The Burman Lectures in philosophy have been given annually by internationally leading philosophers since 1996. The lectures are arranged by the Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Umeå University.
Lecturer: John Macfarlane, Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Berkeley.
Learn more about John Macfarlane
Time: 8-10 October 2025, at 13.15-15.00 PM
Place: Lecture Hall HUM.D.210 and HUM.D.220, Humanities Building, Umeå University
Wednesay 8 October at 13.15-15.00 PM in Lecture Hall HUM.D.220
Abstract: In recent work, Jeffrey King has called our attention to the phenomenon of “felicitous underspecification”: felicitous uses of context-sensitive language in the absence of determinate intentions about the needed contextual supplementation. An example would be talk of a “local shop” in the absence of a determinate intention defining the scope of the locality (local-to-the-neighborhood, local-to-the-city, local-to-the-region?). After discussing the challenge this phenomenon poses for standard theories of communication, I consider King’s own solution and argue that it is inadequate. I then describe the solution I think is needed, which makes use of the basic ideas of Allan Gibbard’s plan expressivism. According to this approach, ordinary descriptive claims like “I went to a local bar” must be understood as expressive of practical plans for the use of words, as well as ordinary beliefs. Indeterminacy amounts to practical indecision.
Thursday 9 October at 13.15-15.00 PM in Lecture Hall HUM.D.210
Abstract: Philosophers often argue from premises about disagreement to conclusions about meaning. For example, from the fact that a fan of brutalist architecture who calls a building “beautiful” thereby disagrees with a traditionalist who calls it “not beautiful,” we may infer that the two parties mean the same thing by “beautiful.” For if they did not, their claims would only have the surface appearance of inconsistency. This form of argument has played a central role in meta-ethics, aesthetics, and discussions of contextualism in epistemology and philosophy of language, but recently its validity has been challenged (most influentially by David Plunkett and Timothy Sundell). It has been argued that the two parties can disagree even while meaning different things by “beautiful” and asserting compatible claims; the locus of disagreement is not what they have asserted, but the competing normative views about how “beautiful” ought to be used they have thereby expressed. This sort of disagreement has been called a “metalinguistic negotiation.” I give reasons for doubting that any interesting cases of disagreement are metalinguistic negotiations in this sense. But I think there is something right about the idea that, in making assertions, we express normative proposals for the use of words. I argue that the expressivist theory sketched in Lecture 1 captures what is plausible in the metalinguistic negotiation account while avoiding its implausible features (and vindicating the argument from disagreement).
Friday 10 October at 13.15-15.00 PM in Lecture Hall HUM.D.220
Abstract: Several philosophers have argued recently that pronouns and proper names should be treated semantically as variables. This treatment allows us to see them both as directly referential (in agreement with Kaplanian orthodoxy) and as potentially shifting their reference in modal and doxastic contexts (against Kaplanian orthodoxy). I show that if the arguments for variabilism are any good, they generalize to all semantic categories and therefore support panvariabilism, the view that all lexical items should be treated as variables. I then give an independent motivation for panvariabilism: it is needed to solve an analogue of the problem of felicitous underspecification that arises, not for the contextual supplementations of lexical items, but for the lexical items themselves. Panvariabilism is the semantics we need to fit the pragmatics argued for in the first two lectures.
All interested are welcome to these lectures.
The 2025 Burman lectures are supported by a generous contribution from the Wenner-Gren Foundations.
2024
C. Thi Nguyen, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah
Scores and the Meaning of Life
Lecture 1: Value Capture
Lecture 2: Mechanical Scoring Systems and Human Values
Lecture 3: Bureaucratic Meanings and Semantic Self-Determination
2023
Professor David Enoch, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Autonomy: Coercion, Nudging and the Epistemic Analogy
Lecture 1: Contrastive Consent and Third-Party Coercion
Lecture 2: How Nudging Upsets Autonomy
Lecture 3: Epistemic Autonomy May Not Be a Thing
Professor Elisabeth Camp, Rutgers University
Perspectives, Frames, and the Coercion of Intimacy
Lecture 1: From Point of View to Perspective
Lecture 2: Perspectival Framing With Pictures and Words
Lecture 3: Frames, Nicknames, and the Coercion of Intimacy
Jeff McMahan, Sekyra and White’s Professor i moralfilosofi vid Oxford University
The Ethics of Creating, Saving, and Ending Lives
Lecture 1: Abortion, Prenatal Injury, and What Matters in Alternative Possible Lives
Lecture 2: The Population Ethics Asymmetry and the Permissibility of Procreation
Lecture 3: Moral Reasons to Cause People to Exist
Professor Ingrid Robeyns, Utrecht University
Why worry about wealth?
Lecture 1: What is limitarianism?
Lecture 2: Arguments for economic limitarianism
Lecture 3. Objections to economic limitarianism
Prof. Jennifer Saul, University of Sheffield.
Race, Manipulative Language, and Politics
Lecture I: Dogwhistles, Political Manipulation and the Philosophy of Language
Lecture II: Racial Figleaves, The Shifting Boundaries of the Permissible, and the Rise of Donald Trump
Lecture III: 'Immigration' in the Brexit Campaign: Dogwhistle Terms in Complex Contexts
Jenann Ismael, University of Arizona
Determinism, Time, and Totality
Lecture I: Determinism and the Causal Order
Lecture II: Time and Transcendence
Lecture III: Totality
Karen Bennett, Cornell University.
Making things Up
Lecture 1: Building
Lecture 2: Causing
Lecture 3: Relative Fundamentality
Elizabeth Anderson, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan.
Pragmatism in Ethics: Why and How
Lecture 1: Why Pragmatism?
Lecture 2: How to Be a Pragmatist 1: Correcting Moral Biases
Lecture 3: How to Be a Pragmatist 2: Experiments in Living
Michael Smith, McCosh Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University
What We Should Do and Why We Should Do It
Lecture 1: "The Standard Story of Action"
Lecture 2: "A Constitutivist Theory of Reasons"
Lecture 3: "A Case Study: The Reasons of Love"
David Chalmers, Australian National University and New York University
Structuralism, space, and skepticism
Lecture 1: Constructing the world
Lecture 2: Three puzzles about spatial experience
Lecture 3: The structuralist response to skepticism
Stephen Finlay, University of Southern California
Metaethics as a Confusion of Tongues
Lecture 1: Metaethics: Why and How?
Lecture 2: The Semantics of "Ought"
Lecture 3: The Pragmatics of Normative Disagreement
Dag Prawitz, Stockholm University
Bevis, mening och sanning
Tim Crane, University of Cambridge
Problems of Being and Existence
Lecture 1: Existence, Being and Being-so
Lecture 2: Existence and Quantification Reconsidered
Lecture 3: The Singularity of Singular Thought
2009
Jerry Fodor, Rutgers University
What Darwin Got Wrong
Lecture 1: What kind of theory is the Theory of Natural Selection?
Lecture 2: The problem about 'selection-for'
2008
Susanna Siegel, Harvard
The Nature of Visual Experience
Lecture 1: The varieties of perceptual intentionality
Lecture 2: The contents of visual experience
2007
Alex Byrne, MIT
How do we know our own minds?
Lecture 1: Transparency and Self-Knowledge
Lecture 2: Knowing that I am thinking
2006
Jonathan Dancy, University of Reading and University of Texas, Austin
Lecture 1: Reasons and Rationality
Lecture 2: Practical Reasoning and Inference
2005
Ned Block, New York University
Consciousness and Neuroscience
Lecture 1: The Epistemological Problem of the Neuroscience of Consciousness
Lecture 2: How Empirical Evidence can be Relevant to the Mind-Body Problem
2004
John Broome, Oxford
Reasoning
2003
Wlodek Rabinowicz, Lund
Värde och passande attityder
2002
Kevin Mulligan, Genève
Lecture 1: Essence, Logic and Ontology
Lecture 2: Foolishness and Cognitive Values
2001
Hubert Dreyfus, Berkeley
Lecture 1: What is moral maturity? A Phenomenological Account Of The Development Of Ethical Expertise
Lecture 2: The primacy of the phenomenological over logical analysis: A Merleau-Pontian Critique of Searle's Account of Action and Social Reality
2000
Herbert Hochberg, University of Texas, Austin
Lecture 1: A Simple Refutation of Mindless Materialism
Lecture 2: Universals, Particulars and the Logic of Predication
1999
Susan Haack, University of Miami
The Science of Sociology and the Sociology of Science
Lecture 1: Social Science as Semiotic.
Lecture 2: Sociology of Science: The Sensible Program.
1998
Howard Sobel, University of Toronto
Lecture 1: First causes: St. Thomas Aquinas's 'Second way'.
Lecture 2: Ultimate reasons if not first causes: Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz on 'the Ultimate Origination of Things'.
1997
Ian Jarvie, York University
Science and the Open Society
1996
David Kaplan, UCLA
What is Meaning: Notes toward a theory of Meaning as Use
The Burman Lectures started in 1996 on the initiative of Inge-Bert Täljedal, then mayor of Umeå and later vice chancellor of Umeå University. The lectures commemorate Erik Olof Burman (1845-1929), Umeå's "first professor of philosophy".
Burman was born in Yttertavle outside of Umeå, went to high school in Umeå, and became professor of practical philosophy 1896-1910 at Uppsala University. Nowadays Burman is best known as the teacher of Axel Hägerström, who is known for his expressivist theory of moral judgments, among other things.
A longer presentation of Erik Olof Burman, written by Inge-Bert Täljedal (Pdf in Swedish)