Zoom: https://umac.zoom.us/j/94306394241 Password: 113021   Abstract This talk examines Kang Youwei’s view of sexual equality based on the study of his The Book of the Great Unity (Da Tong Shu 《大同書》). In the existing literature Kang’s feminism has rarely been discussed in depth, even though the volume on women’s oppression and liberation is one of the most significant parts of The Book of the Great Unity. In the talk I argue that Kang’s critique of the subjection of women is the most systematic, profound, and fierce in the history of modern Chinese philosophy. Although his theory of sexual equality is essentially the combination of liberalism, utilitarianism, and socialism, his work on the subject should be given a special place in […]

Zoom: https://umac.zoom.us/j/98714060738 Password: 895191   Abstract Departing from the concept of “failed world”, this lecture explores the politics of co-living in the time of uncertainty. The liminal and in-between state of international society is no longer a state of exception, but a state of inception that introduces overlapping layers of hybrid orders and norms. Instead of proposing alternative world orders as attempts to formulate a minimalist morality, this lecture overturns the direction of inquiry and asks how we can manage to live in disorder, in the absence of normative consensus. It proposes a new form of cosmopolitanism, that is built on and adapted to contingencies, risks and ruins of our existing political and ecological disasters, and envisions an emancipatory politics […]

Zoom: https://umac.zoom.us/j/95785802564 Password: 884651   Abstract In the modern moral luck debate, Kant is standardly taken to be the enemy of moral luck. My goal in this paper is to show that this is mistaken. The paper is divided into six sections. In the first, I show that participants in the moral luck literature take moral luck to be anathema to Kantian ethics. In the second, I explain the kind of luck I am going to focus on here: consequence luck, a species of resultant luck. In the third, I explain why philosophers have taken Kantian ethics to reject moral luck and, in particular, consequence luck. In the fourth, I explain why these philosophers are mistaken, and I set out […]

Zoom: https://umac.zoom.us/j/99459515373 Password: 978914   Abstract This paper develops a phenomenological account of what it is to have and to lose an underlying sense of “certainty”. By drawing on themes in Wittgenstein’s later writings and also the phenomenological tradition, I conceive of having certainty in terms of the anticipatory structure of experience. It consists in a practical, non-localized, unwavering sense that things will work out, that one will be able to go on. This also involves the pre-reflective acceptance of a form of uncertainty. I conclude by suggesting that, by conceiving of certainty in this way and acknowledging its fragility, we can better understand various different disturbances to which human experience is susceptible. Bio Matthew Ratcliffe is Professor of Philosophy […]