Boole Lectures in Philosophy, 2025-26

In 2025-26, we are pleased to present the following series of lectures.

Second Semester:

• Wednesday 4th February, 1500-1700, CACSSS Seminar Room (O'Rahilly Building)
  • Samir Okasha (Bristol): Biological Essentialism Re-examined.
  • Abstract: Biological essentialism is the idea that species, and possibly other biological taxa, have essences: properties that all and only the members of a species exhibit, and in virtue of which they belong to that species. Despite its venerable Aristotelian pedigree, and its prevalence among lay people, the notion that species have "essences" has long been regarded as incompatible with both modern taxonomic practice and evolutionary theory. For this reason, philosophers of biology are virtually unanimous in rejecting biological essentialism. But in a recent book, Michael Devitt argues that this anti-essentialist consensus is fundamentally mistaken, since it arises from an inadvertent conflation between two questions.  The taxon question asks what makes an organism a member of one species rather than another; while the category question asks what all the different species taxa have in common. Devitt argues that these two questions are independent, and that a non-essentialist answer to the category question is compatible with an essentialist answer to the taxon question. I scrutinize this claim and find it to be untenable, on the basis of a logical analysis of the relationship between the two questions. This shows that the traditional anti-essentialist consensus was correct all along, though not for exactly the reasons that some philosophers have thought.

• Wednesday 11th February, 1500-1700, CACSSS Seminar Room (O'Rahilly Building)
  • István Aranyosi (Bilkent): Flashbacks
  • Abstract: Intrusive memories, informally known as flashbacks, play a central part as a subject matter in trauma theory, but have only incidentally been discussed in the more general and currently burgeoning philosophy of memory and remembering. The phenomenon of flashback is a disruption of the standard memory system, and it differs in many respects from voluntarily retrieved episodic memory. Though there is a temptation to dismiss it as marginal, I will argue that it is worth taking a closer philosophical look at this phenomenon, in that the way we are forced to analyze and interpret it might impact the way we should look at the standard cases of episodic remembering. The latter, in effect, involves a longstanding debate realists (causalists, relationalists) and constructivists (simulationists, narrativists). I will address the question of whether my own, strongly realist view, which I dubbed “preteriception”, benefits from the discussion of flashbacks.

• Wednesday 25th February, 1530-1730, CACSSS Seminar Room (O'Rahilly Building)
  • Alba Montes Sánchez (Madrid), Title: The Phenomenology and Affective Politics of Belonging and Non-Belonging
  • Abstract TBA

• Wednesday 18th March, 1500-1700, CACSSS Seminar Room (O'Rahilly Building)
  • Crescente Molina (Rutgers), Title: Normative Powers and Permissive Right.
  • Abstract TBA

• Wednesday 25th March, 1500-1700, SHTEPPS (The Hub)
  • Denis Dzanic (Graz), Title: How to Husserl a Bayes
  • Abstract TBA

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