Philosophy Voiced Centre for Ethics

In this podcast, Olli Lagerspetz & Silvia Caprioglio Panizza, the two current Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellows (2022) at the Centre for Ethics discuss their EU-funded projects, the value of carrying them out at the Centre, and similarities between their philosophical interests. SCP's project, Moral Impossibility: Rethinking Choice and Conflict (MIGHT), focuses on the scope of what is possible for the subject in a moral sense, and how the range of possibilities that we have available is important in determining what our choices are and mean, as well as in revealing our deepest moral commitments. In this conversation she outlines various forms of moral impossibility, with one extended example from animal testing, and applies the research question to other contemporary issues such as the war in Ukraine, concluding with further applications and interdisciplinary directions for the project. – In his project, Philosophy as Cultural Self-Knowledge: R. G. Collingwood, Peter Winch and the Human Sciences (WC-CULT), OL discusses the role of the humanities and social sciences. History is neither sacred memory nor litigation – as it too often seems in the present war – but targeted inquiries. As with philosophy, the value of the human sciences lies in that they enhance the self-knowledge and self-understanding of cultures and societies. Olli also talks about his finds in the posthumous Peter Winch and R. G. Collingwood Archives. Read along with the transcript here: https://centreforethics.upce.cz/en/transcript-interview-msca-scholars-silvia-caprioglio-panizza-and-olli-lagerspetz

In this episode of Philosophy Voiced, Marie Skłodowská-Curie Fellow Silvia Caprioglio Panizza interviews Sophie Grace Chappell, Professor of Philosophy at the Open University, discussing her the scope and significance of ethics, philosophical style, poetry, non-human animals, embodiment, contemporary politics, climate change, and being a transgender philosopher. Much of the conversation revolves around Prof Chappell’s recent book Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience (Oxford University Press 2022). 
 Sophie Grace Chappell was one of five speakers at the MSCA funded workshop ‘“Here I am, I can do no other – or can I?” On the Reality of Moral Impossibility’ as part of the MIGHT project and hosted by the Centre for Ethics on 9-10 September 2022.  
 Bio: Sophie Grace Chappell is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University. She works in ethics, the philosophy of literature, the philosophy of sex and gender, ancient and mediaeval philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of religion She is the author of over a hundred articles and numerous books, including Aristotle and Augustine on Freedom (Springer 1995), The Inescapable Self (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2005), Knowing What To Do (Oxford University Press 2017). She is now pursuing a number of different writing projects, including a new book: Trans Figured: How to survive as a transgender person in a cisgender world. 

In this episode of Philosophy Voiced, Olli Lagerspetz, Giuseppina D’Oro, Leonidas Tsilipakos, and Jonas Ahlskog discuss their workshop 'Idealism and Realism in the Human Sciences: Collingwood, Winch, and Beyond' which took place in Pardubice, Czech Republic September 22 and 23, 2022.

About the workshop: R.G. Collingwood and Peter Winch were central contributors to the debate on the question of the autonomy of the human sciences (social sciences and the humanities) in the mid- 20th century. Other participants in that debate were Donald Davidson, Charles Taylor and G.H. von Wright. According to von Wright's formulation, the aim of the human sciences was "understanding" rather than "explanation", whereas Davidson argued, on the contrary, that explanation of action in terms of reasons must, in the last analysis, presuppose that reasons have causal efficacy. The debate was not resolved, one reason being the general philosophical shift in the late 20th century. Due to that shift, ontology again entered mainstream analytical philosophy as a topic. With this development, naturalism and scientific realism gained currency as the philosophical paradigm in English-speaking philosophy. In the light of that development, it became customary to view Collingwood and Winch as idealists and/or relativists. The aim of the workshop is to explore connections between views on the epistemological status of the human sciences and general underlying issues on the nature of philosophical research.
 
More about Doc. Olli Lagerspetz's project:
Philosophy as Cultural Self-Knowledge: R. G. Collingwood, Peter Winch and the Human Sciences (WC-Cult)

Podcast editor: Patrick Keenan
Podcast photo by Leonidas Tsilipakos.

In this podcast, PhD students Peter Tuck and Vladimir Lukić speak with Doctor Debbie Roberts about her paper Depending on the Thick. Doctor Roberts is one of two keynotes (along with Professor Roger Crisp) who is speaking at the Centre for Ethics' upcoming PhD conference titled, What Really Matters? Reflections on Human Values, which will take place August 24-26 at the Historical Building of the University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic.
(see the conference poster here)

Doctor Roberts is senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She works mainly in metaethics, and is particularly interested in the metaphysics of the normative.

Abstract for Depending on the Thick:
The claim that the normative depends on the non-normative is just as entrenched in metanormative theory as the clam that the normative supervenes on the non-normative. It’s widely held to be a genuine truism, a conceptual truth that operates as a constraint on competence with normative concepts. Call it the dependence constraint. I argue that this status is unwarranted. While it is true that the normative is dependent it is not a genuine truism, or a conceptual truth, that it depends on the non-normative. I argue for the following inadequacy claim: that when we cull all the normative terms from our language, and so the concepts that they stand for, what we will be left with will not necessarily be sufficient to adequately describe, conceptualise or represent what it is that we are supposed to be making normative judgments in virtue of. This has implications for both ascriptive and metaphysical understandings of the dependence constraint, and the potential to radically reshape the dialectic in metanormative theory.*

*Roberts, D 2017, 'I— Depending on the thick', Aristotelian Society - Supplementary Volume, vol. 91, no. 1, pp. 197-220. https://doi.org/10.1093/arisup/akx006

Podcast edited by Patrick Keenan.
For more information on the upcoming PhD conference, email cfeconference2022@outlook.com

In this podcast PhD students Peter Tuck and Vladimir Lukić speak with Professor Roger Crisp on his paper Towards a Global Hedonism. Professor Crisp is one of the two keynotes (with Doctor Debbie Roberts) at the upcoming PhD conference: What Really Matters? Reflections on Human Values taking place August 24-26 at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. 
(for more information on the conference, email: cfeconference2022@outlook.com)

Professor Crisp is Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University and Uehiro fellow and tutor in philosophy at St. Anne's College, Oxford. His work falls principally within the field of ethics. Roger has written several books including but not limited to:
Reasons and the good (2006),
The cosmos of duty: Henry Sidgwick's Methods of ethics (2018), &
Sacrifice regained: morality and self-interest in British moral philosophy from Hobbes to Bentham (2019).
Here is the abstract forTowards a Global Hedonism
This chapter argues that, of all alleged values of any kind, only pleasure is of ultimate axiological significance. It begins with the suggestion that absolute value—the value some item has through possessing a lower-order evaluative property that makes the world in which it is instantiated good—is foundational. Pleasantness is characterised as a basic category of phenomenal consciousness, and the charge of reductionism against hedonism based on this conception is refuted. Defences of hedonism against various forms of objection that it is counter-intuitive are modelled on an analogy with defences of consequentialism, and the general position is then applied to moral, aesthetic, and epistemic value. It is claimed that those attracted by the parsimony and elegance of welfarism (the view that the fundamental value is well-being) might find these qualities within hedonism in particular.

podcast edited by Patrick Keenan

In this episode of Philosophy Voiced, we are joined by Rick Anthony Furtak, Associate Professor in philosophy at Colorado College, US, former president of the American Søren Kierkegaard Society and an acclaimed poet. Rick is the author of two monographs, Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity (2005) and Knowing Emotions: Truthfulness and Recognition in Affective Experience (2018).
Hosts Kamila Pacovská (Pardubice) and Ruth Rebecca Tietjen (Copenhagen) discuss with Rick his studies in Chicago, the difference between European and American philosophy, connections between philosophy, literature (and poetry) and emotions, topics from his book Knowing Emotions, and other topics from his new book on Proust. 
Rick gave an Intensive seminar at the Pardubice Centre for Ethics (https://centreforethics.upce.cz/en/intensive-seminar-rick-anthony-furtak) which was the occasion of this podcast and inspiration to some of our topics.