The Jowett Society
The Jowett Society provides a forum for the discussion of philosophical issues. The Society dates back to the nineteenth century and was named in honour of Benjamin Jowett. Previous speakers include Russell, Wittgenstein, and Davidson. Admission is free and open to all.
Jowett Society Organising Committee: Joshua Loo, Zachary Lang, Xavier Morales Zayas and Sepehr Razavi | Jowett Society Website
Michaelmas Term 2025 - Term Card
Past Terms
| Week 6 (6th Jun) | Heather Demarest (University of Colorado, Boulder) | Resisting the Increase of Entropy |
| Week 7 (13th Jun) | Jake Nebel (Princeton) | Welfare Reflections: On Duality conditions in the Theory of Value |
| Week 8 (20th Jun) | Zoe A. Johnson King (Harvard) | Aretaic Injustice |
| Week 4 (14th Feb) | Alexandra Zinke (University of Frankfurt) | Induction and Independence. A New Solution to Goodman's Old Riddle |
| Week 7 (7th March) | Francesca Zaffora Blando (Carnegie Mellon University) | Between Symmetries and Best Systems |
| Week 8 (14th Mar) | Victor Verdejo (Universitat Pompeu Fabre) | In Defence of Naivety |
| Week 1 (18th Oct) | David Wallace (University of Pittsburgh) | Learning to Represent: Mathematics-first accounts of representation and their relation to natural language |
| Week 2 (25th Oct) | Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (Moth Quantum) | Quantum Music and The Logic of Sound and Silence |
| Week 3 (8th Nov) | Caspar Hare (MIT) | Dimensions of Value and Open Choice |
| Week 4 (17th May) | Dr Filippo Ferrari & Sebastiano Moruzzi | Logical Constitutivism and the Revisability of Logic |
| Week 6 (31st May) | David Papineau (KCL) | Against Norms of Knowledge |
| Week 7 (3rd Jun) | Paul Boghossian (NYU) & Tim Williamson (Oxford) | Internalism vs. Externalism in Epistemology - a Debate |
| Week 8 (14th Jun) | Max Baker-Hytch (Oxford) | Evil without hiddenness? |
| Week 3 (2nd Feb) | Professor Thomas Kroedel (University of Hamburg) | Epistemic Obligations |
| Week 7 (1st March) | Carlo Rovelli (Rotman Institute of Philosophy) | Neither Presentism nor Eternalism |
| Week 8 (8th March) | Matti Eklund | Alien Languages and Alien Metaphysics |
| Week 1 (13th Oct) | Eleanor Knox | Functionalism Fir for Physics |
| Week 8 (1st Dec) | Tom Sterkenburg | Epistemology and theory of machine learning |
| Week 1 (28th Apr) | Orly Shenker | The Emperor's New Clothes: Funtionalism is Dualism |
| Week 2 (5th May) | Markus Schrenk | Special Science Laws and the Problematic Properties of Better Best Systems |
| Week 3 (12th May) | Isaac Wilhelm (The National University of Singapore) | Centering Perfect Naturalness |
| Week 4 (19th May) | Ernest Sosa (Rutgers) | Dawning Light Epistemology and Its Implications for Methodology and Internalism |
| Week 5 (26th May) | Marc Lange | Inference to the Best Explanation and the Confirmation of Mathematical Conjectures by Mathematical Evidence |
| Week 6 (2nd Jun) | Patricia Blanchette | Conceptual Analysis in Logic and Mathematics |
| Week 7 (9th Jun) | L A Paul | Value by Acquaintance |
| Week 1 (20th Jan) | Daniel Bonevac (University of Texas) | 'Aquinas' Third Way |
| Week 2 (27th Jan) | Aaron Cotnoir (University of St.Andrews) | Unity and Carving: the Case of Networks |
| Week 3 (3rd Feb) | Tushar Menon | Inferential Scientific Realism |
| Week 4 (10th Feb) | Ben Page | Thinking about Divine Timelessness, presentism, and some objections |
| Week 5 (17th Feb) | Benjamin Schnieder | Because |
| Week 6 (24th Feb) | Jan Hertrich-Wolenski | How to Define Logic |
| Week 7 (3rd Mar) | Jessica Leech | Ruth Barcan Marcus and Minimal Essentialism |
| Week 8 (10th Mar) | Inkeri Koskinen | Unifying the notion of objectivity |
| Week 4 (4th Nov) | Michael Strevens | Grasp and Scientific Understanding |
| Week 5 (11th Nov) | Donald Hoffman (UCI) | Conscious Agents, Decorated Permutations, and the Construction of Spacetime |
| Week 6 (18th Nov) | Ard Louis | Why the world is simple |
| Week 1 (29th Apr) | Wolfgang Spohn (Konstanz/Tubingen) | Reflexive Rationality. Rethinking Decision and Game Theory |
| Week 2 (6th May) | Ray Monk (University of Southampton) | The Philosophy of Mathematics: A Wittgensteinian Approach |
| Week 3 (13th May) | Mona Simion (Glasgow) | What Is Normative Defeat? |
| Week 4 (20th May) | Crispin Wright (NYU Stirling) | Closure and Transmission Redux |
| Week 5 (27th May) | Crispin Wright (NYU Stirling) | Closure and Transmission Redux |
| Week 6 (3rd June) | Patricia Palacios (Salzburg) | Emergence, Reduction and Critical Phase Transitions |
| Week 7 (10th Jun) | Philip Goff (Durham) | Meaning Zombies, Free Will and Panpsychism |
| Week 2 (28th Jan) | Rachel Fraser | How to transmit understanding |
| Week 3 (4th Feb) | Jennifer Nado | Conceptual Engineering: A Practical Role Approach |
| Week 4 (11th Feb) | Radcliffe Humanities | TBA |
| Week 5 (18th Feb) | CANCELLED | CANCELLED |
| Week 6 (25th Feb) | Darrell Rowbottom | Can 'Meaningless' STatements be Approximately True? On Relaxing the Semantic Component of Scientific Realism |
| Week 7 (4th Mar) | Tim Maudlin (NYU) | Law, Fact, or Mathematical Consequence? Metaphysical Options in Mathematical Physics |
| Week 8 (11th Mar) | Hannes Leitgeb | On Merely Expressive Devices. Logical Empiricism Revived |
| Week 2 (22nd Oct) | Samir Okasha | Scepticism, evidential holism, and the logic of demonic deception |
| Week 5 (12th Nov) | Erica Schumener | Physicalism as a Nomic Thesis |
| Week 6 (19th Nov) | Sarah Moss | A Contextualist Reframing of Encroachment |
| Week 7 (26th Nov) | Rachel Sterken | On Retweeting |
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Ethan Nowak (Umeå) |
Speech and the Significance of Style |
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Thomas Blanchard (Cologne) |
Interventionism and the Causal Efficacy of Composites |
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Catarina Dutilh Novaes (VU Amsterdam/St Andrews/Munich) |
The Dialogical Roots of Deduction |
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Matthew Mandelkern (NYU) |
Bounds and Probabilities |
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Tim Button (UCL) and Robert Trueman (York) |
Metaphysicians hate this one simple trick for avoiding universals, but they can’t stop you using it! |
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Vera Flocke (Indiana University Bloomington) |
Carnap Is Not Against Metaphysics |
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Paul Egré (Institut Jean Nicod/École Normale Supérieure Paris) |
On the optimality of vagueness - "Around", "Between", and the Gricean Maxims |
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Branden Fitelson (Northeastern) |
Probabilities of Conditionals & Conditional Probabilities |
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Karen Bennett (Rutgers) |
Kinds and Groups |
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Gil Sagi (Haifa): Formalization |
Normative and Descriptive Aspects |
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Elisabeth Camp (Rutgers) |
Just Kidding: Sarcasm, Jokes and Willful Deniability in Speech |
| Week 1 (16th October) | Jonathan Schaffer (Rutgers) |
''No Money, No Women: From Social Constructionism to Social Relationalism'' |
| Week 4 (6th November) | Ginger Schultheis (Chicago) |
''Counterfactual Probability'' |
| Week 5 (13th November) | Katalin Bimbo (Alberta) |
''The development and applications of the Curry–Kripke proof technique'' |
| Week 6 (20th November) | Justin Khoo (MIT) |
''No fact of the middle'' |
| Week 8 (4th December) | Sam Berstler (Princeton) |
''The Geometry of Open Secrets'' |
| Week 1 (24th January) |
Una Stojnic (Princeton) |
Nonnegotiable Meanings |
| Week 2 (31st January) |
Emma Borg (Reading) |
Understanding Agency in Others and Ourselves |
| Week 4 (14th February) |
Ben Holguin (NYU) |
Thinking, Guessing, and Believing |
| Week 6 (28th February) |
Fabrizio Cariani (Northwestern) |
Indirect Evidence and the Easy Foreknowledge Puzzle |
| Week 1 (18th October) | Penelope Mackie (University of Nottingham) | Essentialism, Context-dependence, and Lewisian Counterpart Theory |
| Week 2 (25th October) | Simon Blackburn (Cambridge) | Semantic minimalism and meta-semantic theories |
| Week 4 (8th November) | Peter Fritz (Oslo) | Possible Worlds |
| Week 6 (22nd November) | Kevin Dorst (Oxford) | Rational Polarization |
| Week 8 (6th December) | Katharina Felka (Graz) | Slurs As Asides - A Non-Expressivist Conventional Implicature View |
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Jessie Munton (Cambridge) |
'Seeing the past, remembering the present' |
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| Week 2 (25th January) (Jowett) | Helen Beebee (Manchester) | 'Lewis and van Inwagen on the consequence argument' | |
| Week 3 (1st February) (Philosophical) | Kit Fine (NYU) | 'Chisholm’s Puzzle and Unconditional Obligation' | |
| Week 4 (8th February) (Jowett) | Joel David Hamkins (Univ, Oxford) | 'Potentialism and implicit actualism in the foundations of mathematics' | |
| Week 5 (15th February) (Jowett) | Bernhard Salow (Magdalen, Oxford) | 'Sequential Decisions under the Idea of Freedom' | |
| Week 6 (22th February) (Jowett) | Rachael Wiseman (Liverpool) | 'Linguistic Idealism and Human Essence' | |
| Week 7 (1st March) (Philosophical) | Lavinia Picollo (UCL) | 'Deflationism and Logical Consequence' | |
| Week 8 (8th March) (Jowett) | Anton Ford (Chicago) | 'The Objectification of Agency' |
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Margot Strohminger (Oxford) |
'Supposition, Imagination and Offline Belief' |
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| Week 2 (19th October) (Jowett) | Nilanjan Das (UCL) | 'Externalism and Exploitability' |
| Week 3 (26th October) (Jowett) | Andrew Chignell (Princeton) | 'Knowledge and Ignorance in Kant' |
| Week 4 (2nd November) (Jowett) | John Carriero (UCLA) | 'Spinoza and Our Ontological Demotion' |
| Week 7 (23rd November) (Phil.) | Georgi Gardiner (Oxford) | 'Profiling and Proof: Are Statistics Safe?' |
| Week 8 (30th November) (Jowett) | Maria Alvarez (King's College London) | 'Agency, Abilities and Control' |
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Week 1 (27th April) (Jowett) |
John Hawthorne (USC) |
"Chrisholm's Paradox" |
| Week 2 (4th May) (Jowett) | Murat Aydede (UBC) | "What is pain in a body part?" |
| Week 4 (17th May) (Jowett) | Ian Proops (UT) | "The inestimatable world: Kant's resolution of the mathematical antinomies" |
| Week 5 (24th May) (Phil.) | Fraser MacBride (Manchester) | TBA |
| Week 6 (31st May) (Jowett) | Miriam Schoenfield (MIT) | TBA |
| Week 8 (14th June) (Jowett) | Helen Beebee (Manchester) | TBA |
