Symposia and Lectures

Fall 2023 Colloquium Series

September 29, 2023
 

David Macarthur  (Professor of Philosophy, University of Sydney)

Location: Miner 225
3:30-5:30pm

"Skepticism about Artistic Meaning"

Art is often understood in philosophy and the wider world as "embodied meaning" (Danto) where the artist’s own interpretation is often taken as authoritative. Even where the author’s interpretation is treated as one amongst others, many philosophers continue to think that there is such a thing as the correct interpretation of a work of art. Moreover, it is familiar that in defending the value of a humanistic education in the arts one often hears the claim made that great art and literature contains important moral, social or political messages. In this talk I argue against such interpretationism on three grounds: it fails to do justice to the open-ended plurality of our responses to art and, as a corollary of that, the timelessness of art; and it over-intellectualizes our engagement with art. I shall suggest an alternative relational account which puts the imagination at the centre of our response to art.

October 6, 2023

Nandi Theunissen (Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburg)

Location: Miner 225
3:30-5:30pm

"Is Good Fundamental?"

There is a common intuition about the structure of value—about the dependence of one form of value on another.  If anything is relationally valuable, then something must be non-relationally valuable. There is more than one way to motivate a claim about value-dependence. For example, it appears in much-discussed arguments by infinite regress.  The argument that is in question in this article is a dependency argument, but it is not regressive. It says that when something is intrinsically good for someone, which is to say, directly beneficial for them, it is so (in part but necessarily) because it is good simpliciter. Proponents of the argument have perfectionist values chiefly in mind, which is to say, forms of excellence or exemplariness in different domains: worthwhile artworks, striking natural formations, intellectual and scientific pursuits. They contend that the fact that engaging with perfectionist goods is non-instrumentally good for people depends on the fact that perfectionist goods are good simpliciter. I argue that this style of dependency argument is not forced on us by intuitive claims about dependence, or by the need to be adequate to the character of our practices with perfectionistic values. A relational theory can plausibly account for perfectionist goods. To the extent that they were intended to present a hard case for the view that good is good for, I provide a line of defense for this, a relational, theory of value.

November 17, 2023

Patricia Marechal (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego)

Location: Miner 225
3:30-5:30pm