Morris Colloquium

The Morris Colloquium -- an annual conference in memory of Bertram Morris (Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado at Boulder) -- is organized by the Philosophy Department of the University of Colorado at Boulder and supported by the generous contributions of the Bertram Morris Fund.

Bertram Morris

Bertram Morris (1908-1981) was born in Denver.  Educated at Princeton and Cornell, he taught at the University of Colorado from 1947 until his retirement in 1977.  He published books including The Aesthetic Process, Philosophical Aspects of Culture, and Institutions of Intelligence.

Bertram Morris is remembered as much for his committed involvement in the social issues of his community as for his scholarly work.  In 1953, he began an outreach program at Manual High School in Denver that still continues.  In 1975, he was given a special award by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado for his efforts on behalf of academic freedom and his work to improve conditions at the Boulder County Jail.

As an expression of admiration and gratitude, the Philosophy Department established this Colloquium when Bertram Morris retired in 1977.

2025 Morris Colloquium: Social and Political Justice In Ancient Greek Philosophy

April 11-12, 2025
University of Colorado, Boulder
Benson Earth Sciences 380

Full information and final schedule on our website: https://sites.google.com/view/morris2025/program

Sessions will be available on Zoom. Please register for the Zoom information; link available on website.

Emily Hulme (University of Sydney) 
"Men’s virtues, women’s virtues?"

Are there different virtues for men and women? For some schools in ancient philosophy, this question is laughable—as silly as asking if there’s men’s water and women’s water. Others do claim there are different virtues, but this position is formulated a range of ways, from Aristotle’s claim in the Politics that silence befits women (but not men), to Pythagoras’ claim that generosity is a particularly feminine virtue, to the most common formulation on which courage is a man’s virtue, and temperance a woman’s. The purpose of the talk will be to present current research on what the querelle des femmes, inasmuch as it existed, looked like in ancient Greek philosophy (which I take to revolve around the question mooted above) across a range of schools, with a glance as well at our evidence for female membership in these schools.

Dhananjay Jagannathan (Columbia University)
"Aristotle on Political Justice and Household Justice"

Aristotle tells us in NE V.1 that the primary forum for the exercise of justice is in regard to strangers. He expands on this thought further in NE V.6 when he claims that political justice, which prevails among equals whose interactions are governed by law, is the core sense of justice. Aristotle then draws the inference that justice in the household applies more to husband and wife than to the householder's relations to either his children or slaves, though even this falls short of being political. In this talk, I aim to reconstruct just how Aristotle thinks that household justice is related to political justice, with a special focus on the question of educating children, who are said to be ruled monarchically in Politics I.12, and on the close connection between education and legislative understanding in NE X.9. Moving beyond education, I also explore whether Aristotle's account can account for the pertinence of problems of both distributive and corrective justice within families.

Monte Johnson (University of California, San Diego
"Democritus on Social Justice in a Democracy"

Democritus offered a definition of justice and injustice in the context of his work On Contentment (Peri euthumiês): “Justice is to do ta chrê eonta (what needs to be done or what is useful); injustice is to fail to do ta chrê eonta (what needs be done or what is useful), but turn away” (B256 Diels). The term chrê is ambiguous between “need” and “use”, and Democritus seems to exploit this ambiguity. Part of his theory of justice is rooted in an anthropological speculation about human evolution and the development of language and civilization, according to which humans needed to incapacitate (viz., exterminate) hostile animals and people that threaten their survival. But another part of his theory of justice is rooted in a psychological theory about the good condition of the human soul: contentment (euthumiê), which depends on minimizing painful emotions like envy, jealousy, and relative deprivation, and maximizing pleasant emotions like joy, satisfaction, and security.  In this paper I examine his definition of justice and the function it and related concepts play in his ethical and social-political theory, including his theory of poverty, wealth, and mutual aid. There are several innovative aspects of his theory: beyond the grounding in a naturalistic theory of human history, there is his emphasis on the importance of autonomous (as opposed to heteronymous) sources of moral sanction, and the compatibility of his theory of justice with pro-democratic attitudes and positions. Here the contrast between Democritus’ views and contemporary anti-democratic views, such as those of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, is stark and should be of the greatest interest to those interested in the otherwise very poorly documented history of pro-democratic attitudes in the classical era.

Brennan McDavid (Chapman University)
"Plato’s Ideal and Non-Ideal Craftsmen"

Plato’s political theorizing, in both its ideal and non-ideal iterations, proceeds from particular premises about human nature. Scholars have argued that developments and revisions in his theorizing follow from his reconsideration of human nature and its potential. The focus of the present study is Plato’s attitude toward that principle of human nature specifically as it applies to craftsmen. Unlike other scholars who assess changes in Plato’s conception of human nature by comparing the citizens of Kallipolis with the citizens of Magnesia—the latter group explicitly excluding craftsmen—I will focus on the craftsmen alone. Does Plato in any way alter his estimation of the capacities of that class of people? Whereas in the Republic he carefully embeds the activities of production within the apparatus of the state, seemingly under the pessimistic outlook that activities involving the exchange of money for goods and goods for money require oversight if they are to avert evil outcomes, what treatment does he give those activities in light of his purportedly updated views about human nature? Are craftsmen and other money-makers granted greater license or less? And should we approach these questions as if to examine arguments following from first principles or leading to them? That is, can we reverse engineer Plato’s conception of human nature by observing his treatment of craftsmen—as Bobonich and others believe we can do by observing the treatment of citizens in Magnesia—or can we find out nothing in absence of clear statements of what he takes human nature and its potentialities to be? I begin with a stock-taking survey of Plato’s treatment of craftsmen in the ideal city Kallipolis and in his second-best city Magnesia, and then argue for a particular interpretation of how to compare these treatments. Finally, I draw out conclusions for how we can understand Plato’s conception of human nature.

John Proios (University of Chicago)
"Can Every Cook Philosophize? Plato's Elitism about Philosophy"

In a number of texts, Plato argues that philosophy liberates the soul. In some of these texts, he also suggests that everyone is capable of practicing philosophy by virtue of their rational souls, and he shows some interest in upsetting certain social hierarchies by emphasizing that social identity is irrelevant to the capacity for philosophy. This would seem to be the material for a commitment to democratizing philosophy and universalizing the project of philosophical liberation. Yet Plato is remarkably uninterested in this. Instead, he frequently characterizes philosophy as the purview of an elite minority.  In this talk, I ask why Plato maintains this elitism in spite of having a more universal alternative available to him. I focus on Plato's insistence, in the Theaetetus especially, that philosophy requires leisure. I argue that Plato's elitism about philosophy is not simply a reflection of contingent ideas he has about the economics of leisure (roughly, that leisure needs a division of labor). In the final part of the talk, I explore the idea that Plato's conception of philosophy expresses, in a revisionary way, the historical way of life of a leisured Greek elite.

Jeremy Reid (San Francisco State University)
"The Good Person and the Good Citizen in Aristotle's Politics"

This paper brings together and seeks to explain three claims Aristotle makes about citizen virtue and justice. The first claim is that the work (ergon) of the citizen is to preserve the constitution (Pol. III.4, 1276b27–29); the second claim is that justice is relative to the constitution (Pol. V.9, 1309a33–39); the third claim is that it is only in the best constitution that the same person is both a good person and a good citizen without qualification, whereas in nonideal constitutions people are good relative to their constitutions (Pol. IV.7, 1293b5–7). These three claims form an interesting triad, for what they suggest is that the kind of constitution that you live under determines not only what it means for you to be a just citizen, but also what it means for you to be a good person; so if we think that the virtuous person is a just person (as we should), then I think there is a very serious question about how a virtuous person ought to behave in a non-ideal constitution. If the job of the citizen is to preserve the constitution, but the constitution is not unqualifiedly good, should a virtuous person seek to preserve it? And if justice is relative to the constitution, but the conception of justice in that constitution is not correct, how can a virtuous person act justly in those circumstances? In short, how does the virtuous person get it right when their state orders them to do something they think is wrong? This paper argues that Aristotle’s conception of justice is constitution-relative because justice achieves common goods through collective action and norm-propagation, and that while Aristotle does not offer a theory of civil disobedience, there are ways to improve the constitution within the constraints Aristotle specifies and that manifest virtue.

Rachel Singpurwalla (University of Maryland)
"Plato on the Private Ideology of the Family"

Plato is hostile to the private family. In the Republic, he advocates eliminating the private family (at least for the guardians); and while he allows for private families in the political proposals of the Laws, he clearly considers it a second-best way of structuring a just society. But what is the source of Plato's hostility to the private family? Plato's most well-known criticism of the private family occurs in Republic V, where he argues that the private family is an impediment to the unity of the city in so far as it leads rulers to favor the interests of their own family members over the common good. In this paper, I explore a distinct problem with the private family, one which has received less attention from scholars: the private family, like the city, has its own ideology, or deeply held system of beliefs, values, and ways of behaving. This feature of the private family is an impediment to the twin aims of the political art: promoting the virtue of the citizens and the unity of the city. 

2024 Morris Colloquium: Value in Question — a conference in honor of Graham Oddie on his retirement

August 7, 2024, University of Colorado, Boulder
Eaton Humanities 135

Download the conference program here.

Holes in Oddie's realism.  A friendly examination.
Folke Tersman, Uppsala University
10:00 - 11:20

Abstract:  Can kinds be more or less real? In Value, Reality and Desire, Graham Oddie offers a graded notion of realism, according to which some forms of realism are stronger or involve deeper commitments to realism than others. He then goes on to argue that the strongest form of realism holds for value properties. I shall not directly concern myself with that argumentation but shall instead examine his account of what makes one form of realism stronger than another, partly by considering how useful it is when applied to domains other than metaethics.

A Value Pump for Moral Uncertainty without Intertheoretic Comparisons of Value
Johan Gustafsson, University of Texas Austin
11:40 - 1:00

Intertheoretic comparisons of value are notoriously hard to make (or even make sense of). I present a value pump for approaches to moral uncertainty that do not rely on such comparisons. More precisely, it presents a value pump for all approaches that satisfy two principles, which look plausible given a lack of intertheoretic comparisons of value. The first is Unanimity: if all moral theories in which the agent has some credence says that a certain option ought to be chosen, then that option is the only morally conscientious choice. The second is Credential Dominance: if the agent only has credence in two moral theories (but more credence in one of them) and these theories make conflicting prescriptions in a choice between two options, then the options prescribed by the theory in which the agent has more credence is the only morally conscientious choice.

Transitional attitudes and the cognitive value of learning
Richard Pettigrew, Bristol University
2:00 - 3:20

Abstract: In a series of recent papers and in her forthcoming book, Julia Staffel presents a theory of transitional attitudes and the norms that govern them. Drawing on Graham Oddie's purely epistemic (or cognitive) version of the Value of Information Theorem, as well as the pragmatic original due to Janina Hosiasson, David Blackwell, and Leonard Savage, I will construct an argument that there can be no such attitudes. In the end, the argument doesn't work, but what we learn from its flaws raises interesting questions about what transitional attitudes might be and when they arise.

Person-Affecting Restriction and Incommensurable Lives
Wlodek Rabinowizc, Lund University
3:40 - 5:00

Abstract:  Nebel (2020) argues that, in the presence of incommensurabilities between lives, welfarists should give up the Person-Affecting Restriction (PAR): they should give up the claim that an outcome cannot be better than another outcome unless it is better for someone. Indeed, if lives can be incommensurable, PAR may be violated even if the compared outcomes have the same population. That PAR is problematic if the population may vary is well-known. But that it is problematic even if the population is held fixed is a novel and striking observation. Nebel's argument takes its departure from a problem posed by Hare (2010). I call it a problem of crosswise sweetening. Hare originally posed it as a quandary for rational choice, for agents with incomplete preferences. Nebel finds another application for crosswise sweetening - in population axiology. Nebel's argument against PAR is, I think, basically correct, but it is not fully compelling as it stands: It requires support. This is what I will attempt to do in my talk. I will present a more elaborate argument against PAR, relying on the fitting-attitudes account of value relations. I am going to make use of the ideas similar to the ones I have already presented in Rabinowicz ( 2021). In that paper, I considered yet another axiological application of the crosswise sweetening, one that is closer to Hare's original problem.

Reflections and responses
Graham Oddie, University of Colorado: 5:10-6:00

Value in Question is sponsored by:
the Morris Fund,
the Committee for the History and Philosophy of Science,
the Center for Humanities and the Arts,
the Arts and Sciences Dean's Fund for Excellence.

2023 Morris Colloquium: The Extended Mind at Twenty-Five

August 24 - 26, 2023, University of Colorado, Boulder 

Keynote Speakers: David Chalmers and Andy Clark

The 38^th Annual Boulder Conference on the History and Philosophy of Science is ‘TXM@25 - The Extended Mind at Twenty-Five’. It will be held on campus at UC-Boulder, August 24–26, 2023. This event celebrates the 25th anniversary of the publication of Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s enormously influential paper “The Extended Mind” and features keynote lectures by Clark and Chalmers, as well as sixteen other talks. The purpose of the event is to evaluate and build upon extended and situated approaches to mind and cognition.

‘TXM@25’ simultaneously serves as this year’s Morris Colloquium on Philosophy. It is made possible by financial support from UC-Boulder’s Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science, UC-Boulder’s Morris Fund, UC-Boulder’s Institute of Cognitive Science, and the Volkswagen Foundation. It is co-organized by Tobias Schlicht (Ruhr University, Bochum) and Rob Rupert (UC-Boulder). For more information, contact the organizers, at tobias.schlicht@rub.de or robert.rupert@colorado.edu . There is no registration fee for attendance, and all are welcome, but we ask those who plan to attend to register in advance by contacting Firuze Mullaoglu Firuze.Mullaoglu@ruhr-uni-bochum.de .

2020 Morris Colloquium: Logic, Language and Metaphysics, March 6-7, 2020

The Spring 2020 Morris Colloquium
to mark the occasion of the retirement of Professor Graeme Forbes
"Logic, Language and Metaphysics"
Friday March 6th and Saturday March 7th

Friday March 6th (Hellems 252)

• 2.30 p.m. - 4.00 p.m.: Mark Richard (Harvard): “Superman and Clark Walk Into a Bar”
• 4.15 p.m. - 5.45 p.m.: Ede Zimmerman (Frankfurt): “Propositionalisms”

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Saturday, March 7th (Hellems 269)

• 11.00 a.m. - 12.30 p.m.: Mark Sainsbury (Austin): “Fregean Attributions of Attitudes”
• 2.00 p.m. - 3.30 p.m.: Anne Hunt (Medici): “Frege’s Puzzle in Industrial Applications”
• 3.45 p.m. – 5:15 p.m.: Graeme Forbes (Boulder): “Two New Solutions to Chisholm’s Paradox”

Topic: Medieval Philosophy, April 5-7 2018

On April 5-7, Boulder will be the home to the largest conference in medieval philosophy that has recently taken place in North America.  There are 63 talks scheduled, and over 70 scholars coming into town for the event.

Topic: The Self and Its Realizations, June 16-18 2018

Invitees will interpret the theme broadly, so as to include a wide range of topics, from the psychology of the self to the nature of the neural mechanisms that implement the processes that realize the self to a discussion of the realization-relation itself. Expect a lot of philosophy of psychology/psychiatry, philosophy of science (especially about mechanisms and interlevel relations), and even some abstract metaphysics.

Rob Cummins will open the Morris with a keynote lecture on the evening of June 16. This will be followed by two full days of talks. Other confirmed speakers are

• Fred Adams (U. of Delaware)
• Ken Aizawa (Rutgers U., Newark)
• Heather Demarest (CU-Boulder)
• Zoe Drayson (UC-Davis)
• Carrie Figdor (U. of Iowa)
• Lena Kastner (Ruhr U., Bochum)
• Beate Krickel (Ruhr U., Bochum)
• Tom Polger (U. of Cincinnati)
• Sarah Robins (U. of Kansas)
• Elizabeth Schechter (Washington U. of St. Louis)
• Larry Shapiro (U. Wisconsin-Madison)
• Shannon Spaulding (Oklahoma State U.)

Click here for the official schedule.

Topic: Cultural Property and the Ethics of War

April 27-28, 2017

Topic: Metaphysics and Its History

March 11-12, 2016

The topic of this year's colloquium is metaphysics and its history. It will be a crossover workshop bringing together contemporary metaphysicians working on issues with a rich history and historians of metaphysics working on issues of great contemporary significance, aiming to encourage a dialogue between what are arguably continuous lines of inquiry. To that end, historians will comment on non-historians and non-historians on historians.

More information can be found at the conference website.

You can also contact the conference organizers, Robert Pasnau and Raul Saucedo.

Topic:  Cognitive Values

March 6th - March 7th, 2015

• Richard Pettigrew (University of Bristol)
• Julia Staffel (Washington University St Louis)    
• Luc Bovens (London School of Economics)
• Matt Kopec (Northwestern University)
• Miriam Schoenfield  (University of Texas at Austin)
• Brian Talbot (Washington University St Louis)    
• David Etlin (Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich )
• Branden Fitelson (Rutgers University)
• Ted Shear (University of California, Davis)

More information can be found at the conference website.   (i.e. link to http://www.gjoddie.com/boulder-workshops/workshop-1.html)