[SydPhil] University of Sydney Philosophy Seminar Series: Joseph Rouse

[Ryan Cox]

Hi everyone,

This week’s speaker in the University of Sydney Philosophy Seminar Series is Joseph Rouse (Wesleyan University).

The title of Joseph’s talk is “Radical Naturalism: Giving up a Fourth Dogma of Empiricism”. Here’s the abstract for the talk:

Around mid-20th Century, naturalism supplanted empiricism as the dominant meta-philosophical approach within the Anglophone tradition. David Macarthur and Mario de Caro have since identified a telling split between scientific and liberal versions of a naturalistic orientation. For the past 25 years, I have instead developed an alternative strategy, worked out in Articulating the World (2015) and Social Practices as Biological Niche Construction (2023). My presentation of this more radical naturalism begins with how philosophers of science now mostly reject key features of conceptions of scientific understanding shared by many scientific and liberal naturalists. It then argues that the alternative approach to naturalism within recent philosophy of science extends two influential criticisms of earlier empiricisms. Sellars, Goodman, and Hempel argued that scientific understanding was counterfactually robust and could not do without modal conceptualizations. Quine and Davidson challenged the analytic/synthetic and scheme/content distinctions as unjustified dogmas of empiricism. Naturalists should also give up a fourth dogma of empiricism, which tries to separate an anormative, scientifically intelligible nature from any normative concerns. My presentation concludes with three key features of a radical naturalism that rejects this fourth dogma but retains the commitment to understand ourselves and all we encounter within the conceptual horizons that disclose the natural world as scientifically intelligible.

The talk will take place on Wednesday the 23rd of August at 3:30 p.m. in the Philosophy Seminar Room (N494) in the Quadrangle and will be simulcast via Zoom: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/88699564848.

The talk will be followed by drinks and informal discussion at a nearby venue. All welcome!

Enquiries about the seminar series can be directed to ryan.cox at sydney.edu.au<mailto:ryan.cox at sydney.edu.au>

Ryan Cox
Associate Lecturer in Philosophy
Discipline of Philosophy
School of Humanities
University of Sydney
ryan.cox at sydney.edu.au<mailto:ryan.cox at sydney.edu.au>

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