Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

ABOUT Pauline Kleingeld is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen. Earlier she taught at Leiden University and at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Kant and Cosmopolitanism (CUP 2012), Fortschritt und Vernunft: Zur Geschichtsphilosophie Kants (Königshausen und Neumann 1995) and numerous articles. Her academic interests are in ethics and political philosophy, with a special focus on Kant and Kantian theory. ABSTRACT In the first section of his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (G1), Immanuel Kant claims to identify the supreme principle of morality. After famous discussions of the idea of a ‘good will', ‘acting from duty' and ‘respect', he concludes that the highest moral principle is the following: ‘I ought never to proceed except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law' (G 4:402). He claims that this principle implicitly governs ordinary moral practices and convictions. It is the ‘supreme' moral principle in that it is a meta-principle by means of which substantive Kantian moral principles — such as ‘help others in need' or ‘never lie' — can be derived. Because Kant's argument draws on moral convictions that are still widely shared, and because his conclusion articulates a paradigmatic position in moral theory, G1 has become one of the most renowned texts in the history of philosophy. The structure of Kant's argument towards the identification of the supreme principle, however, has long been the subject of debate. Three serious difficulties stand out in the literature, and they all concern the most important steps of his argument: (1) Kant presents his argument as consisting of three propositions and a conclusion, but he labels only the second and third propositions as such. He does not make explicit what he takes the first proposition to be. In recent decades at least a dozen candidates have been put forward in the literature (see Steigleder 2022). (2) Kant claims that the third proposition follows from the first and the second, but it is widely regarded unclear how it is supposed to follow. (3) Kant's final step to the formulation of the supreme principle is often said to be a jump over a gap, rather than a careful step that follows from the preceding argument. As a result, Kant's reasoning towards the supreme moral principle seems more like a series of assertions and fragmentary arguments rather than a single argumentative chain. In this paper, I argue that Kant's views on philosophical method shed new light on the structure and direction of his argument in G1. It has gone unnoticed that this argument consists of a chain of regressive inferences. I first explain the current positions in the literature regarding Kant's method in G1 (§2). I then turn to Kant's views on method (§3). Using his description of the so-called ‘analytic method', I reconstruct the argument of G1 as a regressive chain. I argue that this reconstruction suggests solutions to the three main difficulties diagnosed in the literature, although several unclarities remain (§4).

ABOUT Léa Salje is an associate professor at the University of Leeds. She joined Leeds in 2015 on a postdoc, and has been there ever since. Before that she did a PhD at UCL. She works in Philosophy of Mind, mostly on issues around self-knowledge and first person thought. Her first monograph Saying What One Thinks (forthcoming with OUP), is about the special form of self-knowledge we get by putting our thoughts into words.

ABOUT Eric Schliesser is professor of Political Science, with a focus on Political Theory, at the University of Amsterdam. He was previously affiliated with Syracuse University, Leiden University, and Ghent University among others. Schliesser has published on early modern philosophy, philosophy of economics, the history of analytic philosophy, the history of feminism, and metaphilosophy. His publications include his monograph, Adam Smith: Systematic philosopher and Public Thinker (OUP, 2017). He has edited numerous volumes including (inter alia) Newton and empiricism. (OUP, with Zvi Biener, 2014); Sympathy, a History of a Concept (OUP, 2015); Ten Neglected Classics of philosophy (Oxford, 2017), Neglected Classics of Philosophy, Vol 2 (Oxford 2022), and a translation of Sophie de Grouchy's Letters on Sympathy (together with Sandrine Berges, Oxford 2019). He keeps a daily blog Digressionsnimpressions.

ABOUT Christopher Cowie is Associate Professor at the University of Durham. He was previously Junior Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and has held visiting fellowships at Harvard and Stanford. He is originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is currently working on the implications of axiological paradox, and, unrelatedly, the philosophy of the search for alien life.

ABSTRACT To act rightly is to act in accordance with moral demands. But what grounds moral demands? Much contemporary moral philosophy tends to take a non-relational approach to answering this question. According to non-relational moral theories, to act rightly is to act in a way that honours or promotes the (non-relational) moral properties of individuals, for example their well-being or their rights. According to relational moral theories, by contrast, at least some moral demands are grounded in a relation between individuals. To act rightly, is to act in accordance with what our moral relations to other individuals demand from us. Within relational theories, there is a further distinction to be drawn. Most contemporary relational theories presuppose that moral relations are determined by relational moral properties of the individuals involved. Call this account of relational moral demands individuals-first relationalism. Radical relationalism, by contrast, rejects the normative priority of moral properties of individuals – whether they are relational or non-relational properties. Instead, it has a relations-first structure. My aim in this paper is to argue that some moral demands are radically relational. ABOUT Fabienne Peter is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, specialising in moral and political philosophy and in social epistemology, including political epistemology. She has published extensively on political legitimacy and democratic theory. Her current research is in meta-ethics. She served as Head of Department at Warwick from 2017 to 2020. Before joining Warwick, she was a postdoc at Harvard University and then an assistant professor at the University of Basel. She has also held visiting positions at the Research School of Social Sciences at ANU and the Murphy Institute at Tulane University. She has previously been an editor of Economics and Philosophy and is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy.

ABSTRACT Many of our practices presuppose moral responsibility. Arguably, agents can only be morally responsible if they are able to act otherwise than they do. Compatibilists and incompatibilists traditionally disagree about whether determinism precludes the ability to do otherwise, often reaching an impasse because they endorse different readings of “able to do otherwise”. I argue that the correct reading of “able to do otherwise” depends on the purposes of our responsibility-entailing practices. Practices serving different purposes may warrant different readings. Consequently, there may be no single independently ascertainable definition of freedom to do otherwise that justifies our responsibility-entailing practices wholesale ABOUT Nadine Elzein is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. She completed her PhD at University College London, and has held posts at the University of Oxford, King's College London, the University of Southampton, and University College London. Her research focuses predominantly on free will, moral responsibility, blame, and determinism. She has a present writing project with OUP on this theme.

ABSTRACT Christine Korsgaard famously argued that even if we accept the metaphysical theory that there are no selves or persons, the practical standpoint requires us to think of ourselves as unified over time. It is the ability to choose and deliberate, make plans and act that requires me to construct an identity for myself. This practical requirement is antithetical to the Buddhist no-self view. Buddhists argue that it is primarily ignorance about our identity that is responsible for suffering, and that this ignorance consists not just in having a false belief in a metaphysical self but also our ordinary self-conception as being unified across time: our ‘I'-sense, so to say. Buddhists claim that this ‘I'-sense is the real culprit and the source of existential suffering. The Buddhist project of eliminating, or at least reducing, suffering is concerned with arguments to show that there is no metaphysical self and that ‘I'-sense is an illusion that we must get rid of. If Korsgaard is right, it seems that the Buddhist project is in deep trouble. I shall argue that Korsgaard's requirement is too strong. The Buddhist project is sound and Buddhists at all stages of their practice can continue to choose and deliberate, make plans and act ABOUT MONIMA Monima Chadha is Professor of Indian Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Lady Margaret Hall. Her research interests are in metaphysics and philosophy of mind in classical Indian and contemporary Western traditions. In recent years, she has written a book Selfless Minds (OUP, 2023) and many articles on Buddhist no-self views and their implications for our concepts of subjectivity, agency, responsibility, and ethical life.

In this podcast, Aristotelian Society officers Dr Jess Leech and Dr Ellie Robson talk to Peter Momtchiloff - commissioning editor for philosophy at Oxford University Press from 1993-2023. Following three decades in this role, we get Peter's thoughts on what he has seen and learned from his time at OUP including questions like: What are some of your most memorable encounters in the job? What are some of the biggest changes you've witnessed over 30 years – for good and for bad – in philosophy? Are there any common struggles for first time authors? How should you approach publishers? This podcast is an audio recording of an interview with Peter Momtchiloff - at the Aristotelian Society on 23rd July 2024.

In this podcast, Aristotelian Society officers Dr Jess Leech and Dr Ellie Robson talk to Peter Momtchiloff - commissioning editor for philosophy at Oxford University Press from 1993-2023. Following three decades in this role, we get Peter's thoughts on what he has seen and learned from his time at OUP including questions like: What are some of your most memorable encounters in the job? What are some of the biggest changes you've witnessed over 30 years – for good and for bad – in philosophy? Are there any common struggles for first time authors? How should you approach publishers? This podcast is an audio recording of an interview with Peter Momtchiloff - at the Aristotelian Society on 23rd July 2024.

The partiality we display, insofar as we form and sustain personal attachments, is not normatively fundamental. It is a byproduct of the deference and responsiveness that are essential to our engagement with the world. We cannot form and sustain valuable personal relationships without seeing ourselves as answerable to the other participants in those relationships. And we cannot develop and sustain valuable projects without responding to the constraints imposed on our activities by the nature and requirements of those projects themselves. More generally, we cannot engage with the world without meeting it on its terms, and we cannot meet the world on its terms without responding differentially – or displaying partiality – with respect to the objects of our engagement. Partiality is thus a byproduct of engagement. We cannot engage with the world at all without exhibiting forms of partiality. Samuel Scheffler is University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at NYU. He works primarily in the areas of moral and political philosophy and the theory of value. His writings have addressed central questions in ethical theory, and he has also written on topics as diverse as equality, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, toleration, terrorism, immigration, tradition, death, and the future of humanity. Scheffler received his A.B. from Harvard and his Ph.D. from Princeton. From 1977-2008 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of six books: The Rejection of Consequentialism, Human Morality, Boundaries and Allegiances, Equality and Tradition, Death and the Afterlife (Niko Kolodny ed.), and Why Worry about Future Generations? He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, and he has been a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His first book was awarded the Matchette Prize of the American Philosophical Association. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, and a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is currently at work on a book (tentatively) titled The Lives We Lead: Personal Attachment and the Passage of Time. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Scheffler's talk - "Partiality, Deference, and Engagement" - at the Aristotelian Society on 20th June 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

At a climactic—and, indeed, incendiary—moment in Bernard Williams' classic essay, “Internal and External Reasons,” Williams says that those who advance moral criticisms by appealing to so-called external reasons are engaging in “bluff”. Williams thus alleges that condemning certain actions of others as somehow not only immoral, but also irrational or contrary to reason is nothing more than a kind of pretense. To say that a favorite pastime that so many of us happily engage in is empty, well—to use an American colloquialism—“them's fightin' words!” Indeed, in criticizing certain moral criticisms in this way, Williams' words are fightin' words about fightin' words. Why does Williams proffer these meta-fightin' words? Readers—and indeed perhaps Williams himself—have struggled to articulate a precise argument for this claim that there are no external reasons and that those who try to invoke them in criticism of others are engaging in bluff. Thus, the force of Williams' point has remained, at best, elusive, perhaps even to Williams himself. In this paper, I first want to defend Williams' claim that the appeal to external reasons is illegitimate. But I will do so from a perspective that is radically different from the ones usually at work in considering Williams' position. Indeed, this perspective is one that may or may not (probably not!) be in the spirit of Williams' actual reasons for rejecting external reasons, so it is important to keep in mind (as I will remind you from time to time) that I am not offering an interpretation of Williams here. The distinctive aspect of my approach is that I argue that a rationalist line of thought can support Williams' claims. To bring out this line of thought, I will examine the metaphysical commitments of those who engage in what Williams calls bluff. I will then reject those commitments on powerful and widely popular rationalist grounds. I will, in other words, endeavor to support Williams' charge of bluff by investigating what I call the metaphysics of bluff and by offering a rationalist critique of that metaphysics. Michael Della Rocca is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He has published widely in early modern philosophy and in contemporary metaphysics. His most recent book, The Parmenidean Ascent (Oxford 2020), defends a radical form of monism in metaphysics, philosophy of action, epistemology, and philosophy of language. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Della Rocca's talk - "Moral Criticism and the Metaphyscis of Bluff" - at the Aristotelian Society on 6th June 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

When we doubt a belief, we examine how things look from a perspective in which that belief is set aside. Sometimes we care about what that perspective recommends and, as a result, we abandon the belief we've been doubting. Other times we don't: we recognize that a perspective in which a certain belief is set aside recommends abandoning it, but we go on believing it anyway. Why is this? In this paper, I'll consider and then reject some proposals concerning when to defer to the perspective of doubt. I'll argue that ultimately the question of whether to defer to doubt on any given occasion can't be answered through rational deliberation aimed at truth or accuracy. If I'm right, this means that a certain challenge facing defeatist views about higher order evidence cannot be met: namely, providing a motivation for abandoning belief in cases of higher order evidence, but not becoming a global skeptic. Miriam Schoenfield received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012 and is now an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and an Affiliate Professor at the Dianoia Institute for Philosophy at Australian Catholic University. In addition to teaching at UT Austin, Miriam has served as a Bersoff fellow at New York University, an Associate Professor at MIT, and has taught philosophy in a number of different prison systems. She is the winner of the Marc Sanders Prize in Epistemology and the Young Epistemologist Prize. Her current research focuses on the ways in which Bayesian epistemology, and the aims of truth and accuracy, bear on debates about how to respond to evidence of our own irrationality. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Schoenfield's talk - "Deferring to Doubt" - at the Aristotelian Society on 30th May 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

In the interpretation of Parmenides of Elea, there is a certain vulgate, one widely represented in general histories of philosophy and indeed assumed by philosophers broadly. The metaphysical tenor and thrust of the philosophy of Parmenides, according to this vulgate, is holistic monism: "all things are one," in Greek, hen to pan. As it may be recalled, Parmenides reached his metaphysical conclusions by initially reflecting on the language of to mē on or to ouk on (either of which may be translated as "what is not," or "non-being," or "not being"). Famously, or notoriously, he did rule that there is something conceptually and logically unacceptable in speaking or thinking of "not being." Ascribing that initial philosophical move to Parmenides is certainly beyond dispute. The vulgate, however, adds that he must also have reflected on the language of "different" (heteron) and "other" (allo); and then he proceeded to draw powerful metaphysical inferences in the following way: If, with respect to some A and some B, we are to hold that A is "different from" (or "other than") B, or vice versa, then we are committed to holding that "A is not B" and "B is not A." But if grasping "not-being" is inherently impossible, it should likewise count impossible that we should conceive more narrowly of "A's not being B," or of "B's not being A." Once distinctions of any sort are logically disallowed, the metaphysical conclusion seems inevitable: hen to pan, "all things are one." The epistemological corollary of holistic monism is that the world humans experience, fraught as it is with plurality and pervasively splintered by distinctions, is ultimately and fundamentally an illusion. Alexander P. D. Mourelatos is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy and in Classics at The University of Texas at Austin, where in 1967 he founded and for twenty years directed, the Joint Classics-Philosophy Graduate Program in Ancient Philosophy. He is the author of The Route of Parmenides (1970; 2nd edn., 2008), and editor of The Pre-Socratics: A Collection of Critical Essays 1974; 2nd edn., 1993). Scholarly articles of his have appeared in journals in: philosophy; classics; ; history of science; and linguistics. On more than 170 occasions, he has delivered invited lectures at academic venues in North and South America, Europe, and Australasia. He received all his academic degrees from Yale University (Ph.D., 1964), and has been awarded two honorary doctorates in his native Greece (University of Athens, 1994; University of Crete, 2017). Students of his and colleagues have presanted him with two collections in his honor: in 2002, Presocratic Philosophy—Essays in Honour of Alexander Mourelatos; and in 2019, a special double issue of the periodical Philosophical Inquiry. He has held research appointments at: the University of Wisconsin, Madison; the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ); the Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington, DC, Harvard University); Cambridge University; and the Australian National University. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Mourelatos's talk - "Parmenides of Elea and Xenophanes of Colophon: the Conceptually Deeper Connections" - at the Aristotelian Society on 23rd May 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

In this paper I give answers to two apparently unrelated questions and aim to convince you that these different concerns are, in fact, intertwined. The first question is, why is dualism so tenacious? The second is, what is really at issue in the debate between Burge and McDowell? Regarding the first question, various contemporary philosophers have cast Descartes as the originator of a pernicious idea about the radical difference between mind and body, an idea with weed-like tenacity, that many have attempted to dig out once and for all, but which always seems to grow back from fragments left in the soil. The problem with this diagnosis of dualistic thinking as the result of an individual philosopher's influence is that it fails to consider that there may be broader and still active causes of its appeal. What is left unconsidered is the possibility that dualism is symptomatic of the wider tendencies of the scientific culture that Descartes, amongst others, represents, and that it persists not because of the long shadow of one philosopher, but because the essentials of this intellectual culture remain. In Sections 2 and 3 I will argue that this is indeed the case, and that the mode of thought at issue is to do with the dominance of scientific idealisations in our thinking about nature, including human beings and their minds. In answer to the second question, Fish (2021) has examined the debate between Burge and McDowell over the alleged incompatibility of disjunctivism with the discoveries of perceptual science, and has compared it to a clash of Kuhnian paradigms. Miguens (2020) takes conflicting ideas about representations to be the main point of disagreement. I will argue instead that the point at issue is Burge's acceptance, and McDowell's rejection of the ‘Cartesian idealisation' of mind as a self-contained system. Fish's treatment of the controversy as a matter of competing research programmes, analogous to scientific ones, neglects the crucial particularity of the case, which is that McDowell's philosophy of perception declines to define its explanatory objects in the way most conducive to scientific research. For this reason, there is more of a tension with science than McDowell admits; but as I will ultimately argue, this does not invalidate disjunctivism. Mazviita Chirimuuta is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Her current research interests include philosophy of perception, philosophy of neuroscience, and history of the mind/brain sciences. She received her PhD in Vision Science from the University of Cambridge in 2004. Following that she held post-docs in perceptual psychology, and in philosophy at Monash University and at Washington University in St. Louis. Between 2011-2020 she was Assistant then Associate Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Her book Outside Colour: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Colour in Philosophy was published by MIT Press in 2015, and she is currently working on a monograph under contract with MIT Press, The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience. The new book examines the various strategies that neuroscientists have used to produce simple models of formidably complex neural systems. Given that simplified representations, such as computational models, require departure from literal truth about the brain, the book will consider how to best interpret such abstractions when doing naturalistic philosophy of mind. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Chirimuuta's talk - "Disjunctivism and Cartesian Idealisation" - at the Aristotelian Society on 9th May 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Common-sense (or folk) psychology holds that (generally) we do what we do for the reasons we have. This common-sense approach is embodied in claims like “I went to the kitchen because I wanted a drink” or “She took a coat because she thought it might rain and she hoped to stay dry”. However, the veracity of these common-sense psychological explanations has been challenged by experimental evidence (primarily from behavioural economics and social psychology) which appears to show that individuals are systematically irrational – that often we do not do what we do because of the reasons we have. Recently, some of the same experimental evidence has also been used to level a somewhat different challenge at the common-sense view, arguing that the overarching aim of reasoning is not to deliver better or more logical decisions for individual reasoners, but to improve group decision making or to protect an individual's sense of self. This paper explores the range of challenges that experimental work has been taken to raise for the common-sense approach and suggests some potential responses. Overall, I argue that the experimental evidence should not (currently) lead us to a rejection of individual rationality. Emma Borg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading and Joint Director of the Reading Centre for Cognition Research. She has held a number of visiting and advisory positions, including the White Distinguished Fellow for Philosophy at the University of Chicago, and sitting on the Executive Committee of the Mind Association. Currently she serves on the Advisory Board of the Leverhulme Trust, and (due to her work in business ethics) as an Independent Advisor to the Professional Standards Committee of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC). In the past, her research has focused on philosophy of language, particularly the semantics-pragmatics interface, but she currently holds a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for work exploring our understanding of human action. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Borg's talk - "In Defence of Individual Rationality" - at the Aristotelian Society on 25th April 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

This paper is about whether it is rational to intrinsically desire the vague. A proposition is inconsequential if neither it, nor its negation is rational to intrinsically desire. The objects of intrinsic desire are propositions, and the contradictory of propositional vagueness is propositional precision. Every vague proposition is not precise, and every precise proposition is not vague. The question to be pursued thus can be posed as follows: is every consequential proposition precise? Jack Spencer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Before doing his PhD at Princeton, he studied philosophy and economics at University of Colorado, Boulder. Much of his research has been in metaphysics and decision theory. He is currently thinking about instantaneous rates-of-change, fundamentality, rationality and vagueness. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Spencer's talk - "Intrinsically Desiring the Vague" - at the Aristotelian Society on 21st March 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Photography is highly valued as a recording medium. Traditionally it has been claimed that photography is fundamentally a causal recording process, and that every photograph is the causal imprint of the world in front of the camera. In this paper I seek to challenge that traditional view. I claim that it is based on a ‘single-stage' misconception of the process that defines photographs as mind-independent images and leaves no room for photographic depiction. I explain my objections to that view and propose an alternative, ‘multi-stage' account of the process, in which I argue that causal registration of light is not equivalent to recording and reproducing an image. The proposed account can explain how photography functions as an exemplary recording medium, without supposing that every photograph is a mind-independent causal imprint of the world. Intervention or non-intervention by photographers is a more complex matter than the traditional view allows. Using the framework of the multistage account, I describe three different ways that photographic pictures can be produced. Dawn Phillips studied at the University of Durham and wrote her PhD on Wittgenstein's say-show distinction. She held philosophy positions at Kent, Cork, Southampton, Oxford, and Warwick. In 2011 she became a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Hull and, also, became Dawn Wilson. Dawn has published on Wittgenstein early and late, particularly the Tractatus, including articles on logical analysis, clarity, symbolism, the picture theory of language and the expression of thought. With David Connearn, she co-authored an article about Wittgenstein's House in Skjolden and co-ordinated an international letters campaign for the conservation of the house and its legacy. She is interested in language, thought and image, particularly in art and aesthetics and the philosophy of photography. Her article, ‘Photography and Causation', launched a field of debate known as the ‘New Theory' of photography and was selected as one of twelve classic texts to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the British Journal of Aesthetics. She recently published ‘Invisible Images and Indeterminacy: Why we need a Multi-stage Account of Photography' and she is co-authoring, with Laure Blanc-Benon, the photography entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. She is writing a book titled Aesthetics and Photography for Bloomsbury, and articles on temporal representation, co-portraiture, and comparing photography with music. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Wilson's talk - "Reflecting, Registering, Recording and Representing: From Light Image to Photographic Picture" - at the Aristotelian Society on 7th March 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Aesthetic beautification is a familiar artistic phenomenon: Even as they face death, heroes and heroines in operas still sing glorious music. Characters in Shakespearean tragedies still deliver beautifully eloquent speeches in the throes of despair. Even depicting suffering and horror, paintings can still remain a transfixing delight for the eyes. In such cases, the work of art represents or expresses something we would, in ordinary life, attribute a negative valence (suffering, horror, death, and the like), but it does so beautifully. Doubtless there is not a single explanation for what transpires in art of this sort or in our experience of it. With some aesthetically beautified art, its foremost goal might be giving aesthetic pleasure, and the beauty of the aesthetic form, even when depicting horrors, is in the service of this primary aim. In other art, the beautification might seek to be jarring and thought-provoking, highlighting a disconnect between the aesthetic frame and what is portrayed. These routes explain much of aesthetic beautification. But I am particularly interested in considering another more specific response still: finding ourselves somehow consoled by the beautification. I begin with some reflections on aesthetic beautification in general, and then turn to consider how beautification and consolation might be connected, and what to make of this. Andrew Huddleston is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, where he is co-Director of the Centre for Research in Post-Kantian European Philosophy. He studied as an undergraduate at Brown and at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and did his PhD at Princeton under the supervision of Alexander Nehamas. Huddleston previously taught at Exeter College, Oxford and at Birkbeck College, University of London. He specializes in 19th and 20th Century European Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Ethics. His book Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture (2019) was published by Oxford University Press, and he is presently at work on a book tentatively titled Art's Highest Calling: The Religion of Art in a Secular Age. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Huddleston's talk - "Aesthetic Beautification" - at the Aristotelian Society on 21 February 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Nietzsche's attitude toward science is ambivalent: he remarks approvingly on its rigorous methodology and adventurous spirit, but also points out its limitations and rebukes scientists for encroaching onto philosophers' territory. What does Nietzsche think is science's proper role and relationship with philosophy? I argue that, according to Nietzsche, philosophy should set goals for science. Philosophers' distinctive task is to ‘create values', which involves two steps: (1) envisioning ideals for human life, and (2) turning those ideals into prescriptions for behaviour and societal organisation. To accomplish step (2), philosophers should delegate scientists to investigate what moral rules and social arrangements have best advanced this ideal in the past or might in the future. Rachel Cristy is a Lecturer in Philosophy at King's College London. She received her PhD in Philosophy from Princeton University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics before coming to King's. She works on the history of late modern philosophy, primarily on Nietzsche, sometimes putting him in conversation with William James, one of the founders of American Pragmatism. She is especially interested in late modern philosophers' attitudes toward science, including both epistemological views (on its methods, its limitations, what sort of philosophical foundation it has or needs) and ethical views (on the proper place of science in the life of individuals and societies). She has also published on Kant's aesthetics as it relates to wine. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Cristy's talk - "Commanders and Scientific Labourers: Nietzsche on the Relationship Between Philosophy and Science" - at the Aristotelian Society on 31 January 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Metaphysicians are in the business of making and defending modal claims – claims about how things must be or cannot be. Wittgenstein's opposition to necessity claims, along with his various negative remarks about ‘metaphysical' uses of language, makes it seem almost a truism that Wittgenstein was opposed to metaphysics. In this paper I want to make a case for rejecting that apparent truism. My thesis is that it is illuminating to characterise what Wittgenstein and Anscombe are doing in their philosophical writing as metaphysics without manufactured necessities. Doing so helps to articulate a sharper, more interesting, critique of contemporary metaphysical practices than therapeutic or linguistic framings of Wittgenstein's method make possible. It also allows us to place Anscombe in the context of a tradition of British metaphysics that emerged in the 1940s in an attempt to reverse the devastating impact on ethics of the new ‘analytical' philosophy. Rachael Wiseman is Senior Lecturer in Philosphy at University of Liverpool. She is the author of the Routledge Guidebook to Anscombe's Intention (Routledge, 2016) and, with Clare Mac Cumhaill, Metaphysical Animals (Chatto & Windus, 2022) — a joint philosophical biography of GEM Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch. She is associate editor (for analytic philosophy) at British Journal for the History of Philosophy. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Wiseman's talk - "Metaphysics by Analogy" - at the Aristotelian Society on 17 January 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

According to the doxastic wrongs thesis, merely entertaining certain beliefs about others can wrong them, even if one does not act on those beliefs. Beliefs based on socially salient characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc., and which turn out to be false and are negatively valenced are prime candidates for the charge of doxastic wronging. My aim, in this paper, is to show that a plausible, Kantian argument for the thesis licences extending the latter to cases in which the belief is true and/or positively valenced. I begin by setting out the doxastic wrong thesis in its general form. I then reject Mark Schroeder's argument for restricting it to false beliefs, and mount a positive, Kantian argument for including true beliefs within the ambit of the thesis. I end the paper by tackling some objections, in the course of which I extend the thesis to further cases. Cécile Fabre is Senior Research Fellow in Politics at All Souls College, Oxford, and Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Oxford. She previous taught at the London School of Economics and the University of Edinburgh. She holds degrees from La Sorbonne University, the University of York, and the University of Oxford. Her research interests include theories of distributive justice, issues relating to the rights we have over our own body and, more recently, just war theory,and the ethics of foreign policy. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Fabre's talk - "Doxastic Wrongs, Non-spurious Generalisations and Particularised Beliefs" - at the Aristotelian Society on 15 November 2021. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Heather Widdows is the John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics and Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research and Knowledge Exchange) at the University of Birmingham. She is Deputy Chair of the Philosophy sub-panel for REF 2021 and was a member of the 2014 sub-panel. Her most recent book, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal (2018), was described by Vogue as “ground-breaking” and listed by The Atlantic as one of the best books of 2018. She is author of The Connected Self: The Ethics and Governance of the Genetic Individual (2103), Global Ethics: An Introduction (2011), and The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch (2005). She has co-edited, with Darrel Moellendorf, The Routledge Handbook of Global Ethics (2014). She co-runs the Beauty Demands Network and Blog and the #everydaylookism project. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Widdows' talk - 'No Duty To Resist: Why individual resistance is an ineffective response to dominant beauty ideals' - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 October 2021. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

As the first talk for the 2021-22 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year's Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Robert Stern (University of Sheffield) as the 114th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society's President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy. The 114th Presidential Address was chaired by Bill Brewer (KCL), the 113th President of the Aristotelian Society. Robert Stern is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, where he has been since 1989. Prior to that he did his BA and PhD at Cambridge, and held a research fellowship at St John's College Cambridge. His main research interests are in the history of philosophy – particularly Kant and Hegel, and also Kierkegaard, and more recently K. E. Løgstrup, Iris Murdoch, Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Luther. He connects these historical inquires with more systematic questions in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, particularly topics such as realism vs idealism, the use of transcendental arguments, and the nature of moral obligation. His books include three works on Hegel; a collection of papers on Kant; a discussion of transcendental arguments; an investigation into Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard on obligation; and a study of Løgstrup. He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2019, and has served on the Executive Committee of the Aristotelian Society and as President of the British Philosophical Association, and is currently chair of the Philosophy sub-panel for REF2021. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Stern's address - 'The Objectivity of Perception' - at the Aristotelian Society on 5 October 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Julia Borcherding is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Before moving to Cambridge, she was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow at New York University. Julia specializes in early modern philosophy, focusing on moral, epistemological and metaphysical themes and their intriguing interconnections. She has published on the philosophy of Leibniz, Conway, Cavendish, Arnauld and Spinoza. Her current book project The Metaphysics of Emotion investigates the underappreciated metaphysical dimensions of early modern accounts of love. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Borcherding's talk - '“I wish my Speech were like a Loadstone”: Cavendish on Love and Self-Love' - at the Aristotelian Society on 28 June 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Michael Beaney (毕明安) is Regius Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen, Professor of the History of Analytic Philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Recent books include The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy (edited, OUP, 2013) and Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2017). While the main focus of his work has been on the history of analytic philosophy (especially the writings of Frege, Wittgenstein, Stebbing, and Collingwood), his research interests include philosophical methodology (with particular reference to analysis and creativity throughout the history of philosophy), historiography, philosophical translation (he has just completed a new translation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus for OUP), and Chinese philosophy (on which he has increasingly been working, especially ancient Chinese philosophy of language and logic). He was editor of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy from 2011 to 2020, and is general editor of a book series on the history of analytic philosophy (published by Palgrave Macmillan), and co-editor of a series entitled ‘BSHP New Texts in the History of Philosophy' (published by OUP). This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Beaney's talk - 'Swimming Happily in Chinese Logic' - at the Aristotelian Society on 21 June 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Corine Besson is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. She did her undergraduate degree in Philosophy and French Literature at the University of Geneva. She went to Oxford for her postgraduate studies, to first do a B.Phil, and then write a D.Phil. on the relation of second-order logic to the theory of meaning. Her research interests are in the philosophy of logic, epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy. Her current work focuses mostly on how logic relates to reasoning — from foundational, normative and epistemological perspectives. She has just finished writing a book for Oxford University Press on the relevance of Lewis Carroll's regress argument (in his Mind 1895 paper ‘What the Tortoise Said to Achilles') to key debates in the philosophy of logic and reasoning. Its (working) title is: Logic, Reasoning and Regresses: A Defence of Logical Cognitivism. Corine also runs the Centre for Logic and Language (CeLL) at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, London, and, together with Anandi Hattiangadi (Stockholm), she holds a three year grant from the Bank of Sweden on The Foundations of Epistemic Normativity. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Besson's talk - 'Knowing How to Reason Logically' - at the Aristotelian Society on 7 June 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Kenny Easwaran is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. He did his PhD in the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at UC Berkeley, and then worked at the Australian National University and the University of Southern California before moving to Texas A&M. He has done work on the foundations of probability and decision theory, as well as on the social epistemology of axioms and proofs in mathematical reasoning. His current work focuses on analogies between different possible futures in decisions under uncertainty, the different individuals in social choices, and the different stages of the self in reasoning across time. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Easwaran's talk - 'A New Method for Value Aggregation' - at the Aristotelian Society on 24 May 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Joseph Chan is Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at The University of Hong Kong. He is Global Scholar and Visiting Professor at the University Center for Human Values of Princeton University in 2019-2021 spring semesters. His recent research interests span Confucian political philosophy, comparative political theory, democratic theory, social and political equality, and popular sovereignty. He is the author of Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times (Princeton, 2014) and co-edited with Melissa Williams and Doh Shin East Asian Perspectives on Political Legitimacy: Bridging the Empirical-Normative Divide (Cambridge, 2016). He has been published in numerous journals such as Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, History of Political Thought, the Journal of Democracy, Philosophy East and West, and China Quarterly. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Chan's talk - 'Equality, Friendship, and Politics' - at the Aristotelian Society on 10 May 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Ralf M. Bader is a professor of philosophy at the Université de Fribourg in Switzerland, where he holds the chair for ethics and political philosophy. His research focuses on ethics, meta-ethics, metaphysics, Kant, political philosophy and decision theory. He is also interested in neo-Kantian and early analytic philosophy, as well as the history of political thought. Previously, he was a Fellow of Merton College and an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Oxford, as well as a Bersoff Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow in the Philosophy Department at New York University. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Bader's talk - 'Coincidence and Supervenience' - at the Aristotelian Society on 24 April 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Helga Varden is Professor of Philosophy and Gender and Women Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of St. Andrews, and she is an executive editor of the Journal of Canadian Philosophy. Her main research interests are Kant’s practical philosophy, legal-political philosophy and its history, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of sex and love. In addition to her Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Theory (Oxford University Press, 2020), Varden has published many articles on a range of classical philosophical issues including Kant’s answer to the murderer at the door, private property, care relations, political obligations, and political legitimacy, as well as on applied issues such as privacy, poverty, non-human animals, and terrorism. The talk delivered here—“Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil”—on how theorize political evil, points both backward to a theme running through Sex, Love, and Gender and forward to a central theme in her new book project on Kant’s transformation of the social contract tradition. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Varden's talk - 'Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil' - at the Aristotelian Society on 22 March 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Nicolas Cornell is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He works in normative ethics, contract law, and private law theory. His writing has appeared both in philosophy journals — including “The Possibility of Preemptive Forgiving” (Philosophical Review, 2017) and “Wrongs, Rights, and Third Parties” (Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2015) — and in law reviews — including “Competition Wrongs” (Yale Law Journal, 2020), and “A Complainant-Oriented Approach to Unconscionability and Contract Law” (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 2016). He is currently working on a book manuscript on the relationship between rights and wronging, under contract with Harvard University Press. Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan, he was an assistant professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Cornell's talk - 'Gambling on Others and Relying on Others' - at the Aristotelian Society on 8 March 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Mary-Louise Gill is David Benedict Professor of Classics and Philosophy at Brown University, and works on ancient Greek philosophy, especially Plato’s later metaphysics and method and Aristotle’s natural philosophy and metaphysics. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, and previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh in Classics, Philosophy, and History & Philosophy of Science. She has held visiting positions at Dartmouth College, UCLA, UC Davis, Harvard, University of Paris-1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, and Peking University in Beijing; her fellowships include the Stanford Humanities Center, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is the author of Aristotle on Substance: the Paradox of Unity (Princeton, 1989), of an Introduction and co-translation Plato: Parmenides (Hackett, 1996), and of Philosophos: Plato’s Missing Dialogue (Oxford, 2012); and she coedited Self-Motion: From Aristotle to Newton (Princeton, 1994), Unity, Identity and Explanation in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Oxford, 1994), and Companion to Ancient Philosophy (Blackwell, 2006). She is currently working on various aspects of Aristotle’s hylomorphism, including his treatment of mind and thought in De Anima, and the culmination of his metaphysics in Metaphysics Lambda on the relation between human and divine substance. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Gill's talk - 'Aristotle’s Hylomorphism Reconceived' - at the Aristotelian Society on 22 February 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Barbara Sattler is professor for ancient and medieval philosophy at Bochum University, and has taught at St. Andrews, Yale, and Urbana-Champaign before. The main areas of her research are issues in metaphysics and natural philosophy in the ancient Greek world, especially in the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle. She focuses on the philosophical processes through which central concepts of metaphysics and natural philosophy, such as space or speed, arise in Greek antiquity. By showing that such concepts were originally spelt out in ways significantly different from the way they are today, she aims to make us aware both of the rich conceptual basis we often take for granted, as well as to sketch out possible alternative understandings. She is the author of The Concept of Motion in Ancient Greek Thought – Foundations in Logic, Method, and Mathematics (CUP 2020), and is currently writing a book on ancient notions of space. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Sattler's talk - 'Paradoxes as Philosophical Method and their Zenonian Origins' - at the Aristotelian Society on 1 February 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Lee Walters is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Southampton. Prior to joining Southampton, Lee studied philosophy at UCL and taught at Oxford. Lee’s main interests are in metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and philosophical Logic, with a particular emphasis on the philosophy of fiction. Lee has been an Associate Editor of Analysis; a trustee of the British Society of Aesthetics; has held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship; and has been a junior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, CEU, Budapest. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Walters' talk - 'The Linguistic Approach to Ontology' - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 January 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Leigh K. Jenco is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics. She received her PhD in political science at the University of Chicago, before teaching at Brown University and the National University of Singapore.  Her research works across the disciplinary platforms of political theory, global intellectual history, and Asian studies to demonstrate the value of Chinese thought for posing new questions of political life.  She has served as associate editor of the flagship journal American Political Science Review (2016-2020) and principal investigator for the Humanities in the European Research Area grant project "East Asian Uses of the European Past"  (2016-2019). She is the author of Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West (Oxford UP, 2015),  and Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao (Cambridge UP, 2010). Most recently, with Megan Thomas and Murad Idris, she co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Oxford UP, 2020). This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Jenco's talk - 'Moral Knowledge and Empirical Verification in Late Ming China' - at the Aristotelian Society on 16 November 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Adrian Haddock is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Stirling, and between 2017 and 2019 he was a Senior Research Fellow in the Forschungskolleg Analytic German Idealism (FAGI) at the University of Leipzig. His work centres on the idea of subjectivity, and on its significance for understanding the fundamental concerns of philosophy. He has written on action, perception, knowledge, and language. He is currently in the process of completing a book manuscript, entitled Subject and Object, and editing (with Rachael Wiseman) a collection of essays on the philosophy of G.E.M. Anscombe. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Haddock's talk - 'The Wonder of Signs' - at the Aristotelian Society on 2 November 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Tommy J. Curry is a Professor of Philosophy and holds the Personal Chair of Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are 19th century ethnology, Critical Race Theory & Black Male Studies. He is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press 2017), which won the 2018 American Book Award, and Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of Racial Empire (SUNY Press 2018), which recently won the Josiah Royce Prize for American Idealist Thought. He has also re-published the forgotten philosophical works of William Ferris as The Philosophical Treatise of William H. Ferris: Selected Readings from The African Abroad or, His Evolution in Western Civilization (Rowman & Littlefield 2016). In 2019 he became the editor of the first book series dedicated to the study of Black males entitled Black Male Studies: A Series Exploring the Paradoxes of Racially Subjugated Males on Temple University Press. Dr. Curry’s research has been recognized by Diverse as placing him among the Top 15 Emerging Scholars in the United States in 2018, and his public intellectual work earned him the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy’s Alain Locke Award in 2017. He is the past president of Philosophy Born of Struggle, one of the oldest Black philosophy organizations in the United States. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Curry's talk - 'Must there be an Empirical Basis for the Theorization of Racialized Subjects in Race-Gender Theory?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 19 October 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

As the first talk for the 2020-21 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year's Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Bill Brewer (King's College London) as the 113th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society's President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy. Bill Brewer is Susan Stebbing Professor of Philosophy at King's College London, having previously been Research Fellow at King’s College Cambridge, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and Professor of Philosophy at Warwick, and also a visiting professor at Brown and Berkeley. He is author of Perception and Reason (Oxford: OUP, 1999) and Perception and Its Objects (Oxford: OUP, 2011), and of many papers on perception, action, objects, and knowledge. He is co-editor of Spatial Representation (Oxford: OUP, 1999) and The Nature of Ordinary Objects (Cambridge: CUP, 2019). He works on Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics, and Epistemology, and is currently returning to an abiding interest in the objectivity of perceptual experience. He is co-editor of Philosophy, the journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Brewer's address - 'The Objectivity of Perception' - at the Aristotelian Society on 5 October 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

As the first talk for the 2020-21 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year's Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Bill Brewer (King's College London) as the 113th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society's President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy. Please visit our Council page for further information regarding the Society's past presidents. The 113th Presidential Address will be chaired by Helen Steward (Leeds) - 112th President of the Aristotelian Society.

Walter Dean works in philosophy of mathematics and mathematical and philosophical logic. He also has interests in theoretical computer science and the history and philosophy of computation. He is currently working on applications of Reverse Mathematics and computational complexity theory within philosophy and on the historical and foundational significance of Gödel’s completeness theorem. He is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick where he convenes the Mathematics and Philosophy degree. Before coming to Warwick, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Paris 7, following a PhD in Computer Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a PhD in Philosophy from Rutgers. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Dean's talk - 'On Consistency and Existence in Mathematics' - at the Aristotelian Society on 15 June 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Béatrice Han-Pile studied philosophy, history and literature at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) and was awarded a Fellowship from the Thiers Foundation while completing her doctoral thesis on Michel Foucault. Before coming to Essex, she taught in France at the Universities of Paris IV-Sorbonne, Reims and Amiens. She is the author of Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical (Stanford University Press, 2002). She has published mostly on Foucault, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, phenomenology (in particular Heidegger) and the philosophy of agency. In 2015-2018 she was Principal Investigator on a three-year AHRC-funded project on ‘The Ethics of Powerlessness: The Theological Virtues Today’ (EoP). She is currently working on medio-passive agency, both in itself and through the writings of early Christian thinkers (John Cassian and St Augustine) and of more recent authors such as Nietzsche, Foucault and Heidegger. She is also working on hope as a (medio-passive) virtue of powerlessness and on the conditions under which this theological virtue might afford us with appropriate ethical guidance in secular contexts. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Han-Pile's talk - 'Two Puzzles in the Early Christian Constitution of the Self: Reflections on Foucault’s Interpretation of John Cassian' - at the Aristotelian Society on 8 June 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Anna Mahtani is Associate Professor in philosophy at the London School of Economics. She did her PhD on vagueness at Sheffield, and then worked at Oxford and the Open University, before arriving at the LSE. She studies decision theory, formal epistemology, and the philosophy of language, and works at the intersection of these different disciplines. She is currently working on several projects: tracing the implications of Frege’s puzzle for various principles of welfare economics; analysing the phenomenon of ‘awareness growth’; and writing a book called The Objects of Credence. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Mahtani's talk - 'Dutch Book and Accuracy Theorems' - at the Aristotelian Society on 1 June 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Maria Rosa Antognazza is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. Educated at the Catholic University of Milan, she has held research and visiting fellowships in Italy, Germany, Israel, Great Britain and the USA, including a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, a two-year research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, and the Leibniz-Professorship at the University of Leipzig (Leibniz’s Alma Mater) in 2016. She served as Head of the King’s Philosophy Department from 2011/12 to 2014/15 and is the current Chair of the British Society for the History of Philosophy. Her research interests lie in the history of philosophy, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. Her publications include Leibniz on the Trinity and the Incarnation: Reason and Revelation in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press 2007); Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge University Press 2009; winner of the 2010 Pfizer Award); and Leibniz: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2016). She is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Leibniz (Oxford University Press 2018) and of early modern texts including Hugo Grotius, The Truth of the Christian Religion, London, 1743 [Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics] (Liberty Fund 2012) and (with Howard Hotson) Alsted and Leibniz on God, the Magistrate and the Millennium (Harrassowitz Verlag 1999). In addition, she has contributed numerous articles and chapters to refereed journals and collective volumes. Most recently, she has been awarded the 2019-2020 Mind Senior Research Fellowship for work on her book Thinking with Assent: Renewing a Traditional Account of Knowledge and Belief (forthcoming with Oxford University Press). This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Antognazza's talk - 'The Distinction of Kind between Knowledge and Belief' - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 May 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Derrick Darby is Henry Rutgers Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He discovered his passion for philosophy growing up in New York City’s Queensbridge public housing projects, as he reports in his TEDx talk Doing the Knowledge. After getting his undergraduate degree at Colgate University, he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. His work in social and political philosophy has focused on rights, inequality, and democracy, and generally examines how the lived experience and history of race and anti-black racism connects with theoretical and normative philosophical questions. He is the author of Rights, Race, and Recognition (Cambridge University Press, 2009). His most recent book, co-authored with historian John L. Rury, is The Color of Mind: Why the Origins of the Achievement Gap Matter for Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2018). His op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Detroit Free Press, The Newark Star Ledger, and elsewhere. He is the founding organizer of the Social Justice Solutions Research Collaboratory at Rutgers and directs its renowned Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Darby's talk - 'Rights Externalism and Racial Injustice' - at the Aristotelian Society on 11 May 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Nancy Cartwright is a methodologist and philosopher of the natural and human sciences, with special focus on causation, evidence and modelling. Her recent work has been on scientific evidence, objectivity and how to put theory to work. She is a Professor of Philosophy at Durham University and the University of California San Diego, having worked previously at Stanford University and the London School of Economics. Professor Cartwright is a former MacArthur fellow, a fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society (the oldest honorary academic society in the US), the Academia Europeae and Leopoldina (the German Society for Natural Science). She has won the Hempel Prize for lifetime achievement in philosophy of science and with Elliott Sober, the Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. She is Tsing Hua Honorary Distinguished Chair Professor in Taiwan and has been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of St Andrews and Southern Methodist University. Her latest books are Nature, the Artful Modeler and Improving Child Safety: deliberation, judgement and empirical research with Eileen Munro, Jeremy Hardie and Eleonora Montuschi. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Cartwright's talk - 'Why Trust Science?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 27 April 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Dana Kay Nelkin is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, and an Affiliate Professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. Her areas of research include moral psychology, ethics, bioethics, and philosophy of law. She is the author of Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 2011), and a number of articles on a variety of topics, including self-deception, friendship, the lottery paradox, psychopathy, forgiveness, moral luck, and praise and blame. She is also a co-editor of the The Ethics and Law of Omissions, The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility, and Forgiveness: New Essays. Her work in moral psychology includes participation in an interdisciplinary research collaboration of philosophers and psychologists, The Moral Judgements Project, which brings together normative and descriptive enquiries about the use of moral principles such as the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing and the Doctrine of Double Effect. Other roles include membership of the advisory board of the UC San Diego Institute for Practical Ethics, service as the North American representative to the Society of Applied Philosophy, and on the Academic Advisory Board of the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Nelkin's talk - 'Equal Opportunity' - at the Aristotelian Society on 30 March 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Andrew Bacon is an associate professor at the University of Southern California. His main interests are in metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. He has recently completed a book on vagueness entitled Vagueness and Thought, and is presently writing a textbook on higher-order logic aimed at metaphysicians. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Bacon's talk - 'Vagueness at Every Order' - at the Aristotelian Society on 16 March 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Alexander Douglas is a lecturer in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological, and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. Previously he taught at Heythrop College, University of London. He studies early modern rationalism, particularly various forms of Cartesianism and especially that of Spinoza. He is interested in the idea that human reason can access a reality not visible to the senses and aims to trace some of its history, involving the history of formal logic and theology as well as of philosophy. He is the author of Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism: Philosophy and Theology (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is also interested in critiques of political economy and is the author of The Philosophy of Debt (Routledge, 2015). He is currently writing a book that draws on Spinoza’s philosophy to present the thesis that ‘special hope’ – hope that exceeds scientifically-warranted belief – is both a personal and political virtue. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Douglas' talk - 'Spinoza’s Unquiet Acquiescentia' - at the Aristotelian Society on 17 February 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Philip Goff is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. His work is focused on how to integrate consciousness into our scientific worldview, and he defends panpsychism on the grounds that it avoids the difficulties faced by the more traditional options of physicalism and dualism. He has published an academic book on this topic – Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (Oxford University Press) – as well as a book aimed at a general audience – Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (Rider in UK, Pantheon in US). Goff has also published in newspapers and magazines, such the Guardian, Aeon, the Times Literary Supplement and Philosophy Now. He blogs at Conscience and Consciousness and can be found on Twitter. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Goff's talk - 'Panpsychism and Free Will' - at the Aristotelian Society on 3 February 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Emily Thomas is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Durham University. Prior to this she obtained a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and held a NWO grant at the University of Groningen. She has published widely on the history of metaphysics, especially space and time. In 2018 she published two books: a monograph Absolute Time: Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics (Oxford University Press) and a collection Early Modern Women on Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press). Her next book, on the philosophy of travel, is forthcoming in 2020. She has recently started a new, AHRC-funded project exploring time in early twentieth century British metaphysics. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Thomas' talk - 'Time and Subtle Pictures in the History of Philosophy' - at the Aristotelian Society on 20 January 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Meena Dhanda is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Politics at the University of Wolverhampton. She is an advocate of socially engaged philosophy. Her research focus is on understanding injustices, prejudices and misrepresentations suffered by powerless groups, which she pursues through transdisciplinary studies, specifically connecting caste, class, gender and race. Her work includes: The Negotiation of Personal Identity and Reservations for Women, besides papers in international journals, book chapters and reference works. She holds a doctorate from Oxford University, where she was a Commonwealth Scholar and a Rhodes Junior Research Fellow. As PI, she has led three transdisciplinary research projects: 1) for the University of Wolverhampton (Black and Minority Ethnic Students’ Experience), 2) for the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (Caste Aside: Dalit Punjabi Identity and Experience) and 3) for the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) (Caste in Britain) leading a consortium of experts from SOAS, Manchester Metropolitan, Goldsmiths, Middlesex and Wolverhampton. Her two EHRC reports (Dhanda et al 2014a and Dhanda et al 2014b) were used by the UK Government Equalities Office in its public consultation on how caste discrimination must be legally addressed in Britain. Professor Meena Dhanda is an executive member of SWIP UK and the BPA. She is placed on Amnesty International’s Suffragette Spirit Map of Britain (2018) in recognition of her long-standing commitment to anti-discrimination research and practice. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Dhanda's talk - 'Philosophical Foundations of Anti-Casteism' - at the Aristotelian Society on 9 December 2019. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.