Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

A research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris since 1979, François Recanati has taught in several major universities around the world, including Berkeley, Harvard, Geneva, and St Andrews. In addition to his CNRS job, he is a ‘directeur d’études’ at EHESS and the Director of Institut Jean-Nicod, a research lab in philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science hosted by the Ecole Normale Supérieure. His publications in the philosophy of language and mind include more than one hundred articles, many edited books, and a dozen monographs, the most recent of which are Mental Files (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Mental Files in Flux (Oxford University Press, 2016). He was the first President of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy (1990-93), and the Principal Investigator of a research project on Context, Content and Compositionality funded by the European Research Council (Advanced Grant, 2009-2013). He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012, and was awarded the CNRS Silver Medal in 2014 and a Honorary Doctorate from Stockholm University (also in 2014). He is the general editor of the Jean-Nicod book series published by MIT Press and of the Context and Content series published by Oxford University Press. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Recanati's talk - 'Fictional, Metafictional, Parafictional' - at the Aristotelian Society on 16 October 2017. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

As the first talk for the 2017-18 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year's Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Helen Beebee (University of Manchester) as the 110th President of the Aristotelian Society. Helen Beebee is Samuel Hall Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. She completed her PhD at King’s College London in 1996, and has previously held positions at Edinburgh, St. Andrews, UCL, The Australian National University, and Birmingham. Her research falls mostly within metaphysics, focussing primarily on causality, laws of nature, and freedom of the will. Her publications include a monograph on Hume (Hume on Causation, Routledge 2006) and a textbook, Free Will (Palgrave, 2013), and she is currently Principal Investigator for an AHRC project, ‘The Age of Metaphysical Revolution’, which focusses on the work and correspondence of David Lewis in the context of his role in the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. She has served as President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science (2015-17), Director of the British Philosophical Association (2007-11), a member of the AHRC Advisory Board (2008-13), and a co-editor of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (current), as well as a member of various executive committees of learned societies and journal editorial boards. She is a Patron of the Athena SWAN Charter. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Beebee's address - 'Philosophical Scepticism' - at the Aristotelian Society on 2 October 2017. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Shamik Dasgupta is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He works primarily in metaphysics and the philosophy of science, with additional research interests in epistemology and ethics. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Dasgupta's talk - 'Normative Non-Naturalism and the Problem of Authority' - at the Aristotelian Society on 19 June 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Daniel Viehoff is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at New York University. His research focuses on political, legal, and moral philosophy. He is especially interested in questions of political authority and legitimacy, and in democratic theory. Daniel is currently completing a book manuscript on the special duties we have to obey democratically made decisions. In addition he is doing work on the nature of voting rights and the justification of democratic enfranchisement. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Viehoff's talk - 'Serving the Governed' - at the Aristotelian Society on 5 June 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Ursula Renz is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, where she teaches classes in both Theoretical Philosophy (epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy) and Early Modern Philosophy. She has published widely on Early Modern Philosophy (Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Shaftesbury), Kant, the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism (Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer), as well as on the emotions, self-knowledge, and the problem of epistemic trust. In her talk, she will address a few philosophical problems of which she became aware of during her work for the edited volume Self-Knowledge: A History (OUP 2017). This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Renz's talk - 'Self-Knowledge as a Personal Achievement' - at the Aristotelian Society on 22 May 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Gerald Lang teaches Philosophy at the University of Leeds, and received his training in Bristol and Oxford. He was the co-editor of Luck, Value, and Commitment: Themes from the Ethics of Bernard Williams (OUP 2012), along with Ulrike Heuer, and How We Fight: Ethics in War (OUP 2014), along with Helen Frowe. He has published on a large number of topics in moral and political philosophy: distributive justice, political liberty, consequentialism, fairness, life and death issues in reproductive ethics, well-being and death, self-defence, the ethics of war, and aspects of practical reason and metaethics. He is currently writing a monograph, Strokes of Luck, about the role of luck in normative ethics and justice, work on which has been partly funded by the Mind Association. His next major research project will be concerned with self-defence, war, and the foundations of deontology. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Lang's talk - 'What Follows from Defensive Non-Liability?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 8 May 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Beate Roessler is Professor of Ethics and its History at the University of Amsterdam; from 2003 to 2010 she also taught as Socrates-Professor for the Foundations of Humanism at Leiden University. She formerly taught philosophy at the Free University, Berlin, Germany, and at the University of Bremen, Germany. In 2003/4 she was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin; she is a co-editor of the European Journal of Philosophy. Her publications include The Value of Privacy, Polity Press 2005; Social Dimensions of Privacy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (ed. with D.Mokrosinska), Cambridge UP 2015; Von Person zu Person. Zur Moralität persönlicher Beziehungen, (ed. with A. Honneth, Frankfurt 2008). Her current research focuses on problems in individual autonomy. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Roessler's talk - 'Privacy as a Human Right' - at the Aristotelian Society on 6 March 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Lea Ypi is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. She is the author of Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (Oxford University Press 2012) and, with Jonathan White, The Meaning of Partisanship (Oxford University Press, 2016). She has edited Migration in Political Theory (OUP 2016, with Sarah Fine) and Kant and Colonialism (OUP 2015, with Katrin Flikschuh). She is currently writing a book on “Teleology and System in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” (under contract with Oxford University Press). This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Ypi's talk - ' Pragmatist Coherence as the Source of Truth and Reality' - at the Aristotelian Society on 20 February 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Genia Schӧnbaumsfeld is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton who specializes in Epistemology, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and the Philosophy of Religion. She is the author of The Illusion of Doubt, forthcoming with Oxford University Press later this year, and of A Confusion of the Spheres – Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion, also with Oxford UP (2007). In her new book she argues that radical scepticism is an illusion generated by a Cartesian picture of one’s evidential situation, which, once undermined, makes available to one a ‘realism without empiricism’ that allows unmediated contact with the objects and persons in one’s environment which an appearance of doubt had threatened to put forever beyond one’s cognitive grasp. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Schӧnbaumsfeld's talk - 'Beliefs-in-a-Vat' - at the Aristotelian Society on 6 February 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Eleanor Knox is a Lecturer in Philosophy at King's College London. Her work has two strands, one in the foundations of spacetime physics, and another in inter-theoretic relations in physics and science more generally. The two come together when thinking about emergent spacetimes in theories of quantum gravity; much of her work focusses on Spacetime Functionalism, an approach to the interpretation of spacetime theories that promises to help us understand emergent spacetimes. After a BA, BPhil and DPhil at Oxford, Eleanor moved to London, first as a Chandaria Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, and then as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and then Lecturer at KCL. She is the winner of the 2015 James T. Cushing Prize in the History and Philosophy of Physics. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Knox's talk - 'Novel Explanation and the Special Sciences - Lessons From Physics' - at the Aristotelian Society on 23 January 2017. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company.