Philosophy

Based on a wealth of experimental data, it has been argued that, already
between their first and second birthdays, children routinely appeal to
mental states---goals, perceptions, beliefs, and desires---to explain the
behaviour of others. In this talk, I will analyse a range of experiments
involving, e.g., non-verbal false-belief tasks, cooperative pointing, and
reasoning about goals and desires, and attempt to show that all of them can
be accounted for on the assumption that infants have a quite minimal theory

Directed by Michael Haneke, 2009, 144 min.
German with English subtitles

ABSTRACT:  A 17th Century print by Giovanni Castiglione bears a motto:  Ubi Inletabilitas ibi Virtus.  Its meaning is far from clear.   What is inletabilitas?  What exactly is its relation to virtue?  To what broader psychological theory and moral theory does the thought in the motto belong?  I draw on a range of resources – from phenomenology, from art history, from the ontology of Renaissance psychiatry – to propose and explore an answer.  Inletabilitas, I argue, is a distinctive form of melancholic self-consciousness.  It is associated closely with grief and mo

Minority Report
Directed by Steven Spielberg, 2002, 145 min.
Starring: Tom Cruise, Max Von Sidow

The Philm Club aims at screening and discussing movies that raise philosophically relevant issues in accessible as well as entertaining ways.

Waking Life
Directed by Richart Linklater, 2001, 99 min.

The Philm Club aims at screening and discussing movies that raise philosophically relevant issues in accessible as well as entertaining ways.

Is it beyond doubt that one exists? In this talk I will describe a number of ways of constructing scenarios which form the basis of a sceptical challenge to the knowledge that one exists . Some of these possibilities depend upon unorthodox metaphysical views about the nature of existence, or the conditions for thought ownership -- but some of them do not. Instead they build on the general point that a sceptical scenario concerning a certain proposition p need not be a case in which p is false.

The goal of this paper is to sketch an account of empathetic pain. The experience of empathetic pain is a species of vicarious experiences of pain. Empathetic responses to another's affective state of kind S are vicarious experiences of affective states of kind S. There are presently two prevalent approaches to empathetic experiences in both cognitive science and philosophy: a mimicry approach (based on the discovery of mirror neurons) and the direct perception approach. Both approaches face insuperable objections.