Philosophy Voiced

In this episode, the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value senior researchers Niklas Forsberg, Kamila Pacovská, Nora Hämäläinen, and Ondřej Beran share their thoughts on what makes the Centre for Ethics special, what philosophy is like at the Centre, what their personal academic influences are, and what they are personally working on.https://centreforethics.upce.cz/

In this episode Kamila Pacovská and Niklas Forsberg speak with Raimond Gaita about a variety of philosophical topics including Academic Philosophy, Public Engagement, Populism, Trump, Climate Change Activism, Moral Exemplars, and Saintly Love, among many others. RAIMOND GAITA is Professorial Fellow in the Melbourne Law School and The Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at King's College London and a senior fellow of the Centre for Ethics as a Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Dr. Anna Bergqvist has been a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University since January 2013. Before coming to MMU, Dr. Bergqvist was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Glasgow and Stockholm University. Before that she was an AHRC funded PhD student at the University of Reading where she worked with Professor Jonathan Dancy on the epistemology of Moral Particularism. She currently supervises doctoral work on Particularism and Wittgenstein at Edge Hill University. Her research specialisms are Metaethics and Aesthetics, and selected issues in Philosophy of Language and Perception. "The moral life is not intermittent or specialised, it is not a peculiar or separate area of our existence . . . . we are all always deploying and redirecting our energy, refining or blunting it, purifying or corrupting it . . . ‘Sensibility’ is a word which may be in place here . . . Happenings in consciousness so vague as to be almost non-existent can have ‘moral colour’. (‘But are you saying that every single second has a moral tag?’ Yes, roughly.) "--- Iris Murdoch. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: 495https://centreforethics.upce.cz/Niklas.Forsberg@upce.cz

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University in the United States. Her research covers a range of fields. She is passionately interested in the question of how ethnography generates concepts; how we might treat philosophical and literary traditions from India and other regions as generative of theoretical and practical understanding of the world; how to render the texture and contours of everyday life; and the way everyday and the event are joined together in the making of the normal and the critical. Her work on collective violence and urban transformations has appeared in many anthologies. Her most recent books are Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (2007) Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (2015) and three co-edited volumes, The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy (2014), Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium (2015) andPolitics of the Urban Poor (forthcoming). Her graduate students are working on a number of issues in different parts of the world and her work is deeply informed by her heady interactions with them."If in life, said Wittgenstein, we are surrounded by death, so to in the health of our understanding we are surrounded by madness. Rather than a forceful exclusion of this voice of madness, Wittgenstein returns us to the everyday by a gesture of waiting: 'If I have exhausted justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: This is simply what I do.' In this picture of the turned spade as indicative of a turned pen, we have the picture of what the act of writing may be in the darkness of this time. For me the love of anthropology has turned out to be an affair in which when I reach bedrock I do not break through the resistance of the other, but in this gesture of waiting I allow the knowledge of the other to mark me."Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 17.https://centreforethics.upce.cz/Niklas.Forsberg@upce.cz

Philosophers Cora Diamond and James Conant discuss the interconnectedness of philosophical topics and the importance of studying philosophy. They explore understanding opponents' perspectives, the role of conclusions and confusion in philosophy, philosophy as a way of life, engaging with the history of philosophy, and the importance of graduate programs in philosophy.