Boole Lectures in Philosophy, 2025-26

In 2025-26, we are pleased to present the following series of lectures. All will take place in the CACSSS Seminar Room of the O Rahilly Building.

First Semester:

• Wednesday 17th September 2025, 1600-1800, Roberta Sala (Milan). Title: Unreasonable Agents in the Digital Era
  • Abstract: This lecture focuses on the relationship between reasonableness and political agency in the digital age. The digital environment tends to affect people’s ability to be reasonable and engage in genuine cooperation with others: digital technologies tend to alter the political agency of citizens in such a way that it undermines their ability to develop autonomous life projects. What seems to be happening is that, especially on social networks, people are more inclined to lose reasonableness both towards others and towards themselves: they tend to undervalue the life projects of others by considering them deplorable, but also to fragilize their own self-determination, to the point of being vulnerable to the very prejudices they adopt. 

• Tuesday 7th October 2025, 1400-1600, Rob Wilson (University of Western Australia): Norming Human Individuality. The Significance of Eugenification
  • Abstract: There has been recent debate over whether relatively recent transformations to human sociality constitute an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI).  These essentially diachronic investigations rest on questions about what antecedent and consequent forms of individuality amount to and these are norm-laden.  Here I draw attention to actual practices of norming, departing from the emphasis on factors like cooperation, altruism, and competition that make an ETI a kind of success story.  I explore three forms that norming of human individuality takes: racialization, eugenification, and transhumanization.  Such aggressively antagonistic norming relies ultimately on a distinction between better and worse forms of human individuality, with the corresponding evaluations informing meliorative projects of human improvement.  For this reason, eugenification—a concept I am introducing here—provides key to understanding both racialization (in the past) and transhumanization (in the future).  I close by considering what this implies for the recent ETI debate with which I began.
• Tuesday 4th November 2025, 1400-1600, Joshua Nichols (McGill): Reconciliation and the Spectre of Legal Skepticism: A Pragmatist Reading of Rule-Following and Legal Authority from Hart to Brandom
  • Abstract: My focus in this paper is on the inferential connections between Hart’s conception of legal authority, the internal point of view, and the structure of legal systems. This is in many ways very well-trodden philosophical terrain. Since the publication of Hart’s Concept of Law in 1961 his theoretical terminology has shaped both the working vocabulary of analytic legal theorists and legal practitioners more generally. I seek to expand the conceptual resources within Hart’s legal theory by contextualizing his work within the philosophical traditions that influenced it. Hart was able to move the project of legal positivism forward by melding the Humean expressivism of Bentham and Austin with the language centered strands of analytic philosophy that gave shape to Oxford philosophy. Many critics have noted that Hart’s legal theory exhibits a problematic dependency on description and I believe this stems from his commitments to (some aspects of) J. L. Austin’s methods and the Humean separation thesis. I believe that bringing Hart’s work into dialogue with Robert B. Brandom and other thinkers from the broader pragmatist tradition allows for a richer understanding of how his ideas might be adapted to address the complexities of contemporary legal and political life. 

Second Semester:

• Wednesday 4th February 2026, 1500-1700. Samir Okasha (Bristol). Title: TBC
• Wednesday 11th February 2026, 1500-1700. István Aranyosi (Bilkent). Title: TBC
• Wednesday 25th February 2026, 1530-1730. Alba Montes Sánchez (Madrid). Title: TBC
• Wednesday 18th March 2026, 1500-1700. Crescente Molina (Rutgers). Title: TBC

All are welcome!

For more details (including abstracts of the talks and other information), please check our Social Media channels: https://linktr.ee/ucc_philosophy