13/7/2014: Joint Session Podcast - Symposium IV on the Ethical Significance of Persistence, featuring Amber Carpenter and Stephen Makin

The 88th Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Cambridge from 11 to 13 July 2014. The Joint Session is a three-day conference in philosophy that is held annually during the summer by the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. It has taken place at nearly every major university across the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Since 1910, the Joint Session has grown to become the largest gathering of philosophers in the country, attracting prestigious UK and international speakers working in a broad range of philosophical areas. Inaugurated by the incoming President of the Mind Association, the Joint Session includes symposia, open and postgraduate sessions, and a range of satellite conferences.

This podcast is a recording of the fourth symposium at the Joint Session - "The Ethical Significance of Persistence" - which featured Amber Carpenter (York) and Stephen Makin (Sheffield). Amber Carpenter has been Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York since 2007; she has taught at St. Andrews, Cornell and Oxford. She has published in Ancient Greek philosophy, especially the ethics, epistemology and metaphysics of Plato, and is the co-founder of the Yorkshire Ancient Philosophy Network. She was an Einstein Fellow at the Einstein Forum, which enabled her to begin work in Indian Buddhist philosophy, and subsequently held an Anniversary Lectureship from the University of York. Her book on metaphysics as ethics in Indian Buddhism appeared in 2013. Her interests include the nature of pleasure and reason and their respective places in a well-lived life; the implications of metaphysics for ethics; and the nature of knowledge, our striving for it, and the effects this has on our character. Stephen Makin took his first degree at Edinburgh University, and then moved to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, to study for a PhD. His research was originally on the philosophy of the early Wittgenstein, but his interests rapidly turned to ancient philosophy. His doctoral thesis was on pre-Socratic atomism. He was a research fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, before being appointed to a lectureship in Sheffield in 1984. Stephen has published papers on philosophy of religion, Democritean atomism, method in ancient philosophy, the metaphysics of Aristotle, and Aquinas’ philosophy of nature. His book on principle-of-insufficient-reason arguments in ancient philosophy was published by Blackwell in 1993 under the title Indifference Arguments. His translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book 9, along with a substantial commentary, was published in the Clarendon Aristotle Series in 2006. His research interests also include various topics in contemporary metaphysics.