Philosophy

The film

In a single recent year the U.S. classified about five times the number of pages added to the Library of Congress. We live in a world where the production of secret knowledge dwarfs the production of open knowledge. Depending on whom you ask, government secrecy is either the key to victory in our struggle against terrorism, or our Achilles heel. But is so much secrecy a bad thing?

Expressive music, almost everyone agrees, evokes an emotional response of some kind in receptive listeners, at least some of the time, in at least some conditions of listening. But is such an emotional response distinctive of or unique to the music that evokes it? In other words, is there such a thing as music-specific emotion? This essay is devoted to an exploration of that question and others related to it.

This workshop introduces two recently published books by members of the Department of Philosophy at CEU: Hanoch Ben-Yami's Descartes's Philosophical Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) and Mike Griffin's Leibniz, God and Necessity (Cambridge University Press, 2012, Paperback 2015). A short summary of each of the books by the authors will be followed by comments and discussions.

Few major philosophers would be better suited to address issues about the challenges that liberal democracies and global institutions face today than Joseph Raz. We aim to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his monumental book The Morality of Freedom in this workshop. Having been at the forefront of many challenging philosophical matters, Raz has indeed changed our legal, political, and moral landscape.