Colloquium Series

The Philosophy Department’s Colloquia Series takes place most Mondays of each academic quarter from 2-4pm in the Living and Learning Neighborhood in the Arts & Humanities Building 1, 0426. Snacks will be served.

To review past departmental colloquium please see our colloquium archive.

Schedule 2025-26

Fall 2025

October 20
Amanda Greene (UC Santa Barbara)

Democratic Legitimacy for Skeptics

 Today democracy is thought to be the most legitimate form of government the world has ever seen. But why does democracy matter at all for political legitimacy? As I understand this question, an adequate answer has not yet been given. Some accounts rely on standards of legitimacy that implicitly regard democracy as a necessary or even constitutive element. These defenses of the value of democracy tend to rely on idealized or romantic views about what democracy is and how it functions. This paper provides a challenge and an alternative to that family of approaches. It does so by showing how democracy makes a special contribution to political legitimacy, even though there is no legitimacy-based imperative to democratize. I argue that democracy contributes to legitimacy because it makes the exercise of power responsive to people’s views. I show that this realistic view has several advantages: it allows us to answer democratic skeptics with a legitimacy-based argument for democracy, it is more compatible with empirical research on political behavior, and it accepts the contingent relationship between democracy and other political values.

November 3
Kenny Easwaran (UC Irvine)

Neural Nets as a Model of "Knowing How"
Gilbert Ryle argued that there was an important distinction between "knowing how" and "knowing that". Stanley and Williamson, "Knowing How" (2001), argued that syntax and semantics require the meaning of "knowing how" to be a sub-type of "knowing that". I will not contest their claim about the formal semantics of English. However, I claim that in doing epistemology, it is useful to consider what concepts exist that are usefully like the concepts we apply to humans, that can be applied more broadly to subjects like animals, groups, and artificial intelligences. I will argue that neural nets are a class of systems that have been used for several decades, for which there is a useful concept of "knowing how" that can be applied. But until the rise of Large Language Models in the past few years, neural nets have not been the subject of a useful concept of "knowing that", and even now it is unclear. I claim that this conception of "knowing that" as a special and refined type of "knowing how" is also a useful way to think of humans, in line with the distinction that cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman draws between "System 1" and "System 2" thinking.

Winter 2026

January 26 
Adina Roskies (UC Santa Barbara)

Inference in Neuroimaging and the Problem of Cognitive Ontology
Neuroimaging studies attempt to assign function to brain regions. The neuroscientific practice of assigning functions to active brain areas involves two general patterns of inference, so-called “forward inference” and “reverse inference”. In this talk, I will evaluate these inferential patterns. Neuroscientists and philosophers of science have recognized and discussed the logical problems attending reverse inference, but have viewed forward inference as straightforward. Here I argue that reverse inference is overly maligned, whereas forward inference is even more problematic than previously recognized. Both forms of inference are closely tied to the problem of cognitive ontology. I situate this problem in contemporary views of philosophy of neuroscience, and suggest avenues to address these problems.

February 23 
Anastasia Berg (UC Irvine)

Coming to an End: Why Care About the Survival of Humanity?
What objective reasons, if any, do we have to care about the survival of humanity? I will critically explore some previously proposed answers—the Arguments from Additional Lives, from Final Value and from Value Dependence—before suggesting an alternative account. According to it, a concern with the existence of human beings in the future is intrinsically implied by the engagement in a particular kind of activities, namely, ones with infinite ends of unconditional worth. The account thereby ties our capacity to appreciate the goodness of a human future to the actuality of our recognition of goodness in human existence in the present.

Spring 2026

April 13
Sara Bernstein (UC Santa Cruz)

May 11
Arthur Ripstein (University of Toronto)