Themed seminar on 'Persons'
Starts:
Finishes:
Venue:
Birkbeck 30 Russell Square
No booking required
Our 'Themed Seminar' is a fortnightly research seminar that meets in the afternoons of the same Thursdays as the ‘Work In Progress’ seminar. It is led by a member of the philosophy academic staff, on a theme in their area of expertise. The seminar meets in Room 501, 30 Russell Square.
In Autumn Term 2025, the seminar will be led by Keith Hossack, on the theme of ‘Persons’, as follows.
PERSONS
Summary A person is a thinking intelligent being that can think of itself in the first-person, i.e., under the concept expressed by the word ‘I’. Persons are beings of a philosophically special kind, because they have intrinsic value, which is the source of the ethical consideration that we owe to persons. This series of seminars will explore the metaphysics and epistemology of persons, and the ethical and religious considerations to which the philosophy of persons gives rise. The five seminars in the series will be as follows.
1 What is a person? (9 October)
Persons have awareness, and something has a mind if it is aware of something, so persons have minds. The mind of a person has various faculties, each faculty being characterised by its power of causing the person to be aware of a particular species of facts. It will be argued that human persons are rational animals; animals are not mechanisms, because a mechanism is incapable of awareness.
2 Other minds (23 October)
A solipsist thinks that they themselves are the only person that exists. Solipsism is a species of scepticism, and it cannot be refuted by any inductive argument. But empathy is the faculty whereby we have awareness of the state of mind of another person, and scepticism about other minds is refuted by ‘naive realism’ about empathy, just as scepticism about the external world is refuted by naive realism about perception.
3 Duties owed to persons (13 November)
Rightness is the property an action has if it is in accordance with duty, and conscience is the faculty whereby we have awareness of the rightness or otherwise of actions. That we ought to do what is right is not an analytic truth, but it is nevertheless evident a priori. It guides our conduct as follows: we should not to do to another person what we would judge not to be right if it were done to us.
4 Love and ethical goodness (27 November)
Love is an unanalysable relation between persons. The loved one has intrinsic value: a person’s admirable qualities may cause us to love them, but the qualities are not what we love the person for; rather, it is the person themselves that we love. There is a deep connection between love and ethical goodness: an action that accords with duty may have no moral worth if done from the motive of self-interest, but is unquestionably good if motivated by love.
5 Is God a person? (11 December)
According to perfect being theology, God can be defined as that being that possesses every perfection. Justice is a perfection, and so God, if he exists, is perfectly just, by definition. Ethical goodness is also a perfection, and so we must suppose that God is perfectly good, hence capable of love. According to Pascal, belief or unbelief in God is a wager about how to live one’s life: we must balance the chance of the universe being just there, without any purpose or meaning, against the chance of it being the creation of a perfectly good God.
Contact name: Keith Hossack
Tags: