Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

The 92nd Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Oxford from 6 to 8 July 2018. 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 second symposium at the Joint Session - "Racial Justice" - which featured Charles Mills (CUNY) and Katrin Flikschuh (LSE). Charles W. Mills is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. He works in the general area of social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. He is the author of over a hundred journal articles, book chapters, comments and replies, and six books: The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997); Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 1998); From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Contract and Domination (co-authored with Carole Pateman) (Polity, 2007); Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality: Race, Class and Social Domination (University of the West Indies Press, 2010); and Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2017). Katrin Flikschuh is Professor of Modern Political Theory at the London School of Economics. She primarily works on Kant's political philosophy and its relation to contemporary liberalism. More recently she has begun to work on modern African philosophy. From April 2014 to December 2017 she is Principal Investigator of a Leverhulme Trust funded International Network that seeks to engage African and Western political theorists and philosophers with one another. She is author of Kant and Modern Political Philosophy (CUP 2000, 2008), Freedom. Contemporary Liberal Perspectives (Polity 2007), and What is Orientation in Global Thinking? A Kantian Enquiry (CUP, 2017). She is co-editor, with Lea Ypi, of Kant and Colonialism (OUP 2014).

The 92nd Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Oxford from 6 to 8 July 2018. 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 first symposium at the Joint Session - "Plato on the Uses and Value of Knowledge" - which featured Verity Hale (Yale) and Melissa Lane (Princeton). Verity Harte is George A. Saden Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Yale University. She is the author of Plato on Parts and Wholes: the Metaphysics of Structure (2002) and of various articles on ancient philosophy. She is co-editor (with MM McCabe, Robert W. Sharples and Anne Sheppard) of Aristotle and the Stoics Reading Plato (2010), (with Melissa Lane) of Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy (2013), and (with Raphael Woolf) of Rereading Ancient Philosophy: Old Chestnuts and Sacred Cows (2017). She is presently writing a monograph on Plato's Philebus. Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where she is also Director of the University Center for Human Values, and an associated faculty member in the Departments of Classics and of Philosophy. Previously she taught in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, after receiving there an M.Phil. and PhD in Philosophy. She writes largely though not exclusively on ancient Greek political philosophy. Her books include Method and Politics in Plato’s Statesman (Cambridge 1998); Plato’s Progeny (Duckworth 2001); Eco-Republic (Peter Lang 2011 / Princeton 2012); and Greek and Roman Political Ideas (Penguin 2014; revised edition published as The Birth of Politics, Princeton 2015). She and Verity Harte co-edited Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy (Cambridge 2013). In 2018 she will be the Carlyle Lecturer at Oxford and give the Knox Lecture at St Andrews and the Royal Institute of Philosophy/Royal Society of Edinburgh annual lecture; she has also delivered named annual public lectures at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Wesleyan University, the University of Auckland, Leiden University; the University of Florida; the University of New Hampshire; and Harvard University, and has been named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The 92nd Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Oxford from 6 to 8 July 2018. 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 inaugural address to the Joint Session - "W(h)ither Metaphysical Necessity?" - which was delivered by the incoming President of the Mind Association, John Divers (Leeds). John is a first-generation University entrant who studied, and subsequently taught, Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield and currently holds that position at the University of Leeds. The dominant theme in his published work is modality, including the 2002 book Possible Worlds and (in progress) Necessity After Quine. John is also an Editor of Thought and Director of the Leverhulme Trust Research Project, Thinking Counterfactually - How "Would have been” reveals what is and what must be.

Victoria McGeer is a Senior Research Scholar in the Center for Human Values and Lecturer in Philosophy at Princeton University. She is also a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University. Her published work reflects her wide range of interests encompassing topics in moral psychology, the development of agential capacities and its impairments, responsibility, the nature of folk-psychological explanation, problems of self-knowledge, and the metaphysics of mind. Her paper, “Mind-making practices: the social infrastructure of self-knowing agency and responsibility” was selected for inclusion in The Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best philosophy articles in 2015. McGeer received her B.A. in government and philosophy from Dartmouth College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. McGeer's talk - 'Intelligent Capacities' - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 June 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Holly Lawford-Smith is a senior lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Melbourne. She held previous positions at the University of Sheffield and the Australian National University. She is currently interested in collective action, collective agency, and collective responsibility, and also their applications in climate ethics, the ethics of consumption, and the ethics of privilege. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Lawford-Smith's talk - 'Collective Culpability and Collective Punishment' - at the Aristotelian Society on 4 June 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Lisa Shapiro is Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. Her research concerns accounts of human nature in the 17th and 18th centuries. In particular, she is interested the place of the passions (or emotions) in these accounts, as vehicles of human cognitive connection to the world. Her work has focused on Descartes, Spinoza and Hume, but also touched on Malebranche and Condillac. Her current project concerns accounts of the development of human rational capacities – or an embodied human mind – in the period. This research intersects with her commitment to rehabilitating the work of women thinkers of the early modern period. She is the PI on a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant New Narratives in the History of Philosophy in an effort to include many of these women (2015-2018). She is editor of the forthcoming Pleasure: A History in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series. She is the translator and editor of The Correspondence of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes and co-editor, with Martin Pickavé, of Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, as well as author of numerous articles. This This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Shapiro's talk - 'Assuming Epistemic Authority' - at the Aristotelian Society on 1 June 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Alison Hills is Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at St John’s College, University of Oxford. Her research is in Moral Philosophy. Her PhD was on Kant’s moral theory, in particular, on whether Kant shows that we have reason to be moral. She also has interests in metaethics (especially moral knowledge) and normative ethics (especially Kant’s moral theory). She has also written on applied ethics, about whether our intentions have any moral significance, and about the moral status of animals. Her most recent book, The Beloved Self (OUP), addressed the conflict between egoism and morality, and whether we can justify claims that we have reasons to be moral. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Hills' talk - 'Moral and Aesthetic Virtue' - at the Aristotelian Society on 23 April 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Martin Saar is professor of social philosophy at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main (since fall 2017). He has taught in Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin and Leipzig. His areas of specialization and teaching are contemporary political and social philosophy and the history of early modern and modern political thought (with focus on Spinoza, Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault, Critical Theory, Post-structuralism, and interdisciplinary research on collective memory, affect, ideology, and power). This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Saar's talk - 'What is Social Philosophy?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 19 March 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Sarah Moss is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. She works primarily in epistemology and the philosophy of language, and often on questions at the intersection of these subfields. She is the author of Probabilistic Knowledge (forthcoming with Oxford University Press), in which she defends a unified probabilistic theory of the contents of belief, assertion, and knowledge. For instance, she argues in her book that credences can constitute knowledge, in just the same way that full beliefs constitute knowledge. Her current work concerns the consequences of her theory of probabilistic knowledge for how we think about racial profiling and legal standards of proof. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Moss's talk - 'Moral Encroachment' - at the Aristotelian Society on 5 March 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Alex Voorhoeve is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He works primarily in the theory and practice of distributive justice (especially with respect to health care), in decision theory, and moral psychology, but also has interests in the work of Epicurus, Mandeville, Hume and Smith. His articles have appeared in Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs, and Economics & Philosophy, among other places. He is the author of a book of interviews with leading thinkers, Conversations on Ethics (Oxford, 2009), and co-author of Making Fair Choices on the Path to Universal Health Coverage (World Health Organization, 2014). This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Voorhoeve's talk - 'Epicurus on Pleasure, the Complete Life, and Death: A Partial Defence' - at the Aristotelian Society on 19 February 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.