Burmanföreläsningarna i filosofi har årligen getts av internationellt ledande filosofer sedan 1996. Föreläsningarna arrangeras av Institutionen för idé- och samhällsstudier vid Umeå universitet.
Professor Ingrid Robeyns, Utrecht University
26-28 November, Umeå universitet
Tisdag 26 november kl. 13.15-15.00, Hörsal F, Humanisthuset
The first lecture introduces the general idea of limitarianism. In its most narrow and technical sense, limitarianism is a distributive rule related to questions of distributive justice, implying that there should be upper limits to what a person can acquire, hold or enjoy. It is a partial account of what the just
pattern of justice would be; it can be combined with different views on what justice requires under the upper-threshold. In principle, limitarianism could be applied to a range of valuable ‘goods’ or the scarce resources that are instrumental to those goods, e.g. to greenhouse gas emissions. Limitarianism could also be seen as a property of social institutions, e.g. in the notions of a limit on what one can inherit, or on the idea of a maximum wage. Thirdly, limitarianism could also be seen as something vaguer and less graspable, namely as a general virtue that would apply to persons, social norms and generally shared moral views. This lecture introduces and motivates this
general idea, and raises some of the philosophical questions that are relevant for the limitarian project, including: is limitarianism a political or merely a moral doctrine? And is limitarianism philosophically distinctive?
Onsdag 27 november kl. 13.15-15.00, Hörsal F, Humanisthuset
This second lecture presents some of the reasons for economic limitarianism. A first reason relates to the project of effective altruists, and argues that given certain empirical conditions, there is a moral duty to spend the excess money that one holds on meeting the unmet urgent needs of others. A second argument investigates the risks that extreme wealth holds for liberal democracies. Thirdly, we investigate whether one could justify limitarianism on grounds of ecological duties. Finally, one could ask whether it would not be in the interests of the superrich themselves if there would be a limit on how much a person can have.
Torsdag 28 november kl. 13.15-15.00, Hörsal E, Humanisthuset
The third and final lecture takes serious some of the most important objections to economic limitarianism. Is economic limitarianism compatible with standard economic incentives or will it lead to a reduction of the efforts of the best-paid and ultimately to a shrinking of the total social product? And does it violate the pareto-principle? If so, would any of this be morally undesirable? Does limitarianism undermine equality of opportunity principles? And finally, could one not object that the superrich deserved their wealth and hence should be able to earn it and keep it, no matter whether this leads to an increase of inequality?
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
Burmanföreläsningarna startade 1996 på initiativ av Inge-Bert Täljedal, då ordförande i kommunalfullmäktige i Umeå och senare rektor vid Umeå universitet. Föreläsningarna är döpta efter Erik Olof Burmans (1845–1929), Umeås "första professor i filosofi".
Burman föddes i Yttertavle utanför Umeå, gick gymnasiet i Umeå och blev professor i praktisk filosofi 1896–1910 vid Uppsala universitet. Numera är Burman mest känd som lärare till Axel Hägerström, som är känd bland annat för sin expressivistiska teori om moraliska omdömen.
En längre presentation av Erik Olof Burman, skriven av Inge-Bert Tjäljedal (Pdf)
