Abstract: This paper is an attempt to develop an account of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s justification for and use of, what I will call, "democratic propaganda" – truthful propaganda that is aimed at promoting and fostering democratic political action by stirring the emotions. Interpreting it light of his broader work, I argue that King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is a piece of democratic propaganda.
Topic: The Wrong and the Bad: Towards a Rationalist Account of Moral Learning
Abstract:
Three Euthyphro Problems
Topic: Conceptual Engineering: How Can We Do It?
Abstract:
Are adult humans the only normative creatures? Recent research by development psychologists and animal behaviorists has begun to challenge the idea that adult humans are the only normative folk; children countenance specific cooperative norms (Hamlin et al. 2007), and some nonhuman animals act consistently with some of the moral foundations found across human cultures (Vincent et al. 2018). Such findings feed the current interest in examining the evolution of morality.
Abstract: Aesthetic values appear to be located in objects, for we see the grace of a dancer’s step and hear the jauntiness of a guitar riff. Indeed, we understand perfectly well how to manipulate an item’s aesthetic value by manipulating its other features. Yet, at the same time, we want to say that aesthetic values are subjective, constituted by our responses. In this talk, Lopes reorients the dialectic by explaining how aesthetic values are natural properties.
Department of Philosophy