Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

Leigh K. Jenco is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics. She received her PhD in political science at the University of Chicago, before teaching at Brown University and the National University of Singapore.  Her research works across the disciplinary platforms of political theory, global intellectual history, and Asian studies to demonstrate the value of Chinese thought for posing new questions of political life.  She has served as associate editor of the flagship journal American Political Science Review (2016-2020) and principal investigator for the Humanities in the European Research Area grant project "East Asian Uses of the European Past"  (2016-2019). She is the author of Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West (Oxford UP, 2015),  and Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao (Cambridge UP, 2010). Most recently, with Megan Thomas and Murad Idris, she co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Oxford UP, 2020).

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Jenco's talk - 'Moral Knowledge and Empirical Verification in Late Ming China' - at the Aristotelian Society on 16 November 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Adrian Haddock is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Stirling, and between 2017 and 2019 he was a Senior Research Fellow in the Forschungskolleg Analytic German Idealism (FAGI) at the University of Leipzig. His work centres on the idea of subjectivity, and on its significance for understanding the fundamental concerns of philosophy. He has written on action, perception, knowledge, and language. He is currently in the process of completing a book manuscript, entitled Subject and Object, and editing (with Rachael Wiseman) a collection of essays on the philosophy of G.E.M. Anscombe.

This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Haddock's talk - 'The Wonder of Signs' - at the Aristotelian Society on 2 November 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Tommy J. Curry is a Professor of Philosophy and holds the Personal Chair of Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are 19th century ethnology, Critical Race Theory & Black Male Studies. He is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press 2017), which won the 2018 American Book Award, and Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of Racial Empire (SUNY Press 2018), which recently won the Josiah Royce Prize for American Idealist Thought. He has also re-published the forgotten philosophical works of William Ferris as The Philosophical Treatise of William H. Ferris: Selected Readings from The African Abroad or, His Evolution in Western Civilization (Rowman & Littlefield 2016). In 2019 he became the editor of the first book series dedicated to the study of Black males entitled Black Male Studies: A Series Exploring the Paradoxes of Racially Subjugated Males on Temple University Press. Dr. Curry’s research has been recognized by Diverse as placing him among the Top 15 Emerging Scholars in the United States in 2018, and his public intellectual work earned him the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy’s Alain Locke Award in 2017. He is the past president of Philosophy Born of Struggle, one of the oldest Black philosophy organizations in the United States.

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Curry's talk - 'Must there be an Empirical Basis for the Theorization of Racialized Subjects in Race-Gender Theory?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 19 October 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

As the first talk for the 2020-21 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year's Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Bill Brewer (King's College London) as the 113th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society's President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy.

Bill Brewer is Susan Stebbing Professor of Philosophy at King's College London, having previously been Research Fellow at King’s College Cambridge, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and Professor of Philosophy at Warwick, and also a visiting professor at Brown and Berkeley. He is author of Perception and Reason (Oxford: OUP, 1999) and Perception and Its Objects (Oxford: OUP, 2011), and of many papers on perception, action, objects, and knowledge. He is co-editor of Spatial Representation (Oxford: OUP, 1999) and The Nature of Ordinary Objects (Cambridge: CUP, 2019). He works on Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics, and Epistemology, and is currently returning to an abiding interest in the objectivity of perceptual experience. He is co-editor of Philosophy, the journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Brewer's address - 'The Objectivity of Perception' - at the Aristotelian Society on 5 October 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

As the first talk for the 2020-21 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year's Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Bill Brewer (King's College London) as the 113th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society's President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy. Please visit our Council page for further information regarding the Society's past presidents.

The 113th Presidential Address will be chaired by Helen Steward (Leeds) - 112th President of the Aristotelian Society.

Walter Dean works in philosophy of mathematics and mathematical and philosophical logic. He also has interests in theoretical computer science and the history and philosophy of computation. He is currently working on applications of Reverse Mathematics and computational complexity theory within philosophy and on the historical and foundational significance of Gödel’s completeness theorem. He is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick where he convenes the Mathematics and Philosophy degree. Before coming to Warwick, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Paris 7, following a PhD in Computer Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a PhD in Philosophy from Rutgers.

This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Dean's talk - 'On Consistency and Existence in Mathematics' - at the Aristotelian Society on 15 June 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Béatrice Han-Pile studied philosophy, history and literature at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) and was awarded a Fellowship from the Thiers Foundation while completing her doctoral thesis on Michel Foucault. Before coming to Essex, she taught in France at the Universities of Paris IV-Sorbonne, Reims and Amiens. She is the author of Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical (Stanford University Press, 2002). She has published mostly on Foucault, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, phenomenology (in particular Heidegger) and the philosophy of agency. In 2015-2018 she was Principal Investigator on a three-year AHRC-funded project on ‘The Ethics of Powerlessness: The Theological Virtues Today’ (EoP). She is currently working on medio-passive agency, both in itself and through the writings of early Christian thinkers (John Cassian and St Augustine) and of more recent authors such as Nietzsche, Foucault and Heidegger. She is also working on hope as a (medio-passive) virtue of powerlessness and on the conditions under which this theological virtue might afford us with appropriate ethical guidance in secular contexts.

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Han-Pile's talk - 'Two Puzzles in the Early Christian Constitution of the Self: Reflections on Foucault’s Interpretation of John Cassian' - at the Aristotelian Society on 8 June 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Anna Mahtani is Associate Professor in philosophy at the London School of Economics. She did her PhD on vagueness at Sheffield, and then worked at Oxford and the Open University, before arriving at the LSE. She studies decision theory, formal epistemology, and the philosophy of language, and works at the intersection of these different disciplines. She is currently working on several projects: tracing the implications of Frege’s puzzle for various principles of welfare economics; analysing the phenomenon of ‘awareness growth’; and writing a book called The Objects of Credence.

This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Mahtani's talk - 'Dutch Book and Accuracy Theorems' - at the Aristotelian Society on 1 June 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Maria Rosa Antognazza is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. Educated at the Catholic University of Milan, she has held research and visiting fellowships in Italy, Germany, Israel, Great Britain and the USA, including a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, a two-year research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, and the Leibniz-Professorship at the University of Leipzig (Leibniz’s Alma Mater) in 2016. She served as Head of the King’s Philosophy Department from 2011/12 to 2014/15 and is the current Chair of the British Society for the History of Philosophy. Her research interests lie in the history of philosophy, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. Her publications include Leibniz on the Trinity and the Incarnation: Reason and Revelation in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press 2007); Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge University Press 2009; winner of the 2010 Pfizer Award); and Leibniz: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2016). She is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Leibniz (Oxford University Press 2018) and of early modern texts including Hugo Grotius, The Truth of the Christian Religion, London, 1743 [Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics] (Liberty Fund 2012) and (with Howard Hotson) Alsted and Leibniz on God, the Magistrate and the Millennium (Harrassowitz Verlag 1999). In addition, she has contributed numerous articles and chapters to refereed journals and collective volumes. Most recently, she has been awarded the 2019-2020 Mind Senior Research Fellowship for work on her book Thinking with Assent: Renewing a Traditional Account of Knowledge and Belief (forthcoming with Oxford University Press).

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Antognazza's talk - 'The Distinction of Kind between Knowledge and Belief' - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 May 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Derrick Darby is Henry Rutgers Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He discovered his passion for philosophy growing up in New York City’s Queensbridge public housing projects, as he reports in his TEDx talk Doing the Knowledge. After getting his undergraduate degree at Colgate University, he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. His work in social and political philosophy has focused on rights, inequality, and democracy, and generally examines how the lived experience and history of race and anti-black racism connects with theoretical and normative philosophical questions. He is the author of Rights, Race, and Recognition (Cambridge University Press, 2009). His most recent book, co-authored with historian John L. Rury, is The Color of Mind: Why the Origins of the Achievement Gap Matter for Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2018). His op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Detroit Free Press, The Newark Star Ledger, and elsewhere. He is the founding organizer of the Social Justice Solutions Research Collaboratory at Rutgers and directs its renowned Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy.

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Darby's talk - 'Rights Externalism and Racial Injustice' - at the Aristotelian Society on 11 May 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.