Podcast appearances and mentions of john locke lectures

Rae Langton is Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Newnham College. Born and raised in India, she studied Philosophy at Sydney and Princeton, and has taught philosophy in Australia, Scotland, the USA, and England. She held professorships at Edinburgh 1999-2004 and at MIT 2004-2013. She works in moral and political philosophy, speech act theory, philosophy of law, the history of philosophy, metaphysics, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (Oxford University Press, 1998), and Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification (Oxford University Press, 2009). Her best known articles are ‘Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts’, ‘Duty and Desolation’, and ‘Defining Intrinsic’ (co-authored with David Lewis). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013, to the British Academy in 2014, and to the Academia Europeae in 2017. She is one of five Cambridge faculty on Prospect Magazine’s voted list of 50 ‘World Thinkers 2014’, chosen for ‘engaging most originally and profoundly with the central questions of the world today’. In 2015 she gave the John Locke Lectures, currently being finalised for publication. She plans to give the H.L.A.Hart Lecture in 2019. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Langton's talk - 'Empathy and First Personal Imagining' - at the Aristotelian Society on 12 November 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

First lecture of the 2009 John Locke Lectures entitled 'Being Realistic about Reasons.

This is the first lecture in the 2008 John Locke Lecture series entitled 'Logic, Normativity, and Rational Revisability'.

This is the second lecture in the 2008 John Locke Lecture series entitled 'Logic, Normativity, and Rational Revisability'.

This is the third lecture in the 2008 John Locke Lecture series entitled 'Logic, Normativity, and Rational Revisability'.

This is the fourth lecture in the 2008 John Locke Lecture series entitled 'Logic, Normativity, and Rational Revisability'.

This is the fifth lecture in the 2008 John Locke Lecture series entitled 'Logic, Normativity, and Rational Revisability'.

This is the sixth lecture in the 2008 John Locke Lecture series entitled 'Logic, Normativity, and Rational Revisability'.

The second lecture will begin with Frank Jackson's knowledge argument. The argument and the responses to it turn on assumptions about the nature of the contents of belief and the objects of knowledge. I will argue that one cannot escape the anti-materialist conclusion of the knowledge argument by adopting a fine-grained conception of content.

One strategy for responding to the knowledge argument exploits an analogy between knowledge of phenomenal experience and essentially indexical or self-locating knowledge. I think this is a promising analogy, but I will argue that before we apply it, we need to get clearer about the contents of self-locating belief and knowledge.

The fourth lecture will begin with a variation on the thought experiment about Mary that is the focus of the knowledge argument, using it to develop the analogy between self-locating knowledge and knowledge of phenomenal experience. The success of the analogy will turn on the rejection of an assumption that is intuitively plausible, but that I will argue should be rejected.

Russell held that we must be acquainted with the constituents of the contents of our thoughts, and remnants of this doctrine persist in the work of a number of more recent philosophers. Our knowledge of our own phenomenal experience is supposed to be a paradigm of acquaintance, but acquaintance is sometimes explained in a way that implies that it involves knowledge of the essential nature of a thing or property.

The sixth lecture will try to resolve a familiar tension between externalism about mental content and the assumption that we have some kind of privileged knowledge of the contents of our own thoughts. I will look at the "slow switching" scenarios, and consider what they show about the role of propositional content in characterizing mental states.

Our topic is a subject's knowledge of his own phenomenal experience and of the content of his thought, but I will approach the topic from the outside, treating the subject as an object in the world. The first lecture will characterize, in a general way, this externalist strategy, and look at some familiar examples of it in the recent philosophical tradition.