Digest Easter Vacation 2021

Oxford Mathematics Public Lecture | 17:00 - 18:00 | Online

Title: From one extreme to another: the statistics of extreme events
Speaker: Jon Keating (Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Oxford and Fellow of The Queen's College)

Jon Keating will discuss the statistics of rare, extreme events in various contexts, including: evaluating performance at the Olympics; explaining how glasses freeze; illustrating why computers are more effective than expected at learning; and understanding the Riemann zeta-function, the mathematical object that encodes the mysterious distribution of the prime numbers. 

Watch (no need to register and it will remain available after broadcast):
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The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.

Anscombe Reading Group | 7:00–18:30 | Online via Zoom

This is the final week of our reading group on Anscombe’s Intention. We will focus on the last few sections of the book, especially on the case of St Peter. Please feel free to join even if you’ve missed the prior sessions. For the Zoom link, contact Matt Rosen. After this week, the Anscombe reading group will become a Cora Diamond reading group in conjunction with the In Parenthesis project. If you would be interested in joining that group, please contact Matt Rosen as well. 

BPPA Seminar Series | 16:00-17:00 | Online via Zoom 

Title: Sharpening the Tool of Cognitive Diversity
Speaker: Charlotte Zemmel (Cambridge) 

In the third session of the BPPA’s spring seminar series, Charlotte Zemmel (Cambridge) will offer a critique of the dominant arguments in favour of increasing cognitive diversity from the perspective of consensus and dissent. The session will be a 40-min. talk followed by a 20-min. audience Q&A. You can see the seminar schedule and sign up for the mailing list and Zoom link here. With any questions contact Matt Rosen.

Philosophy Practical, Political, and Ethical lecture series | 16:00-18:00 | Online

Title: Vision and Ethics: Looking at Animals
Speaker: Samantha Vice (University of the Witwatersrand)

Please register for each talk on the IP’s events page here (registration is required). And please feel encouraged to participate in a way that your living, caretaking, and Zoom fatigue situation allows.

The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society | 17:30-19:15 | Online

Title: Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil
Speaker: Helga Varden (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Further details | View the programme | Read the draft paper

LSE Conference on Automation and the Future of Work | 14:00 | Online via Zoom

Title: Automation and the Future of Work: What, When, Where?
Speakers: Prof. Lisa de Propris (Birmingham), Ms Laura Frigenti (KPMG) and Dr Stijn Broecke (OECD)

Register here.

Cora Diamond Reading Group | 17:00–18:30 | Online via Zoom

A reading group of Cora Diamond’s Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going On to Ethics begins this week. In the course of the next few weeks we’ll discuss Frege, Wittgenstein early and late, Anscombe, language, the ethical, moral imagination and concepts, and other such subjects. This first week we’ll talk about the way Diamond sets up her project, and we’ll start talking about the Tractatus. Everyone would be very welcome. If you’re interested, email Matt Rosen for the Zoom link. 
 

BPPA Seminar Series | 16:00-17:00 | Online via Zoom

Title: Infantilization, Dehumanization, and Cognitive Disability
Speaker: Rhona Flynn (Cork)

In the fourth session of the BPPA’s spring seminar series, Rhona Flynn (Cork) will argue that existing philosophical accounts of dehumanization can’t fully account for the dehumanization of cognitively disabled people because of a focus on animalization and objectification. The session will be a 40-min. talk followed by a 20-min. audience Q&A. You can see the seminar schedule and sign up for the mailing list and Zoom link here. With any questions contact Matt Rosen. 

11th Session of the United Nations Open-ended Working Group on Ageing Side Event | 6.15 - 7.30 | Online

Title: COVID-19 and Older People's Rights: Social Connectedness and Belonging
Speakers:  Dr. Kimberley Brownlee, Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political & Social Philosophy, University of British Columbia

Kim Samuel, Founder and Chief Belonging Officer, Samuel Centre for Social Connectedness

Dr. Sharifah Sekalala, Associate Professor, Global Health Law, University of Warwick

Dr. Henry Shue, Emeritus Professor of International Relations, University of Oxford

This event is free of charge and will be recorded and broadcast live on UN WebTV (http://webtv.un.org/). 

Further information here.

Uncertainty, Decision and Policy | 10:00 - 16:30 | Virtual workshop

A key feature of the COVID-19 pandemic has been uncertainty: we are uncertain what the large-scale effects of policies such as lockdown might be; we are uncertain of the risks associated with researching vaccines; and we are uncertain about such basic issues as whether our best vaccines stop transmission of the disease. These deep and pervasive uncertainties raise a series of philosophical questions regarding who should decide how to proceed in the face of uncertainty, and how they ought to decide. Can we have reasons to adopt policies that we know must be “second-best” given the actual state-of-the-world when we are uncertain how the world is? Should we adopt “precautionary” measures or are these policies inherently irrational? How should we act when we are uncertain not only about the facts but about relevant normative issues? 

Hosted by the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. To register for this event, please use this link