Colloquia

January 8, 2025 | 5:00PM – 7:00PM Location TBD & Zoom RSVP HERE   Join us on Wednesday, January 8, 2025 for a talk by Josh Hunt, Syracuse University, as part of the History, Philosophy, and Science of Science (HPASS) speaker series. Location TBD.   On the Constitutive Aims of Science   I recast the debate between scientific realists and antirealists as a dispute over the constitutive aims of science. Drawing on accounts of epistemic normativity, I propose a general method for identifying the constitutive aims of an activity, understood as minimal criteria for success. Applying this method, I argue that...

January 10, 2025 | 4:00PM – 6:00PM Location TBD & Zoom RSVP HERE   Join us on January 10, 2025 for a colloquium with T. M. Scanlon, Harvard University. The talk will take place from 4:00PM – 6:00PM with a reception to follow. Location TBD.     Contractualism and Intuitionism   A reexamination of the contractualist theory of right and wrong put forward in What We Owe to Each Other and subsequent papers, considering the reasons for finding the view appealing as well as important problems with it, including overdemandingness, the charge of circularity, and the wholesale exclusion of interpersonal aggregation. A...

January 17, 2025 | 4:00PM – 6:00PM Location TBD & Zoom RSVP HERE   Join us on Friday, January 17, 2025 for a talk by Rose Novick, University of Washington, as part of the History, Philosophy, and Science of Science (HPASS) speaker series. Location TBD.   One Kind of Adaptationism   There is only kind of adaptationism: explanatory adaptationism. Explanatory adaptationism claims that adaptation is the “big question” in evolutionary biology, and natural selection is the “big answer”. In recent decades, philosophers of biology have largely come to agree, first, that explanatory adaptationism is only one kind of adaptationism among many...

January 24, 2025 | 4:00PM – 6:00PM PT Zoom   Join us on January 24, 2025 for a virtual colloquium with Stephen Yablo, MIT. The talk will take place from 4:00PM – 6:00PM PT on Zoom.   Talk title, abstract, and speaker bio coming soon.     Join our mailing list! Sign up for our mailing list to stay up-to-date with future UCLA Philosophy events, conferences, and colloquia! SIGN UP HERE