, Merton College.
Trinity Term 2011
John Cooper, (Princeton)
'Ancient Greek Philosophies as a Way of Life'

Abstract
Philosophy is a demanding intellectual discipline, with many facets: logic, epistemology, philosophy of nature and science, metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of art, rhetoric, philosophy of language and mind. But a long tradition of ancient Greek philosophers, beginning with Socrates, made their philosophies also complete ways of life. For them reason, perfected by philosophy—not religion, not cultural traditions and practices—constitutes the only legitimate authority for determining how one ought to live. They also thought philosophically informed reason should be the basis for all our practical attitudes, all our decisions, and in fact the whole of our lives. In these lectures we examine the development of this pagan tradition in philosophy, from its establishment by Socrates, through Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicurus, the Pyrrhonian Skeptics, and Plotinus and late ancient Platonism.
The 2011 John Locke Lecture series was held at 5 p.m. on Wednesdays in weeks 1 to 6 of Trinity Term 2011. The lectures were given at the Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre, St Cross Building, Manor Road. The classes took place at the Faculty of Philosophy, 10 Merton Street.
Lecture 1 (4th May): 'Philosophy in Antiquity as a Way of Life' [Handout] [MP3]
Lecture 2 (11th May): 'Aristotle's Philosophy as Two Ways of Life' [MP3]
Class/Seminar (18th May): 'The Epicurean and Pyrrhonian Ways of Life' (Texts and Discussion).
Lecture 3 (25th May): 'The Stoic Way of Life' [Handout] [MP3]
Lecture 4 (1st June): 'Platonism as a Way of Life' [Handout] [MP3]
Class/Seminar (8th June): 'Plotinus on the Human Person and the Virtues' (Texts and Discussion)
Trinity Term 2010
Professor David Chalmers (ANU)
'Constructing the World'

Abstract
In Der Logische Aufbau Der Welt, Carnap argued that all truths are definitionally entailed by a very limited class of truths. Most philosophers think that the project of the Aufbau is a failure and that nothing like it can succeed. I will investigate the prospects for an Aufbau-like project, centering around what I call the Scrutability Thesis: all truths are a priori entailed by a very limited class of truths. I will also discuss applications to Carnapian projects in epistemology, the philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and metaphilosophy.
The lectures took place on Wednesdays, Weeks 2 to 7, of Trinity Term 2010. They started at 5pm, and took place at the Gulbenkian Theatre, St Cross Building, Manor Road.
Lecture Schedule:
- Lecture 1 (5th May): A Scrutable World [Handout] [MP3] [Slides]
- Lecture 2 (12th May): The Cosmoscope Argument [Handout] [MP3] [Slides]
- Lecture 3 (19th May): The Case for A Priori Scrutability [Handout] [MP3] [Slides]
- Lecture 4 (26th May): Revisability and Conceptual Change: Carnap vs. Quine [Handout] [MP3] (No slides were used)
- Lecture 5 (2nd June): Hard Cases: Mathematics, Normativity, Ontology, Intentionality [Handout] [MP3] [Slides]
- Lecture 6 (9th June): Whither the Aufbau? [Handout] [MP3] [Slides]
The book manuscript can be found at http://consc.net/oxford/
Trinity 2009
Thomas M. Scanlon (Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, Harvard)
'Being Realistic about Reasons'
Abstract: The idea that there are irreducibly normative truths about reasons for action, which we can discover by thinking carefully about reasons in the usual way, has been thought to be subject to three kinds of objections: metaphysical, epistemological, and motivational or, as I would prefer to say, practical. Metaphysical objections claim that a belief in irreducibly normative truths would commit us to facts or entities that would be metaphysically odd—incompatible, it is sometimes said, with a scientific view of the world. Epistemological objections maintain that if there were such truths we would have not way of knowing what they are: we could “get in touch with” them only through some strange kind of intuition. Practical objections maintain that if conclusions about what we have reason to do were simply beliefs in a kind of fact, they could not have the practical significance that reasons are commonly supposed to have. This is often put by saying that beliefs alone cannot motivate an agent to act, but it is better put as the claim that beliefs cannot explain action, or make acting rational or irrational in the way that accepting conclusions about reasons is normally thought to do.
I will argue that all of these objections are mistaken. The idea that there are truths about are reasons for action does face serious problems. But these are normative problems—problems internal to the normative domain, whose solutions, if there are such, must themselves be normative.
The lectures took place on Wednesdays, Weeks 1 to 5, of Trinity Term 2009. They started at 5pm, and took place at the Gulbenkian Theatre, St Cross Building, Manor Road.
Lecture Schedule:
- Lecture 1: Introduction (MP3) / (Text - PDF file)
- Lecture 2: Normativity and Metaphysics (MP3) / (Text - PDF file)
- Lecture 3: Motivation and the Appeal of Expressivism (MP3) / (Text - PDF file)
- Lecture 4: Epistemological Problems (MP3) / (Text - PDF file)
- Lecture 5: Normative Structure (MP3) / (Text - PDF file)
Trinity 2008
Professor Hartry Field (NYU), ‘Logic, Normativity, and Rational Revisability’ - Wednesdays at 5pm, Weeks One to Six (23rd April to 28th May 2008) was held in the Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre, St Cross Building, Manor Road, Oxford
(n.b., the Lecture in Fifth Week (21 May) took place in Lecture Theatre II of the St Cross Building, not the Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre)
| Handouts | Podcasts |
| Wednesday 23rd April 2008 - Lecture 1 (PDF) | |
| Wednesday 30th April 2008 - Lecture 2 (PDF) | |
| Wednesday 7th May 2008 - Lecture 3 (PDF) | |
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Wednesday 14th May 2008 - Lecture 4 (PDF) |
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| Wednesday 21st May 2008 - Lecture 5 (PDF) | |
| Wednesday 28th May 2008 - Lecture 6 (PDF) |
Trinity 2007
| 2006-2007 | Professor Robert Stalnaker | ||
| (TT2007) | MIT | ||
| Our knowledge of the internal world | |||
| Lecture One (Wednesday 2nd May): Starting in the middle | abstract (PDF) | handout (PDF) | lecture (MP3) |
| Lecture Two (Wednesday 9th May): Epistemic possibilities and the knowledge argument | abstract (PDF) | handout (PDF) | lecture (MP3) |
| Lecture Three (Wednesday 16th May): Locating ourselves in the world | abstract (PDF) | handout (PDF) | lecture (MP3) |
| Lecture Four (Wednesday 23rd May): Phenomenal and epistemic indistinguishability | abstract (PDF) | handout (PDF) | lecture (MP3) |
| Lecture Five (Wednesday 30th May): Acquaintance and essence | abstract (PDF) | handout (PDF) | lecture (MP3) |
| Lecture Six (Wednesday 6th June): Knowing what we are thinking | abstract (PDF) | handout (PDF) | lecture (MP3) |
| Trinity 2006 | Professor Robert Brandom | Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism |
| Pittsburgh University | ||
| Lecture 1 - Week 2 (3 May): “Extending the Project of Analysis” | Handout (PDF) | Text (PDF) |
| Lecture 2 - Week 3 (10 May): “Elaborating Abilities: The Expressive Role of Logic” | Handout (PDF) | Text (PDF) |
| Lecture 3 - Week 4 (17 May): “Artificial Intelligence and Analytic Pragmatism” | Handout (PDF) | Text (PDF) |
| Lecture 4 - Week 5 (24 May):“Modality and Normativity: From Hume and Quine to Kant and Sellars” | Handout (PDF) | Text (PDF) |
| Lecture 5 - Week 6 (31 May): “Incompatibility, Modal Semantics, and Intrinsic Logic” | Handout (PDF) | Text (PDF) |
| Lecture 6 - Week 7 (7 June): “Intentionality as a Pragmatically Mediated Semantic Relation” | Handout (PDF) | Text (PDF) |
| 2004-05 (TT2005) |
Professor Ernest Sosa Brown University and Rutgers University |
Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge Lecture 1 Dreams and the Cogito |
| 2003-04 (TT 2004) |
Professor J. Barnes Paris-Sorbonne University |
Truth, etc. Some Topics in Ancient Logic
Lecture 1 Truth |
| 2002-03 (TT 2003) |
Professor K. Fine New York University |
Reference, Relation and Meaning Lecture 1 Variables |
| 2001-02 (TT 2002) |
Christine Korsgaard Harvard |
Self-constitution: Action,Identity and Integrity A copy of the lectures is held in the Philosophy Library. Lecture Handouts:
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| 2000-01 (TT 01) | Bas van Fraassen Princeton |
Structure and Perspective: An Empiricist View |
| 1997-98 (TT 98) | Lawrence Sklar University of Michigan |
Philosophy within Science |
| 1996-97 (TT 97) | Robert Nozick Harvard |
Invariance and Objectivity |
| 1996-97 (MT 96) | Jerry Fodor Rutgers University |
Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong |
| 1994-95 (TT 95) | Frank Jackson Australian National University |
Supervenience, Metaphysics, and Analysis |
| 1992-93 (TT 93) | Tyler Burge UCLA |
Sources and Resources of Reason |
| 1991-92 (TT 92) | Jonathan Bennett Syracuse University, NY |
Judging Behaviour: Analysis in Moral Theory |
| 1990-91 (TT 91) | John McDowell University of Pittsburgh |
Mind and World |
| 1989-90 (HT 90) | Thomas Nagel New York University |
Equality and Plurality |
| 1988-89 | Professor Ernst Tugendhat University of Berlin |
Withdrew due to illness |
| 1986-87 | Barry G. Stroud University of California, Berkeley |
The Quest for Reality |
| 1983-84 | David Lewis Princeton University |
On the Plurality of Worlds |
| 1982-83 | Daniel C. Dennett Tufts University, MA |
The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting |
| 1979-80 | David B. Kaplan UCLA |
This and D That: A History of Demonstratives (postponed) |
| 1978-79 | Professor H.P. Grice University of California, Berkeley |
Aspects of Reason |
| 1975-76 | Hilary W. Putnam Harvard University |
Meaning and Knowledge |
| 1974-75 | Professor R.B. Brandt University of Michigan |
Psychology and the Criticism of Desires and Morality |
| 1973-74 | Saul Kripke Rockefeller University, NY |
Reference and Existence (Lectures available in the Philosophy Library) |
| 1971-72 | Sydney S. Shoemaker Cornell University |
Mind, Body and Behaviour |
| 1969-70 | Donald Davidson Princeton University |
The Structure of Truth |
| 1968-69 | Noam Chomsky M.I.T. |
Language and the Study of Mind |
| 1967-68 | Paul Lorenzen University of Erlangen |
Non-Empirical Truths |
| 1965-66 | Wilfred S. Sellars University of Pittsburgh |
Science & Metaphysics: Some Variations on Kantian Themes |
| 1963-64 | Jaakko Hintikka University of Helsinki |
Some Main Problems in the Philosophy of Logic |
| 1961-62 | Nelson Goodman University of Pennsylvania |
Languages of Art |
| 1959-60 | Gregory Vlastos Princeton University |
Mysticism & Logic in Heraclitus, Parmenides and Plato |
| 1957-58 | A.C. Jackson University of Melbourne |
Material Things |
| 1955-56 | A.N. Prior Canterbury University College, NZ |
Time and Modality |
| 1954-55 | Hao Wang Harvard University |
On Formalizing Mathematical Concepts |
| 1950-51 | Oets Kolk Bouwsma University of Nebraska |
The Flux |





