Boole Lectures in Philosophy | University College Cork

Modules and Timetables 2026-2027

Details of our modules for academic year 2026-27 can be found via this link: Undergraduate

MA in Philosophy and Postgraduate Diploma in Philosophy, 2026-27, details can be found here MA in Philosophy Handbook 2026-27

In 2026-27, we are pleased to present the following series of lectures.

First Semester:

Tuesday 22nd September, 1400-1600, CACSSS Seminar Room (O'Rahilly Building)
- Julie Reshe (UCC), Book Launch: Negative Essays: On Death, Love, and Depressive Realism
- Abstract: Death is often claimed to be central to philosophy, yet it is frequently approached as something to be overcome, or subordinated to life. This lecture explores what changes when death, instead of being redeemed, is allowed to remain central, and when love is understood, instead of as its opposite, as one of the forms through which finitude becomes most painfully intimate. Drawing on my new book Negative Essays, I propose depressive realism as a perspective that resists consolation and attends instead to the tragic entanglement of love, mortality, and existence.
  Signed copies of Negative Essays will be available for purchase at the event.

Tuesday 27th October, 1400-1600, CACSSS Seminar Room (O'Rahilly Building)
- Rachel Barney (University of Toronto), Title Plato on the Normativity of Craft
- Abstract: Craft [technê] is Plato’s default conceptual tool, used to organize his inquiries into ethics, epistemology, and every topic from politics to language to theology. This paper attempts to articulate the conception of craft with which Plato operates, and to identify the distinctive features of his thinking about it. These flow from the fact that a craft is defined not only by knowledge but by a teleological and normative structure: craft aims at an end, which sets norms for its activities and practitioners. For Plato, it is important that this end and norms are objective and disinterested -- independent of the beliefs, interests, and preferences of the practitioner. Moreover, the end of a real craft must be genuinely good: a specialized contribution to the common good of the community in which it is practised.

Wednesday 28th October, 1400-1700, CACSSS Seminar Room (O'Rahilly Building)
- Vittorio Bufacchi, convenor (UCC): Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels at 300
- Section 1: (2-3pm)
  - Welcome by Vittorio Bufacchi (Philosophy)
  - Sarah Harte (Irish Examiner): Swift’s Misogyny: Or Gulliver’s?
  - Clíona Ó Gallchoir (English): ‘how modest I was in my Nature, how nicely I regarded my honour’: The Feminization of Gulliver.
- Section 2: (3-4pm)
  - Barry O'Sullivan (Computer Science): Swift’s Model Proposal and the Attention Economy.
  - Joel Walmsley (Philosophy): ‘Without the least assistance from genius or study’: Laputa's Large Language Model.
  - Mary O'Connell (English): Gulliver and the Printing Press.
- Section 3: (4-5pm)
  - Emma Dore-Horgan (Philosophy): Distracted Laputans, Then and Now: The Need For a “Flapper” in the Smartphone Age.
  - Claire Connolly (English): Gulliver’s Travels on the Irish Sea.
  - Launch: The Gulliver’s Travels Project

Tuesday 17th November, 1400-1600, CACSSS Seminar Room (O'Rahilly Building)
- Farbod Akhlaghi (TCD), Title: On the Ethics of Drifting
- Abstract: Are there ways of making transformative and other 'hard' choices that are morally objectionable? I argue that a common way that we do, in fact, engage with such choices is so. Edna Ullmann-Margalit (2006) identifies the ‘drifter’: someone who makes ‘one’s big decisions conscious of their being decisions but not of their being big…[they carry] on with the business of his or her life, making incremental, stepwise decisions only.’ I argue that drifting is morally dangerous. Seeing why illuminates some of what is morally at stake when we face transformative and other hard choices. But it also explains why exercising the degree of causal control that we often associate with praise or blame over these choices has the moral significance I have previously attributed to it (Akhlaghi 2023). We owe it to ourselves and others, I argue, in Ullmann-Margalit’s words, to look such choices ’straight in the eye.’

Second Semester:

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

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