What's So Great About Gratitude?
Emer O'Hagan (Professor, Philosophy)
Friday, March 10th @ 7:00pm

Many claims are made about the value of gratitude. In this talk, I will briefly outline some characterizations of gratitude in moral life in Western philisophical tradition. Turning to contemporary views, I'll distinguish between two different kinds of gratitude: gratitude to persons (for example, one's loyal friend), and gratitude for the conditions one finds oneself in (for example, for having a warm winter coat on a cold day). Are these different kinds of gratitude related? If not, are they both actually kinds of gratitude? I'll suggest that they are conceptually related, but they play different roles in the development in character and virtue.

Can Psychedelics Really Make People Better?
Sarah Hoffman (Professor, Philosophy)
Friday, February 10th @ 7:00pm

Scientific evidence of the potential of psychedelic drugs for the treatment of a variety of mental health conditions abounds. Data suggests that psychedelic use is associated with lowered risks of criminality and anti-social behaviors. And there is a long history of the religious and ritual use of these substances around the world. The positive transformative power of psychedelic experience seems well supported by these facts, which further suggests that psychedelics have the capacity to make people better, both in terms of health and morality. In this talk I explore some ways we might account for this and suggest a role that the aesthetic aspects of psychedelic experience might play in its transformtion.

Fame, Heroes, Memory, and the Stories We Tell
Leslie Howe (Professor, Philosophy)
Friday, Jan. 13th @ 7:00pm

 The heroes of the past sought fame as a means of securing both personal glory and an enduring place in history. We can understand this quest for narrative immortality as a manifestation of the human existential struggle for permanence of identity against the oblivion of time and memory. It can also be an attempt to assert agency into a future in which one no longer participates. This talk explores some of the motivations for fame and recognition, as well as its futility.

Professor Emer O'Hagan

Many people find life to be absurd, at least sometimes. It seems that life is without point or meaning, and yet of utter significance. Can this attitude - that life is absurd - be explained? Are there good reasons to conclude that life is absurd?  In this talk I will outline the main arguments for and against and the claim that life is absurd and, I hope, spark a lively and fruitful discussion.

Professor Valery Chirkov
(Department of Psychology, University of Saskatchewan)

I will start this presentation with a discussion of some problems of psychological research that limit psychologists’ capacities to move this science forward. Certain problems will be attributed to the dominance of positivism, which sometime has been labeled ‘statistism’ or ‘statistical positivism’. Main features of this form of positivism and their consequences for success of psychological research will be discussed. The realist philosophy will be introduced as an alternative position and its advantages for psychological investigations will be elaborated.

This question, from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, captures the deep divide in classical theories of love. According to the Erosic model of love, “I love you because you’re beautiful,” or, the lover appraises the value of the beloved. According to the Agapic model, “You’re beautiful because I love you,” or, the lover bestows value onto the beloved. Both models correctly capture certain intuitions about the nature of love, but are also defective in other respects. I will survey the strengths and weaknesses of both theories, and consider the merits of various compromise positions.

Professor Sarah Nickel
(Department of Indigenous Studies, University of Saskatchewan)

When did Indigenous women become feminists and what did that look like? What can 20th century Indigenous women’s political organizations tell us about Indigenous feminism and the nature of Indigenous politics? Here, I will explore the ways in which Indigenous women in the 1960s-1980s combatted their unique gendered and racialized political suppression through interactions with mainstream second wave feminism and the male-dominated Indigenous rights movement.

Professor Will Buschert

In this talk I’ll be exploring some of the moral implications of (highly anthropomorphic, socially interactive, possibly artificially intelligent) sex robots. Some experts predict that such robots are a near-future possibility. According David Levy, for instance, by 2050 sex robots will be commonplace and socially accepted. And, at least on Levy’s analysis, this will be a good thing in that they will provide sexual and emotional gratification to millions of people who, for whatever reason, are unable or unwilling to enter into real life intimate relationships. Others are not nearly so optimistic. For instance, Kathleen Richardson and other proponents of the Campaign Against Sex Robots argue that sex robots ought to be outlawed, on the grounds that they will reinforce the objectification of women and children and replicate essentially exploitative client-john relationships. In my view, there may be no easy answers in this domain, but we probably can’t avoid asking the questions.

Professor Charles Smith 
(Political Studies, St, Thomas More College) 

This talk will take up a variety of issues in political theory, applying them to our current context as we face a federal election.

Humans seem to be free, and moral responsibility may require free will. But, neuroscientific evidence suggests behaviour is determined by physical processes. (How) can we be free if our behaviour is determined by unconscious brain processes? After briefly objecting to several proposed answers to this question, I offer a proposal that secures autonomous agency yet remains consistent with microphysical determinism.

We often say that the self-deceiver lies to him or herself, but a liar knows the truth that he or she denies to another. How can one person be both liar and dupe? This apparent paradox has led many to either deny that self-deception is possible or to attempt to resolve the paradox in a way that also ends up eliminating the phenomenon. Yet, self-deception seems a clearly recognisable, and constant, feature of our daily lives. This talk will explore the problem of what self-deception is, how we do it, and why.

Professor Eric Dayton

Can the existence of evil be reconciled with the existence of an all-good, omnipotent, all-knowing God? This talk will present the traditional argument known as the problem of evil, and will consider the problem in relation to the nature of belief and rational judgement, and the understanding of morality

Professor Pierre-Francois Noppen 
(Philosophy, St. Thomas More College)

To many progressive thinking appears to be in a deadlock. Have we exhausted the critical resources of the Enlightenment? Has our nature finally caught up with our aspirations? Or is the world we have created simply out of hand? This talk will examine recent arguments for the rebooting of the Enlightenment. At issue will be the question of Enlightenment’s blind spots and some resources available to progressive thinking.

Professor Avi Akkerman 
(Department of Geography and Planning)

Some recent reflections upon the built environment have related urban design with what has been termed Dionysian and Apollonian dispositions of the arts. The Dionysian is an artistic expression that emphasizes time or temporal flows as its medium, and these include poetry and other literary forms, music, or dance. The Apollonian is an artistic expression that emphasizes space, such as painting, sculpture, or architecture. The Dionysian often represents femininity, while the Apollonian often represents masculinity. Where does urban design or urban planning fit? This question is not of a merely scholastic nature. The Philosophical Urbanism of Walter Benjamin has shown almost a hundred years ago that there is linkage between city-form and mind. Benjamin points out that this linkage suggests a psychoanalytic discourse related to foundational gender aspects in the process of urban design. In the contemporary milieu of urban society, policy and politics, such a discourse has its own significance. Its implications upon gender representation in the built environment, i.e. our own city-form, are of particular significance.

Professor William Buschert

Ever since the term “robot” was first introduced by Karel Čapek in 1920 science fiction has been preparing us to believe that robots are capable of morally bad behaviour. Yet while fictional robots are often portrayed as fully-fledged moral agents, capable of self-directed, autonomous action and possessing distinctive moral character, many people continue to believe that, in actuality, robots will never be capable of ‘real’ moral agency. For many years this was an essentially speculative, ‘merely philosophical’ topic. In recent years, however, it has assumed increasing practical significance. In the already-upon-us world of driverless cars, military robots, and automated financial software systems, questions about how (or whether) morality can be programmed into machines are becoming more and more acute. This talk will explore some of those questions, including questions about what the investigation of machine ethics might be able to tell us about the nature of morality generally.

Professor Sarah Hoffman

Our world is saturated in drugs. From prescribed medications, alcohol, caffeine and nicotine, to stigmatized and criminally controlled substances, it is hard to imagine a life untouched in some way by drugs. The problems caused by drug addiction are impossible to see as anything but gravely serious, even tragic. But are psychoactive drugs always negative and threatening? Might they sometimes enhance autonomy or allow individuals to live more authentically? In this talk I take up this issue and survey the complicated conceptual terrain revealed by reflecting on freedom and compulsion, autonomy and responsibility, and artificiality and authenticity through the lens of drug use and addiction.

 

Matthew Dean

Am I writing these words of my own free will? I endorse the activity as consistent with my past actions: I am not acting out of character. My actions do not appear externally caused by illness, phobia, intoxication, or threats. My actions feel internally caused and free from coercion. By any common definition of free will, then, my actions count as free. However, hard determinism is one side of a millennia-old debate within philosophy that argues that because I am not an uncaused cause, that all my future behavior is the result of previous causes, free will is an illusion. Said another way, I may will how I act, but I may not will what I will (Schopenhauer). Hard determinism's thesis has unsettling conclusions: the decisions one makes are not a matter of the will, there is no metaphysical "I" and moral responsibility may be impossible. I will present recent arguments for and against the existence of free will, with a particular focus on the consequences of each for moral responsibility, criminal justice, and interpersonal relationships.

Professor Sarah Hoffman

Behaviours considered vices in many quarters cause a lot of social problems and harms to health. Many arise in part because activities like drug use and sex work are criminalized, and the people involved in them lack information and strategies to protect themselves. Harm reduction approaches assume that people will engage in these risky but pleasurable behaviours despite social ostracization; they seek to prevent avoidable harms and nonjudgementally arm people with protective information whether through safe injection sites, provision of condoms, needle exchanges, workshops on safer sex or drug use or other related things. These approaches have been criticized as encouraging dangerous and socially negative behaviours. In this talk I will consider the arguments in this area, arguing myself that harm reduction strategies are the wise and moral thing to do. 

"Freedom, Responsibility and Morality"

Professor Emer O’Hagan

If we don’t freely choose our actions, can we reasonably be held responsible for what we do?  In this talk I will discuss some of the relations between freedom, responsibility, and morality. I will focus on those theories of freedom that suggest that freedom is nothing more than being moved by one's deepest desires, or deepest self.  While such views of freedom have merit, they have been objected to on the grounds that the deepest desires of some persons could be "insane." This leads us to consider whether or not true freedom requires morality, and how we should think about the nature of moral responsibility.

"Can We Learn About the World by Just Thinking?"

Geordie McComb, PhD Candidate, University of Toronto

The answer seems to be no.  After all, you can't find out what a pineapple tastes like without tasting one.  Yet scientists and philosophers have often learned about the world using "thought experiments"—that is, just by thinking in a certain way.  How could this be?  To illustrate the problem, consider a couple of examples.  First, do masses fall twice as fast when they're twice as heavy?  No, said Galileo, they fall at the same speed, and to find this out we need only imagine a couple falling stones and do a little reasoning.  Second, if a fetus is a person, and if all people have a right to life, is abortion obviously impermissible?  No, says philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, and we can come to see this just by thinking about a certain imaginary violinist.  Over the past 25 years, philosophers have argued for a number of fascinating accounts of how we can use these and other thought experiments to learn about the world.  We will have a look at some of the most prominent accounts, and discuss several important objections.

The role philosophy plays in education is often unexamined, despite philosophy’s historical and methodological connection to inquiry based learning. Given the importance of education to the community, many philosophers care very deeply about the subject. Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey (to name just a few) each took education to be a fundamentally important philosophical endeavor. That said, it is not just up to philosophers to examine the role of philosophy in education. This is so, in part, because the inquiry process is most effective in social matters when the community of inquiry is widely inclusive.

In this talk I will suggest that a potential risk of not examining the role of philosophical inquiry in education is that our standards of education – the expectations we have of ourselves to affect our own lives, for instance – may thereby become compromised. Furthermore, when education is the topic of philosophical inquiry, one benefit is that the inquiry process itself becomes a measure of the degree of freedom a community agrees upon having, resulting in the clarification of that community's educational standards. I support this hypothesis by way of empirical evidence drawn from the experience of teaching Philosophy in Education: Introduction to Philosophy for Children.

Dr. Alex Beldan

There are commonly taken to be two kinds of reasons for action. There are, on the one hand, the reasons that best explain our actions, often called motivating reasons. Motivating reasons are the reasons for which we do act. These reasons are commonly taken to be elements of the psychology of the person acting – the person's desires and beliefs. On the other hand, there are reasons which justify our actions, often called normative reasons. These are the reasons for which we should act, which are usually taken to be facts of the matter. The different natures of motivating and normative reasons lead some to conclude that normative reasons, if they are facts of the matter, aren't really reasons at all. This creates a problem for those, like myself, who think that there are moral facts that give us normative reasons to do certain actions, regardless of what any person is actually motivated to do. In my talk, I will examine and discuss a number of possible solutions to this problem.

Professor Eric Dayton

Granted that there is an art to living well, can (or even should) one make one’s life into a work of art? Attempting to answer this question, I will canvas some views on what could constitute a legitimate aim of living, draw some distinctions, and in the end argue that there is a confusion between the idea that 'life has to be worked at to be good' and 'that life has to become a work of art in order to be good’.

Professor Emer O’Hagan

Assumptions about human nature are prevalent and greatly influence the shape inquiry takes in numerous disciplines. Yet it is not entirely clear what we mean when we use the phrase “human nature”. In this talk I will consider several different views of what “human nature” could mean and possibly be, as well as objections to these views. I will frame my discussion of the concept by posing two questions: If we were to understand human nature, what good would it do us? If we failed to understand human nature, how might we be disadvantaged?

Professor Ria Jenkins
(Department of Philosophy, St Thomas More College)

Professor Len Findlay
(Department of English, University of Saskatchewan)

In this talk I will explore the philosophical underpinnings of the Occupy Movement with three goals in mind:

To see how this Movement stands up to philosophical scrutiny, bearing in mind that there are many forms of such scrutiny;

To explore how philosophy stands up to activist scrutiny, bearing in mind Marx’s celebrated stricture in his Theses on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have in their various ways merely interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it”;

And to suggest how philosophy and social activism face a common enemy--that neoliberalism currently working so hard in Canada to discourage both the kind of independent reflection that philosophy demands and nourishes and that kind of critically engaged citizenship the Occupy Movement seeks to model and propagate.

But, are these views in conflict? Does a policy of recognition, demanding that we respect differences among citizens, undermine our attempts to insure that all are treated as equals? These questions are the focus of tonight’s discussion.

Professor Ken Norman (College of Law, U of S)

The Supreme Court of Canada currently is deliberating  the Whatcott case.  During the arguments several of the judges peppered counsel with questions revealing a strong distaste for s.14 of The Saskatchewan Human Rights Code’s project of protecting minorities from hateful speech.  For the purposes of our discussion let’s look at one of William Whatcott’s pamphlets, “Sodomites in our Public Schools” which asserts: “If Saskatchewan’s sodomites have their way, your school board will be celebrating buggery too!” and, “Our acceptance of homosexuality and our toleration of its promotion in our school system will lead to the early death and morbidity of many children”.  So far, in the three tiers of adjudication leading to the Supreme Court, the answer to the question whether this message amounts to hatred that can be limited by a human rights code without infringing freedom of expression under the Charter has been yes, yes and no. The arguments in the national controversy surrounding Whatcott as to the wisdom of limiting any speech deserve our attention.

Søren Kierkegaard was the first existentialist philosopher and a trenchant critic of the superficialities and excesses of modernism. His critique of modernity has made him a favourite of postmodernists but he would have given them equally short shrift. This talk will present an overview of Kierkegaard's critique of triviality, bombast, and pusillanimity in philosophy, religion, and society, a critique that remains as pertinent to us as it was to 1840s Europe. 

"Truth, Fiction and the Value of Literature"

Professor Rhonda Anderson

What kind of value, if any, is there in reading fiction?  In this talk I explore two possibilities for the purported of value of literature: the claim that it develops moral knowledge and the claim that it develops cognitive knowledge.  Neither of these views is without problems, however.  While some have argued that literature is useless, I won’t defend such a strong claim, but will instead suggest that the subjectivity of the experience of reading literature makes it difficult or impossible to identify the value of fiction.

"Lots of Living to Do, Death at any Moment: Time in Narratives of Cancer and Aging" 

Professor Ulrich Teucher, 
Department of Psychology, University of Saskatchewan

While cancer may strike at any time, it is primarily an illness of people growing older. Yet, hardly anything is known about the difficulties with which cancer patients struggle as they try to make meaning of their experiences. Particularly as cancer patients grow older, time becomes more of the essence: the uncertain certainties of endings – of lives and cancer narratives – can elicit a new generativity, rebelliousness, and sense of time. Bonds, whether established or newly created, familial or in work, are celebrated and extended into a transcendent, timeless future (“The end is my Beginning”, Terzani 2008). The qualitative study that I will be reporting about is grounded in an interdisciplinary framework of concepts of aging, time, and mortality, using Interpretive Description (Thorne 2008), informed by Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith 2009) and a Therapeutic Psychopoetics (Teucher 2000), to explore interviews with 20 aging cancer patients and advocate for a better understanding of their needs. 

Philosophy has, throughout its past, been profoundly marked out from other fields of study by the peculiar roles skepticism has played within it. From its role in ancient philosophy to the varied roles skepticism has played in early modern philosophy, skepticism has been embraced or exploited as a part of philosophy itself.  But it has also been exploited, for both religious and also for more secularly humanist ends, against philosophy. In no other and for no other discipline has scepticism had or could it plausibly have any such roles as these. In this talk, then, we will be examining critically each of these diverse roles skepticism has had in relation to philosophy, as well as the positions philosophers and the critics of philosophy have attempted to provide in opposition to skepticism. We hope that through such an examination we may be better able to understand and appreciate not only what philosophy is and has been but also of what it can still meaningfully be.

Professor Eric Dayton

Food, its preparation and consumption, plays a central role in human life. It is both a cultural achievement and a human necessity; it is a central source of pleasure, necessary for health, and undergirds diverse forms of human cultural flowering. It also disappears into the ordinary everydayness of living, blinding us to its significance for living well. I will attempt to bring that significance into view through philosophical illumination.

Professor Heidi Epstein, 
Department of Religious Studies, St. Thomas More College 

This talk explores the creative tensions, problems and opportunities endemic to using human language – philosophical and scriptural – to name and conceptualize God. Particular attention will be devoted to the socio-cultural repercussions that issue from literalist approaches to religious language, as evidenced, for example, in fundamentalist attitudes toward women, warfare and the environment. 

Professor Peter Alward 
Department of Philosophy, University of Lethbridge

Professor Emer O'Hagan

In Canada informed consent to treatment is both a legal requirement and professional standard governing clinical encounters between health care professionals and patients. Clinical encounters involve the disclosure of risks, benefits and any alternatives to the proposed test or treatment. In my presentation I will argue that the Breast Cancer Screening Program fails to include the relevant information that would allow women to provide truly informed consent for this test.

Professor Emer O’Hagan

Do our obligations to animals extend to our not killing and eating them? If so, on what grounds? In this talk I will outline some of the different arguments for vegetarianism, concentrating on the question of what grounds our obligations to animals and how this ground shapes our understanding of their proper (and improper) treatment. 

Derek Postnikoff 

What is critical thinking? Why should we think critically? By considering some answers to these questions, we will take the first steps towards becoming critical thinkers. In particular, the discussion will focus on several examples of fallacies, or ways that reasoning can go wrong. 

Professor William Buschert 

Rachel Loewen Walker

There are two sides to every story: on the one hand, feminists have fought hard for a woman’s right to control her own body, and on the other hand, they have argued that bodies are policed by embedded norms of femininity and masculinity. Does today’s empowered woman freely choose plastic surgery, or have gender regulations tricked her into a false freedom? 

Professor Howard Woodhouse

The nature of academic freedom is not well understood either within the academy or in society at large. Academic freedom is a necessary condition for the advancement and dissemination of shared knowledge and intimately connected to the public interest. As a form of  individual liberty, it also draws upon a tradition of collective freedom, which is particularly important as universities are currently besieged by the "market model of education."  Some time will be spent during the presentation critically analyzing the market model.

We spend much of our time making evaluations. We frequently express likes and dislikes about movies and art. We often disapprove of the way people behave. We have opinions about whether our teachers were any good, about whether assisted suicide should be legalized and about how animals should be treated.

Sometimes people claim that such value judgments – especially those about art and morality – are relative. But what does this claim mean? Is it that our evaluations are based on personal feelings? Or that they merely reflect the views of our society or culture?

This evening’s talk will look at these questions: what does it means to say that morality is relative? and is it true that morality is relative in some sense?

Famous existentialist philosophers include Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir. The common thread running through their work is the idea that human beings are free to choose how to shape their future. This lecture will deal specifically with Sartre’s existentialism and his depiction of moments of choice and stress in human reality. Sartre focuses on the ways we feel anxiety in the face of realization that we are free. He analyzes self-deception, a tool we utilize in coping with a future that is overwhelmingly filled with various possibilities. I will explore the basic concepts found in his work and show how they apply to everyday situations.

Presenter: Professor William Buschert

Presenters: Professors Howard Woodhouse, Mark Flynn, Ed Thompson, Bob Regnier (The University of Saskatchewan Process Philosophy Research Unit)

Presenter: Professor Emer O'Hagan

The topic of this presentation is informed consent to medical treatment. The presentation is designed to clarify the concept of informed consent, and to provide a forum for a discussion of some of the ethical issues faced by those who wish to be fully involved in decisions concerning their own health care, and the care of their family members.

In 1925 John Scopes was put on trial for teaching the theory of evolution in a high school in Tennessee. This became known as the “Scopes Monkey Trial”, and it was all the more famous because it pitted the two top lawyers of the day against one another: Clarence Darrow for the defense versus William Jennings Bryan. (The story of this trial was told in the film, Inherit the Wind, with Spencer Tracy playing Clarence Darrow.)
80 years later, in 2005, a similar trial took place, this time in Dover, Pennsylvania. Here the school board was sued for including the teaching of the theory of intelligent design - the view that the world was created by an intelligent God - in the high school science curriculum.

Together these two trials raised questions about freedom of speech and the separation of church and state, and generated a lot of discussion about what was or wasn’t a scientific theory. The biologist Richard Dawkins has argued that evolutionary theory offers the correct view of the origins of the world, although he recognizes that the case for intelligent design has had a long history and that many people have believed that God created the universe because they have accepted “some version of the ancient Argument from Design.”

In this talk we will look at this ancient argument, why it has always had considerable appeal and why some have rejected it.

This talk will discuss various aspects of the problem of punishment and the theories explaining why we punish.

Presenter: Professor T.Y. Henderson

This talk considers a controversy of long standing in Christian theology, namely whether morality is necessarily related to religion, or whether the relationship of morality to religion is merely a historical one. This sort of problem was first noticed by Plato. There are defenders on both sides. I will not take a posistion on either side, but will try to make the opposing views clear and to look at the implications of each. I will do this by examining the relationships among certain concepts, such as omnipotence (infinite power), omnibenevolence (infinite goodness) and logical necessity. The audience will be asked to consider which view is most consistent with a traditional conception of Christianity. No attempt will be made to determine whether the arguments examined would apply to any other religion, or to unusual versions of Christianity, such as those defended by Kierkegaard or Paul Tillich. I will also consider, briefly, whether it would be necessary for a reasonable person to give up a belief that morality is objective if the relationship between morality and religion is not a necessary one.

No attempt will be made to examine or to solve all of the philosophical problems involved in the study of religion or theology, such as (a) whether God's existence can be proved, (b) whether free will can be reconciled with God's omniscience, (c) whether the Problem of Evil can be solved within the framework of traditional Christianity, and so on. All of these and many more are interesting issues in the philosophical study of religion, but are not directly related to the topic of tonight's discussion.