11/11/2024: Christopher Cowie on Optimism In the Search for Extraterrestrial Life: A Philosophical Perspective

About Lewis Ross is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. He is also the Director of LSE’s Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS). Lewis works on different topics at the intersection between epistemology, philosophy of law, and political philosophy. Right now, he is particularly interested in the theory and practice of criminal justice. His PhD was from the University of St Andrews and before that he completed a law degree. Abstract Philosophy is much changed from the time that many of the analytic classics were produced. It now resembles, in many ways, a mature scientific discipline—with large division of cognitive labour. Big philosophical questions are routinely broken down into ever-smaller research questions and addressed in growing thousands of narrow publication units. Yet what purpose does this division of labour serve? Philosophers are notoriously sceptical about simply relying on each other’s published findings. Indeed, most publications seem to add to, rather than reduce, philosophical disagreement. There is a looming worry about absurdity here. Large amounts of intellectual effort are spent on activities that seemingly do not contribute to settling the core questions of the field. In response to this worry, some are tempted by radical claims about the point of philosophy. For instance, some say that it is an ‘exceptional’ field that does not aim to settle on knowledge or truth in the same way as other fields of inquiry. But this response, it seems to me, still leaves the structure of contemporary philosophy without justification. In this talk, I grapple with this problem and explore a more optimistic perspective. I consider a middle ground between two typical ways to think about philosophical progress: locating progress not in the mind of the individual, nor in the discipline as a whole, but rather in the small research communities that populate it.

About Colin Chamberlain is Associate Professor of philosophy at University College London. He was previously an Associate Professor at Temple University. He is currently working on a book about Nicolas Malebranche’s account of the embodied mind, as well as working on Margaret Cavendish’s views about colour and perception. Abstract Malebranche holds that the Fall changes the mind’s relationship to the body from union to dependence. This change transforms the significance the senses have for the mind. Before the Fall, the senses respectfully advised the mind of the body’s needs. After, the senses command and tyrannize it. That is, the senses come to speak with the force of law when they urge the mind to care for the body’s needs. In general, Malebranche holds that a perception—a mental representation that things are thus and so—becomes a command for the mind, obliging it to consent, when the perception is enforced by inner sanctions. A perception has the force of law when the mind feels pain in withholding consent, pleasure when giving it. I argue that, after the Fall, the senses command in just this way. Sensory perceptions are accompanied by inner sanctions—pleasure and pain, reward and punishment—that imbue them with obligatory force.

ABSTRACT It is currently fashionable to talk about “synchronic conditionalization” – and more generally, synchronic or time-slice versions of norms that are normally understood as diachronic. But what is a synchronic version of conditionalization? Few authors address this question directly,1 but one often sees this synchronic entity labeled as a “plan”, “policy”, or “disposition”. I want to look at these labels a little more carefully. I will argue that conditionalization is a bad plan. More precisely: the way we naturally assess plans makes conditionalization look bad. But being disposed to conditionalize is good. That is, the way we naturally assess dispositions makes conditionalization look good like a good one to have. So if we want to defend a synchronic analog to conditionalization, we should go with dispositions, not plans. At the end of the paper I’ll argue that our way of assessing plans has more in affinity with another important epistemic concept: deference. ABOUT Sophie Horowitz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, focusing on epistemology. Her interests include higher-order evidence, permissivism, and accuracy. Her monograph in progress, Guesswork, develops a view of accuracy according to which partial beliefs are more accurate insofar as they license true forced-choice guesses.

ABSTRACT In his influential master-slave dialectic, Hegel looks to demonstrate that being a master is self-defeating. The master seeks absolute independence and genuine recognition from another. However, they depend upon their slave for their mastery, and the recognition their slave provides is “one-sided and unequal” (PS, §191, p. 114). Thus, Hegel claims that mastery undermines itself. In this paper, I put some pressure on this dialectic. Amongst other things, I argue that what is primarily wrong with the master is the fact they dominate a slave, not that they somehow fail on their own terms. ABOUT Joe primarily works on ethics and agency in Kant and the post-Kantian tradition. He also has interests in the philosophy of love and media ethics.

ABSTRACT What enables me to know that others exist? Natalie Duddington (PAS 1918-1919) offers two distinctive, and underexplored, insights into the question. She focusses on our capacity to perceive minds in perceiving animate beings, and on the ways in which we stand to be affected by others in knowing them. I will suggest a way of understanding what it is to see minds in action. I will also argue that ways we stand to be affected by others offers a resource for knowing others that takes us beyond perception, and is one that constitutes an antidote to the solipsist. ABOUT Lucy O’Brien is Richard Wollheim Professor of Philosophy at UCL. She has been at UCL since 1992. Her studies in Philosophy began with a BA Joint Hons in Pure Mathematics and Philosophy, and an MPhil in Philosophy, at the University of Sheffield. She went on to a DPhil in Oxford, followed by a post-doctoral position at King’s London. Her research interests lie in the philosophy of mind and action, with a particular focus on various forms of self-consciousness, and self-knowledge. She is writing a book on interpersonal self-consciousness following receipt of a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship. She has published papers in a range of journals and collections, she is the author of Self-Knowing Agents  (OUP, 2007) and co-editor, with Matthew Soteriou, of Mental Actions  (OUP, 2009). She served as Director and Treasurer of the Aristotelian Society 2007-2014, and Vice-Chair of the Royal Institute of Philosophy 2015-2020. She was awarded a Humboldt Forschungspreis in 2021, and was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 2024. She was co-editor, with A. W. Moore, of the journal MIND from 2015-2025. She has been Chair of the Royal Institute of Philosophy since 2020.

ABOUT Pauline Kleingeld is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen. Earlier she taught at Leiden University and at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Kant and Cosmopolitanism (CUP 2012), Fortschritt und Vernunft: Zur Geschichtsphilosophie Kants (Königshausen und Neumann 1995) and numerous articles. Her academic interests are in ethics and political philosophy, with a special focus on Kant and Kantian theory. ABSTRACT In the first section of his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (G1), Immanuel Kant claims to identify the supreme principle of morality. After famous discussions of the idea of a ‘good will’, ‘acting from duty’ and ‘respect’, he concludes that the highest moral principle is the following: ‘I ought never to proceed except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law’ (G 4:402). He claims that this principle implicitly governs ordinary moral practices and convictions. It is the ‘supreme’ moral principle in that it is a meta-principle by means of which substantive Kantian moral principles — such as ‘help others in need’ or ‘never lie’ — can be derived. Because Kant’s argument draws on moral convictions that are still widely shared, and because his conclusion articulates a paradigmatic position in moral theory, G1 has become one of the most renowned texts in the history of philosophy. The structure of Kant’s argument towards the identification of the supreme principle, however, has long been the subject of debate. Three serious difficulties stand out in the literature, and they all concern the most important steps of his argument: (1) Kant presents his argument as consisting of three propositions and a conclusion, but he labels only the second and third propositions as such. He does not make explicit what he takes the first proposition to be. In recent decades at least a dozen candidates have been put forward in the literature (see Steigleder 2022). (2) Kant claims that the third proposition follows from the first and the second, but it is widely regarded unclear how it is supposed to follow. (3) Kant’s final step to the formulation of the supreme principle is often said to be a jump over a gap, rather than a careful step that follows from the preceding argument. As a result, Kant’s reasoning towards the supreme moral principle seems more like a series of assertions and fragmentary arguments rather than a single argumentative chain. In this paper, I argue that Kant’s views on philosophical method shed new light on the structure and direction of his argument in G1. It has gone unnoticed that this argument consists of a chain of regressive inferences. I first explain the current positions in the literature regarding Kant’s method in G1 (§2). I then turn to Kant’s views on method (§3). Using his description of the so-called ‘analytic method’, I reconstruct the argument of G1 as a regressive chain. I argue that this reconstruction suggests solutions to the three main difficulties diagnosed in the literature, although several unclarities remain (§4).

ABOUT Léa Salje is an associate professor at the University of Leeds. She joined Leeds in 2015 on a postdoc, and has been there ever since. Before that she did a PhD at UCL. She works in Philosophy of Mind, mostly on issues around self-knowledge and first person thought. Her first monograph Saying What One Thinks (forthcoming with OUP), is about the special form of self-knowledge we get by putting our thoughts into words.

ABOUT Claire Field is a postdoc at the University of Zürich, where she is a member of the Zürich Epistemology Group on Rationality. Previously, she has held positions at Glasgow, Stirling, and UCL. Her research lies primarily in epistemology, and includes projects on the epistemology of normative beliefs, rational risk-taking, level-(in)coherence, the normativity of logic, and the philosophical implications of neurodiversity. ABSTRACT The requirements of structural rationality prohibit incoherence, but paradigmatic examples of incoherence are very diverse. Beyond an intuitive sense that incoherent attitudes do not fit together in the right way, it is difficult to characterize precisely what, if anything, unifies these examples. This paper offers a new analysis of incoherence based on the idea that attitudes are incoherent when they are unintelligible given the conceptual background in play. I argue that this analysis offers a major theoretical advantage: it allows us to make progress in debates about foundational issues, such as the nature of truth, logic, and belief.

ABOUT Eric Schliesser is professor of Political Science, with a focus on Political Theory, at the University of Amsterdam. He was previously affiliated with Syracuse University, Leiden University, and Ghent University among others. Schliesser has published on early modern philosophy, philosophy of economics, the history of analytic philosophy, the history of feminism, and metaphilosophy. His publications include his monograph, Adam Smith: Systematic philosopher and Public Thinker (OUP, 2017). He has edited numerous volumes including (inter alia) Newton and empiricism. (OUP, with Zvi Biener, 2014); Sympathy, a History of a Concept (OUP, 2015); Ten Neglected Classics of philosophy (Oxford, 2017), Neglected Classics of Philosophy, Vol 2 (Oxford 2022), and a translation of Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy (together with Sandrine Berges, Oxford 2019). He keeps a daily blog Digressionsnimpressions.

ABOUT Christopher Cowie is Associate Professor at the University of Durham. He was previously Junior Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and has held visiting fellowships at Harvard and Stanford. He is originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is currently working on the implications of axiological paradox, and, unrelatedly, the philosophy of the search for alien life.