Each semester, the department offers a series of lectures given by a mix of guest speakers from around the world and UNLV professors, presenting current research on a broad range of philosophical issues. These lectures expand on topics covered in philosophy classes. There is also a course (PHIL 482) centered on the Colloquium Series itself.

Colloquium Series Archive Download the Entire Fall 2024 Schedule

Fall 2024 Colloquia

  • Sep 05: University Forum Lecture Series - What are Latin[a/o/x/e]s Anyway?

    Speaker: Manuel Vargas, Professor of Philosophy, University of California San Diego A variety of philosophers and social theorists have thought that Latinxs don’t fit the usual identity categories in the United…

  • Sep 06: “Echoes of Agency: Mexican Existentialism and Ecological Agency”

    Manuel Vargas, Dept. of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego—Contemporary approaches to agency and responsibility have tended to be individualistic in two ways, that is, in focusing on individual agents and in…

  • Sep 20: "Normativity and Arbitrariness"

    Lisa Cassell, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Maryland, Baltimore County—It’s a widely held idea that logic is normative. But defending this idea is complicated. On a particularly strong view, to say that logic is…

  • Oct 11: “Compositional Abduction and Mental Representation”

    Ken Aizawa, Dept. of Philosophy, Rutgers University—This talk will introduce a theory of compositional abduction as an account of some instances of scientific confirmation. I will then show how this theory is relevant to…

  • Oct 18: “Delusions, Experience, Rationality, and Non-Literal Thought”

    Quinn Hiroshi Gibson, Dept. of Philosophy, Clemson University—Subjects with monothematic delusions believe apparently incredible things, e.g., that they are dead or that their spouses have been replaced by impostors or…

  • Nov 01: “Later Wittgenstein on the Analysis of Experience: A Problem for Early Modern Empiricism?”

    Philip Bold, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities—Philosophical Investigations 47 offers a compelling critique of the metaphysical notion of ‘absolute simples’—either of language, reality, or of (visual…

  • Nov 15: “Logic is Not Logic”

    Jean-Yves Beziau, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian Research Council and Brazilian Academy of Philosophy—In this talk I will examine the very nature of logic by distinguishing between Logic as…

  • Dec 06: “Simplicity and the Underintellectualization of Everyday Life”

    Eric Mandelbaum, Dept. of Philosophy, City University of New York—Maximally simple models of the mind have dominated both empiricist and rationalist theorizing. From behaviorism to associationism to Chomskian Minimalism to…