The Ockham Society
The Ockham Society provides a forum in which graduate students in philosophy (particularly BPhil, MSt, and PRS students) may present their ideas to their peers at the University of Oxford. Our aim is to provide every Oxford graduate student with the opportunity to present their ideas in a friendly environment at least once during their time in Oxford. It is an ideal opportunity to gain feedback on your essays, and to gain first experiences in academic presenting. Small, experimental and unfinished papers are just as welcome as more advanced ones.
Ockham Society Convenors: Lucas Janz; Isabel Weir; Rían Coady | Ockham Society Website
Michaelmas Term 2024 - Term Card
Trinity Term 2024 - Term Card
Hilary Term 2024 - Term Card
Michaelmas Term 2023 - Term Card
Trinity Term 2023 - Term Card
Hilary Term 2023 - Term Card
Michaelmas Term 2022 - Term Card
Hilary Term 2022 - Term Card
Michaelmas Term 2021 - Term Card
Past Terms
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Kiran Lloyd |
Sometimes you should take the lower expected value, riskier bet |
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Week 2 (5th May) |
Amy Thompson |
Dignity in the Market and Dignity in Society |
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Week 3 (12th May) |
Martin Schlombs |
Is Speaker-Meaning without Common Ground Uptake Possible? |
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Week 4 (19th May) |
Ockham x Womxn’s Week |
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Week 5 (26th May) |
Matt Hitchens and Niklas Welsch |
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Week 6 (2nd June) |
Jingyi Yang |
Plato on memory and anticipatory pleasure: reinterpreting the “mind-book simile” in the Philebus |
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Week 7 (2nd June) |
Marta Bielinska |
Leibniz and Kant on the nature of space. Forgotten context of “Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume” |
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Week 8 (16th June) |
Kida Lin |
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| Week 1 (20th January) |
Becky Clark |
Would a Universal Basic Income (UBI) promote gender justice? |
| Week 2 (27th January) |
Fionn Kennedy |
Are there Good Dogs? Conceptual barriers to the possibility of Moral Agency in non-human animals |
| Week 3 (3rd February) |
Leo Schneider |
Reasons as Evidence and the Asymmetry Charge |
| Week 4 (10th February) |
Hal Willis |
Give Me Virtue, or Give Me Death: Problems and Prospects for Contemporary Virtue Ethics |
| Week 5 (17th February) |
OCKHAM WOMXN'S WEEK |
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| Week 6 (24th February) |
Michael O'Connor |
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| Week 7 (3rd March) |
Jules Desai |
Wittgenstein and the possibility of worldmaking |
| Week 8 (10th March) |
Kabir Bakshi |
On Halpern and Hitchcock's Account of Actual Causation |
| Week 1 (14th October) |
Steven Diggin (Merton College) |
'Towards a post-post-Gettier Epistemology' |
| Week 2 (20th October) |
Sophie Nagler (New College) |
'Proof-theoretic pluralism: co-determination on two levels' |
| Week 3 (28th October) |
Val Borba (Regent’s Park College) |
'A feminist reading of Parmenides' |
| Week 4 (4th November) |
Hallam Willis (Wolfson College) |
'The Ethical Normativity of Perception' |
| Week 6 (18th November) |
Kimon Sourlas-Kotzamanis (Wolfson College) |
'Epistemic Injustice and its Place in Epistemology and Ethics' |
| Week 7 (25th November) |
Katie Prosser |
'The Harm of the Pornography of Meat' |
| Week 8 (2nd December) |
Sebastian Sanchez-Schilling |
'Must an ethics founded on human good be political?' |
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Sasha Arridge (Mansfield College) |
Moral Responsibility as a Necessary Presupposition of Action: A Solution to the Problem of Constitutive Moral Luck |
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Sam Williams (New College) |
Supervaluationism and Higher-Order Vagueness; or, Supersupervalutionism |
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Abigail Whalen (Magdalen College) |
Does Justification of Political Authority Entail Political Legitimacy?: Contra Simmons’ Philosophical Anarchism |
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| Week 4 (14th February) |
Richard Roth (New College) |
Preservation + Anti-Moore = KK |
| Week 5 (21st February) |
Maurice Grüter (Lincoln College) |
How to ground Stoic ethics without appealing to providence – and why we perhaps shouldn’t |
| Week 6 (28th February) |
Alexander Read (St Hilda’s) |
Debunking De Se Content |
| Week 7 (6th March) |
Amy Thompson (St Anne’s) Alessio Vaccari (St Peter’s College) |
'Recht oder Unrecht – Mein Vaterland': Is patriotism a virtue? David Hume on Resentment |
| Week 8 (13th March) |
Patricia Elena Cipollitti (Wolfson College) |
Towards an account of vulnerability in social relations |
| Week 1 (18th October) | Kacper Kowalczyk (St Anne’s College) | Transfinite transitivity / Irina Starikova (National University HSE, Moscow): Beyond diagrams: mathematical thought experiments |
| Week 2 (25th October) | Abigail Whalen (Magdalen College) | Locke’s Characterization of Consciousness in His Essay |
| Week 4 (8th November) | Denis Kazankov (St Cross College) | Context and Quantifier Domain Restriction |
| Week 5 (15th November) | John Fan (St Cross College) | Eudaimonism Without Egoism: The Transformation of Practical Reason in Plato’s Republic |
| Week 6 (22nd November) | Aglaia von Götz (Merton College) | How to count with partial oranges |
| Week 8 (6th December) | Richard Roth (New College) | Hierarchies of senses in Frege’s semantics for attitude ascriptions |
| Week 1 (18th January) | Simon-Pierre Chevarie-Cossette (University College) | 'Excuses and Alternatives' |
| Week 2 (25th January) | Kacper Kowalczyk (St. Anne’s College) | 'A limited defence of limited aggregation' |
| Week 3 (1st February) |
Paul de Font-Reaulx (Trinity College) |
'Evidentialism and Why There Ain't No Such Thing as A Computationally Free Lunch' |
| Week 4 (8th February) | Kiril Maltsev (St. Catherine’s College) | 'Vacuum fluctuations in Quantum Field Theory, and Nothingness' |
| Week 5 (15th February) | Christopher Benzenberg (St. Cross College) | 'The Moral Fiction: Solving a Metaethical Dilemma' |
| Week 6 (22nd February) | Aglaia von Götz (Merton College) | 'A desideratum for a theory of definite descriptions' |
| Week 7 (1st March) | Sara Chan (Blackfriars Hall) | 'The Minority Mind: A Theory of Mental Disability and Disorder' |
| Week 8 (8th March) |
Beatriz Santos (Lincoln College) Richard Roth (New College) |
'Armchair Modality' 'Abominable Junk' |
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No seminar |
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| Week 2 |
No seminar |
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| Week 3 (26th October) |
Kuizhi (Lewis) Wang (Hertford) James Matharu (New) |
'The Value of Authorial Connectedness' '(Un)Natural Violation: The Human Forms and Poe's `Spirit of Perverseness'' |
| Week 4 (2nd November) |
Joseph Borges-Santos (Keble) Christopher Benzenberg (St. Cross) |
'Towards Internalism about Reasons as Such' 'Oops!... I did the right thing: The Moral Worth of Actions' |
| Week 5 (9th November) |
Sasha Lawson-Frost (Keble) James Kirkpatrick (University) |
'Geach on Predicative Adjectives' 'The Acquisition of Generics' |
| Week 6 (16th November) |
Joseph Chapa (Magdalen) Daniel Kodsi (Balliol) Ruby Shao (Exeter) |
'A New Moral Equality of Combatants' 'Causation, Harm and the Non-Identity Problem' 'Not Moral Vagueness, but Mere Ignorance' |
| Week 7 (23rd November) |
Franziska Poprawe (Exeter) Jay Jian (Balliol College) |
'Normativity & Reasoning' 'The Rational Irrelevance of Desire Strength' |
| Week 8 (30th November) |
Sebastian Liu (Merton) Joshua Pearson (Trinity) |
'Fragile Epistemic States and Akrasia' 'Moral Contingent Epistemology' |
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Thomas Mitchell (Worcester College) Sebastian Liu (Merton College) |
"Irrationality of Self-Doubt" "A Fitch-like Paradox for Weak-KK" |
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| Week 2 (4th May) |
William Gildea (Keble College) C. M. Lim (Corpus Christi College) |
"A puzzle about killing" "The communicative constraint on civili disobedience" |
| Week 3 (11th May) |
Rhys Southan (Exeter College) Sarah Chan (Blackfriars Hall) |
"Why we can't appeal to the universe to explain the value of creating new lives" "Teleological potentiality for rational agency as the grounds for moral rights" |
| Week 4 (18th May) |
Weng Kin San (St Hilda's College) Kieran Marray (St Catherine's College) |
"Generalising Fitch's result" "What Can Epistemology Do For Economics? The Radical Implications of Foundationalism in Economic Modelling" |
| Week 5 (25th May) |
Simon Wimmer (Warwick) Oliver Hurcrum (Worcester College) |
"Knowledge-first belief: counterfactuals and variables" "Composition as Identity and Temporal Counterpart Theory" |
| Week 6 (1st June) |
Milena Bartholain (Regent's Park) Raphaël Millière (Magdalen College) |
TBA "Are there degrees of self-consciousness?" |
| Week 7 (8th June) |
Sean Costello (Blackfriars Hall) Sasha Arridge (St Anne's College) |
"The Difficulty of Aristotle’s ‘Connate Breath'" "Deriving Basic Equality from Self-Respect" |
| Week 8 (15th June) |
Alasdair Craig (Lady Margaret Hall) Dabin Kwon (St Edmund's Hall) |
"Experientialism and the problem of cognitive penetration" "In what sense is technology a threat to Dasein? Heidegger’s philosophy of technology" |
