Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast The London Lecture Series

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Professor Peter Hacker. He discusses the salient achievements of Wittgenstein’s two masterpieces, the Tractatus and the Investigations, and their influences on philosophy.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Professor Jonathan Wolff, who explores how ideas of relational equality have developed in the past 100 years.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

In this London Lecture, Professor Michele M. Moody-Adams will explore the role of imagination in political communities as democracies.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Professor Timothy Williamson. He asks what it might mean to call philosophy a science, and explores different views of the relation between philosophy and science over the past century.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Dr Mazviita Chirimuuta. Science assumes the universe is comprehensible to the human mind. AI tech casts doubt on this. So, should scientists give up on their goal?

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

Over the last 100 years the condition of women in society has changed and so has feminist philosophy. Professor Clare Chambers will reflect on the philosophy, politics, and practice of sex discrimination as it has developed over the past century.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Professor Michael Rosen. Unlike other disciplines, the history of philosophy does not involve the accumulation of knowledge or the resolution of problems. But why?

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Professor Naomi Eilan. She offers an account of second person awareness, mutual I-you relations, and the essential link between second person awareness and ethics.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Dr Rowan Williams. Is empathy required for ethical values? How we can hang on to a proper valuation of empathic understanding without sentimentality.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Professor Peter Adamson, who will argue that Avicennan and Cartesian “arguments from doubt” may actually be stronger than they seem.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Professor John Haldane. He looks back at philosophy since 1925, arguing for a kind of philosophical humanism that was more prominent a century ago than it is today.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Professor Fiona Woollard. She explores how philosophy can help us to understand pregnancy and improve the treatment of people who are pregnant.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Professor Regina Rini. She explores why we no longer need philosophers as all-purpose public sages.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Dr Nikhil Krishnan. The politics of the last decade have been accused of moralistic excess. If this is fair, how might moral philosophy cure us of moralism?

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

This lecture is presented by Derek Matravers, and discusses how the choices we make in framing the past can influence our views on it.

Part of TRIP's London Lecture Series  2024-25, on Remembering and Forgetting.

This lecture is presented by Tom Stern, exploring the phenomenon of involuntary memory in Proust’s work.

Part of TRIP's London Lecture Series  2024-25, on Remembering and Forgetting.

This lecture is presented by James Wilson, exploring how to reconcile different reasons for public remembrance.

Part of TRIP's London Lecture Series  2024-25, on Remembering and Forgetting.

Katherine Puddifoot explores how social stereotypes shape our recollections and how this can lead to injustice in personal memories.

Part of TRIP's London Lecture Series  2024-25, on Remembering and Forgetting.

This lecture is presented by Kathleen Higgins, exploring how memories and new insights help us honor the dead and integrate their presence into our lives.

Part of TRIP's London Lecture Series  2024-25, on Remembering and Forgetting.

In this episode, Michael Brady explores how memory can contribute to post-traumatic growth, examining the role of emotional memories in recovery.

Part of TRIP's London Lecture Series  2024-25, on Remembering and Forgetting.

In this talk Matthew Ratcliffe discusses the broader conception of human emotional experience through the lens of being haunted by one’s past.

Part of TRIP's London Lecture Series  2024-25, on Remembering and Forgetting.

In this episode Kieron O’Hara examines how digital technology shapes our memories and alters our perception of the past, questioning the integrity of human memory in the age of social media and AI.

Part of TRIP's London Lecture Series 2024-25, on Remembering and Forgetting.

In this episode, Erich Matthes navigates questions of conservation, and how some easily overlooked aspects of conservation can render its relationship with remembering more complex than it initially appears.

Part of TRIP's London Lecture Series 2024-25, on Remembering and Forgetting.

In this lecture, Lucy Allais considers the reasons philosophers have given for thinking that forgiveness is puzzling, and argue that they are key to understanding why we need it – but also why we don’t always have to forgive.

Part of TRIP's London Lecture Series  2024-25, on Remembering and Forgetting.

In this talk Alessandra Tanesini explores how Social Networking Sites, especially Facebook, act as platforms where memories can be shared, individuals memorialised, and where at times some feel shunned and forgotten. Alessandra delves into the potential consequences of offloading one’s private memories onto public digital platforms .

Part of TRIP's London Lecture Series  2024-25, on Remembering and Forgetting.

We all have treasured memories, but what, exactly, is it that makes them so valuable to us? In this talk, Marya Schechtman explores this question, proposing that one source of value is the role such memories can play in constituting and maintaining both personal identity and intimate social relationships. But what are the implications of this, ethical or otherwise, for our practices of remembering?

Part of TRIP's London Lecture Series  2024-25, on Remembering and Forgetting.

How does memory help some people grow after trauma? Post-traumatic growth (PTG) is a term which has been extensively studied by psychologists for the past 30 years, but also represents a new version of an ancient idea present in theology, philosophy, and cultural narratives – namely, that great good can come from adversity and suffering. In his talk, James Dawes explores the role of memory in PTG. How should trauma be remembered?

Part of TRIP's London Lecture Series  2024-25, on Remembering and Forgetting.

Welcome to the London Lecture Series  2024-25! This year our talks focus on questions surrounding the theme of "Remembering and Forgetting."

In this first talk of our latest series, Rima Bisu explores the important role forgetting plays in facilitating and protecting moral goods, such as forgiveness and privacy.  Forgetting plays an indispensable role in our lives. Sometimes we want aspects of our identity to be forgotten, and there is a distinctive harm that accompanies the permanence of some content about us. How do we navigate this duty to forget with other important elements of our social and epistemic lives?

Mary Boyle & Lucy Johnstone examine the downfalls of the traditional methods of psychiatric diagnosis, and discuss the implications of their proposed Power Threat Meaning Framework as an alternative to psychiatric diagnosis.

Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Louis Sass examines the enigmatic nature of human subjectivity and its history from the European Renaissance, the status of psychology and related fields in conceptualising human existence, and whether we as humans have lost the ability to see ourselves in great works of art.

Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Since the 1970s, psychiatry has been in the grip of a paradigm I call ‘madness-as-dysfunction’. In this view, mental disorders happen when something inside the person isn’t working as it should, or is ‘broken.’ 

In his previous work, Justin Garson has identified an alternate paradigm, which he calls ‘madness-as-strategy,’ which sees mental illness in terms of purpose, adaptation and function. In this lecture, Justin contrasts these frameworks and outlines their implications for research, treatment and stigma.

Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Over six decades of research confirm there are ethnic inequalities in the experiences and outcomes of severe mental illness.  The reasons for these differences have been debated, some arguing they meet treatment needs, others say they are manifestations of structural racism. 

Kim Bhui shares his views on conceptual confusions, causes, and remedies by drawing on recent Lived Experience Data on compulsory treatment, other research, and campaigns over three decades.

Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Why is it so tempting to understand spirituality / religion as counter to our conception of mental health, both in terms of its causality and its therapeutic restoration? 

Camilia Kong seeks to provide a philosophical diagnosis of the problem through Taylor’s discussion of the ‘immanent frame’ in Western modernity, and in so doing, provide the conceptual space for enriching understanding of divergent explanatory frameworks of mental disorder and cognitive disability in other sociocultural contexts. 

Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Many people suffer from psychiatric disorders and mental distress. But how are we to understand these problems, and how are we to treat them? Sanneke de Haan argues that we need to look at their developmental history, the social and cultural practices they take part in, and their existential (self)understanding. 

Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

At present, psychiatry and psychology research in mental healthcare is focused on interventions. In contrast, social science and humanities research pursues its own, sometimes rather theoretically-driven agenda. In this lecture, Dr Armstrong and Dr Byrom, bring together these disparate fields of research with the aim of promoting more productive interdisciplinary interaction. 

Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Rose Mcabe, Lisa Bortolotti, and Michele Lim examine video-recorded encounters between young people and mental healthcare practitioners in emergency services, and describe communication that adopts an agential stance towards the young person.

Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Claire Hogg discusses the theoretical basis for the defence of legal “insanity”.  She explorse a number of competing analyses by which the relevance of a defendant’s mental disorder to their criminal culpability may be understood, including counterfactual analyses and capacity models.

Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Is mad life possible? Constrained by everyday mentalism, and controlled by various forms of psychiatrization of our biographies, we ask – can we live the lives we dream rather than dreaming that we live? 

Jasna Russo looks at the processes of knowledge making on what is considered madness and our ability to address each other in the second person, as you and me. Erick Fabris revisits a life of activism, from mutual aid to identity politics, and asks if Mad culture is possible in our time.

Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Somogy Varga and Andrew J. Latham report results from a series of experimental philosophy studies which aimed to examine how people understand and deploy  concepts of health and disease, and the factors that influence their health-related judgments.

Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Can assisted dying for persons with mental disorders be permitted on ethical grounds? What should the criteria be for allowing a person to make the choice to end their own life? 

Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Richard Gipps discusses the question of who gets to call whom mad, and with what right, and confronts the idea that  the world of the 'mad' person is any less valid than that of the 'sane'.

Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Is it right to assume that speaking our minds is good and keeping silent may be a sign of oppression? Havi Carel and Dan Degerman present this lecture.

Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

What would it mean to do justice to testimonies of traumatic experience? That is, how can experiences which do not fit the customary scripts of sense-making be heard? Whereas processes of official memorialization or legal redress often demand that victims and survivors convey their experiences through familiar modes of narration, María del Rosario Acosta López's project on “grammars of listening” asks how it might be possible to hear these experiences on their own terms and what are the challenges that we encounter when trying to do so. She argues that doing justice to trauma requires a profound philosophical questioning of the conditions that allow us to listen to testimony, and a true reckoning of the responsibility that we bear as listeners.  

María del Rosario Acosta López is a professor at the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California Riverside where she is also a co-operating faculty member of the philosophy department. Her teaching and research is in areas around romanticism and German idealism, aesthetics, contemporary political European philosophy and more recently questions of decolonial and Latin American studies with an emphasis on questions of memory and trauma in the Americas. 

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) lived what was in many ways an astonishingly modern, transcultural and translingual life. He was born in Lisbon and grew up in Anglophone Durban, acquiring a life-long love for English poetry and language. Returning to Lisbon, from where he would never again leave, he set himself the goal to travel throughout an infinitude of inner landscapes, to be an explorer of inner worlds. He published very little, but left behind a famous trunk containing a treasure-trove of scraps, on which were written some of the greatest literary works of the 20th century, mainly in Portuguese but also substantially in English and French. He is now acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, and he has emerged over the last decade as a forgotten voice in 20th century modernism, taking his rightful place alongside C. P. Cavafy, Franz Kafka, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Jorge Luis Borges. Pessoa was also a serious student of philosophy and himself a very creative philosopher, yet his genius as a philosopher has hardly been recognized. In this episode, Jonardon Ganeri sets out to put that right.

Jonardon Ganeri holds the Bimal Matilal Distinguished Professorship in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His work draws on a variety of philosophical traditions to construct new positions in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and theory of knowledge. He's a great advocate for an expanded role for cross-cultural methodologies and his research subjects include consciousness, self, attention, the idea of philosophy as a practice and its relationship to literature. His books include "Attention Not Self"; "Inwardness: An Outsider's Guide" and most recently "Fugitive Selves: Fernando Pessoa and His Philosophy".

The classical Greeks give us a concept of substance that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. Roger Ames argues that in the Yijing or "Book of Changes" we find a stark alternative to this ontology which reflects a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. This cosmology begins from “living” itself as the motive force behind change, and gives us a world of boundless “becomings:” not “things” that are, but “events” that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of human “beings” and a process conception of what Ames calls human “becomings.” 

Roger Ames is the Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University in Beijing and also Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. He's the author and co-author of many books including his study of ancient Chinese political thought, "The Art of Rulership" and "Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary".

Lewis Gordon examines what it means for philosophy to be ‘colonised’ and the challenges involved in ‘decolonising’ it in philosophical and political terms. 

Lewis Gordon is professor of philosophy and head of the department of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He works in a number of areas of philosophy including Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political thought, post-colonial thought and on the work of thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Franz Fanon. His most recent books are "Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization" and "Fear of Black Consciousness".

In his famous 1897 essay, “The Conservation of Races”, Du Bois advocated that African Americans hold on to their distinctiveness as members of the black race because this enables them to participate in a cosmopolitan process of cultural exchange in which different races collectively advance human civilization by means of different contributions. Philosophers like Kwame Anthony Appiah and Tommie Shelby have criticised the position that Du Bois expresses in that essay as a problematic form of racial essentialism. Chike Jeffers explores how Du Bois' 1924 book "The Gift of Black Folk" escapes or fails to escape that criticism. He argues that recognising the cultivation of historical memory as a form of cultural activity is key to understanding the concept's unity. 

Chike Jeffers is associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Dalhousie university. He is the co-presenter of the Africana philosophy editions of the "History of Philosophy without Any Gaps" podcast and two forthcoming books based on it. He is also the co-author of "What is Race? Four Philosophical Views", and editor of "Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy". 

While Heidegger and Derrida both contributed groundbreaking reflections on hospitality (and “hostipitality”), they failed to recognize that the host-guest relationship can only succeed if it is correlated with the notion of mutual guardianship. The lecture will describe historic guardian civilizations and then turn to Ricoeur’s linguistic hospitality as a possible blueprint for future cultural hospitality. However, the latter scenario will have no need for a third party, i.e., a “translator” who mediates between host and guest. The challenge consists of designing a host-guest relationship in which both parties become each other’s translators - and guardians.

Tamara Albertini is a professor and department chair at the university of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Professor Albertini’s research in Renaissance philosophy focuses on Nicholas of Cusa (mathematics, cosmology), Marsilio Ficino (metaphysics, aesthetics) and Charles de Bovelles. Within Islamic philosophy, Professor Tamara Albertini’s publications aim at reintroducing the vigor and vision of Muslim intellectual contributions from the classical period.

We live in an age of anger and shameless disregard for what is true and good. What can we learn from other cultures about better ways to do anger and shame? How can we develop better norms for being angry at the right things, in the right way, at the right times? How can we inculcate norms for proper shame at callous disregard for what is true and good? Flanagan argues that attention to how other cultures do anger and shame provides tools to enlarge our moral imagination.

Owen Flanagan is the James B Duke University Professor Philosophy and Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University. Owen is the author of numerous books on a range of subjects in the philosophy of mind, piths and moral psychology, such as The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalised (2011), The Geography Of Morals (2016), and most recently How To Do Things with Emotions: Anger and Shame Across Cultures (2021).