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Moral Sciences Club

Moral Sciences Club

by University of Cambridge, Faculty of Philosophy

Education Philosophy

Why Is Genius Still Gendered?

In the past, accounts of genius have been put forward which explicitly exclude women from this category. Today genius does not tend to be explicated in such an explicitly gendered way. Nonetheless, stereotypes exist which indicate that whilst the category of genius may not explicitly exclude women, genius remains psychologically associated with men more than women. This paper explores what could be working to shape these associations. Specifically, I investigate whether, in addition to the impact of historic inequality of opportunity, our conception of genius itself serves to sustain or even perpetuate these gendered psychological associations. My pursuit of this hypothesis reveals an issue with the concept: its ambiguity, which I argue forces a reliance on stereotypes. To overcome this problem, I propose that a new, optimal account of the concept be developed. I will end by putting forward a set of considerations for building such an account in the future.

Do Pictures Look Like What They Depict?

Pictures look like what they depict to those who understand them. That is a natural and seemingly unassailable thought. Looking at Mona Lisa, the painting strikes us as looking like a woman with a mysterious smile in front of a mountainous backdrop. Call this the ‘looks like’ intuition. It is tempting to think not just that the ‘looks like’ intuition is true, but that it gets at the heart of what is distinctive about depictive understanding in pre-theoretical, informal terms. To understand a depiction (as opposed to a linguistic description, say) is for it to strike us as looking like what it depicts. In this talk, I take the ‘looks like’ intuition at face-value, and discuss what it more precisely comes to. I consider and reject three interpretations, before presenting what I take to be its correct interpretation. It is easy to think that the intuition points to an inherent connection between depiction and resemblance, but I argue that that is false. Its correct interpretation is Wollheimian: when we understand a picture P of O, P ‘looks like’ O in the sense of giving us a (very distinctive kind of) visual experience of O.

Fear, Sallust and Roman Political Theory

Explaining the decline of the Roman Republic, the historian Sallust made a famous claim about the importance of fear, a claim which has influenced writers from Augustine to Schmitt. Drawing on phenomenological apparatus, including Lear on the collapse of Native American society, this paper has two goals. First, to show that the standard reading of Sallust is incoherent. Second, to propose a new reading, on which the key question is not one of motivation nor of social order, but of the criterion by which virtue is to be measured. I close with some broader implications for how we think about social decay.

Consent and Common Ground

Manon Garcia has recently proposed a model of sexual consent as conversation, which emphasizes collaboration and that interlocutors work together toward a common goal. Independently, though in a similar spirit, John Gardner has developed an idea of consent as teamwork. There is much that is appealing about these models of consent as ideals. Still, this paper challenges the de facto possibility of consent so understood. Genuine conversations and teamwork are enabled by and premised on a shared common ground in being essentially collaborative activities. If there is no such common ground, genuine collaboration is not possible. Since sexual common ground looks to be largely missing, or is at the very least seriously eroded, consent as conversation or teamwork is not possible as things stand. However, the paper further explores what would be needed to scaffold the kind of common ground that could facilitate collaborative conceptions of consent.

Inextricability and the Brain

In discussions concerning the possibility of AI consciousness, computational functionalism has been the dominant position. This is the view that consciousness is essentially kind of computation and therefore medium independent (not reliant on any one kind of physical realizer). The opposing position, biological naturalism, has recently been discussed by Block (2025) and Seth (forthcoming). This is the view that consciousness is essentially a property of (some) living organisms and is therefore medium dependent. According to Block, the debate between computational functionalism and biological naturalism is over whether it is the role or the realizer that determine consciousness. Here I argue that biological naturalism is better understood as the thesis that in living, conscious beings, roles and realizers are inextricably related in such a way that the computational functionalist requirement of medium independence cannot obtain. I discuss findings in neuroscience that are relevant to this issue. Although the neuroscience is still not settled, we can make progress on setting the parameters for the debate over the material basis of consciousness as it unfolds.

Aristotle on Being Ruled Well

In Politics 3.4 Aristotle distinguishes the virtue of the good citizen from the virtue of the good person by noting that the good citizen should both rule well and be ruled well. I show that ‘being ruled well’ here is best understood in terms of ‘being good at being ruled’ and find evidence elsewhere for what Aristotle thinks it is to be good at being ruled, how this differs from and is related to what it is to be good at ruling, and why Aristotle thinks that it is appropriate for a citizen in a political community to be good at being ruled.

Touching Through: The Puzzle of Mediated Contact (co-authored with Robert Morgan, University of Leeds)

It is natural to think that one person touches another when their bodies make direct contact. However, much of interpersonal touch is not like this. We often touch people through things like their clothing. But this raises a puzzle: how can you touch someone without directly touching them? Moreover, where particular moral violations and crimes essentially involve touch, an account of when one person mediately touches another is required to determine when the relevant wrong or crime has occurred. We introduce and articulate this puzzle (§1), reject five plausible solutions (§§2-4), and develop and defend our own account (§§5-6), on which one person touches another through some medium when the medium acts as a certain kind of personal boundary determined by social norms concerning intimacy. Note: There will be some limited discussion of sexual assault.

Why Doesn't Physics Matter More?

There is an explanatory puzzle about the relationship between physics and the rest of science: if the lower-level facts from physics in some way underpin higher-level facts, why don’t the lower-level details matter more for the day-to-day practice of the special sciences? Is it just a pragmatic feature of the practice of science, or are the special science genuinely autonomous, and if so, in what sense? In this talk I will develop a new account of autonomy following Woodward (2018) which I dub ‘generalised autonomy’ since it unifies dynamical, causal and nomic autonomy. This account can solve the explanatory puzzle, and walk the tightrope of balancing the dependence on the lower level with the independence of the higher level. I'll argue that physics sometimes doesn't matter to sciences like ecology and biology in a genuine and objective sense - and prevents one objection to realism about these higher-level sciences.

The Revival of Classical Pragmatism: Truth, Reality and Methodology

Talk given by Professor Hasok Chang at the Moral Sciences Club on November 25th 2025.

The Incomparable Value of the Individual

Talk given by Professor Christine Korsgaard at the Moral Sciences Club on October 21st 2025.

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