CMC Philosophy

Join us on January 23 at 4:15 pm for a talk by Daniel Muñoz on "Epistemic Supererogation and the Right to Believe.”

Abstract: It's a sad fact that other people are so often wrong and unreasonable. Even worse, they think the same of us! How can we live together on civil terms when we can't rationally endorse each other's views? I think the answer lies in a phrase often thrown around but rarely pinned down: "the right to believe." Usually, the right to believe is thought of as a claim against brainwashing or browbeating, but I argue that there is a quite literal sense in which our rights let us justify our beliefs to others about matters of religion, morality, and aesthetics. This "epistemic prerogative," as I call it, is not a reason to believe anything in particular, just as the right to free speech is not a reason to say anything in particular. But
the prerogative allows us to tolerate, in a coherent and principled way, beliefs that we know to be subpar. Rather than seeing our beliefs as obligatory for others to share in, we should tend to see these beliefs as "supererogatory"—the philosopher's term for "beyond the call of duty."

The awards for members of our Department keep on coming! Congrats to Professor Hurley who was recently selected by President Chodosh as this year’s recipient of the Presidential Award for Merit!

Congrats to Prof Locke for winning this year’s Lisska prize from the APA! See https://www.apaonline.org/page/2025prizes-s/ for the prize announcement.

We think therefore we are.

Come party with the Department! Alums welcome!

How to think about consciousness | Psyche Guides What is it like to be you? Dive into the philosophical puzzle of consciousness and see yourself and the world in new ways

Check out the great post by CMC philosophy major Sara Arjomand '26 at The Junkyard. Drawing on work she did during CMC's Summer Research Program, Sara explores a puzzle about the apparent imaginability of nonsense, that is, our seeming ability to imagine what we’re unable to understand. Her solution relies on the way that illusions of sense can prompt imaginative responses.

The Puzzle of Imagining Nonsense — The Junkyard A post by Sara Arjomand Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” is a nonsense poem. Carroll begins: “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe” (Carroll 1900). Half of the words in the first stanza of “Jabberwoc...