Seminar Series: Igor Cvejić

The Institute of Philosophy of the Research Centre for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences kindly invites you to the upcoming talk of its seminar series

Igor Cvejić:
A NEW OUTLOOK ON KANT`S ACCOUNT OF FEELING

Date and Venue of the lecture: 26h May 2015, 4.00 pm, Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 30. Országház Street, 2. floor, "Pepita" room.

Abstract:
I will present approach to Kant`s understanding of feeling rather different from those we are commonly encountered. Consideration of specific original meaning of German word “Gefühl“, and specific understanding of pleasure and displeasure by Kant`s predecessors is of crucial importance. Kant himself has had many doubts about how to use this word before he articulated it as a feeling of pleasure and displeasure. Central presupposition was tripartite division of faculties into faculty of knowledge, desires, and feeling of pleasure and displeasure. As I intend to show, in accordance with this division, Kant understood feeling not as representation itself, but rather as subjective relational property of some representation, namely, its subjective causality to maintain or restrain its state (statum representativum). Both dominant interpretations of feeling (causal and intentional), as I will argue, fail to grasp this crucial aspect. Further, I will point to potential implications of my thesis concerning understanding of Kant`s aesthetics, by focusing my attention to §12. of Critique of the Power of Judgment.

Seminar Series: Ferenc Huoranszki

The Institute of Philosophy of the Research Centre for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences kindly invites you to the upcoming talk of its seminar series

Ferenc Huoranszki:
Compatibilism, Chance, and Freedom

Date and Venue of the lecture: 21h May 2015, 5.00 pm, Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 30. Országház Street, 2. floor, "Pepita" room.

Traditionally, compatibilism in metaphysics is a thesis about the possibility of free will in deterministic worlds. More recently, however, a new question about compatibility has been raised in philosophy of science. Is chance, i.e. single case objective probability, possible in deterministic worlds? In this talk I shall discuss the potential relevance of this latter type of question to the metaphysics of free will by investigating the connection between chances and abilities.

Talk by Bryan Roberts

Our speaker for next Wednesday (20th of May, 16h, Pepita room, Orszaghaz str. 30) is Bryan Roberts (LSE) who is going to talk about “New directions for passing time”. Please find the abstract below.

Bryan W. Roberts (LSE), “New directions for passing time”

Abstract:
The problem of passing time is that it is a pervasive part of our experience, and yet seems to have no natural description in our best scientific theories. After introducing this problem I will point out a new way forward using the concept of ‘time observables’, and then indicate some further applications such as for the characterisation of the direction of time.

III. Hungarian-Polish Workshop

Next week (Thursday-Friday, May 21-22) the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest will host the 3rd workshop of the Budapest-Krakow Research Group on Probability, Causality and Determinism.

Speakers: Sam Fletcher, Márton Gömöri, Michał Tomasz Godziszewski, Balázs Gyenis, Gábor Hofer-Szabó, Ferenc Huoranszki, Attila Molnár, Bryan Roberts, Iñaki San Pedro, Slobodan Perović, Tomasz Placek, Leszek Wroński.

The workshop website with schedule and further details is here.
Everyone is welcomed to attend!

Ferenc Hörcher in Lublin and Warsaw

Ferenc Hörcher, the director of the Insititue of Philosophy at the HAS, has given a talk on the 6th of May at the John Paul II Catholic University in Lublin on the conference on Elites - their past, now and future, entitled The Communist Destruction of the Middle Classes of Hungary - Is There a Way to Heal It? He was and will be giving lectures in Warsaw on the 7th and 20th of May as a part of the Humane Philosophy Project at the University of Warsaw. His lectures are scheduled within the series of talks on Humane Philosophy and the Idea of the Tragic, where he was and will be talking about Sophocles's "Antigone" and T. S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral".

Seminar Series: J. D. Mininger

The Institute of Philosophy of the Research Centre for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences kindly invites you to the upcoming talk of its seminar series:

J. D. Mininger:
Anxiety: Genealogy of a Philosophical Discourse

Date and Venue of the lecture: 11th May 2015, 4.00 pm, Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 30. Országház Street, 2. floor, "Pepita" room.

Abstract:
Contrary to the philosophical understanding of anxiety popularized by canonical figures such as Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, which figures anxiety as a universal and perpetually given human condition, this lecture explores the possibility that anxiety as a philosophical concern is an historically and peculiarly modern preoccupation. The arc of the lecture pursues a kind of genealogy of the philosophical discourse of anxiety, beginning with Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and buoyed further by analysis of Michel Foucault’s lectures on the hermeneutics of the Subject, which implicate the essential historicity of anxiety (e.g. at what point did anxiety become a preoccupation of Western self-understanding?), and reflections by Paulo Virno on the changing nature of how the experience of anxiety is articulated today—publicly and socially as opposed to privately and inwardly.

Talk by Roland Poellinger

The History and Philosophy of Science research group of the Institute of Philosophy cordially invites you to Roland Poellinger's (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich) talk entitled "The Problem of Mental Causation in Non-Markovian Network Models". The talk is scheduled at 4pm on on the 5th of May.

Abstract:
Listing The Non-Reductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation (1993) Jaegwon Kim suggested that the only remaining alternatives are the eliminativist’s standpoint or plain denial of the mind’s causal powers if we want to uphold the closure of the physical and reject causal overdetermination at the same time. Nevertheless, explaining stock market trends by referring to investors’ fear of loss is a very familiar example of attributing reality to both domains and acknowledging the mind’s interaction with the world: “if you pick a physical event and trace its causal ancestry or posterity, you may run into mental events” (Kim 1993). In this talk I will use the formal framework of Bayes net causal models in an interventionist understanding (as devised, e.g., by Judea Pearl in Causality, 2000) to make the concept of causal influence precise. Investigating structurally similar cases of conflicting causal intuitions will motivate a non-Markovian, yet natural extension of the interventionist Bayes net framework, Causal Knowledge Patterns, in which our intuition that the mind makes a difference finds an expression.

Talk by David Pitt

The History and Philosophy of Science research group of the Institute of Philosophy cordially invites you to a talk by Prof. David Pitt (California State University, Los Angeles / CEU IAS) entitled "Phenomenal Sorites and Unconscious Qualia". The talk is scheduled at 4 pm on the 24th of April.