Philosophy 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)

Reasons and Pronouns
Abstract: This talk suggests that the concepts of gendering and misgendering encompass a broader range of phenomenon than traditionally thought. Whereas the distinction between gendering and misgendering is often thought to revolve around correctness and incorrectness, I argue that gendering and misgendering are located in a broader schema of normative properties. A fully fleshed out theory of gendering and misgendering must include an account of the reasons involved in attributing a gender to an individual. After examining some relevant reasons through examples, I articulate a distinction between Bad Gendering, Misgendering, and Defective Gendering. With a fuller schema in hand, I draw some lessons for social metaphysics.

April 17
Gil Hersch (Virginia Tech)

Procedural Allocative Fairness
Abstract: Fairness matters in allocation when there isn't enough of the good to go around. Who gets into the Titanic lifeboats? Who gets the full ride at the flagship state university? Who gets the first available doses of the vaccine? Questions of fairness in allocation are some of the most common and urgent moral problems we face as a society. There are a variety of different procedures for allocating goods that might seem fair at different times: based on some morally relevant criteria, such as need, deservingness, or merit (Fumagalli 2022); relying on the price mechanism of markets (Brennan & Jaworski 2015); using lotteries (Broome 1990, Stone 2011); and implementing first-come-first-serve queues (John & Millum 2020). While there is no one allocative procedure that works across all cases, there is much more similarity between cases in different contexts than might first meet the eye. I argue that we can make a lot of progress in developing a philosophical account of procedural allocative fairness once we recognize that there are some underlying principles that cut across contexts.

May 11
Arthur Ripstein (University of Toronto)

Two Forms of Relational Normativity
Abstract: Darwall begins his book The Second Person Standpoint with two examples: the first involves you telling me to get off your toe; the second a drill sergeant ordering a platoon to fall in. Darwall treats both as instances of the same phenomenon; I contend that they are normatively and conceptually distinct. Both forms are non-derivatively relational. Attending to the differences between them shows why the existence of relational duties does not depend on questions of ease, difficulty, or degree. It also reveals that features often taken to be definitive of relational morality, particularly moral motivation and reactive attitudes, play no direct part in it.