CURRENT EVENTS

Guest Speaker: Dr. Bruce Baumgartner, University of Idaho

Friday, April 24, 2026 3:30 – 5:30 p.m. ILC 404

New Trails, Old Coastline: Humanities Takeover in the Era of Agentic AI: The humanities defined themselves in opposition to formalization, and for good reason: the available tools demanded that interpretive, meaning-rich inquiry be flattened into something machine-readable. But the tools changed. Agentic AI systems — not chatbots, but systems that plan, use tools, and iterate through multi-step research — work in natural language. They can engage with metaphor, narrative, and interpretive questions *as* humanistic questions, not as proxies for something more tractable.
I offer the coastline as a governing analogy. The humanities are fractal, inexhaustibly rich, revealing more structure the closer you attend. Previous waves of digital humanities brought rulers to the beach; what arrives now is not a better ruler but a scout that speaks the humanist’s language. I illustrate with three case studies from my own work — MARC, NARC, and Complementary Inquiry — and close with practical next steps for humanists who are curious, or at least willing to be.

Saturday, April 25, 2026 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. ILC 404

Was the Gettier Problem Inevitable? Language Models as Instruments for Complementary Inquiry: Some intellectual developments look inevitable in hindsight: Newton and Leibniz both invented the calculus; Darwin and Wallace independently formulated natural selection. Others appear to be massive creative leaps. Which is which has been treated qualitatively, but never measured. Complementary Inquiry makes the question empirical. We train language models from scratch on temporally bounded corpora — everything written in a domain up to a specific moment, with a known development deliberately excluded — and probe whether the model can reconstruct what was left out. The help it needs is itself a measurement: an “Inevitability Index.”
Two completed cases show that developments can be latent in different ways: Pluto’s reclassification as category strain, and the Hindu-Arabic shift as representational structure. The talk’s primary focus is a third: Gettier’s 1963 counterexample to justified true belief, probed against a 155M-token corpus of philosophy from Plato through early 1963.

Guest Speaker: Dr. Anthony Fisher, Gonzaga University

Friday, November 14th, 2025 3:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. Location: ILC202

Fictionalism About Agentic AI: This paper motivates, sketches, and argues for a new meta-ethical theory in AI Ethics, namely, fictionalism about AI systems, especially agentic AI. On this view, AI agents are not moral agents and not truly held accountable for their decisions or outputs, but they are according to the fiction. It is also argued that the fiction is useful and that developers and deployers of AI systems should be explicit in setting up the context so that it is clear to users that an AI agent is a fictional individual. Fictionalism has many attractive features; importantly, it allows for liberal license to build responsible AI frameworks where some notions of responsibility are applied to AI systems directly (within the fiction), which can fill responsibility gaps.

Saturday, November 15th, 2025 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Location: ILC304

Making Time: An Ontology of Temporal Fiat Objects: In the social world, our lives are informed, impacted, and controlled by time. Behind this grand saying there is the phenomenon of making time. More precisely, there are acts and processes, largely conventional and oftentimes institutional, that create temporal fiat objects (TFOs for short). A TFO is an abstract entity set with temporal boundaries, much like a national park is a creatable spatial fiat object with spatial boundaries. In this paper, I construct an ontology of TFOs and argue that it is explanatorily useful for understanding how TFOs are created and maintained (often at the hands of those in power) and for solving justice issues that arise from TFOs generated in morally problematic ways. A comprehensive social metaphysics should make room for such temporal entities.

Guest Speaker: Dr. David Barton, Retired Deputy General Counsel, St. Luke’s Health Systems

Friday, October 24th, 2025 3:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m., ILC Room 204

Aristotle on the Indeterminacy of Legal Rules: Aristotle claims that good legal and moral decision-making cannot be entirely a matter of the mechanical application of generally applicable rules, because such rules will lead to incorrect action if applied thoughtlessly. I develop and defend this Aristotelian theme about the limit of rules of conduct, and I argue that it provides a promising starting point for understanding legal reasoning.

Guest Speaker: Dr. Bradley Rettler, University of Wyoming

Friday, February 21st, 2025 12:00 p.m. – 2 :00 p.m. MBEB 1301

Bitcoin is Good: Opinions on whether bitcoin is good for the world vary wildly. Many focus on bitcoin’s energy consumption and use in criminal enterprise, ignoring its positive uses. Others focus on its privacy features or supply cap, and ignore the negative externalities.

Saturday, February 22nd, 2025 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. ILC Room 203

Is there a Object/Property Distinction?: Nearly everyone thinks that there is a distinction between objects and properties. What that distinction amounts to is much harder to say.

Guest Speaker: Dr. Ezra Rubenstein, UC Berkeley

Friday, November, 15th, 2024, 3:30-5:30 p.m., ILC 204

Against Grounding Physicalism: Is consciousness physical? A popular view amongst contemporary philosophers is ‘grounding physicalism’. On this view, consciousness is not itself a physical phenomenon, but it is ‘grounded in’ (or ‘realized by’) what is physically going on in systems like brains. I argue that this idea fails, because it requires an implausible commitment to simple laws connecting physics to consciousness.

Saturday, November 16th, 2024, 11:00a.m.-1:00p.m., ILC204

Conjunction as Identity: How do conjunctions relate to their conjuncts? How, for example, does <Snow is white and grass is green> relate to the propositions <Snow is white> and <Grass is green>? I propose the following unorthodox answer: conjunctions are identical to their conjuncts. I present some motivations for this view, discuss some objections, and point out some connections to issues of propositional grain and fundamentality.

Guest Speaker: Dr. Neil A. Manson, University of Mississippi

Friday, March 1, 2024 3:30-5:30p.m. Location: ILC 203

“God, Fine-tuning, and the Multiverse: A Short Philosophical Introduction”

The Fine-tuning Argument is currently the most popular scientific argument for the existence of God. Numerous discoveries in physics and cosmology indicate that the universe is a very special place. It is extremely unlikely that it would be the sort of place in which life could even arise. Some argue these discoveries indicate God created the universe. Others claim they show our universe is but one universe in an immensely large multiverse. The multiverse would explain fine-tuning because, just as you’ll probably get a good selfie if you take enough selfies, there’ll probably be a universe that is well-suited to life if there are enough universes. So which view is approach is better – God or the multiverse? Manson will lead the audience on a tour of the central issues involved in this deep and fascinating topic.

Saturday, March 2, 2024 11-1p.m. Location: ILC 204

“Theological Problems with the Fine-tuning Argument”

Since the Fine-tuning Argument (FTA) for the existence of God first appeared on the scene in the 1980s, both proponents and critics of it have neglected its theological aspects, focusing instead on the scientific, epistemological, and metaphysical issues it raises. Yet if the existence of a universe finely tuned for life is no more probable on the theistic hypothesis than the atheistic hypothesis, the FTA gets nowhere. In this paper Manson will first locate the FTA within the broader context of natural theology. Then he will focus on a particular theological question FTA raises: why should we think that the probability of a life-permitting universe if God exists (PLUG) is not extremely low? He will argue that constraints from traditional theology – specifically, from the notion that God is the absolutely perfect being – make it difficult to answer this question. He will then articulate and criticize a recent maneuver by prominent defenders of the FTA to sidestep this question. He concludes with a call for proponents of the FTA to engage much more thoroughly with theology.

Dr. Colin Marshall, University of Washington

Friday, Feb 2, 2024 3:30pm-5:30pm Location: ILC 303

“Compassion, Schopenhauer, and the Holy Grail of Moral Philosophy”

According to some philosophers (Blackburn, Street), the ‘holy grail’ of secular metaethics is to show that selfish and malicious people are somehow out of touch with reality. In this talk, I attempt to reach the grail by drawing on Arthur Schopenhauer’s view of compassion as affect-perception (with some discussion of human echolocation along the way). The result may not convince any bad people to change their ways, but it can offer metaethical reassurance to those of us who do feel compassion for our fellow creatures.

Saturday, Feb 3, 2024 11:00am-1:00pm Location: ILC303

“Moral Pluralism as Perceptual Pluralism”

According to partialists from Kongzi to Noddings, personal relationships directly shape our ethical obligations. According to impartialists from Mozi to Singer, our ethical obligations have no direct connection to our personal relationships. In this talk, I extend the neo-Schopenhauerian view defended in Marshall 2018 to make sense of the long-running partialist/impartialist standoff. I suggest that understanding compassion as revelatory perception can ground a limited but ineliminable pluralism on which each approach corresponds to a distinct objectively well-grounded perceptual state. Metaethically speaking, this suggests there is often no all-things-considered answer to the question of what we should do.