UVic Philosophy

Professor Yap on Anti-racism https://thetyee.ca//Dear-Universities-Anti-Racism-Worksho/

We are very excited to announce that Madeleine Kenyon has just been named a 2020 3M National Student Fellow! Congratulations, Maddy Kenyon!

http://darinthompson.ca//colin-macleod-right-wrong-wicked/

Raymond Tallis Thursday/Friday! Landsdowne Lecture: Title: Are We (Just) Animals? Thursday, February 27th, 2020 at 7:00pm in Engineering Computing Science (ECS) Building, room 116... Abstract: Increasingly, it is claimed that human beings are best understood in biological terms; that persons are their brains, and societies are best understood as collections of brains; and that we should consequently look to evolutionary theory to understand what we are now. In short, our biological roots explain our cultural leaves. I will argue, against this, that the gap between our nearest animal kin and ourselves is too wide to read across from the one to the other. Persons are not (just) brains or (just) animals. Department Colloquium: Title: Myth-Information Friday, February 28th at 2:30pm in CLE A303 Abstract: The talk will examine the misuse of ‘Information’, a term that is ubiquitous in contemporary philosophy. Materialist philosophers find it especially useful for reducing the mind to activity in the brain. If consciousness is information and what goes on in the brain is information-processing, then the mind is brain activity. At the heart of this argument are many confusions, the most important being the muddling of ‘information’ in everyday sense with the technical sense used in communication engineering. So long as ‘myth-information’ has such a prominent place in philosophical discourse, philosophers cannot even attempt to think about the relationship between mind and cosmos.

Colloquium Friday! Title: Why Can't I Change Bruckner's Eighth Symphony? Friday, Feb 7th, at 2:30pm... Location: Clearihue A303 Dr. David Friedell, UBC Abstract: Bruckner revised his Eighth Symphony. He changed, among other things, the tonality of the third movement. I can't change the symphony, no matter how hard I try. Why not? This is especially mysterious, since Ella Fitzgerald changed jazz pieces she didn’t compose. I solve the puzzle by giving a new theory of music on which musical works are created partless abstracta. Musical works undergo socially determined normative changes to how they should be performednot changes to their intrinsic properties. Were social practices radically different, I could change Bruckner’s symphony.