SW Philosophy

Swansea University’s Philosophy Research Group (PRG) is delighted to announce a small event designed to bring together philosophers in the South of Wales and Southwest of England to celebrate the diversity and quality of the philosophy research taking place in this region. Please find details below. All are welcome.

Contact: [email protected]

Programme:

1:00pm—1:15pm Arrival and refreshments

1:15pm—2:15pm: Rob Fraser – “Conceptual & Logical Explanation”

In this talk, I sketch my preferred theory of explanation, according to which to explain is to provide information about objective relations of dependence, and I defend it against the charge that it cannot accommodate cases of conceptual and logical explanation. I agree that conceptual and logical relations bind their relata too tightly to do the work of dependence. However, such relations nevertheless facilitate the provision of a very general kind of information about dependence. By showing that two phenomena stand in a certain intimate conceptual or logical relation, we can show that they depend on the very same things. This is useful for explanatory purposes when it is easier to see what one of the related phenomena depends on. I close by exploring work that my analysis can do in the philosophy of time travel and the metaphysics of truth.

2:15pm—3:15pm: Anna Bortolan – TBA

3:15pm—3:30pm: Comfort break

3:30pm—4:30pm: Dan Degerman – “The medicalisation of silence”

This talk explores and problematises the medicalisation of silence. Scholars working within the growing, interdisciplinary field of silence studies warn that silence has been pathologised in Western culture. By this, they mean that silence is being reduced to a social, political, and ethical dysfunction resulting from resulting from injustice, rather than that it is being understood literally as an illness. In this talk, I want to suggest that the latter is occurring as well: silence is often understood as an illness subject to medical expertise and intervention. Using depression as a case study, I begin by showing that silence is treated both as a symptom and a cause of depression in mental healthcare. I then demonstrate that it is not just in healthcare that silence is being medicalised, but also in business management. A growing number of management researchers argue that employee silence may be both a risk factor for and a result of depression. Finally, I consider the potential implications of this. It is vital to recognise that the medicalisation of silence is not inherently problematic. However, in the blunt forms it tends to take, I will argue that it threatens to obscure the diverse and sometimes positive role of silence in human life.

4:30pm—5:30pm Daisy Dixon – “Aesthetic Slurs”

I present a novel account of what I call the ‘aesthetic slur’. Inspired by Patricia Hill Collins’s notion of ‘controlling images’, I will delineate images which behave in much the same way as slurs, analysing particularly their feature of ‘effluence’; how their harmful content can leak out and not be insulated by intention or context. I will then use this analysis to explain what went wrong with Makode Linde's controversial artwork Painful Cake (2012). Content warnings: showings of racist & antisemitic imagery.