Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

Robert Kane (Ph. D. Yale University) is University Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and Professor of Law at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of seven books and more that seventy articles on the philosophy of mind, free will and action, ethics and value theory and philosophy of religion, inclu­ding Free Will and Values (1985), Through the Moral Maze (1994), The Significance of Free Will (Oxford, 1996), A Contem­pora­ry Introduction to Free Will (Oxford, 2005), Four Views of Free Will (co-authored with John Fischer, Derk Pereboom and Manuel Vargas, Black­well, 2007) and Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom (Cambridge, 2010). He is editor of The Ox­ford Handbook of Free Will (2002, 2nd edition, 2011), among other anthologies, and a multiple contri­bu­tor to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. His lecture series, The Quest for Mea­ning: Va­lues, Ethics and the Modern Experience, appears in The Great Courses on Tape Series of The Teaching Company (Chantilly, Virginia). His book, The Significance of Free Will, was the first annual winner of the Robert W. Hamilton Faculty Book Award. His article, “The Modal Ontological Argument” (Mind, 1984), was selected by The Philosopher’s Annual as one of ten best of 1984. The recipient of fifteen major teaching awards at the University of Texas, including the President’s Excellence Award for teaching in the University’s Honors Program, he was named in 1995 one of the inaugural members of the Universi­ty’s Aca­demy of Distinguished Teachers. He is known internationally for his defense of a libertarian or incompatibilist view of free will (one that is incomaptible with determinism) and for his attempt to reconcile such a view with modern science.

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Kane’s talk - 'Acting “of One’s Own Free Will”: New Perspectives on an Ancient Philosophical Problem' - at the Aristotelian Society on 21 October 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.

David Enoch is The Rodney Blackman Chair in the Philosophy of Law, at The Faculty of Law and the Philosophy Department, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studied law and philosophy in Tel Aviv University, where he earned his B.A. and LL.B. in 1993. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from NYU in 2003. David works primarily in moral, political, and legal philosophy. His publications include: Taking Morality Seriously (OUP, 2011); “Against Public Reason”, in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 1 (2015); “Agency, Shmagency”, Philosophical Review 115 (2006); and “Why Idealize”, Ethics 115(4) (2005).

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Enoch's talk - 'What’s Wrong with Paternalism:Autonomy, Belief and Action' - at the Aristotelian Society on 19 October 2015. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Metaphysicians are in the business of making and defending modal claims – claims about how things must be or cannot be. Wittgenstein’s opposition to necessity claims, along with his various negative remarks about ‘metaphysical’ uses of language, makes it seem almost a truism that Wittgenstein was opposed to metaphysics. In this paper I want to make a case for rejecting that apparent truism. My thesis is that it is illuminating to characterise what Wittgenstein and Anscombe are doing in their philosophical writing as metaphysics without manufactured necessities. Doing so helps to articulate a sharper, more interesting, critique of contemporary metaphysical practices than therapeutic or linguistic framings of Wittgenstein’s method make possible. It also allows us to place Anscombe in the context of a tradition of British metaphysics that emerged in the 1940s in an attempt to reverse the devastating impact on ethics of the new ‘analytical’ philosophy.

Rachael Wiseman is Senior Lecturer in Philosphy at University of Liverpool. She is the author of the Routledge Guidebook to Anscombe’s Intention (Routledge, 2016) and, with Clare Mac Cumhaill, Metaphysical Animals (Chatto & Windus, 2022) — a joint philosophical biography of GEM Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch. She is associate editor (for analytic philosophy) at British Journal for the History of Philosophy.

This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Wiseman's talk - "Metaphysics by Analogy" - at the Aristotelian Society on 17 January 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Rae Langton is Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Newnham College. Born and raised in India, she studied Philosophy at Sydney and Princeton, and has taught philosophy in Australia, Scotland, the USA, and England. She held professorships at Edinburgh 1999-2004 and at MIT 2004-2013. She works in moral and political philosophy, speech act theory, philosophy of law, the history of philosophy, metaphysics, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (Oxford University Press, 1998), and Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification (Oxford University Press, 2009). Her best known articles are ‘Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts’, ‘Duty and Desolation’, and ‘Defining Intrinsic’ (co-authored with David Lewis). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013, to the British Academy in 2014, and to the Academia Europeae in 2017. She is one of five Cambridge faculty on Prospect Magazine’s voted list of 50 ‘World Thinkers 2014’, chosen for ‘engaging most originally and profoundly with the central questions of the world today’. In 2015 she gave the John Locke Lectures, currently being finalised for publication. She plans to give the H.L.A.Hart Lecture in 2019.

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Langton's talk - 'Empathy and First Personal Imagining' - at the Aristotelian Society on 12 November 2018. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.