Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

The Aristotelian Society
  • 4.8 (13)
  • PHILOSOPHY

The Aristotelian Society, founded in 1880, meets fortnightly in London to hear and discuss talks given by leading philosophers from a broad range of philosophical traditions. The papers read at the Society’s meetings are published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. The mission of the Society is to make philosophy widely available to the general public, and the Aristotelian Society Podcast Series represents our latest initiative in furthering this goal. The audio podcasts of our talks are produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London. Please visit our website to learn more about us and our publications: http://www.aristoteliansociety.org.uk

  1. 09/29/2025

    29/09/2025: Lucy O'Brien: Duddington and Our Awareness of Others’ Minds

    ABSTRACT What enables me to know that others exist? Natalie Duddington (PAS 1918-1919) offers two distinctive, and underexplored, insights into the question. She focusses on our capacity to perceive minds in perceiving animate beings, and on the ways in which we stand to be affected by others in knowing them. I will suggest a way of understanding what it is to see minds in action. I will also argue that ways we stand to be affected by others offers a resource for knowing others that takes us beyond perception, and is one that constitutes an antidote to the solipsist. ABOUT Lucy O’Brien is Richard Wollheim Professor of Philosophy at UCL. She has been at UCL since 1992. Her studies in Philosophy began with a BA Joint Hons in Pure Mathematics and Philosophy, and an MPhil in Philosophy, at the University of Sheffield. She went on to a DPhil in Oxford, followed by a post-doctoral position at King’s London. Her research interests lie in the philosophy of mind and action, with a particular focus on various forms of self-consciousness, and self-knowledge. She is writing a book on interpersonal self-consciousness following receipt of a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship. She has published papers in a range of journals and collections, she is the author of Self-Knowing Agents  (OUP, 2007) and co-editor, with Matthew Soteriou, of Mental Actions  (OUP, 2009). She served as Director and Treasurer of the Aristotelian Society 2007-2014, and Vice-Chair of the Royal Institute of Philosophy 2015-2020. She was awarded a Humboldt Forschungspreis in 2021, and was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 2024. She was co-editor, with A. W. Moore, of the journal MIND from 2015-2025. She has been Chair of the Royal Institute of Philosophy since 2020.

    50 min

  2. 06/02/2025

    10/03/2025: Pauline Kleingeld on Kant and the Methods of Moral Philosophy

    ABOUT Pauline Kleingeld is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen. Earlier she taught at Leiden University and at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Kant and Cosmopolitanism (CUP 2012), Fortschritt und Vernunft: Zur Geschichtsphilosophie Kants (Königshausen und Neumann 1995) and numerous articles. Her academic interests are in ethics and political philosophy, with a special focus on Kant and Kantian theory. ABSTRACT In the first section of his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (G1), Immanuel Kant claims to identify the supreme principle of morality. After famous discussions of the idea of a ‘good will’, ‘acting from duty’ and ‘respect’, he concludes that the highest moral principle is the following: ‘I ought never to proceed except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law’ (G 4:402). He claims that this principle implicitly governs ordinary moral practices and convictions. It is the ‘supreme’ moral principle in that it is a meta-principle by means of which substantive Kantian moral principles — such as ‘help others in need’ or ‘never lie’ — can be derived. Because Kant’s argument draws on moral convictions that are still widely shared, and because his conclusion articulates a paradigmatic position in moral theory, G1 has become one of the most renowned texts in the history of philosophy. The structure of Kant’s argument towards the identification of the supreme principle, however, has long been the subject of debate. Three serious difficulties stand out in the literature, and they all concern the most important steps of his argument: (1) Kant presents his argument as consisting of three propositions and a conclusion, but he labels only the second and third propositions as such. He does not make explicit what he takes the first proposition to be. In recent decades at least a dozen candidates have been put forward in the literature (see Steigleder 2022). (2) Kant claims that the third proposition follows from the first and the second, but it is widely regarded unclear how it is supposed to follow. (3) Kant’s final step to the formulation of the supreme principle is often said to be a jump over a gap, rather than a careful step that follows from the preceding argument. As a result, Kant’s reasoning towards the supreme moral principle seems more like a series of assertions and fragmentary arguments rather than a single argumentative chain. In this paper, I argue that Kant’s views on philosophical method shed new light on the structure and direction of his argument in G1. It has gone unnoticed that this argument consists of a chain of regressive inferences. I first explain the current positions in the literature regarding Kant’s method in G1 (§2). I then turn to Kant’s views on method (§3). Using his description of the so-called ‘analytic method’, I reconstruct the argument of G1 as a regressive chain. I argue that this reconstruction suggests solutions to the three main difficulties diagnosed in the literature, although several unclarities remain (§4).

    57 min

  3. 06/02/2025

    28/04/2025: Léa Salje on "Artspeak"

    ABOUT Léa Salje is an associate professor at the University of Leeds. She joined Leeds in 2015 on a postdoc, and has been there ever since. Before that she did a PhD at UCL. She works in Philosophy of Mind, mostly on issues around self-knowledge and first person thought. Her first monograph Saying What One Thinks (forthcoming with OUP), is about the special form of self-knowledge we get by putting our thoughts into words.

    51 min

  4. 05/30/2025

    13/05/2024: Eric Schliesser on Synthetic Philosophy: a restatement

    ABOUT Eric Schliesser is professor of Political Science, with a focus on Political Theory, at the University of Amsterdam. He was previously affiliated with Syracuse University, Leiden University, and Ghent University among others. Schliesser has published on early modern philosophy, philosophy of economics, the history of analytic philosophy, the history of feminism, and metaphilosophy. His publications include his monograph, Adam Smith: Systematic philosopher and Public Thinker (OUP, 2017). He has edited numerous volumes including (inter alia) Newton and empiricism. (OUP, with Zvi Biener, 2014); Sympathy, a History of a Concept (OUP, 2015); Ten Neglected Classics of philosophy (Oxford, 2017), Neglected Classics of Philosophy, Vol 2 (Oxford 2022), and a translation of Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy (together with Sandrine Berges, Oxford 2019). He keeps a daily blog Digressionsnimpressions.

    46 min

  5. 05/30/2025

    11/11/2024: Christopher Cowie on Optimism In the Search for Extraterrestrial Life: A Philosophical Perspective

    ABOUT Christopher Cowie is Associate Professor at the University of Durham. He was previously Junior Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and has held visiting fellowships at Harvard and Stanford. He is originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is currently working on the implications of axiological paradox, and, unrelatedly, the philosophy of the search for alien life.

    53 min

  6. 05/30/2025

    30/09/2024: Fabienne Peters on Inaugural Address: Relational Moral Demands

    ABSTRACT To act rightly is to act in accordance with moral demands. But what grounds moral demands? Much contemporary moral philosophy tends to take a non-relational approach to answering this question. According to non-relational moral theories, to act rightly is to act in a way that honours or promotes the (non-relational) moral properties of individuals, for example their well-being or their rights. According to relational moral theories, by contrast, at least some moral demands are grounded in a relation between individuals. To act rightly, is to act in accordance with what our moral relations to other individuals demand from us. Within relational theories, there is a further distinction to be drawn. Most contemporary relational theories presuppose that moral relations are determined by relational moral properties of the individuals involved. Call this account of relational moral demands individuals-first relationalism. Radical relationalism, by contrast, rejects the normative priority of moral properties of individuals – whether they are relational or non-relational properties. Instead, it has a relations-first structure. My aim in this paper is to argue that some moral demands are radically relational. ABOUT Fabienne Peter is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, specialising in moral and political philosophy and in social epistemology, including political epistemology. She has published extensively on political legitimacy and democratic theory. Her current research is in meta-ethics. She served as Head of Department at Warwick from 2017 to 2020. Before joining Warwick, she was a postdoc at Harvard University and then an assistant professor at the University of Basel. She has also held visiting positions at the Research School of Social Sciences at ANU and the Murphy Institute at Tulane University. She has previously been an editor of Economics and Philosophy and is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy.

    1h 5m

  7. 05/30/2025

    10/02/2025: Nadine Elzein on Abilities, Goals, & Justifications

    ABSTRACT Many of our practices presuppose moral responsibility. Arguably, agents can only be morally responsible if they are able to act otherwise than they do. Compatibilists and incompatibilists traditionally disagree about whether determinism precludes the ability to do otherwise, often reaching an impasse because they endorse different readings of “able to do otherwise”. I argue that the correct reading of “able to do otherwise” depends on the purposes of our responsibility-entailing practices. Practices serving different purposes may warrant different readings. Consequently, there may be no single independently ascertainable definition of freedom to do otherwise that justifies our responsibility-entailing practices wholesale ABOUT Nadine Elzein is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. She completed her PhD at University College London, and has held posts at the University of Oxford, King’s College London, the University of Southampton, and University College London. Her research focuses predominantly on free will, moral responsibility, blame, and determinism. She has a present writing project with OUP on this theme.

    1h 4m

  8. 01/14/2025

    13/01/2024: Monima Chadha on "Can We Construct Persons?"

    ABSTRACT Christine Korsgaard famously argued that even if we accept the metaphysical theory that there are no selves or persons, the practical standpoint requires us to think of ourselves as unified over time. It is the ability to choose and deliberate, make plans and act that requires me to construct an identity for myself. This practical requirement is antithetical to the Buddhist no-self view. Buddhists argue that it is primarily ignorance about our identity that is responsible for suffering, and that this ignorance consists not just in having a false belief in a metaphysical self but also our ordinary self-conception as being unified across time: our ‘I’-sense, so to say. Buddhists claim that this ‘I’-sense is the real culprit and the source of existential suffering. The Buddhist project of eliminating, or at least reducing, suffering is concerned with arguments to show that there is no metaphysical self and that ‘I’-sense is an illusion that we must get rid of. If Korsgaard is right, it seems that the Buddhist project is in deep trouble. I shall argue that Korsgaard’s requirement is too strong. The Buddhist project is sound and Buddhists at all stages of their practice can continue to choose and deliberate, make plans and act ABOUT MONIMA Monima Chadha is Professor of Indian Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Lady Margaret Hall. Her research interests are in metaphysics and philosophy of mind in classical Indian and contemporary Western traditions. In recent years, she has written a book Selfless Minds (OUP, 2023) and many articles on Buddhist no-self views and their implications for our concepts of subjectivity, agency, responsibility, and ethical life.

    55 min
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4.8
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About

The Aristotelian Society, founded in 1880, meets fortnightly in London to hear and discuss talks given by leading philosophers from a broad range of philosophical traditions. The papers read at the Society’s meetings are published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. The mission of the Society is to make philosophy widely available to the general public, and the Aristotelian Society Podcast Series represents our latest initiative in furthering this goal. The audio podcasts of our talks are produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London. Please visit our website to learn more about us and our publications: http://www.aristoteliansociety.org.uk

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