SYMPOSIA AT THE 2017 CPA CONGRESS SYMPOSIUMS AU CONGRÈS 2017 DE L’ACP The Canadian Journal of Philosophy Distinguished Lecture The CPA’s Founders’ Address / La conférence des fondateurs de l’ACP

Human Rights without Human Supremacism Will Kymlicka Queen’s University Several recent theories of human rights have appealed to the idea that human rights can be grounded on some account of human dignity. Critics of these `dignitarian' accounts argue that the idea of human dignity is vague to the point of emptiness, and lacks any determinate content. In fact, however, recent discussions of human dignity do make one very specific claim: namely, that humans must not be treated in the same way we treat animals. Whatever else human dignity requires, it requires that we give humans a much higher status than we give animals. In this respect, dignitarian defenses of human rights follow in a long line of other supremacist accounts of human rights, all of which are as concerned to argue that animals do not deserve rights as they are to argue that humans do deserve rights. I will suggest that the human rights project will be much stronger, both philosophically and politically, if it jettisons such supremacist defenses. There is growing evidence that the more people draw a sharp species hierarchy between humans and animals, the more they draw hierarchies amongst humans, weakening the rights of subaltern groups. Defending human rights on the backs of animals is not only philosophically suspect, but politically self-defeating.

Book Panels / Tables rondes autour d’un livre : Patricia Marino’s Moral Reasoning in a Pluralistic World This panel will examine the central arguments and philosophical significance of Patricia Marino’s Moral Reasoning in a Pluralistic World (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). In this book, Marino articulates and defends an account of moral reasoning and moral coherence grounded in value pluralism. This view, termed “pluralist coherence,” honours our moral experiences of making judgments in a world where conflict and disagreement are pervasive. Drawing inspiration from W. D. Ross’s intuitionistic pluralism, Marino argues that we can make judgments that prioritize certain values without requiring a systematic account that unifies all values under a single principle. Further, rather than seeking to eliminate conflicts, Marino argues that conflicts are a central feature of moral reasoning and accounts of moral coherence that attempt to explain away conflicts are philosophically suspect. The aim of this panel is to explore and assess the philosophical significance of the main arguments in Moral Reasoning in a Pluralistic World. Marino contributes a novel account of moral pluralism in normative ethics. In addition to the strength of the argument itself, pluralist coherence has implications for how we conceive of moral reasoning in applied and pedagogical contexts. It succeeds in narrowing the gap between theoretical and applied discussions in ethics (a divide which many philosophers think hinders philosophical progress in ethics). Marino also succeeds in taking seriously the moral experiences that structure our everyday experiences of judgment. This panel will provide critical comments on Marino’s arguments for pluralist coherence and will address the ways in which pluralist coherence might be taken up in applied contexts.

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Organizer and Moderator / Organisatrice et présidente de la session : Katie Fulfer (University of Waterloo) Panelists / Participant-e-s : Patrick Clipsham (Winona State University) Chris Kaposy (Memorial University) Vanessa Lam (University of Waterloo) Anthony Skelton (Western University) Author / auteure : Patricia Marino (University of Waterloo)

Carrie Jenkins’ What Love Is: And What It Could Be What is love? Aside from being the title of many a popular love song, this is one of life s perennial questions. In "What Love Is," philosopher Carrie Jenkins offers a bold new theory on the nature of romantic love that reconciles its humanistic and scientific components. Love can be a social construct (the idea of a perfect fairy tale romance) and a physical manifestation (those anxiety- inducing heart palpitations); we must recognize its complexities and decide for ourselves how to love. Motivated by her own polyamorous relationships, she examines the ways in which our parameters of love have recently changed to be more accepting of homosexual, interracial, and non-monogamous relationships and how they will continue to evolve in the future. Full of anecdotal, cultural, and scientific reflections on love, "What Love Is" is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand what it means to say I love you. Whether young or old, gay or straight, male or female, polyamorous or monogamous, this book will help each of us decide for ourselves how we choose to love. Organizer and Chair / Organisatrice et présidente de la session : Samantha Brennan (Western University) Panelists / Participant-e-s : Alice MacLachlan (York University) Shannon Dea (University of Waterloo) Patricia Marino (University of Waterloo) Jasper Heaton (University of British Columbia) Author / auteure : Carrie Jenkins (University of British Columbia)

Melinda Hall’s The Bioethics of Enhancement : Transhumanism, Disability, and Biopolitics This Author-Meets-Critics (book panel) session will contribute to the emerging sub-field of philosophy of disability through consideration of Melinda Hall’s new book, The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, and Biopolitics. Hall’s book is a timely and unique contribution to philosophy of disability and a bold intervention into philosophical bioethics. It is also an important addition to the growing body of work that uses Foucault to interrogate the role that academic philosophy and bioethics play in the subordination of disabled people. Drawing upon Hall’s book, the panel will cover a range of issues pertinent to philosophers in general and to bioethicists in particular, including enhancement, race, disability, gender, and ethics; biopolitics, bioethics, and neoliberalism; the biopolitics of disability and enhancement; the biopolitics of bioethics; and the biopolitics of philosophy.

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Organizer / Organisatrice :

Shelley Tremain (Independent Scholar)

Panelists / Participant-e-s : Alexandre Baril (Dalhousie University) Jane Dryden (Mount Allison University) Ladelle McWhorter (Richmond University) Author / auteure : Melinda Hall (Stetson University) Chair / Présidente de la session : Tracy Isaacs (Western University)

Author Meets Critics / Auteur face aux critiques : Berislav Marusic’s Evidence and Agency Organizer / Organisateur : David Hunter (Ryerson University) Panelists / Participant-e-s : Phil Clark (University of Toronto) Kate Nolfi (University of Vermont) Miriam McCormick (University of Virginia) David Hunter (Ryerson University) Author / auteur : Berislav Marusic (Brandeis University)

Symposia / Symposiums : Evolution and Morality Organizer / Organisateur :

Victor Kumar (University of Toronto)

Panelists / Participant-e-s : Victor Kumar (University of Toronto) Joseph Heath (University of Toront) Kristin Andrews (York University) Ronald de Sousa (University of Toronto)

Self-Knowledge as an Achievement “Self-Knowledge” is not a common term in current philosophical dictionaries, and where it occurs, it generally refers to a sort of introspective knowledge of one’s own mental states. The idea of this panel is to look at the practical side of self-knowledge, as it used to be emphasized by Socrates, continued to be important for later ancient and early medieval authors, and is taken up, for instance, by the late Foucault. In this context, self-knowledge is not the knowledge of what happens in one’s own mind, but rather a sort of practical accomplishment: the practice of self-control, self-care, and self-management. The aim of the panel is to bring together authors who have recently published outstanding work on this kind of selfknowledge.

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Organizer / Organisateur :

Boris Hennig (Ryerson University)

Participants / Participant-e-s : Christopher Moore (Penn State University) Hugo Strandberg (Åbo Akademi University, Åbo, Finland) Kim Frost (Syracuse University)

Domain Goals at the Semantic-Pragmatic Interface Organizer / Organisateur :

Justin Bledin (Johns Hopkins University)

Panelists / Participant-e-s : Una Stojnic (NYU / Columbia University) Lucas Champollion (NYU) Justin Bledin (Johns Hopkins University)

Finding the Philosophy in Medieval Philosophy Organizer / Organisatrice :

Margaret Cameron (University of Victoria)

Panelists / Participant-e-s : Taneli Kukkonen (NYU / Abu-Dhabi) Mikko Yrjonsuuri (University of Jyväskylä) Gloria Frost (St. Thomas University) Chair: Margaret Cameron (University of Victoria)

Sensation and Perception Organizer / Organisateur :

Jacob Beck (York University)

Panelists / Participant-e-s : Mohan Matthen (University of Toronto) – Why There Are Novel Colours, but no Novel Sounds Richard Murray (York University) – Comment on Matthen Susanna Schellenberg (Rutgers University) – Perceptual Consciousness as a Mental Activity James John (University of Toronto) – Comment on Schellenberg Jacob Beck (York University) – Is Sensory Experience Analog? John Morrison (Columbia University) – Comment on Beck Chair: Diana Raffman (University of Toronto)

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Pragmatism in the 21st Century Organizer / Organisateur et organisatrice : Diana Heney (Fordham University) Kenneth Boyd (University of Toronto) Panelists / Participant-e-s : Kenneth Boyd (University of Toronto) and Diana Heney (Fordham University) – Pierce on Instinct, Intuition, and Common Sense Shannon Dea (University of Waterloo) – Pragmatism from Margins to Centre Andrew Howat (Cal State at Fullerton) – Rational Self-Control: Pragmatism vs. Free Will Skepticism Pierre-Luc Dostie Proulx (Université catholique de Louvain) – Évaluation et philosophie sociale : l'approche de John Dewey

Epistemic Silencing, Epistemic Injustice Organizer / Organisatrice :

Natalie Stoljar (McGill University)

Panelists / Participant-e-s : Amandine Catala (UQAM) – Stereotypes and Epistemic Injustice Stephanie Kapusta (Dalhousie University) – Gender Invariance and Gender Universalism: Their Role in Hermeneutical Marginalization Rebecca Mason (University of San Francisco) – Oppression and Incredulity Nicole Ramsoomair (McGill University) and Natalie Stoljar (McGill University) – Hermeneutical Injustice and Autonomy

Productive Justice Organizer / Organisateur :

Louis-Philippe Hodgson (York University)

Panelists / Participant-e-s : Martin O’Neill (York - UK) Julie Rose (Dartmouth University) Lucas Stanczyk (Harvard University) Arash Abizadeh (McGill University)

Disagreement, Higher-order Evidence and New Arguments for Scepticism Sceptical worries are sometimes generated on the basis of doubts about the reliability of sense perception. A Cartesian evil demon might be deceiving me, or I could be a brain in a vat, or I could be in the Matrix. Any knowledge claims that rely on my perceptual experience of the world can be doubted. While it remains controversial as to whether there are successful replies to these sceptical worries, it seems that many philosophers are not very concerned with this form of scepticism. Perhaps along the same lines as G.E. Moore, they are simply more sure that sense perception is reliable than the sceptical arguments that question it are sound. Or maybe scepticism about sense perception is simply the result of an unrealistically high standard for knowledge that comes close to equating epistemic justification with certainty. The purpose of this symposium is to explore new arguments for scepticism that arise from making a distinction between first-order evidence and higher-order evidence. Higher-order evidence constitutes facts about the first-order evidence I possess for a proposition P, and plausibly also facts about my ability to assess the evidence for P. The first-order evidence I possess for P might be some articles and books on different arguments for P. Higher-order evidence is based on facts about that first-order evidence including things such as epistemic 5

peer disagreement. Sceptical worries for my belief that P arise when I become aware that I have epistemic peers – (approximate) cognitive and evidential equals – who believe not-P. This symposium will make advances on the current epistemology of disagreement literature by exploring the underdeveloped connections between peer disagreement and scepticism. This will be achieved, in part, by exploring more general questions about the epistemic significance of higher-order evidence. Organizer / Organisateur :

Kirk Lougheed (McMaster University)

Panelists / Participant-e-s : Tim Kenyon (University of Waterloo) Catherine Elgin (Harvard University) Klaas J. Kraay (Ryerson University) Kirk Lougheed (McMaster University) Tim Kenyon (University of Waterloo) Higher-order Evidence in Applied Epistemology of Disagreement The literature on the epistemology of disagreement proposes a range of principles governing or conditioning the interpretation of higher-order evidence – specifically, evidence bearing on the calibre of evidence that a disagreeing interlocutor might have for their belief. Taking a cue from Jennifer Lackey, I argue that some of these principles are particularly dubious because they are linked to a debate over which of conciliationism and steadfastness is the better general or default theory of disagreement. This focus on generality is a problem for both camps, leading to poor characterizations of the significance of higher-order evidence on all sides. I conjecture some different principles, framed as applied epistemic guidelines, that reflect a more contextually sensitive or particularist approach. These heuristics, I suggest, neither require nor invite responses that leave relevant higherorder evidence on the table. In this respect they differ from proposed principles like Independence and Uniqueness, and extant responses to those principles, on which a full openness to higher-order evidence is subordinated to the aim of arguing: in general, conciliate; or, in general, stand fast.

Catherine Z. Elgin (Harvard University) The Value of Disagreement Discussions of disagreement typically assume that if epistemic peers disagree, at least one of them has made a mistake. I will argue that this is not always so. Even if peers have the same evidence, background information, education, and reasoning abilities, they may responsibly differ over how to deploy these resources. They may, for example, assign different weights to bits of evidence, set different standards for acceptability, favor different reasoning strategies, and/or diverge in their assessments of the reliability or significance of the background information that they share. If so, disagreement among competent epistemic agents is an asset. It reveals important features of the epistemic situation and the perspectives that can responsibly be adopted toward it. The existence of such disagreements may support skepticism vis à vis the first order issue under dispute. If so, such skepticism is a virtue rather than a vice.

Klaay J. Kraay (Ryerson University) Community-Oriented Anti-Revisionism What should happen when two epistemic peers learn that they disagree about the truth-value of some proposition? Some say that that both parties are rationally required to revise their position in some way. Others say that, at least in some cases, neither one is rationally required to revise her position. In this paper, I set out an important and provocative argument for the latter view due to Catherine Z. Elgin (2010). Elgin argues that within certain epistemic communities, the shared goals of inquiry are sometimes best served when certain individuals or groups remain steadfast in their positions in the face of peer disagreement. These individuals or groups can use their differing positions as premises in their reasoning and as bases for action, and thereby put them to the test in the community’s marketplace of ideas. The resulting diversity of cognitive commitments, Elgin argues, may well help the community as a whole to achieve its epistemic goals better than it otherwise would. Accordingly, and contra revisionism, it is not epistemically obligatory for S to revise her acceptance of P when confronted with disagreement from epistemic peers. I flesh out Elgin’s view and defend it against a series of six objections, arranged in order of increasing strength. I ultimately conclude that none of these objections is decisive as stated, but that more work is nevertheless needed for her defence of anti-revisionism to succeed. In particular, I argue that Elgin owes a more detailed account of the conditions under which S can reasonably think that her remaining steadfast concerning P in the face of peer disagreement will likely benefit her epistemic community to achieve its goal of ultimately figuring out the truth-value of P.

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Kirk Lougheed (McMaster University) Religious Scepticism and Religious Experience Many religious believers do not appear to take the existence of religious disagreement as a serious challenge to the rationality of their religious beliefs. Bryan Frances notes that “in an enormous number of cases people think, at least implicitly, that their group is in a better position to judge [the truth about religious claims]. I will think my group knows something the critics have missed” (Frances 2014, 165). Perhaps at least implicitly religious believers tend to dismiss worries based on disagreement by appealing to the fact that they enjoy a special insight that their opponent fails to possess. Religious believers need to do more work to explain the relevant epistemic advantage they allegedly have over their non-religious opponents. A potential explanation may lie in empirical investigations of religious experience since such studies will be able to offer a potential relevant epistemic asymmetry in objective and public terms. However, in his work on religious experience Phillip H. Wiebe speculates that religious experiences might be objective, but also private. I conclude that if religious experiences are private, they can potentially justify a religious believer remaining steadfast in the face of disagreement. But the private nature of such experiences explains why appealing to them may not be satisfying to opponents.

Metaphysics and Politics: Their Mutual Influence En dépit des divisions traditionnelles des sciences et des savoirs en fonction desquelles les pendants plus spéculatifs de la pensée seraient séparés des considérations pratiques, l’histoire de la philosophie témoigne d’une profonde influence mutuelle entre métaphysique et pensée politique. Dès Socrate, l’enquête sur les affaires humaines s’accompagne chez Xénophon d’une investigation sur ce qu’est chacun des étants (ti hekaston eiê tôn ontôn), et la fondation de la cité platonicienne semble indissociable d’une connaissance de l’idée du Bien, laquelle serait, selon la célèbre formule, au-delà de l’être (epekeina tês ousias). Chez Aristote, la praxis est fondée ontologiquement comme acte (energeia), si bien que l’action humaine n’est pleinement intelligible qu’à l’aune de la métaphysique de la puissance et de l’activité qui la structure. Mais cette influence n’est pas qu’ancienne et semble persister dans la modernité : n’observe-ton pas en effet chez Machiavel que seul une forme de refus ou de rejet du métaphysique permette d’accorder plus de place à la vérité effective du politique? La philosophie kantienne du droit n’est-elle pas tributaire de l’édifice critique, et donc ultimement d’une « métaphysique de la métaphysique »? Quant à la philosophie du droit chez Hegel, elle demeure irrémédiablement liée par son système à l’Esprit absolu qui achève et totalise le savoir. On observe par suite au sein des néokantismes une série de tentatives de repenser la philosophie pratique, tentatives largement motivées par l’ambition de faire autant que possible l’économie de la métaphysique. À ce jour, même la thèse contemporaine d’une fin de la métaphysique ne peut laisser indifférente la politique : chez Heidegger, l’impression d’une occlusion quasi-définitive de la Seinsfrage semble affecter profondément la pensabilité du politique – avec toutes les conséquences sulfureuses que cela peut impliquer; chez d’autres comme Derrida ou Deleuze, la fin de la métaphysique laisse place à une pensée de l’évènement où peuvent à la fois se profiler une critique des résidus métaphysiques dans l’ensemble de la vie sociale et politique, et se déployer des possibles politiques nouveaux qui manifesteront précisément le caractère évènementiel de l’évènement. Il s’agira dans le cadre de cette table ronde d’explorer l’influence mutuelle entre la métaphysique et la politique qui a ponctué et ponctue encore aujourd’hui le cours de la pensée. À cet effet, les intervenants tâcheront de répondre, en présentant les résultats de leurs travaux de recherche, à de multiples questions que soulève l’existence de ce rapport réciproque : la politique doit-elle être fondée métaphysiquement? Peut-on envisager inversement une fondation politique de la métaphysique ? La métaphysique doit-elle nécessairement avoir des conséquences politiques? Est-ce la métaphysique ou la politique qui doit être dite première, et en quel sens? La relation entre métaphysique et politique peut ou doit être explorée par quelle(s) discipline(s)? Etc. Organizer / Organisateur :

Antoine Pageau-St-Hilaire (Université d’Ottawa)

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Panelists / Participant-e-s : Antoine Pageau St-Hilaire (Université d’Ottawa) Gabriel Côté (Université Laval) Thomas Anderson (Université Laval) Jean-Christophe Anderson (Université Laval) Alexandre Leduc Berryman (Université Laval) Samuel Descarreaux (Université d’Ottawa) Antoine Pageau St-Hilaire (Université d’Ottawa) Metaphysics and Politics in Aristotle: Their Relationship and its Ontological Meaning Aristotle is well known for having separated his work in numerous treatises dedicated to single subject matters, beginning thus a tradition of a division of scientific disciplines. Against those who suggested that this separation was a mere question of philosophical methodology, Leo Strauss has argued that this separation of the disciplines had deeper roots in Aristotle’s view of the nature of philosophy, and even more his conception of Being. Relating Aristotle’s thought to the Platonic doctrine of noetic heterogeneity, he stresses that it is impossible to have a genuine knowledge of the parts that constitute the whole of Being without knowing the appropriate place of these parts in the organization of the whole, and thus without a genuine knowledge of the whole. According to this view, in order to separate properly the disciplines, Aristotle either pretended to possess the knowledge of the whole, or thought that such knowledge was possible. Although I hold that Strauss is right about noetic heterogeneity, this paper will argue that his broader view is wrong. First, I will show that, despite the being exposed into different treatises, Aristotelian ethics and politics are unintelligible without an understanding of the metaphysics of activity (energeia) on which they rely. Second, I will explore the ontological consequences of such a relationship: I will argue that Aristotelian metaphysics, since they imply the fundamental difference between transitive and intransitive activities, constitute an ontology that is far less dogmatic that Strauss might have thought, and much more compatible with the elusiveness of Being that he finds in Plato.

Gabriel Côté (Université Laval) Fichte et le fondement pratique de la philosophie Les premières origines de la pensée de Fichte ont leurs racines dans la révolution française, à laquelle le père de « la doctrine de la science » se dit redevable « des premiers signes de son système » en tant que celui-ci devait être « le premier système de la liberté » (Lettre à Baggessen, avril 1795). Or, bien que le système fichtéen ait sa source dans un évènement politique, il peut être difficile de voir clairement le lien entre la doctrine de la science, qui aux dires de Fichte n’est pas autre chose que la métaphysique elle-même [Briefwechsel] (Druet 1975), et le domaine proprement politique de la réflexion fichtéenne. Pour comprendre ce lien, il faut voir en quoi le système de Fichte est un système de la liberté. Il faut, pour ce faire, se tourner vers le texte de 1796-1797 sur le Fondement du droit naturel à partir des principes de la doctrine de la science où le droit naturel est ce qui permet de faire le lien entre la liberté et la nature, et vers La destination de l’homme, qui explore, du point de vue de la conscience ordinaire, ce rapport entre nature et liberté. Cette étude montrera que la question du sens de la liberté est intrinsèquement liée à la question du sens de la vie humaine.

Thomas Anderson (Université Laval) Tragédie et destin politique chez Hegel : une perspective métaphysique La tragédie grecque est un objet d’interrogation qui traverse de part en part l’œuvre de Hegel – des Jugendschrifte (1792-1800) jusqu’à l’élaboration du système dans l’Encyclopédie des sciences philosophiques (1817-1830). Les plus récentes études portant sur la tragédie dans la réflexion hégélienne en ont explicité la portée historico-politique en montrant qu’elle pouvait être interprétée comme une méditation sur le « destin » problématique du bios politikos depuis la Grèce antique jusqu’à la modernité. On a soutenu à cet effet que le questionnement de Hegel sur la tragédie « porte sur ce qu’était la politique, sur ce qu’elle est devenue et sur ce qu’elle est dans le monde moderne » (Thibodeau : 2011). Notre présentation cherchera à mesurer – en nouant un dialogue avec cette approche qui inscrit la question dans son horizon politique – jusqu’où une compréhension plus englobante de l’interrogation sur le tragique chez Hegel pourrait bénéficier de l’adoption d’un cadre interprétatif plus large : celui de la métaphysique. Il s’agira avant tout de définir ce que le philosophe considère comme le propre du conflit tragique en mettant au centre de notre analyse la notion de justice ainsi que l’opposition théologico-politique classique entre la loi humaine et la loi divine. Il en ressortira que la tension à la source de la tragédie déborde du simple contexte de la polis et qu’elle doit être ultimement rapportée à une contradiction métaphysique. Cette thèse implique que le problème du bios politikos ne puisse trouver – pour ce qui est de la cité grecque aussi bien que de la modernité – sa solution qu’à l’intérieur d’un nouveau paradigme métaphysique permettant de dépasser (Aufheben) toute opposition tragique.

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Jean-Christophe Anderson (Université Laval) Le statut de la providence chez Tocqueville et l’ambiguïté de l’héritage chrétien en démocratie L’importance accordée à l’idée de providence dans les différentes lectures de la Démocratie en Amérique d’Alexis de Tocqueville jure avec l’utilisation discrète qu’en fait l’auteur. Si la notion mérite sans doute l’attention qu’on lui accorde en ce qu’elle s’avère indissociable du mouvement d’égalisation des conditions dont Tocqueville reconnaît lui-même la centralité, on peut néanmoins déplorer le fait qu’un nombre insuffisant d’interprétations cherchent à l’éclairer à partir de l’œuvre tocquevillienne elle-même. Ce biais ouvre en effet la porte à maintes lectures polarisantes, qui subsistent parallèlement sans que ne semble possible leur réunion. L’on fait de Tocqueville, selon nos allégeances, un génie politique qui ne serait préoccupé que métaphoriquement par le sens providentiel de l’histoire, ou encore, en sens inverse, un penseur effrayé par la découverte d’un processus métaphysique inéluctable menaçant toute liberté humaine. Nous entendons soutenir que le traitement de la providence chez Tocqueville peut et doit prendre pour point de départ les développements qu’il consacre aux modalités de la vie religieuse en démocratie. Plus précisément, il appert qu’au sein même des chapitres que Tocqueville réserve à la vie spirituelle américaine, l’analyse spécifique du maintien de l’héritage chrétien dans un corps social spontanément « cartésien » mette au jour une ambiguïté qui rappelle fortement celle enveloppant la notion de providence. Approfondir cette symétrie nous permettra de préciser le sens du terme disputé et de rapprocher les lectures opposées, en montrant que Tocqueville envisageait le déterminisme historique et la liberté politique dans un rapport de réciprocité plutôt que de stricte opposition.

Alexandre Leduc Berryman (Université Laval) Physis et praxis dans la critique arendtienne du travail Hannah Arendt place au premier rang des causes de l’aliénation de l’homme moderne l’élévation du travail au sommet de la hiérarchie des occupations humaines, sous l’impulsion, entre autres, des travaux de Karl Marx, infusés de l’idée que le travail constitue le vecteur d’accomplissement de l’humanité de l’homme. Loin de permettre la réalisation de l’essence humaine, le travail relèverait plutôt d’une nécessité naturelle qui enfermerait l’homme dans le mouvement cyclique auquel il est assujetti et qui le maintient hors d’un monde proprement humain. Arendt critique la prééminence du travail dans les affaires humaines en mobilisant une compréhension aristotélicienne de la vie humaine, conçue comme une praxis, mais il nous semble que sa critique doit aussi être rapprochée d’une conception de la nature héritée de la philosophie d’Aristote. En effet, Arendt décrit la nature comme un mouvement cyclique qu’elle impose nécessairement à tout ce qui vit. Parallèlement, Aristote désigne la nature comme le principe du mouvement des êtres en qui elle réside (Métaphysique, Δ, 4 ; Physique, II, 1). Or, la vie humaine, en tant que praxis, est une activité dont la fin est immanente à l’agent, qui est ici l’homme (Métaphysique, Θ, 6). Nous croyons qu’Arendt conçoit le travail comme le mouvement imposé nécessairement à l’être humain par le principe naturel qui lui est immanent. Par conséquent, sa critique provient de ce que l’agent du mouvement naturel est la nature elle-même, et non l’homme. Ériger le travail au sommet des occupations humaines revient donc à destituer l’homme de ce qui fait de lui un homme, et non seulement un être naturel.

Samuel Descarreaux (Université d’Ottawa) Heinrich Rickert and Max Weber: The Metaphysical Implications of the Objectivity's Issue in Cultural Sciences Cultural science studies imply an epistemologically curious concept: values. In fact, values claim to possess objectivity, even if it is not one established according to the criteria of natural sciences. Unlike natural sciences, the objectivity of values does not essentially depend on effective causality. Also, as Wirklichkeitswissenschaften, sciences about concrete reality, cultural sciences are interested by “the infinite complexity or irrationality of reality” (Oakes 1988), i.e. the irreducible individual qualitative value judgments. The objectivity of values thus raises the following question: how is it possible for cultural sciences to bridge the infinitely complex reality and the abstract concept of value? In the early twentieth century, Max Weber argued that an individual phenomenon acquires a cultural relevance by reference to a meaning that relies on a certain value. To study values, one has to go through a process of rationalization that produces ideal types. This process allows values “to be described and interpreted rather than evaluated and judged” (Oakes 1988). But still, one can ask: do values acquire any objective relevance? At the end, Weber's answer, as we will try to prove, derives from axiological value polytheism, which implies the existence of an “irreducible variety of values and the irresolvability of radical value conflicts”(Oakes 1988). Weber's ideal types method and metaphysically posited value polytheism stand as a response to Heinrich Rickert's neo-kantian interpretation of value relevance. For Rickert values must have unconditional general validity. Therefore they are neither empirical nor hypothetical maxims. Instead, Rickert asserts that existence of purely formal axiological values cannot be deduced; it is rather a fact and due to its normative nature, it provides cultural values objectivity. This brief overview of Weber's and Rickert's related answers to the objectivity issue of cultural sciences will allow us to appreciate their ‘metaphysical’ and critical implications, i.e. axiological polytheism and factual normative axiological values.

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Words, Concepts, and Propositions Organizer / Organisateur :

Ben Caplan (Ohio State University at Columbus)

Panelists / Participant-e-s : Esa Díaz-Léon (University of Barcelona) – On the Conceptual Mismatch Argument: Descriptions, Disagreement, and Amelioration Lorraine Juliano Keller (Niagara University) – In Defense of Magic Ashley Feinsinger (University of San Diego) – The Variation Problem

The Life of Things This session brings continental philosophy, critical race theory, care ethics, literature, affect theory and post-colonial literature together in order to explore the "life of things." What are the testimonies expressed by "things" like photographs, molecules, landfills and other objects? What are the stakes of how such testimonies are represented? How might we shift our capacity for attending to such testimonies? This session stages a set of conversations between thinkers and things, opening up a range of questions about the nature of subjectivity, objectivity and materiality. Organizer / Organisatrice :

Ada Jaarsman (Mount Royal University)

Panelists / Participant-e-s : Mariana Ortega (John Carroll University) Namrata Mitra (Iona College) Karen Houle (University of Guelph) Christina Kingsbury (Visual Artist) - http://www.christinakingsbury.com Anna Bowen (Writer / Poet) Ada Jaarsma (Mount Royal University) Moderator: A. Jaarsma (Mount Royal University) Mariana Ortega (John Carroll University) The Life of Things: Melancholia, Memory, and Exile Inspired by the work of Ann Cvetkovich in which she analyzes photographing objects as a "queer archival practice," I look into the traces that are captured by photographs of objects. That is, I follow the lives of objects that are deeply interconnected to the lives of those who "owned" them or held them or kept them as the only reminder of a past that no longer is. Using a photograph of the only remaining toy that I have from my childhood, and the only object that survived my fleeing from Nicaragua in 1979, I provide a discussion of a personal journey into the life of this particular object within a framework of exile. In so doing I wish to show the manner in which our existence transcends the boundaries of our flesh.

Namrata Mitra (Iona College) The Life of Shame: In Body, Politics, and Representation How do we live with shame? In this paper, I draw on queer theorists and postcolonial writers such as Maggie Nelson, Eve Sedgwick, and Amitav Ghosh to explore ways in which shame is experienced as a repeated acts of nonrecognition of one's subjectivity and having to stage response to it. Shame is manifest simultaneously in multiple ways: as an intensely embodied experience (Probyn), a rejection or interruption of one's interest in another (Tomkins), and as political orientation (Ahmed). For instance, Sara Ahmed shows how nationalisms are built by ensuring that citizens come to be similarly oriented towards shared objects and ideals. In this context, shame is experienced as a collective affect in the service of re-consolidating the nation (by reorienting the collective "we" towards a shared object of shame). However, if the state attempts to harness shame to its own ends then marginalized communities which are subject to ongoing shaming have often attempted to reject it all together, such as in queer pride or colonial cultural nationalisms (Partha Chatterjee). Yet, Eve Sedgwick reminds us that experiencing shame is part and parcel of identifying as queer in a world that rejects queerness. Taking the cue

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from these thinkers, I explore some of the different ways in which philosophical and literary texts render shame intelligible, as living in our bodies, in politics, and in representation.

Karen Houle (University of Guelph); Anna Bowen (Writer and Poet); Christina Kingsbury (Visual Artist) The Many (Barely Hidden) Lives of Things: What a Landfill Can Make you Say or Do This part of the session brings care ethics, literature, site-specific multimedia restoration work together to explore place, labour and ecology through the peculiar archiving of the "life of things" that is a decommissioned landfill site. Anna's poetry testifies on behalf of what lives and affects are expressed by the "things" and their legible remains (including people) that once made or continue to make a particular landfill "home:" bull-semen tubes, foxes, tonnes of broken garden stones, burdock, killdeer. Christina's devoted seed-gathering, paper-making and re-quilting "of" the landfill testifies to the absurdity of "craft" in the face of global capitalism yet also, of the surprising productivity of being ritually attentive; of the powers of an embodied practice of remediation. Finally, conversations between Karen, Anna and Christina, and the words and objects that they meshed together from different angles by way of a focus on a local landfill brought a new and concrete ecological insight to the feminist concepts of care labour and care ethics.

Ada S. Jaarsma (Mount Royal University) The Life of Molecular Memory: Epigenetics and Critical Race Theory Thanks to recent epigenetic research, the status of "memory" is increasingly understood in dynamic, molecular terms. This paper examines the life of "molecular memory" and its significance for critical race theory. Reflecting on the racial imaginary, Claudia Rankine writes, "The body has memory," a point that aligns with a key insight of epigenetic research: our biological processes testify to the ecologies in which we develop, as well as to environmental, habitual and dietary events from our ancestral past. At stake in discussions about epigenetic mechanisms is not only what counts as injury, including injuries from the past, but also what measures are in place to seek redress. This paper makes a provisional case for the promise of epigenetic research, a promise that depends in part upon heeding the lessons of thinkers like Rankine.

Restricting Liberty / Infringing Autonomy Liberty and autonomy are important and prominent values in liberal democracies. Laws and policies that either restrict citizens’ liberty or infringe on their autonomy therefore face a high justificatory burden. In this symposium, we explore the moral permissibility of restrictions to liberty and infringements on autonomy in three contexts: the design of welfare policies; religious accommodation; and biomedical research. States often impose conditions on the receipt of welfare benefits, for example, participation in the workforce or abstaining from drugs. In recent years, a number of commentators have argued that the placement of such conditions constitutes a paternalistic interference with recipients’ liberty. Still others have argued that the mere provision of in-kind benefits, rather than cash transfers, is itself paternalistic. In “Welfare State Paternalism,” MacKay provides a definition of welfare state paternalism, and suggest that welfare policies are not necessarily paternalistic simply because they offer recipients in-kind benefits rather than cash, or place conditions on the receipt of benefits. He then formulates a framework to help policy-makers determine when paternalistic welfare policies wrongly restrict recipients’ liberty or infringe on their autonomy. Kessler explores the moral permissibility of restrictions on citizens’ religious liberty, focusing on the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent “Hobby Lobby” decision. In this case, a for-profit employer, Hobby Lobby, argued that the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate violated its religious liberty. The Supreme Court ruled in their favour. In its decision the Court appealed to the idea of a “sincerely held religious belief” and argued that being a for-profit privately held business did not mean relinquishing one’s right to freedom of religion. Kessler argues that deference to sincerely held religious belief is a wrongheaded strategy for realizing the very important goal of religious accommodation. Religious accommodation, properly understood, is a balancing exercise between competing claims. The state is the only body with the authority to engage in this balancing and so it must claim competence in matters of religious freedom. Kessler shows that on this view an employer would not be able to appeal to religious belief to deny contraception access to its employees, and applies this argument to religiously-based speech that involves discrimination against vulnerable groups.

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Finally, Gelinas explores the permissibility of using non-rational and autonomy-limiting influences, such as coercive sanctions or ‘nudges,’ to promote participation in biomedical research. While medical research is widely acknowledged to be a valuable public good, it is controversial whether participating in research is obligatory for the public, as well as whether or to what extent the state or other institutions would be justified to interfere in the lives of people to promote research participation. Some argue that the state may in principle be justified to coerce individuals to participate in research by imposing penalties for nonparticipation, but most reject this view as heavy-handed, for various reasons. But there is also the possibility that the state or other institutions might employ non-rational influences or ‘nudges’ that, while not coercive, nonetheless bypass or undermine autonomy in the service of promoting research participation, such as setting defaults to automatic enrollment in certain types of research or exploiting framing or priming effects in research recruitment materials. Gelinas approaches this issue by examining whether research participation is an obligatory public service (similar to paying taxes or voting) and the arguments for and against imposing coercive sanctions for non-participation in research. Gelinas then asks whether the objections to coercing research participation apply to using (non-coercive) autonomy-limiting ‘nudges’ toward this same end. Ultimately, Gelinas argues that evaluating the ethical status of nudges toward research participation requires us to be clear about two things: (1) the degree to which different forms of nudging infringe autonomy, and (2) the distinction between paternalistic and other-centered justifications of nudging and the ethical weight each can bear. Organizer / Organisateur :

Douglas MacKay (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Participants / Participant-e-s : Douglas MacKay (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) – Welfare State Paternalism Michael Joel Kessler (University of Toronto – Trinity College) – Sincerely-Held Religious Belief and Discrimination Danielle Bromwich (UMass at Boston) – Restricting Liberty to Enhance Autonomy Luke Gelinas (Harvard Law School) – Autonomy Infringements in Recruitment to Medical Research

Minimalism and the Philosophy of Language Organizer / Organisatrice : Ashley Atkins (University of Western Michigan) Panelists / Participant-e-s : Norbert Hornstein (University of Maryland) – What’s the Question the Minimalist Program Wants to Answer? John Collins (University of East Anglia) – Keeping Merge Minimal Wolfram Hinzen (University of Western Michigan) – How Thought Disorders Illuminate Theories of the Semantic Interface Ashley Atkins (University of Western Michigan) – Minimalist Interface Explanations

Essentialism and Abstracta Organizer / Organisateur :

Sam Cowling (Denison University)

Panelists / Participant-e-s : James Davies (University of Toronto) – The Essences of Abstract Mathematical Objects Wesley Cray (Texas Christian University) – Concreta with No Spatial Parts at a Time Chris Tillman (University of Manitoba) and Joshua Spencer (University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee) - TBA Mary Leng (The University of York – UK) – Minimalist Interface Explanations Chair / Président de la session :

Sam Cowling (Denison University)

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Rorty’s Political Thought To date, most serious, philosophical engagement with Rorty’s work has examined his critiques of epistemology and his lack of metaphysics, or his use and misuse of other philosophical figures. It is only over the past few years that similarly serious engagement has emerged with regard to his political work. However, recent weeks and months have seen a marked increase in the attention being given to Rorty’s political thought by philosophers, especially as excerpts from his 1997 Massey Lectures were circulated via social media in the context of the U.S. election. His comments in those excerpts have been called “eerily prescient” of Trump’s rise to the presidency, and have forced both the Left and the Right to re-examine their positions and strategies. The papers in this panel contribute to the growing interest in Rorty’s political thought by investigating the value and importance of taking him seriously as a political thinker. They explore his work in relation to the analytic tradition, the continental tradition, the feminist tradition, and the contemporary political scene. In so doing, they demonstrate the breadth of Rorty’s work and recommend a style and methodology that speaks to multiple traditions, across disciplinary boundaries, and beyond the academy. Organizer / Organisatrice : Susan Dieleman (University of Saskatchewan) Panelists / Participant-e-s : David Rondel (University of Nevada at Reno) Clayton Chin (University of Melbourne) Susan Dieleman (University of Saskatchewan) Carl Sachs (Marymount University) David Rondel (University of Nevada at Reno) Achieving our Country Revisited Achieving Our Country is by most accounts one of Richard Rorty’s more minor works. A series of Massey Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1997, it narrates a story about what the American Left used to be, what it is now, and what it might yet become in the future. In this paper I re-examine some of the main arguments in Achieving our Country, almost twenty years after the book first appeared. Not only are many of Rorty’s predictions about the trajectory of American politics eerily prescient of the rise of Donald Trump, I argue, but there are also lessons for contemporary political philosophers that ought to be seriously heeded. More particularly, I argue that Rorty’s book introduces a healthy dose of political realism into some debates in contemporary egalitarian theory. Contemporary egalitarian philosophers disagree (among many other things) about whether equality is best understood fundamentally as a distributive ideal or as an ideal governing the ways in which people ought to stand and relate to one another. I argue on Rorty’s behalf that, given the narrative recounted in Achieving Our Country, egalitarians would do well to refocus their energies on economic/distributive inequalities. This is not because distributive equality is in the end more important than relational equality. It is simply because, given the contingent political trajectory of the last four or five decades, economic inequality may be the more urgent egalitarian aim of the current moment.

Clayton Chin (University of Melbourne) Rorty and Continental Political Thought: A Critique and Fusion of Horizons One of the most distinctive aspects of the work of Richard Rorty was its transgression of philosophical and disciplinary boundaries. With few equals, he both flitted back and forth between complex traditions and fields of inquiry managing to both speak to the conversations there and develop a unified and unique perspective in his own right. Further, while Rorty has often been the recipient of a great deal of vitriol, recent scholarship has done much to illustrate the coherence, nuance, and positive project within the breadth of his work. In contrast to earlier criticism, this third wave of criticism has also tended to be external looking, bringing Rorty to new conversations and questions. However, while often noted as fundamental to his own work, the nature of Rorty’s relation to Continental thought has rarely been examined in detail or as a whole. This paper argues that there is both a unity to his readings of various Continental figures and a shape to his approach to this complex tradition, and both are specifically oriented to the political consequences of the major ideas of the tradition. While he agrees with much within recent Continental thought, Rorty’s reading and use is specifically motivated by a fundamental flaw in their construal of contingency and its theoretical and practical consequences.

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Further, his critical engagements with and positive appropriations of Gadamer, Heidegger, Hegel, Habermas and Foucault (amongst others) reveal a two part strategy of critique and fusion that attempts to maintain its own perspective while seeking common ground for shared conversation. Thus, beyond illustrating Rorty’s relation to Continental Thought, this paper sketches the broad outlines of Rorty’s method of engaging different vocabularies, from across deep theoretical differences. This offers important insights for one of the key methodological challenges facing theoretical disciplines today: the diversity of interpretative frameworks and the difficulty of engaging their mutual critical and normative claims in common conversation without predisposing the dialogue to one framework. Equally, this raises key issues and suggests key insights within Rorty’s for contemporary political thought and its discussions of democratic dialogue in the context of difference.

Susan Dieleman (University of Saskatchewan) Who is this ‘We’ of whom Rorty Speaks? As a feminist, I have on occasion found myself in the position of having to defend my favourable reading of Rorty to fellow feminist philosophers, who have not been an altogether receptive audience. Yet any individual feminist philosopher is likely to cite a different reason for her less-than-positive reading of Rorty. Some, like Charlene Haddock Seigfried and Sonia Kruks, think his linguistic version of pragmatism narrows the resources available to feminism as a liberatory project. Others distance themselves from Rorty’s project because of its reliance on a strict delineation between public and private spheres. Still other feminists find it problematic that Rorty adopts wholesale an inherently conservative liberalism. Though I have thought about each of these reasons for dismissing Rorty’s work to greater or lesser extents, there is an additional reason – one that can be seen as playing a role in each of the concerns just expressed – that I have not yet explored in much detail, and so I take this opportunity to begin that exploration. This reason, cited by many feminist philosophers, involves Rorty’s ubiquitous use of the term ‘we.’ That is, many feminist philosophers cite Rorty’s presumption that there is a ‘we’ about which he can meaningfully speak, as a reason for their difficulties in taking Rorty’s views seriously. Theirs is a worry similar and related to worries expressed about Rorty’s unabashed ethnocentrism, but while many who criticize Rorty’s ethnocentrism consider it a slippery slope to a relativism they’d rather avoid altogether, feminists who are concerned about Rorty’s we-saying are motivated by a different worry: who gets counted as ‘we’? In this paper, I will suggest that there are two different ‘wes’ at play, which can be mapped onto the transition in Rorty’s work from his earlier writings, focused on epistemology and metaphysics, to his later, more explicitly political writings.

Carl Sachs (Marymount University) Rorty’s Aversion to Normative Violence: The Myth of the Given and the Death of God I shall argue that among the deeper strata of Rorty’s philosophy is what I call his aversion to normative violence. By ‘normative violence’ I mean the injury committed when someone attributes to him or herself the authority to speak on behalf of the normative as such. Normative violence occurs when some specific group presents itself as having the only coherent conception of a normative phenomenon. Such claims are performatively enacted by invoking some special relation, enjoyed only by members of that group, with nature, reality, or God. Rorty’s implicit critique of normative violence is largely indebted to Nietzsche and to Sellars. From Nietzsche, Rorty inherits a wide-ranging diagnosis of “the death of God”. From Sellars, Rorty inherits a set of powerful arguments for rejecting the Myth of the Given. Rorty recognized that both the Given and God are species of normative violence. Informed by Nietzsche’s death of God as a thesis about the transformation of cultural politics, Rorty transforms the Myth of the Given from a criticism of epistemological positions into a more general and wide-ranging commitment to an ethics of discourse. Given that commitment, normative violence arises whenever the open-endedness of cultural politics is arbitrarily arrested by the stipulation of an ontological claim.

Knowledge in Nonhuman Species: The Epistemic Levers Hypothesis The goal of this symposium is to outline a novel account of non-human animal knowledge and of its relationship to “properly” human knowledge. Standard arguments for the relevance of a notion of animal knowledge rest on demonstrating the explanatory usefulness of such a concept (e.g. Kornblith 2002). These arguments only support the claim that attributing knowledge to nonhuman animals may prove useful when providing behavioral explanations that go beyond mechanical descriptions (e.g., positing intentional states makes it possible to group together mechanically diverse behaviors on the basis of their function). The stronger claim is that, not only do animals have knowledge, but that a fully naturalized epistemology should consider the type of knowledge exhibited by nonhuman minds as well as specifically human forms of knowledge can be supported by approaching animal knowledge as a biological lever. Barker (2007) defines

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biological (or behavioral) levers as biological features involved in the regulation of certain processes. Such mechanisms rely on limited cues to regulate things like behavior (e.g. environmental indicators co-opted by an organism to become reproducible signals that carry information). This notion provides a solid basis for explaining widespread epistemic capacities in the animal realm, and can potentially provide insights for studies of human knowledge insofar as the mechanisms that support these capacities can reasonably be expected to constitute some of the scaffolding on which human epistemic capacities rely. However, as a relatively novel approach to naturalized epistemology, there is a significant amount of work to be done in situating it within the context of existing approaches to animal knowledge, providing a solid justification for the application of a biological concept such as biological levers to epistemology, and to what degree it can provide answers to classical epistemological questions, such as specifying demarcation criteria for what counts as knowledge “proper”. Exploring these questions and fixing a research agenda for epistemic levers will be the main goal of this symposium. Organizers / Organisateurs : Frédéric-Ismaël Banville (Western University) Guillaume Beaulac (Concordia University) Panelists / Participant-e-s : Colin Allen (Indiana University – Bloomington) Frédéric-Ismaël Banville (Western University) Gillian Barker (Western University) Ronald de Sousa (University of Toronto) Andrew Fenton (Dalhousie University & California State University – Fresno) Alice Livadaru (Université du Québec à Montréal) Jacqueline A. Sullivan (Western University) Chair / Président de la session : Guillaume Beaulac (Concordia University)

Phénoménologie et politique : temps, pouvoir et communauté La phénoménologie semble avoir été hantée par la difficulté d’articuler un certain nombre de thèmes essentiels et communs dans l’histoire de la pensée et, au premier chef, ceux touchant au politique. L’histoire et ses enjeux semblent notamment difficilement réductibles à la temporalité vécue, tout comme le concept de communauté paraît déborder les ressources de celui d’intersubjectivité. De surcroît, on ne trouve aucun texte explicite sur le politique dans les descriptions pourtant nombreuses et variées de Husserl. Toutefois, plusieurs auteurs de la philosophie continentale contemporaine qui se sont inscrits dans une filiation hétérodoxe ou critique à Husserl et surtout à Heidegger – pensons par exemple à Derrida, Agamben, Ricoeur et Sloterdijk – ont fait droit dans leur œuvre à une pensée profonde et originale du politique. Ce faisant, ils apparaissent chacun pouvoir contribuer à une réflexion sur les concepts fondamentaux de la pensée politique contemporaine, notamment quant aux thèmes de la temporalité, du pouvoir et de la communauté politiques. Ces développements au-delà des frontières de la phénoménologie historique sont-ils alors autant de signes d’une sortie hors de la phénoménologie, ou au contraire ne doivent-ils pas encore être comprises dans une phénoménologie en un sens plus large, comme retour à ce qui fait sens et s’impose de façon originaire pour l’être en commun ? Telle est la question que ce symposium entend développer sous des axes privilégiés, en regroupant des chercheurs oeuvrant dans différents horizons de la philosophie continentale récente. Organizer / Organisateur et organisatrice : Sophie-Jan Arrien (Université Laval) Jean-Sébastien Hardy (Université Laval)

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Panelists / Participant-e-s : Donald Landes (Université Laval) – Humanism and Contingency: Politics as Expression in Merleau-Ponty Jonathan Short (York University) – Esposito’s Munus and Butler’s Relational Dispossession: Some Preliminary Investigations Jean-Pierre Couture (Université d’Ottawa) – Peter Sloterdijk: Un surhomme en démocratie Jean-Sébastien Hardy (Université Laval) – L’imminence comme horizon temporel du politique. Le messianisme derridien à l’épreuve du présent. Giulio Mellana (Université Laval) – Pensée modale et politique : une approche Phénoménologique Jean-François Perrier (Université Laval) – Phénoménologie, despotisme et démocratie. Quelques réflexions sur la phénoménologie de Marc Richir Chair / Présidente de la session : Sophie-Jan Arrien (Université Laval)

Social Ontology: Dependence, Construction, Reality Organizer / Organisatrice : Katherine Ritchie (CUNY) Panelists / Participant-e-s : Esa Diaz-Léon (University of Barcelona) – Social Construction, Grounding, and Conceptual Ethics Ron Mallon (Washington University at St. Louis) – The Conditions of Construction Rebecca Mason (University of San Francisco) – Social Kinds, Essence and Dependence Katherine Ritchie (CUNY) – Social Structures and Social Groups

Le désir et l'intention dans l'action / Desire and Intention in Action According to a broad strand in philosophical theorizing about human agency (e.g. Harman, Bratman, Mele, Holton), intentional action typically results from a more or less complex interplay of desire and intention against the background of the agent’s beliefs. Both desire and intention are held to be non-cognitive and distinctively practical states that play neatly separable normative and causal roles with respect to behavior and reasoning. The workshop will showcase new work that casts doubt on central tenets of this dualist picture of the mind in action. Its contributors will explore new arguments concerning the nature of intention as well as the role of desires in rationalizing and motivating action. Relevant issues arise from the recent revival of ‘guise of the good’ theories of agency (e.g. Tenenbaum 2007, Schafer 2014), from new neoHumean accounts of motivation (e.g. Arpaly & Schroeder 2014), and from recent investigations of mental agency (Proust 2014). Selon un courant important de la théorisation philosophique de l’agentivité humaine (Harman, Bratman, Mele, Holton), l’action intentionnelle est typiquement conçue comme le résultat d’une interaction plus ou moins complexe entre le désir et l’intention, appuyée sur les croyances de l’agent. Le désir et l’intention sont considérés comme des états non-cognitifs et pratiques, qui jouent des rôles normatifs et causaux nettement distincts dans le raisonnement et le comportement. L’atelier de travail sera l’occasion de présenter les récents travaux qui soulèvent des doutes quant aux principes centraux de cette conception dualiste de l’esprit et de l’action. Ses participants exploreront de nouveaux arguments à propos de la nature de l’intention autant que du rôle des désirs dans la rationalisation de l’action et la motivation. D’importantes questions émergent du retour en force des théories de l’agentivité dites « de l’apparence du bien » (Tenenbaum 2007, Shafer 2014), des nouvelles approches néo-humiennes de la motivation (Arpaly & Schroeder 2014), et des enquêtes récentes sur l’agentivité mentale (Proust 2014).

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Organizers / Organisateurs et organisatrice : Christine Tappolet (Université de Montréal) Paul Boswell (CRÉ, Université de Montréal) Jens Gillessen (CRÉ, Université de Montréal) Panelists / Participant-e-s : Nomy Arpaly (Brown University) Paul Boswell (Université de Montréal) Aude Bandini (Université de Montréal) Sergio Tenebaum (University of Toronto) Jens Gillessen ((Université de Montréal) Chair / Présidente de la session : Christine Tappolet (Université de Montréal) Nomy Arpaly (Brown University) Duty and Desire The sense of duty—the feeling that a course of action is required of us, in contrast to having the “inclination” to do it— is taken by many to be a knock-down counter example to the view that actions are all motivated by desires. I argue that it isn’t, and that a neo-Humean can explain the sense of duty without conceptual loss.

Paul Boswell (Université de Montréal) There Are No Intrinsic Desires There are no intrinsic desires. I do not deny that we desire some things finally, that is, not for the sake of something else we desire. Nor do I deny facts about what you “really want”, if that means facts about what will satisfy you. But sometimes it is held that practical reasoning is a matter of determining to do what you “really” or “intrinsically” want to do in another sense (e.g. Arpaly & Schroeder 2014). By ‘intrinsic desires’ I mean final desires which are held (i) to causally explain and rationalize all of our motivations (or at least actions done for a reason) in conjunction with our beliefs, (ii) to have abstract content that is not consciously accessible, and (iii) to non-trivially determine in any circumstance, in conjunction with the facts, what we objectively ought to do. Desires that satisfy (i) and (ii) are too indeterminate in content to satisfy (iii), or they will have that content only given a future specification of it.

Aude Bandini (Université de Montréal) L’agentivité mentale : désirs, intentions et buts épistémiques Les travaux récents en métacognition (Proust 2014) ont clairement mis en évidence l’existence d’une authentique agentivité mentale, au moyen de laquelle le sujet épistémique exerce une forme de contrôle et de régulation sur ses propres états cognitifs. L’usage de ce concept d’agentivité ne va cependant pas de soi, dans la mesure où il semble nous contraindre à importer, dans la sphère cognitive et épistémique, des concepts avant tout forgés pour rendre compte de l’action pratique : celui d’action et, avec lui, ceux de désirs, d’intention et de but. Il est désormais admis qu’il existe des sentiments épistémiques, et que les émotions jouent un rôle crucial dans nos processus cognitifs. Peut-on cependant aller jusqu’à parler au sens littéral (et pas seulement métaphorique) de désirs, d’intentions et de buts épistémiques, et si oui, quels sont les phénomènes mentaux que cela pourrait nous permettre de mieux saisir ?

Sergio Tenenbaum (University of Toronto) Intentions as Good-Judgments “Guise of the good” views often take an intention to be a judgment to the effect that the content of the intention is “allout” good, or good “simpliciter”. Bratman famously argued that “Buridan” cases pose a serious problem to any attempt to identify intentions with evaluative judgments; in Buridan cases, I need to form exactly one intention while I judge that two or more options are equally good. I argue that a model of defeasible reasoning, roughly along the lines proposed by John Horty, allows us to identify intentions with conclusions of evaluative reasoning, and thus with evaluative judgments, in an unproblematic manner.

Jens Gillessen (Université de Montréal) Judging Future Action To Be Good. A Dilemma Do we intend what we intend under ‘the guise of the good’? A view along these lines was held by Davidson in his ‘Intending’; more recently, Tenenbaum has given it a defense. Little attention has been paid, however, to a dilemma which Davidson struggled hard with. On the one hand, judging future action φ to be merely conditionally good would

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not account for the rationalizing powers of intentions. On the other, judging φ to be unconditionally good can even seem irrational per se. After all, untoward circumstances could make whatsoever now good-seeming future action bad, and what circumstances will obtain is largely open. The talk will argue that the dilemma troubles extant ‘guise of the good’ accounts just as it troubled Davidson’s; all the more so since Davidson’s alleged solution can be refuted with striking counter-examples. These claims will finally be combined with a ‘guide of the good’ thesis about desire, and it will be argued that intention is either a non-evaluative belief, or (more plausibly, as Bratman argued) a mental state of its own.

The Epistemic and the Practical Organizer / Organisateur :

Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (University of British Columbia)

Panelists / Participant-e-s : Patrick Rysiew (University of Victoria) – Epistemic Norms and the Practical Lisa Miracchi (University of Pennsylvania) – Liberals Own Up: Diagnosing Our Intellectual Role in Producing Post-Truth Politics Jonathan Ichikawa (UBC) – Comments on Rysiew and Miracchi

The Animal Sciences Meet Animal Ethics Attitudes toward nonhuman animals are clearly changing in all of the many contexts in which we interact with them – from the roads that we build through their habitats, to the treatment of our companion animals, to the food we put on our plates. While scholarly interest has generated important work in critical animal studies and animal ethics, it has not yet produced a theoretical framework that can effectively inform and transform the many public and science policies that constrain our interactions with nonhuman animals. Scholars in critical animal studies often approach the subject in ways that imply cultural or moral relativism, which is antithetical to strong normative claims and a poor basis for developing robust policies. Animal ethics scholarship, although decidedly normative and thus initially promising as a basis for policy, has been hampered by theoretical frameworks that rely on universalizations that are incompatible with, or only vaguely informed by, the findings of the animal sciences. The animal sciences increasingly support the view that humans are not the only species with rich mental, social, and emotional lives. For example, behavioural science research indicates that many intensely social animals exhibit behavioural traditions that differ from one population to the next (sometimes regarded as cultures), an awareness of where they fit in their social hierarchies, and an ability to cooperate with others. These discoveries imply the presence of various sophisticated cognitive capacities, including memory, a social self-awareness, abilities to plan, and a sense of possible advantage or present disadvantage. Research in the neurosciences is bolstering these conclusions. In 2012 a group of prominent neuroscience researchers, buoyed by this research, crafted The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, in which they state: "the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and may other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates." These scientific developments are having an impact on social norms, including science policies governing experimentation on nonhuman animals. Unfortunately, logical inconsistencies riddle public and science policies, underscoring the urgent need for robust and coherent analysis that has the conceptual resources to reconcile contemporary science and the changing moral status of nonhuman animals. In this panel we will address key philosophical issues that appear when the animal sciences meet animal ethics. Some of the panelists will address the ethical aspects of interspecies relationships between humans and animals. Specifically, Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson plan to investigate how recent scientific findings on interspecies communication with domesticated animals reveal the potential for interspecies sociability (and hence citizenship), drawing on some recent studies about human-dog communication (showing that humans know how to interpret different dog barks, even though they don’t know that they know this), and some similar studies about human-horse communication. They maintain that this research helps address both epistemic concerns about our ability to know animals' good and also helps increase possibilities for mutually negotiated activities.

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Other panelists will address normativity in other than human species. Specifically, Kristin Andrews will develop some of her work on the evolution of morality. She is particularly interested in in-group/out-group thought, purity, and the adoption of group cultural behaviors by immigrants that one finds in various ape and cetacean cultural groups. In a similar vein, Guillaume Beaulac will present his work on cognitive environments, and how important these are when we think about decision making and changing our habits and practices. He will argue that investigation of other species’ cognitive strategies and behaviour in various different contexts can bring insight into how humans choose between options. Andrew Fenton and Maria Botero take some of these considerations about human-nonhuman relationships and the continuities between human and nonhuman cognitive and affective capacities and bring then to bear on laboratory research. Despite a distinct 'relational turn' in some prominent, progressive discussions of animal ethics (e.g, see recent work by Donaldson, Gruen, Kymlicka, and Palmer), the morality of such captive contexts as laboratories and zoos tends to be understood through a rather traditional abolitionist lens. Fenton will discuss how such captive contexts can be analyzed without embracing a strong abolitionism, borrowing insights from some relational animal ethics and recent moves to seek a speciesinclusive research ethics framework. In a similar vein, Maria Botero will interrogate the recent move by the National Institute of Health (NIH) to retire all current chimpanzees in invasive research, which is the first time that a non-human animal has been granted this kind of protection in North America. Though critics maintain that the series of reports that lead to this historic decision lacks moral arguments to justify that decision, Botero will analyze the moral justification behind the 2015 NIH decision to stop using chimpanzees in research. She will argue that the characterization of chimpanzees presented in the 2013, Council of Councils Working Group on the Use of Chimpanzees in NIH-Supported Research report presents chimpanzees as being capable of possessing basic personal autonomy, and on this basis grants them the moral status that earns them protection from being used in experimental research. Botero will further investigate how this kind of capacity can be used is future analyses of the moral status of other species used in animal experimentation. Gillian Crozier will extend some of these reflections on moral status and related concerns about political status to zoos and aquariums. She will explore philosophical arguments made in defence of the legitimacy of these institutions and evaluate the extent to which these arguments are applicable in the current social and scientific context, with a particular focus on the Canadian setting. Organizers and Co-Chairs / Organisateur et organisatrice – présidente et président de la session: Letitia Meynell (Dalhousie University) David Pena Guzman (Johns Hopkins University) Panelists / Participant-e-s : Kristin Andrews (York University) – Natural Norms in Great Apes and Cetaceans Guillaume Beaulac (Concordia University) – Cognitive Environments and Changing Habits Les environnements cognitifs et le changement des habitudes Maria Botero (Sam Houston State University) – Autonomous Chimpanzees Clocking Out for the Last Time: The Moral Argument behind a Decision to Retire Chimpazees from Research Gillian Crozier (Laurentian University) – Revisiting the Social License of Zoos and Aquariums Andrew Fenton (Dalhousie University / Cal State at Fresno) – Co-creating Decisional Authority in Compromised Spaces Will Kymlicka (Queen’s University) and Sue Donaldson (Independent Scholar) – Why Don’t You Just Ask?

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Joint Sessions / Sessions conjointes : NASSP – SNAPS / CPA – ACP

Gender and the Politics of Cyberspace Cyberspace is a constructed environment that at times aspires to overcome many of the shortcomings of the ‘real’ world of embodied politics. The hacker ethic proposed in Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984) espouses principles some of which echo familiar principles of justice: universal access, non-discrimination, and free access to information. Yet, the aspiration to non-discrimination on the internet has not been realized in the 33 years since the publication of Steven Levy’s book, and indeed the level of discrimination and unequal treatment experienced online and in social media is cause for concern. Indeed, the extent to which sex is explicitly or implicitly referenced online is astronomical. The politics of cyberspace seems distinctly and decidedly gendered. This feature of a socially and technologically constructed environment is not surprising, but nonetheless remains under examined in the literature on cyber ethics and cyber politics. Recent cyberbullying examples ranging from the sexual harassment of Rahteah Parsons and Amanda Todd to #gamergate to they trolling of American gymnast Gabby Douglas show that cyberspace can be a dangerous place for women and girls, for people of colour, and for otherwise marginalized individuals. This panel attempts to examine issues at the intersection of gender and the politics of cyberspace. The panel will explore gendered aspects of trolling and incivility in cyberspace, online sexual harassment and bullying, and the putative anonymity or neutrality of cyberspace. Interactions in cyberspace have the appearance of being disembodied, and hence empowering for individuals whose embodied existence is attached to a marginalized or oppressed social identity. Yet embodied life is constantly referenced in social media, and the neutral aspirations of the technology have not matched the reality.

Organizer / Organisatrice :

Jennifer Szende

(University of Guelph)

Participants / Participantes : Samantha Brennan (Western University) Kathryn Norlock (Trent University) – Online Shaming: Rethinking the Social Psychology of Public Power in Cyberspace’s Imaginal Communities Sandra Raponi (Merrimack College) – The Dark Side of the Internet: Online Harassment Against Women Jennifer Szende (University of Guelph)

CSWIP / CPA – ACP

Distress, Trauma and Anxiety in the Neoliberal Institutions Organizer / Organisatrice :

Karen Robertson (Trent University)

Participants / Participantes : Vanessa Lehan (York University) Suze Berkout (Independent Scholar) Kelly Fritsch (University of Toronto) Émilie Dionne (Université d’Ottawa)

SSC – SCES / CPA – ACP

Spinoza Society of Canada: Politics, Superstition and Human Nature The recent publication of Edwin Curley’s Second Volume of "Spinoza’s Collected Works" has finally provided the English-language Spinoza scholarship with a reliable translation of Spinoza’s texts on politics and religion. Similarly, the most accurate French translations of Spinoza’s "Political Treatise" and "Theologico-Political Treatise" were published in 2005 and 2012, respectively. As a result, both Francophone and Anglophone Spinoza scholars are currently renewing their focus on Spinoza’s political

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thought and his analysis of religion. This year, the "Spinoza Society of Canada / Société canadienne d’études sur Spinoza" aims to promote a dialogue between Canadian English and French-language Spinoza scholars on these themes, inviting selected speakers to present papers in both French and English on topics broadly related to Spinoza’s political theory, philosophical anthropology, and the role of superstition and religious customs in human societies. Organizers / Organisateurs : Oberto Marrama (UQTR / Groningen University) Torin Doppelt (Queen’s University) Participants : Jon Miller (Queen’s) – Spinoza’s Cosmopolitanism Shannon Dea (Waterloo) – Spinoza and Race

ACCUTE – ACUTE / ACP – SCHPS

Attention and Imagination Is imagination a form of attention? If so, what are its foci? There is an ordinary sense in which “imagination” is synonymous with daydreaming and being deceived. Let us set aside this sense, however, as an epistemic dead-end, and instead accept Jan Zwicky’s invitation to “contemplate thinking in images as a way of understanding the real.” Let us hypothesize that imagination is a form of attention to real (rather than fictive) things, and let us call these things “images.” And let us adopt Ezra Pound’s working definition of an image: “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” What can we learn by attending to images? Is imagination at the root of all thinking (as Aristotle maintained)? Or are there some kinds of thinking that are incompatible with imagining? If so, how are they structurally different from imagining? In the history of Western philosophy — in the work of Descartes and Spinoza, for example — imagination has tended to be associated with the body. Insofar as we are embodied beings living in an embodied world, imagining seems indispensable to knowing that world and our place in it. In this interdisciplinary workshop, we shall draw upon the resources of philosophy, aesthetics, political science, and comparative literature to investigate what it means to think in images. Organizer and Chair / Organisateur et président de la session : Warren Heiti (Vancouver Island University) Participants / Participant-e-s : Lucy Alford (University of Chicago) Sheri Benning (University of Regina) JanaLee Cherneski (Reed University) Carolyn Richardson (Independent Scholar) Suzanne Taylor (University of Chicago) Lucy Alford (University of Chicago) Out of Nothing: Imagination as a Mode of Poetic Attention Imagination can be understood as the ability of the mind to attend to what is not present in given perception, drawing on a combination of stored perceptual memory and creative elaboration. This talk draws on the philosophies of imagination and attention articulated by Aristotle, Al-Farabi, Immanuel Kant, and Elaine Scarry, to propose that A) attention is the essential medium of poetry, and B) imagination is an inflection, or mode, of this medium of poetic attention, in which attention is directed to objects of mental representation. Pairing my philosophical investigation with readings of poems by William Wordsworth, Rainer Maria Rilke, and John Burnside, I identify and explore three kinds of imaginative attention (reproductive, recombinatory, and elaborative) as they play out in poetic language.

Sheri Benning (University of Regina) Re-imagining the Prairies “Vast and worthless,” “an ocean with no past,” “extended beyond credulity” are a few descriptions of the prairies by early European explorers. This inability of newcomers to “see” the prairies engendered efforts to “improve” the land. One such effort, farming, took phenomenal hold. By 1913 a million people had settled the prairies, reined in by Ottawa’s grid system of land division that not only disregarded harmonizing with the natural terrain but also displaced both First

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Nations and Métis peoples from their traditional homes. Currently, Saskatchewan is undergoing another crisis of place: small-scale farming has given way to agribusiness and as the average farm size increases, rural communities and landscapes suffer. According to Deleuze and Guattari, by disrupting and expanding how we “see” the world, art makes possible new modes of understanding. If the exploitation of the prairies – the land and its people – is, in part, due to a failure of the imagination, then to escape the devastating legacy of colonial, extractive capitalism, we need also to look to artists for guidance on how to re-imagine our ways of being here.

JanaLee Cherneski (Reed University) Imagination and the Activity of Politics What does ‘thinking in images’ mean for the activity of politics? I approach this question as it relates to the daily tasks and practices of ethical (and political) actors. Moving beyond visual propaganda and ‘imagined communities’, my paper explores this question by thinking with and against J.S. Mill, Fernando Pessoa, F.R. Scott, Simone Weil, and Mahatma Gandhi. To act with an image is to use an embodied vision of political ends as the basis for pursuing the means by which such ends are achieved. It is to reject the consequentialist and Machiavellian notion that the ends justify the means. To act with an image demands that affect, body, action and ‘end’ are bound together in a whole practice or enterprise rather than parcelled into compartments, specializations, and segments of time.

Carolyn Richardson (Independent Scholar) Projective Imagination as a Route to Knowledge According to Stanley Cavell’s understanding of the distinctive method of ordinary language philosophers, the imagination has a special role to play in philosophical thinking. When Wittgenstein or Austin ask “What would we say if...?” they are inviting us to use what Cavell calls our projective imagination as a route to knowledge. To know what we would say under certain circumstances, then, is not to know an empirical generalization based on what people have said, but rather to imagine ourselves in those circumstances and thereby see what we would and would not say. This paper describes and evaluates this particular use of the imagination in the service of philosophy.

Suzanne Taylor (University of Chicago) The Perils of Poetry: Disordering Imagination in Hume’s Treatise One of the most innovative (and most debated) aspects of Hume’s theory of sympathy is his claim that mere ideas can acquire the vivacity of impressions when they are brought home to that liveliest of all ideas: the self. Yet Hume’s discussion of the imagination in Book I of the Treatise suggests that sympathy is not the only process by which ideas can attain the status of impressions. There he claims that in a fit of madness—poetic or otherwise—the imagination may become disordered, and in this state, fictions may take on all the force of a sense impression. This paper will argue that for Hume, poetry has the potential to reorganize the ontological hierarchy of images in the mind, and by extension, to change how we view the world.

CPA / CSHMP

New Perspectives on Logic in the Nineteenth Century, From Kant to Russell Participants / Participant-e-s : Jamie Tappenden (University of Michigan) – Frege, Carl Snell and Romanticism: Fruitful Concepts and the ‘Organic / Mechanical Distinction’ Nick Stang (University of Toronto) – Anti-Psychologism in Context Erich Reck (University of California at Riverside) – The Logic in Dedekind’s Logicism Nicholas Griffin (McMaster University) – Russell and Hilbert and Kant and Geometry Sandra Lapointe (McMaster University) – Logic in the 19th Century, before Frege Dirk Schlimm (McGill University) – Practices of 19th-Century Logic

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CPA / CPSA

Roundtable on Arneil and Hirschmann’s Disability and Political Theory Organizer / Organisatrice : Barbara Arneil Participants / Participant-e-s : Will Kymlicka (Queen’s University) Michael Prince (University of Victoria) Annie Heffernen (University of Chicago) Anita Silvers (San Francisco State University)

Special Sessions / Sessions spéciales CPA – ACP / PITS - PPE

Philosophy, Democracy, and Education Organizer / Organisateur :

Nick Tanchuk (Columbia University)

CPA – ACP / Equity Committee – Comité d’équité

Stereotype Threat & Implicit Bias Organizers / Organisatrices : Katie Stockdale (Cornell University/ Dalhousie University) Chandra Kavanagh (McMaster) Jenna Woodrow (Thompson Rivers University) Participants / Participant-e-s : Carla Fehr (University of Waterloo) Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour (Thompson Rivers University) Andrew Molas (York University) Meredith Schwartz (Ryerson University) Jenna Woodrow (Thompson Rivers University)

Truth and Reconciliation, and Native Canadian Philosophy Organizers / Organisateur-trice :

David Hunter (Ryerson University) Sandra Lapointe (McMaster University)

Participants / Participant-e-s : Dale Turner (Dartmouth University) Douglas Sanderson (University of Toronto) Gordon Christie (UBC) Sandra Tomsons (University of Winnipeg) Moderator / Présidente de la session : Sandra Lapointe (McMaster University)

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