As the first talk for the 2021-22 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year’s Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Robert Stern (University of Sheffield) as the 114th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society’s President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy. The 114th Presidential Address was chaired by Bill Brewer (KCL), the 113th President of the Aristotelian Society. Robert Stern is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, where he has been since 1989. Prior to that he did his BA and PhD at Cambridge, and held a research fellowship at St John’s College Cambridge. His main research interests are in the history of philosophy – particularly Kant and Hegel, and also Kierkegaard, and more recently K. E. Løgstrup, Iris Murdoch, Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Luther. He connects these historical inquires with more systematic questions in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, particularly topics such as realism vs idealism, the use of transcendental arguments, and the nature of moral obligation. His books include three works on Hegel; a collection of papers on Kant; a discussion of transcendental arguments; an investigation into Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard on obligation; and a study of Løgstrup. He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2019, and has served on the Executive Committee of the Aristotelian Society and as President of the British Philosophical Association, and is currently chair of the Philosophy sub-panel for REF2021. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Stern's address - 'The Objectivity of Perception' - at the Aristotelian Society on 5 October 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

4/10/2021 – 114th PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: Robert Stern asks ‘How is human freedom compatible with the authority of the Good?’ Murdoch on moral agency, freedom, and imagination

Julia Borcherding is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Before moving to Cambridge, she was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow at New York University. Julia specializes in early modern philosophy, focusing on moral, epistemological and metaphysical themes and their intriguing interconnections. She has published on the philosophy of Leibniz, Conway, Cavendish, Arnauld and Spinoza. Her current book project The Metaphysics of Emotion investigates the underappreciated metaphysical dimensions of early modern accounts of love. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Borcherding's talk - '“I wish my Speech were like a Loadstone”: Cavendish on Love and Self-Love' - at the Aristotelian Society on 28 June 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

28/06/2021: Julia Borcherding on “I wish my Speech were like a Loadstone” – Cavendish on Love and Self-Love

Michael Beaney (毕明安) is Regius Professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen, Professor of the History of Analytic Philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Recent books include The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy (edited, OUP, 2013) and Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2017). While the main focus of his work has been on the history of analytic philosophy (especially the writings of Frege, Wittgenstein, Stebbing, and Collingwood), his research interests include philosophical methodology (with particular reference to analysis and creativity throughout the history of philosophy), historiography, philosophical translation (he has just completed a new translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus for OUP), and Chinese philosophy (on which he has increasingly been working, especially ancient Chinese philosophy of language and logic). He was editor of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy from 2011 to 2020, and is general editor of a book series on the history of analytic philosophy (published by Palgrave Macmillan), and co-editor of a series entitled ‘BSHP New Texts in the History of Philosophy’ (published by OUP). This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Beaney's talk - 'Swimming Happily in Chinese Logic' - at the Aristotelian Society on 21 June 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

21/06/2021: Michael Beaney on Swimming Happily in Chinese Logic

Corine Besson is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. She did her undergraduate degree in Philosophy and French Literature at the University of Geneva. She went to Oxford for her postgraduate studies, to first do a B.Phil, and then write a D.Phil. on the relation of second-order logic to the theory of meaning. Her research interests are in the philosophy of logic, epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy. Her current work focuses mostly on how logic relates to reasoning — from foundational, normative and epistemological perspectives. She has just finished writing a book for Oxford University Press on the relevance of Lewis Carroll’s regress argument (in his Mind 1895 paper ‘What the Tortoise Said to Achilles’) to key debates in the philosophy of logic and reasoning. Its (working) title is: Logic, Reasoning and Regresses: A Defence of Logical Cognitivism. Corine also runs the Centre for Logic and Language (CeLL) at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, London, and, together with Anandi Hattiangadi (Stockholm), she holds a three year grant from the Bank of Sweden on The Foundations of Epistemic Normativity. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Besson's talk - 'Knowing How to Reason Logically' - at the Aristotelian Society on 7 June 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

07/06/2021: Corine Besson on Knowing How to Reason Logically

Kenny Easwaran is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. He did his PhD in the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at UC Berkeley, and then worked at the Australian National University and the University of Southern California before moving to Texas A&M. He has done work on the foundations of probability and decision theory, as well as on the social epistemology of axioms and proofs in mathematical reasoning. His current work focuses on analogies between different possible futures in decisions under uncertainty, the different individuals in social choices, and the different stages of the self in reasoning across time. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Easwaran's talk - 'A New Method for Value Aggregation' - at the Aristotelian Society on 24 May 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

24/05/2021: Kenny Easwaran on a New Method for Value Aggregation

Joseph Chan is Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at The University of Hong Kong. He is Global Scholar and Visiting Professor at the University Center for Human Values of Princeton University in 2019-2021 spring semesters. His recent research interests span Confucian political philosophy, comparative political theory, democratic theory, social and political equality, and popular sovereignty. He is the author of Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times (Princeton, 2014) and co-edited with Melissa Williams and Doh Shin East Asian Perspectives on Political Legitimacy: Bridging the Empirical-Normative Divide (Cambridge, 2016). He has been published in numerous journals such as Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, History of Political Thought, the Journal of Democracy, Philosophy East and West, and China Quarterly. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Chan's talk - 'Equality, Friendship, and Politics' - at the Aristotelian Society on 10 May 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

10/05/2021: Joseph Chan on Equality, Friendship, and Politics

Ralf M. Bader is a professor of philosophy at the Université de Fribourg in Switzerland, where he holds the chair for ethics and political philosophy. His research focuses on ethics, meta-ethics, metaphysics, Kant, political philosophy and decision theory. He is also interested in neo-Kantian and early analytic philosophy, as well as the history of political thought. Previously, he was a Fellow of Merton College and an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Oxford, as well as a Bersoff Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow in the Philosophy Department at New York University. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Bader's talk - 'Coincidence and Supervenience' - at the Aristotelian Society on 24 April 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

24/04/2021: Ralf Bader on Coincidence and Supervenience

Helga Varden is Professor of Philosophy and Gender and Women Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of St. Andrews, and she is an executive editor of the Journal of Canadian Philosophy. Her main research interests are Kant’s practical philosophy, legal-political philosophy and its history, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of sex and love. In addition to her Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Theory (Oxford University Press, 2020), Varden has published many articles on a range of classical philosophical issues including Kant’s answer to the murderer at the door, private property, care relations, political obligations, and political legitimacy, as well as on applied issues such as privacy, poverty, non-human animals, and terrorism. The talk delivered here—“Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil”—on how theorize political evil, points both backward to a theme running through Sex, Love, and Gender and forward to a central theme in her new book project on Kant’s transformation of the social contract tradition. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Varden's talk - 'Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil' - at the Aristotelian Society on 22 March 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

22/03/2021: Helga Varden on Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil

Nicolas Cornell is Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He works in normative ethics, contract law, and private law theory. His writing has appeared both in philosophy journals — including “The Possibility of Preemptive Forgiving” (Philosophical Review, 2017) and “Wrongs, Rights, and Third Parties” (Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2015) — and in law reviews — including “Competition Wrongs” (Yale Law Journal, 2020), and “A Complainant-Oriented Approach to Unconscionability and Contract Law” (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 2016). He is currently working on a book manuscript on the relationship between rights and wronging, under contract with Harvard University Press. Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan, he was an assistant professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Cornell's talk - 'Gambling on Others and Relying on Others' - at the Aristotelian Society on 8 March 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

08/03/2021: Nicolas Cornell on Gambling on Others and Relying on Others

Mary-Louise Gill is David Benedict Professor of Classics and Philosophy at Brown University, and works on ancient Greek philosophy, especially Plato’s later metaphysics and method and Aristotle’s natural philosophy and metaphysics. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, and previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh in Classics, Philosophy, and History & Philosophy of Science. She has held visiting positions at Dartmouth College, UCLA, UC Davis, Harvard, University of Paris-1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, and Peking University in Beijing; her fellowships include the Stanford Humanities Center, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is the author of Aristotle on Substance: the Paradox of Unity (Princeton, 1989), of an Introduction and co-translation Plato: Parmenides (Hackett, 1996), and of Philosophos: Plato’s Missing Dialogue (Oxford, 2012); and she coedited Self-Motion: From Aristotle to Newton (Princeton, 1994), Unity, Identity and Explanation in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Oxford, 1994), and Companion to Ancient Philosophy (Blackwell, 2006). She is currently working on various aspects of Aristotle’s hylomorphism, including his treatment of mind and thought in De Anima, and the culmination of his metaphysics in Metaphysics Lambda on the relation between human and divine substance. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Gill's talk - 'Aristotle’s Hylomorphism Reconceived' - at the Aristotelian Society on 22 February 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

22/02/2021: Mary-Louise Gill on Aristotle’s Hylomorphism Reconceived

Barbara Sattler is professor for ancient and medieval philosophy at Bochum University, and has taught at St. Andrews, Yale, and Urbana-Champaign before. The main areas of her research are issues in metaphysics and natural philosophy in the ancient Greek world, especially in the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle. She focuses on the philosophical processes through which central concepts of metaphysics and natural philosophy, such as space or speed, arise in Greek antiquity. By showing that such concepts were originally spelt out in ways significantly different from the way they are today, she aims to make us aware both of the rich conceptual basis we often take for granted, as well as to sketch out possible alternative understandings. She is the author of The Concept of Motion in Ancient Greek Thought – Foundations in Logic, Method, and Mathematics (CUP 2020), and is currently writing a book on ancient notions of space. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Sattler's talk - 'Paradoxes as Philosophical Method and their Zenonian Origins' - at the Aristotelian Society on 1 February 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

01/02/2021: Barbara Sattler on Paradoxes as Philosophical Method and their Zenonian Origins

Lee Walters is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Southampton. Prior to joining Southampton, Lee studied philosophy at UCL and taught at Oxford. Lee’s main interests are in metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and philosophical Logic, with a particular emphasis on the philosophy of fiction. Lee has been an Associate Editor of Analysis; a trustee of the British Society of Aesthetics; has held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship; and has been a junior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, CEU, Budapest. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr. Walters' talk - 'The Linguistic Approach to Ontology' - at the Aristotelian Society on 18 January 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

18/01/2021: Lee Walters on the Linguistic Approach to Ontology

Leigh K. Jenco is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics. She received her PhD in political science at the University of Chicago, before teaching at Brown University and the National University of Singapore.  Her research works across the disciplinary platforms of political theory, global intellectual history, and Asian studies to demonstrate the value of Chinese thought for posing new questions of political life.  She has served as associate editor of the flagship journal American Political Science Review (2016-2020) and principal investigator for the Humanities in the European Research Area grant project "East Asian Uses of the European Past"  (2016-2019). She is the author of Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West (Oxford UP, 2015),  and Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao (Cambridge UP, 2010). Most recently, with Megan Thomas and Murad Idris, she co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Oxford UP, 2020). This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Jenco's talk - 'Moral Knowledge and Empirical Verification in Late Ming China' - at the Aristotelian Society on 16 November 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

16/11/2020: Leigh Jenco on Moral Knowledge and Empirical Verification in Late Ming China

Adrian Haddock is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Stirling, and between 2017 and 2019 he was a Senior Research Fellow in the Forschungskolleg Analytic German Idealism (FAGI) at the University of Leipzig. His work centres on the idea of subjectivity, and on its significance for understanding the fundamental concerns of philosophy. He has written on action, perception, knowledge, and language. He is currently in the process of completing a book manuscript, entitled Subject and Object, and editing (with Rachael Wiseman) a collection of essays on the philosophy of G.E.M. Anscombe. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Haddock's talk - 'The Wonder of Signs' - at the Aristotelian Society on 2 November 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

2/11/2020: Adrian Haddock on the Wonder of Signs

Tommy J. Curry is a Professor of Philosophy and holds the Personal Chair of Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are 19th century ethnology, Critical Race Theory & Black Male Studies. He is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press 2017), which won the 2018 American Book Award, and Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of Racial Empire (SUNY Press 2018), which recently won the Josiah Royce Prize for American Idealist Thought. He has also re-published the forgotten philosophical works of William Ferris as The Philosophical Treatise of William H. Ferris: Selected Readings from The African Abroad or, His Evolution in Western Civilization (Rowman & Littlefield 2016). In 2019 he became the editor of the first book series dedicated to the study of Black males entitled Black Male Studies: A Series Exploring the Paradoxes of Racially Subjugated Males on Temple University Press. Dr. Curry’s research has been recognized by Diverse as placing him among the Top 15 Emerging Scholars in the United States in 2018, and his public intellectual work earned him the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy’s Alain Locke Award in 2017. He is the past president of Philosophy Born of Struggle, one of the oldest Black philosophy organizations in the United States. This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Curry's talk - 'Must there be an Empirical Basis for the Theorization of Racialized Subjects in Race-Gender Theory?' - at the Aristotelian Society on 19 October 2020. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

19/10/2020: Tommy Curry asks 'Must there be an Empirical Basis for the Theorization of Racialized Subjects in Race-Gender Theory?'

The Aristotelian Society, founded in 1880, meets fortnightly in London to hear and discuss talks given by leading philosophers from a broad range of philosophical traditions. The papers read at the Society’s meetings are published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. The mission of the Society is to make philosophy widely available to the general public, and the Aristotelian Society Podcast Series represents our latest initiative in furthering this goal. The audio podcasts of our talks are produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London. Please visit our website to learn more about us and our publications: http://www.aristoteliansociety.org.uk

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Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

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