Spring 2012 (Colloquium Organizer: Alan Richardson)

• J. A. (Hans) Radder (Amsterdam) "Does the Brain ‘Initiate’ Freely Willed Processes? A Philosophy of Science Critique of Libet-Type Experiments and Their Interpretation" – January 6
• Sandy Goldberg (Northwestern) "Safety, Luck, and Gettierization" – January 13
• Alan Hájek (Australian National University) "Staying Regular" – January 20
• Sandra LaPointe (McMaster) "Bolzano's Logical Syntax" – February 10

Fall 2011 (Colloquium Organizer: Paul Russell)

• Susan Haack (University of Miami) "Epistemology: Who Needs It?" (2011 Richard and Dorothy Sikora Annual Lecture) – September 23
• Stephen Davies (Auckland) "Literary Darwinism Examined" – September 30
• Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (Aarhus/UBC) "Knowing the Answer to a Loaded Question" – October 7
• Roberta Ballarin (UBC) "Disjunctive Effects and the Logic of Causation" – October 14
• Mini Conference on David Hume (Organized by Paul Russell)
  October 22, Saturday
  • Angela Coventry (Portland State)
    "Hume and Rawls"
  • Margaret Schabas (UBC)
    "Hume on Economic Well-Being"
  • Don Garrett (NYU)
    "Hume's Sense of Probability"
• John Richardson (NYU) "Nietzsche on Truth" – October 28
• Michael Griffin (UBC) "Platonism's Two Worlds" – November 4
• Priori Workshop 2011 (Organized by Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins, November 18–20)
  • Gillian Russell (WUSTL)
    Commentator: Roberta Ballarin (UBC)
  • Jonathan Ichikawa-Jenkins (UBC)
    Commentator: David Plunkett (UCLA)
  • Michael Devitt (CUNY)
    Commentator: Adam Morton (UBC)
  • John Bengson (Wisconsin)
    Commentator: Matt Bedke (UBC)
  • Christina Van Dyke (Calvin College)
    Commentator: Kris McDaniel (Syracuse)
  • Jeremy Fantl (Calgary)
    Commentator: Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (Aarhus/UBC)
• Christopher Mole (UBC) "The Unexplained Intellect" – November 25

Spring 2011 (Colloquium Organizers: Matt Bedke and Margaret Schabas)

• Mukesh Eswaran (UBC) "Self-Awareness of Culpability: The Mainspring of Moral Behavior?" – January 21
• Lara Buchak (UC Berkeley) "Faith and its Relationship to Belief" – February 4
• David Silver (UBC) "Towards an Epistemology of Objective Norms of Ethics" –
  February 25
• Allan Gibbard (Michigan) "Meaning as a Normative Concept" – March 4
• Lisa Shapiro (Simon Fraser) "Spinoza on Imagination and the Affects" – March 11
• Nathan Salmon (UC Santa Barbara) "Recurrence" (Dept Colloquium) – March 18
• Philosophy Department “Spring Colloquia” on "Normative Questions" (organized by Sylvia Berryman and Scott Anderson) – March 26 (Saturday)
  • Mark Warren (UBC): "Exit-based Empowerment in Democratic Theory"
  • Elizabeth Brake (University of Calgary): "The Limits of Parental Rights: Feminism, Family Law, and Self-Respect"
  • Sarah Buss (University of Michigan): "The Value of Humanity"
    
  • Margaret Cameron (University of Victoria): "Norms of meaning: Do you know what you're talking about?"
• Paul Bartha (UBC) "What Can We Learn from Analogies in Mathematics?" – April 1
• Jim Franklin (University of New South Wales) "Realism, Australian Style: Universals, Probabilities, Mathematics" – June 14
• Naomi Scheman (U of Minnesota) "In Praise of Discombobulation" – July 22

Fall 2010 (Colloquium Organizers: Matt Bedke and Margaret Schabas)

• Rick Grush (UCSD) "Control, Embodiment, and Demonstrative Semantics"
  – September 17
• Rob Stainton (Western Ontario) "Pragmatic Impairments" – September 24
• Donald Ainslie (Toronto) "Hume's Diagnosis of False Philosophy" – October 1
• Sarah Stroud (McGill) "Partiality and Plural Agency" – October 15
• Stephen Darwall (Yale) "Bipolar Obligation" – October 22
• Matthew Fulkerson (UBC) "Touch without Touching" – October 29
• Andrea Woody (University of Washington) "Is Water H2O? Molecules, Models, and Making Sense" – December 3

Spring 2010 (Colloquium Organizer: Ori Simchen)

• Dan Kaufman (Colorado) “Descartes, Material Substance, and the Real Distinction” – January 22
• Natalie Gold (Edinburgh) "Framing and Team Reasoning" – March 5
• David Schmidtz (Arizona) "What Teachers Owe Students" – March 12
• Patricia Churchland (UC San Diego) “Morality and the Social Brain” – March 19
• Philosophy Department “Spring Colloquia” on Epistemology & Information (organized by Matt Bedke and Chris Mole) – March 20 (Saturday)
  • "The Concepts of Information and Deception in Signaling Games" • Brian Skyrms (UC Irvine)
  • "Epistemic Logic and Epistemology" • Audrey Yap (University of Victoria)
  • “Field’s Deflationary Philosophy of Logic” • Phil Hanson (Simon Fraser)
  • “The Psychology and Epistemology of Ethical Intuitions” • Matt Bedke (UBC)
• Frederique de Vignemont (CNRS, Paris; NYU) "The coming out of bodily sensations" – April 9

Fall 2009 (Colloquium Organizer: Ori Simchen)

• Derek Matravers (Open University) "Narrative and Fiction" – September 11
• Michael Griffin (Killam Fellow, UBC) "Mangling Aristotle's Tables: Ancient and Modern Perspectives on the Ambiguity of the Categories" – September 25
• Sherri Roush (Berkeley) "Optimism about the Pessimistic Induction" – October 2
• Samuel Scheffler (NYU) "The Good of Toleration" (2009 Richard and Dorothy Sikora Annual Lecture) – October 23
• Keith Lehrer (Arizona/Miami) "Art and Intentionality" – October 30
• Evan Thompson (Toronto) "Embodiment and Consciousness" – November 6
• Jeremy Fantl (Calgary) "A Defense of Dogmatism" – November 20
• Brad Murray (UBC) "The Making of Driftwood: Understanding the Ontology of Found Artifacts" – December 4

Spring 2009

• Robert Kane (University of Texas, Austin) "Are All Values Relative?: Seeking Common Ethical Ground in a Pluralist World" – March 6
• Spring Colloquia (Mini Conference on "Free Will, Responsibility, and Moral Community" organized by Paul Russell) – Saturday, March 7
  • Angela Smith (University of Washington) • Chair: P. Russell
    "Unconscious Omissions, Reasonable Expectations, & Responsibility"
  • Robert Kane (University of Texas) • Chair: O. Deery
    "Free Will, Responsibility, and the Moral Community"
  • Scott Anderson (UBC) • Chair: J. Tian
    "How Coercive Communities Affect Determinations of Responsibility for Actions"
  • David Shoemaker (Bowling Green) • Chair: J. Topornycky
    "Responsibility and Disability"
• Scott Edgar (UBC) "Hermann Cohen and a Kantian Problem of Objectivity" – March 27
• Marcus Arvan (UBC) "Groundwork for a Non-Ideal Theory of Justice" – April 3

Fall 2008 (Colloquium Organizer: Eric Margolis)

• Joan Weiner (Indiana University, Bloomington) "On knowing when to stop: Davidson on predication" – November 14
• Dan Ryder (UBC, Okanagan) "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? Naturalizing Empty Concepts" – October 24
• Corolina Sartorio (University of Wisconsin, Madison) "Failing to Do the Impossible" – October 3
• Steve Stich (Rutgers) "Empirical Challenges to the Use of Intuitions as Evidence in Philosophy" – September 12

Spring 2008 (Colloquium Organizer: Murat Aydede)

• Lisa Shapiro (Simon Fraser) "Passionate Perception in Descartes and Spinoza" – April 11
• John Searle (UC Berkeley) "Language and Social Ontology" 2008 Richard and Dorothy Sikora Annual Lecture – Marh 26
  
• Spring Colloquia (Mini Conference on Philosophy of Mind organized by Ori Simchen)
  Saturday, March 15
  • Murat Aydede (UBC) "Are Phenomenal Zombies Conceivable?"
    
  • John Perry (Stanford) "Return of the Zombies"
  • Justin Fisher (UBC) "Why Nothing Mental Is in the Head"
    
  • Brie Gertler (Virginia) "Self-Knowledge and the Transparency of Belief"
• Berys Gaut (St. Andrews) "Medium-Specificity Arguments and Cinema" – March 7
• Alan Thomas (Kent/UBC) "Liberalism, Republicanism and the Idea of an Egalitarian Ethos" – Feb 29
• Phil Dowe (Queensland) "Every Now and Then: A-Theories of Time and Closed Time-like Curves" – Feb 15
• Justin Fisher (UBC) "The Authority of Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis" – Feb 8
• Richard T. W. Arthur (McMaster) "Leibniz and the Elimination of Time" – Feb 1
• Joshua Knobe (UNC Chapel Hill) "The Pervasive Impact of Moral Judgment" – Jan 25
• Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA) "Two Kinds of Agency" – Jan 11

Fall 2007 (Colloquium Organizer: Chris Stevens)

• Rachel Zuckert (Northwestern) "Kant on the Emotions of Reason" – Dec 7
• Margaret Schabas (UBC) "Nature Does Nothing in Vain: Self-Reflexivity as an Adaptive Trait" – Nov 16
• Brian Hepburn (UBC) "Physics without Newton: How Euler Explained Everything" – Nov 9
• Alan Thomas (Kent) "Is Practical Reasoning "Essentially First Personal"?" (Talk to the Value Theory Workshop) – Nov 5
• Austen Clark (Connecticut) "Modeling Sensory Awareness" – Nov 2
• George Sher (Rice) "Knew or Should Have Known?" – Oct 26
• Tyler Burge (UCLA) "Perceptual Objectivity" – Oct 19
• Doran Smolkin (Kwantlen) "Puzzles about trust" – Oct 12
• Alan Richardson (UBC) "Has philosophy of science completely lost its (transcendental) mind?" – Oct 5
• Anita Silvers (San Francisco State University) "Justice For Outliers: More On Redeeming Social Contract Theory" – Sept 28
• Pablo Rychter (Logos-Universitat de Barcelona/UBC) "Stage Theory and Proper Names" – Sept 21
• Peter Singer (Princeton) (4-5:30 p.m. In Frederic Wood Theatre) "Global Poverty: what are our obligations?" (Sikora Lecture) – Sept 7

Past Colloquia and Talks (Fall 2004 - Spring 2007)

The following talks were given by visiting speakers from September 2004 onwards. UBC and SFU faculty are not listed. Recent speakers before 2004 included Alex Byrne, Noel Carroll, Fred Dretske, Jesse Prinz, Alison Simmons, and many others.

Spring 2007

• Brian Thomas (UBC) "On some Recent Attempts to Address Group Differentiated differences Under the Norm of Equality"
• Bence Nanay (UBC / Syracuse) "Perception, Action and What's In-Between"
• Audrey Yap (UVic) "Creation and Construction: Dedekind and Kronecker on the Philosophy of Mathematics"
• Anita Ho (UBC) "To Trust or not to Trust: That is the Question"
• Allen Wood (Stanford) "Kant and the Right to Lie"
• Tina Lupton & Alex Dick (UBC English) "Theory and Practice in 18th Century Philosophy: a short Introduction; Thomas Reid, Media Theorist"
• Gideon Yaffe (USC) "Excusing Mistakes of Law"

Fall 2006

• Justin Fisher (UBC) "The Challenge of Syntactic Typing"
• Bradley Armour-Garb (SUNY, Albany)
• Harvey Brown (Oxford) "Time and Motion"
• Ernie Lepore (SFU) "When the Medium is the Message"
• Thomas Pogge (Columbia University) "Why I am not a Rawlsian"
• Wayne Myrvold (UWO) "Simplicity and Theory Choice: Ockham's Disposable Razor"
• Mark McPherran (SFU) "Socratic Epagoge and Socratic Induction"

Spring 2006

• Gillian Russell (Washington University in St Louis) "Truth in Virtue of Meaning"
• Jeff McMahan (Rutgers University) "War, Terrorism, and the 'War on Terror'"
• Jesse Prinz (UNC Chapel Hill) "The Emotional Foundation of Moral Attitudes"
• John Campbell (UC Berkeley) "What's the Role of Spatial Awareness in Perception of Objects?"

Fall 2005

• Peter Kivy (Rutgers University) "A Tale of Two Authenticities"
• Shaun Nichols (University of Utah)
• Ernie Sosa (Brown University and Rutgers University) "Dreams and Philosophy"
• Bonnie Kent (University of California, Irvine) "Aquinas and Weakness of Will"
• Amie Thomasson (University of Miami) "Answerable and Unanswerable Questions"
• David Kaplan (UCLA) "Some Help for Students with the Difficult Bits in 'On Denoting,' on the Centenary of That Great Work"
• Ruth Anna Putnam "Democracy as a Way of Life"
• Hilary Putnam (Harvard University) "Philosophy in the 21st Century"

Spring 2005

• Margaret Osler (University of Calgary) "When Did Gassendi Become a Libertine? Or, The Historian of Philosophy in Context"
• Lynn Hankinson Nelson (University of Washington) "It Takes a Village: Creating Knowers"
• David Raynor (University of Ottawa) "What Kind of Philosopher Was Hume?"
• Jonathan Kaplan (Oregon State University) "The End of the Adaptive Landscape Metaphor?"
• John Searle (University of California, Berkeley) "The Ontology of Civilization"
• David Stern (University of Iowa) "Wittgenstein's Physicalism: Why Wittgenstein Accused Carnap of Plagiarism"
• Adam Morton (University of Alberta)
• Candace Vogler (University of Chicago)
• Robert Hopkins (University of Sheffield) "The Epistemology of Moral Testimony"
• Kendall Walton (UNiversity of Michigan) "Hobby Horses and Children's Games"
• Hartley Slater, (University of Western Australia) "Out of the Liar Tangle"

Fall 2004

• Jan Wolenski (Jagiellonian University) "Determinism and Logic"
• Tad Schmaltz (Duke University) "The Metaphysics of Rest in Cartesian Physics"
• Jennifer Whiting (University of Toronto) "Aristotle on Friendship"
• Elijah Millgram (University of Utah) "Why Didn't Nietzsche Get His Act Together?"
• Ish Haji (University of Calgary) "Intrinsically Motivated Actions and Appraisability"
• David Widerker (Bar Ilan University) "Insufficiently Robust Alternatives, and the Principle of Alternative Expectations"
• Michael McKenna (Ithaca College) "Where Frankfurt and Strawson Meet"
• Angela Smith (University of Washington) "Guilty Thoughts"