The Ockham Society
The Ockham Society provides a forum in which graduate students in philosophy (particularly BPhil, MSt, and PRS students) may present their ideas to their peers at the University of Oxford. Our aim is to provide every Oxford graduate student with the opportunity to present their ideas in a friendly environment at least once during their time in Oxford. It is an ideal opportunity to gain feedback on your essays, and to gain first experiences in academic presenting. Small, experimental and unfinished papers are just as welcome as more advanced ones.
Ockham Society Convenors: Lucas Janz; Isabel Weir; Rían Coady | Ockham Society Website
Michaelmas Term 2025 - Term Card
Past Terms
| Week 1 (1st May) | Charlotte Dorneich (Queen's) | Rationality in Perception |
| Week 2 (8th May) | Benedict Blunt (Hertford) | Empirical Idealism and The Ethical Point of Wittgenstein's Tractatus |
| Week 3 (15th May) | Roshni Thangavelu-Truax (Lincoln College) | Talked Into It |
| Week 4 (22nd May) | Lukas Joosten (Worcester) | Bisexuality without Biconditionality: In Support on Non-Conditional Dispositionalism about Sexual Orientation |
| Week 5 (29th May) | Zachary Lang (Wadham) | Interminability and the Limits of Third-Party Blame |
| Week 6 (5th Jun) | Thomas Dorsey (Balliol College) | A Dilemma for Conjunctive Closure |
| Week 7 (12th Jun) | Lucas Janz (Corpus Christi) | Inescapable Concepts don't License metaphysical Conclusions |
| Week 8 (19th Jun) | Rian Coady (Lincoln) | Is Aesthetic Realism as Plausible as Moral Realism? |
| Week 1 (23rd Jan) | Thomas Dorsey (Balliol College) | Are We Entitled to Our Controversial Opinions? |
| Week 2 (30th Jan) | Adam Feng (Wolfson College) | Augustine on Lying and Deception |
| Week 3 (6th Feb) | Aniket Chakravorty (New College) | Opacity and Examples: A tension in Kant's work? |
| Week 4 (13th Feb) | Neha Gupta (Linacre College) | A Newer Riddle of Induction and its Grounding-based Solution |
| Week 5 (20th Feb) | Lina Alrawashdeh (St. Catherine's College) | Pill-Popping vs. Meditating: Is Bio-Medical Moral Enhancement Cheating? |
| Week 6 (27th Feb) | Ed Lamb (Brasenose College) | Reinvestigating the Stoic personae theory |
| Week 7 (6th Mar) | Joshua Loo (Somerville College) | Self-knowledge in Hume's Treatise and Malebranche's Recherche |
| Week 8 (13th Mar) | Cristobal de Losada (St Cross college) | Transparency Reconsidered |
| Week 2 (24th Oct) | Wesley J.Park (St. Anne's) | What Would Virtous Agents Do? |
| Week 3 (31st Oct) | Yuqi Liang (Corpus Christi, Oxford) | Casually Discounting the Future |
| Week 4 (7th Nov) | Wendi Zhou (St Cross, Oxford) | The Ockham Society |
| Week 5 (14th Nov) | Arthur Kleinman | Is the Sophist's 'Dunamis Proposal' (247de) compatible with a two-tier ontology? |
| Week 6 (21st Nov) | CANCELLED | CANCELLED |
| Week 7 (28th Nov) | Robin Truax | (they/them) No Standards for Standards |
| Week 8 (5th Dec) | Yuqi Liang (Corpus Christi) | Casually Discounting the Future |
| Week 1 (25th Apr) | Ryan Kendall (Regent's Park) | The more the merrier: Solidarity when pitting many people against each other |
| Week 2 (2nd May) | Luke Jennings (Balliol) | Plato on the Possibility of a Rhetorical Art in the Phaedrus |
| Week 3 (9th May) | Leonard Li (St. Hugh's) | Procedural Equality and Self-Regardingness |
| Week 4 (16th May) | Alexander Satola (Somerville) | Agree to Disagree: International Pluralism and the Law of Peoples |
| Week 5 (23rd May) | Ari Deller (St. Peter's) | Inquiry, Loss of Perspective and Resulting Downstream Harms |
| Week 1 (18th Jan) | CANCELLED | CANCELLED |
| Week 2 (25th Jan) | Victor Joss (Oxford) | Internalism, Externalism, and the Explanation of Moral Motivation |
| Week 3 (1st Feb) | Aniket Chakravorty (New College) | Moral Vagueness: A problem for epistemicism? |
| Week 4 (8th Feb) | Rei Takahashi (St Cross College) | Do Groups Have Well-Being? Objections from Hedonism and the Consciousness Requirement |
| Week 5 (15th Feb) | Ari Deller (St Peter's College) | Higher-Order Evidence Harms the Self |
| Week 6 (22nd Feb) | Wesley J. Park (St Anne's College) | Shame in Aristotle's Ethics |
| Week 7 (29th Feb) | Ryan Kendall (Regent's Park College) | The more the merrier: On how more competitors entails more solidarity |
| Week 8 (7th Mar) | Max Heitmann (Worcester College) | Revisiting Retrocausality in Newcomb's Problem |
| Week 2 (19th Oct) | Isaac Hadfield | Caring Inquiry, and the Puzzle of Moral Testimony |
| Week 3 (26th Oct) | Wesley J Park | Modern Moral Happiness |
| Week 4 (2nd Nov) | Liam Patell | Too Fragmented? Greco on Fragmentation and Higher-order Evidence |
| Week 5 (9th Nov) | CANCELLED | CANCELLED |
| Week 6 (16th Nov) | Nathan Johnston | Revisiting Gettier: What Does it Take to Believe That p? |
| Week 7 (23rd Nov) | Bruno Goes | Republicanism and the Right to Private Property |
| Week 8 (30th Nov) | Zhanming Gu | Essence and Metanormativity |
| Week 3 (11th May) | William Nolan | A Powers Solution to Mental Causation |
| Week 4 (18th May) | Henry Phillips | Inarticulate Virtue |
| Week 5 (25th May) | Bruno Goes | On the Justice of Voluntary Ownership Exchange |
| Week 6 (1st Jun) | Anna Connell | Knowing Others and Other Minds |
| Week 7 (8th Jun) | Sam D'Ambrosio | Materialist Dual-aspects and X-Ray Diffraction |
| Week 8 (15th Jun) | Lara Schiebli | The Epistemology of #believewomen |
| Week 2 (26th Jan) | Max McLoughlin | Is 'Moral Schizophrenia' a Genuine Problem? |
| Week 3 (2nd Feb) | Olle Lovgren | Physicalism and Necessity |
| Week 4 (9th Feb) | Ruyi He (Corpus Christi) | Sellars's Myth of the Given and Our Rational Openness to the world |
| Week 6 (23rd Feb) | Alexander Satola | Democracy and normal justification |
| Week 8 (9th Mar) | Julius Geißler (Oxford) | Towards an Aesthetic Justification of Existence - Ritual and Overcoming Nihilism in Nietzsche and Xunzi |
| Week 5 (10th Nov) | Hermann Koerner | Unless one calls the good "belonging" - Oikeion and Agathon in Plato's Symposium |
| Week 6 (17th Nov) | Isaac Hadfield (Trinity) | Hedonism and Personal Identity |
| Week 7 (24th Nov) | Luca Marsico (St. Peter's) | Heidegger and the Philosophy of Technology |
| Week 8 (1st Dec) | Nik Land (St. Hugh's) | Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant |
| Week 1 (20th Jan) | Hallam Willis (Wolfson) | The Tragic Vision: Iris Murdoch on Morality and Tragedy |
| Week 2 (27th Jan) | TBD | TBD |
| Week 3 (3rd Feb) | Amit Karmon (Reuben) | Freedom and Ignorance |
| Week 4 (10th Feb) | Arthur Xinpeng Wu (Hertford) | An Easier Metaphysics? |
| Week 5 (17th Feb) | Quincy Crawford (New College) | Carroll's Regress and Strict Monism |
| Week 6 (24th Feb) | TBA | TBA |
| Week 7 (3rd Mar) | Colton Karpman (St Anne's) | The Dangerous Dilemma: Hume's Skepticism and Naturalism in the Treatise |
| Week 8 (10th Mar) | Jens Pier (St Hugh's) | Metaphysics and the Articulation of Thought |
| Week 2 (22nd Oct) | Eric Sheng | Dynamic Justice |
| Week 3 (29th Oct) | Kimon Sourlas-Kotzamanis | Mickey Mouse Could Have Been Real |
| Week 4 (5th Nov) | Fionn Kennedy | Consciousness and Blindsight in Non Human Animals |
| Week 8 (3rd Dec) | Hallam Willis | Building the City of Freedom: Plato's Critique of the Democratic Conception of Freedom - CANCELLED |
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Kiran Lloyd |
Sometimes you should take the lower expected value, riskier bet |
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Week 2 (5th May) |
Amy Thompson |
Dignity in the Market and Dignity in Society |
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Week 3 (12th May) |
Martin Schlombs |
Is Speaker-Meaning without Common Ground Uptake Possible? |
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Week 4 (19th May) |
Ockham x Womxn’s Week |
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Week 5 (26th May) |
Matt Hitchens and Niklas Welsch |
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Week 6 (2nd June) |
Jingyi Yang |
Plato on memory and anticipatory pleasure: reinterpreting the “mind-book simile” in the Philebus |
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Week 7 (2nd June) |
Marta Bielinska |
Leibniz and Kant on the nature of space. Forgotten context of “Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume” |
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Week 8 (16th June) |
Kida Lin |
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| Week 1 (20th January) |
Becky Clark |
Would a Universal Basic Income (UBI) promote gender justice? |
| Week 2 (27th January) |
Fionn Kennedy |
Are there Good Dogs? Conceptual barriers to the possibility of Moral Agency in non-human animals |
| Week 3 (3rd February) |
Leo Schneider |
Reasons as Evidence and the Asymmetry Charge |
| Week 4 (10th February) |
Hal Willis |
Give Me Virtue, or Give Me Death: Problems and Prospects for Contemporary Virtue Ethics |
| Week 5 (17th February) |
OCKHAM WOMXN'S WEEK |
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| Week 6 (24th February) |
Michael O'Connor |
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| Week 7 (3rd March) |
Jules Desai |
Wittgenstein and the possibility of worldmaking |
| Week 8 (10th March) |
Kabir Bakshi |
On Halpern and Hitchcock's Account of Actual Causation |
| Week 1 (14th October) |
Steven Diggin (Merton College) |
'Towards a post-post-Gettier Epistemology' |
| Week 2 (20th October) |
Sophie Nagler (New College) |
'Proof-theoretic pluralism: co-determination on two levels' |
| Week 3 (28th October) |
Val Borba (Regent’s Park College) |
'A feminist reading of Parmenides' |
| Week 4 (4th November) |
Hallam Willis (Wolfson College) |
'The Ethical Normativity of Perception' |
| Week 6 (18th November) |
Kimon Sourlas-Kotzamanis (Wolfson College) |
'Epistemic Injustice and its Place in Epistemology and Ethics' |
| Week 7 (25th November) |
Katie Prosser |
'The Harm of the Pornography of Meat' |
| Week 8 (2nd December) |
Sebastian Sanchez-Schilling |
'Must an ethics founded on human good be political?' |
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Sasha Arridge (Mansfield College) |
Moral Responsibility as a Necessary Presupposition of Action: A Solution to the Problem of Constitutive Moral Luck |
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Sam Williams (New College) |
Supervaluationism and Higher-Order Vagueness; or, Supersupervalutionism |
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Abigail Whalen (Magdalen College) |
Does Justification of Political Authority Entail Political Legitimacy?: Contra Simmons’ Philosophical Anarchism |
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| Week 4 (14th February) |
Richard Roth (New College) |
Preservation + Anti-Moore = KK |
| Week 5 (21st February) |
Maurice Grüter (Lincoln College) |
How to ground Stoic ethics without appealing to providence – and why we perhaps shouldn’t |
| Week 6 (28th February) |
Alexander Read (St Hilda’s) |
Debunking De Se Content |
| Week 7 (6th March) |
Amy Thompson (St Anne’s) Alessio Vaccari (St Peter’s College) |
'Recht oder Unrecht – Mein Vaterland': Is patriotism a virtue? David Hume on Resentment |
| Week 8 (13th March) |
Patricia Elena Cipollitti (Wolfson College) |
Towards an account of vulnerability in social relations |
| Week 1 (18th October) | Kacper Kowalczyk (St Anne’s College) | Transfinite transitivity / Irina Starikova (National University HSE, Moscow): Beyond diagrams: mathematical thought experiments |
| Week 2 (25th October) | Abigail Whalen (Magdalen College) | Locke’s Characterization of Consciousness in His Essay |
| Week 4 (8th November) | Denis Kazankov (St Cross College) | Context and Quantifier Domain Restriction |
| Week 5 (15th November) | John Fan (St Cross College) | Eudaimonism Without Egoism: The Transformation of Practical Reason in Plato’s Republic |
| Week 6 (22nd November) | Aglaia von Götz (Merton College) | How to count with partial oranges |
| Week 8 (6th December) | Richard Roth (New College) | Hierarchies of senses in Frege’s semantics for attitude ascriptions |
| Week 1 (18th January) | Simon-Pierre Chevarie-Cossette (University College) | 'Excuses and Alternatives' |
| Week 2 (25th January) | Kacper Kowalczyk (St. Anne’s College) | 'A limited defence of limited aggregation' |
| Week 3 (1st February) |
Paul de Font-Reaulx (Trinity College) |
'Evidentialism and Why There Ain't No Such Thing as A Computationally Free Lunch' |
| Week 4 (8th February) | Kiril Maltsev (St. Catherine’s College) | 'Vacuum fluctuations in Quantum Field Theory, and Nothingness' |
| Week 5 (15th February) | Christopher Benzenberg (St. Cross College) | 'The Moral Fiction: Solving a Metaethical Dilemma' |
| Week 6 (22nd February) | Aglaia von Götz (Merton College) | 'A desideratum for a theory of definite descriptions' |
| Week 7 (1st March) | Sara Chan (Blackfriars Hall) | 'The Minority Mind: A Theory of Mental Disability and Disorder' |
| Week 8 (8th March) |
Beatriz Santos (Lincoln College) Richard Roth (New College) |
'Armchair Modality' 'Abominable Junk' |
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No seminar |
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| Week 2 |
No seminar |
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| Week 3 (26th October) |
Kuizhi (Lewis) Wang (Hertford) James Matharu (New) |
'The Value of Authorial Connectedness' '(Un)Natural Violation: The Human Forms and Poe's `Spirit of Perverseness'' |
| Week 4 (2nd November) |
Joseph Borges-Santos (Keble) Christopher Benzenberg (St. Cross) |
'Towards Internalism about Reasons as Such' 'Oops!... I did the right thing: The Moral Worth of Actions' |
| Week 5 (9th November) |
Sasha Lawson-Frost (Keble) James Kirkpatrick (University) |
'Geach on Predicative Adjectives' 'The Acquisition of Generics' |
| Week 6 (16th November) |
Joseph Chapa (Magdalen) Daniel Kodsi (Balliol) Ruby Shao (Exeter) |
'A New Moral Equality of Combatants' 'Causation, Harm and the Non-Identity Problem' 'Not Moral Vagueness, but Mere Ignorance' |
| Week 7 (23rd November) |
Franziska Poprawe (Exeter) Jay Jian (Balliol College) |
'Normativity & Reasoning' 'The Rational Irrelevance of Desire Strength' |
| Week 8 (30th November) |
Sebastian Liu (Merton) Joshua Pearson (Trinity) |
'Fragile Epistemic States and Akrasia' 'Moral Contingent Epistemology' |
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Thomas Mitchell (Worcester College) Sebastian Liu (Merton College) |
"Irrationality of Self-Doubt" "A Fitch-like Paradox for Weak-KK" |
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| Week 2 (4th May) |
William Gildea (Keble College) C. M. Lim (Corpus Christi College) |
"A puzzle about killing" "The communicative constraint on civili disobedience" |
| Week 3 (11th May) |
Rhys Southan (Exeter College) Sarah Chan (Blackfriars Hall) |
"Why we can't appeal to the universe to explain the value of creating new lives" "Teleological potentiality for rational agency as the grounds for moral rights" |
| Week 4 (18th May) |
Weng Kin San (St Hilda's College) Kieran Marray (St Catherine's College) |
"Generalising Fitch's result" "What Can Epistemology Do For Economics? The Radical Implications of Foundationalism in Economic Modelling" |
| Week 5 (25th May) |
Simon Wimmer (Warwick) Oliver Hurcrum (Worcester College) |
"Knowledge-first belief: counterfactuals and variables" "Composition as Identity and Temporal Counterpart Theory" |
| Week 6 (1st June) |
Milena Bartholain (Regent's Park) Raphaël Millière (Magdalen College) |
TBA "Are there degrees of self-consciousness?" |
| Week 7 (8th June) |
Sean Costello (Blackfriars Hall) Sasha Arridge (St Anne's College) |
"The Difficulty of Aristotle’s ‘Connate Breath'" "Deriving Basic Equality from Self-Respect" |
| Week 8 (15th June) |
Alasdair Craig (Lady Margaret Hall) Dabin Kwon (St Edmund's Hall) |
"Experientialism and the problem of cognitive penetration" "In what sense is technology a threat to Dasein? Heidegger’s philosophy of technology" |
