Every semester, our department invites several guest speakers to lecture on various topics. All lectures are free, and are open to all members of the community and to the general public.
Tuesday, Oct. 22nd, 3-5pm: Myron A. Penner, Trinity Western University
Title: “Pro-Theism and the Added Value of Morally Good Agents”
Location: KHW 057
Abstract:
In this talk I explore an argument for pro-theism (the view that God’s existence would be, on balance, a good thing and as such it is rational to want it to be the case that God exists). The first premise claims that if it’s rational to believe that God’s existence would, on balance, be a good thing, then it’s rational to want it to be the case that God exists. The plausibility of this premise turns both on the sense of rationality one has in view and on the relationship between preferences and rational belief. The second premise claims that it is rational to believe that God’s existence would, on balance, be a good thing. I explore whether this premise is plausible based on considerations of how morally good agents tend to add value to states of affairs into which they are introduced.
Thursday, Oct. 31st, 3-5pm: Robert Sinnerbrink, Macquarie University
Title: “Cinematic Ethics: The Moral Melodrama.”
Location: ENG LG04
Abstract:
Film theorists have long linked genres with emotional responsiveness, investigating how genres can variously cue, modulate, or manipulate our emotional engagement with film. Less attention, however, has been given to the question of how genre, emotional response, and ethical experience are related. One genre that brings together these aspects in dramatic fashion is the melodrama. As Stanley Cavell has argued, melodrama can be viewed as a philosophical genre in its dramatisation of the interplay of knowledge and scepticism, self-deception and self-transformation, moral transgression and moral perfectionism. Departing from Cavell, my paper will explore what we might call the ‘moral melodrama’: films that use melodrama to elicit forms of emotional engagement that open up a space for moral questioning and critical reflection. Moral melodramas combine intensely affecting performances, dramatic presentation of character, and the evocative disclosure of social situations within a melodramatic narrative framework that invites ethical engagement and moral reflection from the viewer. From tragicist and feminist readings of melodrama to Cavell’s meditations on the ‘melodrama of the unknown woman’, this genre has proven one of the most arresting ways of evoking ethical experience via the aesthetic devices of narrative cinema. To elaborate this idea, I explore some accomplished and provocative examples of moral melodrama, both in classical Hollywood (Sirk’s All the Heaven Allows) and contemporary European cinema (Almodóvar’s All About My Mother and Talk to Her).
Tuesday, Nov. 12th, 3-5pm: Lisa Guenther, Vanderbilt University
Title: “Social Death and Living Resistance: A Critical Phenomenology of Solitary Confinement.”
Location: KHW 057
Tuesday Nov. 26th, 3-5pm: Robert Mann, University of Western Ontario
Title: “Puzzled by Particularity”
Location: KHW057
Abstract:
It is now clear that our cosmos is riddled with considerable degree of particularity. In responding to this a number of scientists have in recent years advocated a "super Copernican" revolution, in which our universe is regarded as a small part of a much larger structure known as the multiverse. Scientifically, this entails an unprecedented combination of broadened theoretical perspective with severe empirical limitations, implicitly redefining what is meant by science. Theologically, it introduces a new question: why is there something instead of everything? This talk will give an overview of the epistemic costs the multiverse extracts for both science and theology. I will also explore what alternatives there might be for understanding the atypicality of our observable universe.
Videos of some of our recent visiting speakers are below.
