Friday, September 52:00pm Conference on Rationalism & Monism  …
Selfridge 2025 will conclude with a two-day Selfridge Workshop on "Post-Avicennan Philosophy", which is a theme that represents much of Prof. Adamson's recent research focus. The workshop will include presentations by Prof. Peter Adamson, Prof. Bligh Somma (Fordham University),…
Selfridge 2025 will conclude with a two-day Selfridge Workshop on "Post-Avicennan Philosophy", which is a theme that represents much of Prof. Adamson's recent research focus. The workshop will include presentations by Prof. Peter Adamson, Prof. Bligh Somma (Fordham University),…
About the Lecture: According to a long-standing, but now widely discredited, narrative about philosophy in the Islamic world, it more or less ends with the commentaries of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in the 12th century. In fact, philosophy continued to be pursued with great…
In this lecture, Professor Adamson will focus on a skeptical argument stating that animals have a different perspective on the world from humans. Since there is no reason to prefer the human perspective on the world to animal perspectives, one should suspend judgment about the…
In July 1656, Bento (Baruch) de Spinoza was given the harshest herem (ban or ostracism) ever issued by the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community. The text of the ban rains curses down upon the young man, for his “abominable heresies and monstrous deeds”. Unlike other bans issued…
Abstract: Kant’s key question driving his Critique of Pure Reason is, as he wrote to Herz, ‘On whatground rests the relation of that in us which is called representation to the object?’ Kantidentified key problems about sensation, perception and cognition, which ultimately…
Professor Michael Della Rocca is Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. A rationalist, monist, skeptic, and renegade analytic philosopher, Michael Della Rocca is the author of The Parmenidean Ascent, of two books on Spinoza's philosophy, and of many…
In this lecture, Professor Della Rocca will examine five crucial and influential episodes from early analytical philosophy in which Frege, Russell, Moore, and others play key roles. In each episode, the debate is, he argues, structurally analogous to the debate over…
Never in its history has philosophy been as socially relevant as today: we are blindly entering the “automation age” (McKinsey) without any reliable means of risk calculation: the creation of intelligent embodied artificial ‘social’ agents, increasingly equipped with generative…
Contemporary linguists have been impressed by the pervasiveness of polysemy, the sort of lexical ambiguity that goes beyond mere homonymy, whereby the distinct meanings of words are related. For example, instances of ‘bark’ in ‘dogs bark’ and ‘tree bark’ are mere homonyms, while…