Digest Week 4 Hilary Term 2023
HT23, Week 4 (5th-11th February)
If you have entries for the weekly Digest, please send information to admin@philosophy.ox.ac.uk by midday, Wednesday the week before the event.
Notices - other Philosophy events, including those taking place elsewhere in the university and beyond
General Linguistics Seminar
Hosted by Víctor Acedo-Matellán and Daniel Altshuler
Title: Pragmatic sociolinguistics: Formalizing the social world
Speaker: Heather Burnett (CNRS – Université Paris Cité)
The seminar will take place at 5:15pm in Room 2 of the Taylorian Institute
Per Se Ordered Series and Aquinas' Fifth Way
Monday 4th week (6th February), 15:00, Worcester College, £3 entry or £10 for annual membership
Dr Gaven Kerr will be giving a lecture on ‘Per Se Ordered Series and Aquinas' Fifth Way'.
Dr Kerr, currently a lecturer in philosophy at St Patrick's Pontifical University, is an accomplished Thomist who has published two books on the philosophies of Aquinas: ‘Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Creation', and ‘Aquinas's Way to God: The Proof in De Ente et Essentia' as well as his PhD thesis ‘The Metaphysics of St Thomas Aquinas and Neo-Theomistic Realism' alongside a plethora of articles and book chapters.
Aquinas' fifth way, commonly known as the design argument, relies upon a distinction between per accidens and per se ordered causal series – that is, those series which can and those which cannot continue forever – to show that ordered creation must ultimately be attributable to God. Dr Kerr will be speaking on the role which per se ordered series have in this argument for the existence of God.
Hegel Reading Group
We shall be meeting on Tuesdays 6-7.30 pm on Skype; please email louise.braddock@philosophy.ox.ac.uk for the Skype link.
This term and the next we are reading Hegel's Anthropology, in the ‘Philosophy of Mind' (translation is by Wallace and Miller) but we will work from the Michael Inwood revision (OUP 2007). We are starting (in 1st Week) from para 377, eventually getting to the end at para 412 (we will not read the Zuzatse in the sessions).
The reading is posted each week on hegelinoxford.wordpress.com
Gadfly Reading Group
focusing on the writings of Plato
Meet on Tuesdays during term time, 7:30pm at St John's College
Reading: TBC
“I am the gadfly of the Athenian people” - Socrates, in Plato's Apology
The Gadfly Club was founded because we believe that dialogue is the principal and most effective method of understanding ourselves and the world around us. We thus read Plato's dialogue not just as a model of dialogue, nor only for his philosophical insights; we use his dialogues as a springboard to discuss the real and living problems they present. This is why, after an hour or more of live-reading, we head to the only place friends and philosophers must go – the pub!
We encourage all – especially those who don't consider themselves ‘students of philosophy' – to come and join us, hoping to remain true to the main desire of the OSM – that of stimulating inter-disciplinary engagement.
Jaeggi Reading Group
Text: Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation, trans Neuhouser/Smith (Columbia UP, 2014). German editions 2005/2016: Entfremdung.
The English text is available electronically via SOLO.
Friday 1.30-3.00pm HT 2023 Weeks 1 to 8
Venue: Worcester College, Le May Seminar Room