58th Chapel Hill Colloquium in Philosophy

 

Location: Murphey Hall, Room 116

 
8:30 am-9:00 am

Breakfast


9:00 am-10:30 am

Roy Lee (NC State) and Mariska Leunissen (UNCCH):

“Aristotle’s Philosophical Indebtedness to Ancient Medicine”

Philosophy, Aristotle often urges, has much to learn from the methodology of medicine. In our talks, we consider what some of these lessons might be, focusing first on Aristotle’s ethics—specifically: what makes a satisfying ethical explanation? Aristotle answers this question through a medical analogy, drawing on a picture corroborated by ancient medical sources. Examining this parallel will show how, for Aristotle, philosophy might seek to develop methodological rigor by following other relatively successful technical and scientific pursuits. We then use this case study as a starting point for considering Aristotle’s philosophical practice more broadly and its indebtedness to ancient medicine in particular. How does Aristotle conduct philosophical inquiry, and how does he select, organize, and transform the ancient medical materials on which he draws? We will discuss examples that illustrate Aristotle’s practices of collecting and organizing evidence from medical sources to offer some preliminary answers to these questions.

Mariska and Roy will both discuss cases where it seems like Aristotle is drawing from the ancient medical tradition to do some philosophical heavy lifting. We’ll trade off giving introductory remarks, a conclusion, and/or brief comments on each other’s case study to stimulate discussion.

 
11:00 am-12:30 pm

Derek Skillings (UNCG) and Katie Deaven (UNCCH):

“Is Senescence a Spurious Kind?”

Aging is one of the most familiar features of biological life, and one we fight hard against whether by trying to slow it or reverse it outright. Despite its centrality to human experience, aging has proven difficult to explain. Looking across the tree of life, senescence appears to be a process nearly all living things undergo, but it is far from uniform: different species senesce at wildly different rates, and some barely senesce at all. Are organisms simply susceptible to wear and tear from continued use like machines, as Aristotle proposed? If so, why has natural selection–which optimizes for traits that promote survival and reproduction–failed to eliminate this systematic deterioration? We survey the theories of the evolution of senescence on offer, some competing and some complementary, and assess the current state of this debate. In doing so, we showcase some upshots philosophy of biology yields through disentangling conceptual confusions, disambiguating explanans from explanandum, and evaluating the comparative value of rival explanations. We also discuss the practical consequences of this work. Namely, an adequate explanation of senescence bears directly on how we treat aging in humans and on sustainable practices in fishing industries and wildlife management.


12:30 pm-2:30 pm

Lunch


2:30 pm-4:00 pm

Andrew Rubner (UNCCH) and Jorge Morales (Duke)

“What is Consciousness Good For?”

What is consciousness good for from a biological point of view? Unlike other biological traits, such as having a heart, visual detection of looming objects or reasoning, it’s easy for us to imagine a creature that is identical to an ordinary human being but lacks consciousness (witness Zombie thought experiments and the last decades of unconscious perception research). Thus, we should take seriously the possibility that consciousness has no biological purpose, i.e., that it has no biological function. Put more starkly, it’s a live possibility that consciousness is as fitness enhancing for humans as are tail bones. Call this view, “Darwinian Epiphenomenalism”.

Andrew will first provide several ways of making Darwinian epiphenomenalism precise by drawing on the functions literature in the philosophy of biology. He will also discuss some research programs in the scientific study of consciousness that may help (dis)confirm Darwinian Epiphenomenalism.

Jorge will then present a case for the view that consciousness has the function of acting as a catalyst for certain mental abilities, e.g., reasoning with mental images. Special attention will be paid to recent work on aphantasia, e.g., cases in which subjects can perform tasks used to measure mental imagery capacity but report no conscious awareness of the mental images used therein.


4:30 pm-6:00 pm

Luc Bovens (UNCCH) and Matt Adler (Duke)

“Utilitarianism, Prioritarianism, and Uncertainty”

Utilitarianism ranks outcomes according to the sum total of individual well-being. Prioritarianism gives extra weight to the worse off—an idea that is formalized by summing a concave function of well-being.

Utilitarianism and prioritarianism, if operationalized as tools for policy choice, require an “uncertainty module”—explaining how they should be applied by a policymaker who is uncertain about which outcome would result from a given policy. This raises tricky questions, not merely practical but also philosophical.

In this session, Matthew Adler and Luc Bovens will give two presentations on the topic, followed by Q&A. Adler’s presentation will focus on the axiomatic tradeoffs involved in specifying utilitarian and prioritarian uncertainty modules, and will then discuss an illustrative policy example, involving policies that reduce fatality risks. Bovens will discuss two policy issues–viz. selective cancer screening and GiveWell’s support for deworming programs–and show how systematic deviations from utilitarian recommendations under conditions of uncertainty can be made defensible.


7:00 pm-9:00 pm

Dinner at The Story Venue

450 W Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC 27516