Lectures & Events

In this talk, Dr. Jesse Tomalty will evaluate several recent accounts of why it is morally impermissible for states to discriminate against prospective immigrants on the basis of race, ethnicity, or religion.

On the occasion of UNESCO World Philosophy Day, the Philosophy Department will host an information session for students who may want to pursue graduate studies.

An aesthetic community is a group of people engaged in coordinated practices oriented towards aesthetic value: Marvel fans, classical music connoisseurs, Instagram aestheticians. Recent work on aesthetic communities aims at articulating a "communitarian" account of the aesthetic domain, opposing an "individualistic" alternative. In this talk, Dr. Nicholas Wiltsher will argue that the emerging communitarian account is actually still pretty individualistic. He suggests that proper analysis of aesthetic communities requires analysis of relations of power within them. He further suggests that focus on such relations allows us to see the theoretical options more clearly than an approach using only a distinction between communities and individuals.

In this talk, Dr. Pierce Randall compares three competing normative frameworks for understanding public health policy and what they say about surveillance: the transaction framework, which conceives of the public role of public health authorities as correcting for market failures in health; the common good framework, which conceives of public health interventions as correcting for moral failures of markets to promote our shared interests in population health; and the security interest framework, which draws on the contractualist tradition in political philosophy to evaluate public health interventions in light of the fundamental security interests members of society have and what policies they would accept to promote those interests. He will outline how the security interest framework can draw on resources from surveillance ethics to provide guidance on how to weigh privacy interests against the need to prevent the spread of disease.

Have contemporary francophone Marxist theorists learned from previous critiques regarding the relationship between race and class?

Meena Krishnamurthy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Queen’s University. She is a political philosopher who works on race, democracy, and social movements. She is currently writing a book, "The Emotions of Nonviolence," and a series of related papers on Martin Luther King Jr.’s political philosophy. Her work is about King’s views on the role of the political emotions in motivation to end racial injustice. It explores how he used the various tactics of the civil rights movement (protest, images, letters, and oratory) to engage these emotions and to overcome some of the barriers to political action. This project is a follow up to her earlier piece on King, “(White) Tyranny and the Democratic Value of Distrust.”

Attunement and Individuation: Existential Tonality in Being and Time

The Surrealist Glance: A Phenomenological Analysis of Surrealism

An Empiricist Solution to the Radical Concept Nativism Puzzle

Foucault's Archaeological Method: Dispersing the Temporal Unity of Phenomenological Experience