AUB Philosophy Research Seminar brings together students, faculty members, and scholars interested in sharing and discussing work in progress. The seminar meets every two to three weeks on Tuesday evenings and is open to all members of the community.
Fall 2025-2026
Tuesday, October 28, 2025 at 6:00pm
Farouk Jabre Center | Conference Room, Lee Observatory, lower level (backyard entrance)
AUB Philosophy Research Seminar #4 | Fall 2025-2026
Philosophical Roots of Lebanese Political Projects:
Charles Malek and Antun Saade
Omar Talhouk PhD - AUB
Antun Saade and Charles Malek are generally considered to be unique figures in the political history of Lebanon. They are most commonly known for proposing radically different political visions for Lebanon and its broader role in the region. However, they are less commonly known as intellectuals, who supplemented their political views with general reflections on a wide range of topics. In this talk, I will introduce each of Saade and Malek as philosophers, and show how their political differences can be traced back to fundamental philosophical differences concerning the nature of tradition and human sociality. On the one hand, Malek uses a broadly phenomenological approach to argue that individual experiences of truth are only possible from within one universal human tradition. Saade, on the other hand, uses a broadly naturalistic framework to argue that traditions reflect the interests and values of the particular societies within which they have evolved. I will show how each of Malek’s phenomenology and Saade’s naturalism informs the way they understood what was at stake in political projects that sought to either pull Lebanon closer to Europe and the US, or to more fully integrate it within the geographical region it finds itself in.
Omar Talhouk is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at AUB. He earned his PhD from Georgetown University in 2023. His dissertation entitled: “The Functions of Metaphysics,” delves into issues in meta-metaphysics, philosophy of science, and German philosophy and offers an alternative approach to familiar disputes over the status of metaphysics. In the dissertation, he argues that metaphysical concepts have a variety of important functions that are independent of debates surrounding the status of metaphysical knowledge, and provides an initial taxonomy of those functions. Currently, Omar is working on a long-term research project to make contemporary philosophy written in the Arab world more widely known and accessible.
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Tuesday, October 14, 2025 at 6:00pm
Issam Fares Institute, Conference Room - 4th Floor
Safety, Security, and the Social Contract:
AI’s Role in Public Safety Governance
Mohamad Cherry - AUB / London School of Economics (LSE)
As governments increasingly deploy artificial intelligence for public safety, from algorithmic risk assessment in courts to crowd monitoring at events, we face fundamental questions about political authority and democratic consent. This talk examines how AI governance challenges the classical social contract theory and proposes a framework for ethical AI deployment in public spaces. Drawing on recent empirical research utilizing John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance,” this presentation argues that a Rawlsian approach is the most ideal for AI governance. The talk identifies three critical challenges: 1- the consent problem (how do citizens meaningfully agree to algorithmic governance?); 2- The representation problem (whose values are embedded in AI systems?); and 3- The accountability problem (who governs the governors when they are algorithms?). These principles are tested against real-world cases: COMPAS’s recidivism predictions contrasted with N-AI’s crowd crush predictions. The presentation traces how social contract theories would approach AI governance, before developing a contemporary Rawlsian framework. It concludes with procedural and substantive requirements for legitimate AI governance, offering practical implications for policymakers, technologists, and citizens navigating algorithmic authority in democratic societies.
Mohamad Cherry holds an MA in Philosophy from the American University of Beirut (2023) and has completed his MSc in Social and Cultural Psychology at the London School of Economics (2025). His recent LSE dissertation, "Resilient Communication in High-Risk Teams: Insights from the Apollo 13 Mission," examined communication patterns under extreme pressure, complementing his philosophy thesis on moral psychology, responsibility attribution, and group dynamics. Drawing on his background in philosophy and social psychology, he is currently exploring how philosophical and theoretical frameworks can inform contemporary debates about AI governance and democratic legitimacy.
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Tuesday, September 30, 2025 at 6:00pm
Farouk Jabre Center | Conference Room, Lee Observatory, lower level (backyard entrance)
Wherein Are Social Kinds Normative?
Muhammad Ali Khalidi PhD - City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center
The categories of the social sciences aim to delineate “real kinds” (Mill 1843, Hacking 2007) in the social domain, just as those of the natural sciences aim to do so in their respective domains. Social kinds can therefore be considered real kinds in the social domain, and as with real kinds in other domains, social kinds are aspects of the causal structure of the social world. As a result, categories corresponding to social kinds feature in explanations and inductive inferences in the social sciences, despite important differences between the natural and social sciences. After some preliminaries about social kinds, I will go on to discuss the demarcation of the social domain, arguing that there can be di erent degrees of sociality, and accordingly, social kinds can come in different varieties. Since norms can be understood as social structures, distinctive of a certain type of sociality, it would appear that many social kinds are trivially normative. But in determining whether the boundaries of social categories are fixed by norms, it is crucial to distinguish norms of the social actors (emic) from norms of the researchers (etic). While norms of social actors are often constitutive of social kinds, this type of normativity is part and parcel of the causal structure of the social world and does not preclude them from corresponding to real kinds. However, when the boundaries of social categories are individuated according to the norms of researchers, we can no longer expect them to correspond to real kinds, featuring in inductive inferences, explanations, and empirical generalizations.
Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center, where he teaches in the philosophy of science. His work focuses on the philosophy of science, particularly cognitive science and social science. He has published extensively in philosophy of science, philosophy of cognitive science, psychology, biology and philosophy of social science. Among his most recent publications: Natural Kinds (Cambridge Elements in the Philosophy of Science, 2024) and Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic Practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
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Tuesday, September 23, 2025 at 6:00pm
Issam Fares Institute, Conference Room - 4th Floor
The Kantian Rational Will and Nietzsche-Zarathustra’s
Tyranny of Self-Overcoming
Francesca Cauchi PhD - National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan
The thematic of this talk is the consonance between the autonomous, self-legislating, rational will of Kantian ethics and Zarathustra’s concept of a destructive-generative rational will. In Zarathustra’s rendition, the rational will has sufficient intellectual rigour to interrogate entrenched moral dogmas and the requisite strength to overcome the latter through the incorporation of a new law: the law of perpetual becoming. The impetus behind this rational will to overcome, I contend, is Nietzsche’s relentless will to truth, which in its resolute opposition to inclination and self-interest transposes the ontological law of becoming into the normative doctrine of self-overcoming. I shall further argue that in the rational will’s steadfast opposition to the affective will to power can be discerned distinct traces of the Kantian ‘good will’ that masters rather than serves inclination.
Francesca Cauchi earned her PhD from the University of Cambridge (Corpus Christi College), and began her academic career in 1994 at AUB. Since then, she has taught at universities in the West Bank, Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey, Cyprus, Chile, and Malaysia. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan. Her principal research interests include Nietzsche, the English Romantic poets, modern European drama, and Shakespeare. In addition to numerous articles, her most recent publications include: Nietzsche’s Rhetoric: Four Case Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023); Zarathustra’s Moral Tyranny: Spectres of Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
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Spring 2024-2025
Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at 4:30pm
Issam Fares Institute, Conference Room - 4th Floor
HOW TO RESIST A DOUBLE BIND
Tamara Fakhoury PhD - University of Minnesota
What are oppressive double binds and how can we resist them? These no-win situations rely on stereotypes and other oppressive narratives to constrain a person’s choices and impose harm, often by exploiting the power of shame. Drawing on examples from the feminist, civil rights, and Palestinian liberation movements, I suggest that one way to resist double binds is by reinterpreting one’s options through values that directly challenge the normative assumptions sustaining them. In doing so, individuals may be able to evade or lessen some of the harms these binds impose—for example, by avoiding the shame often associated with defying dominant norms. This kind of resistance draws its strength from communities rooted in counter-oppressive values—like
sumud and
nonviolence—that empower individuals to see beyond imposed limits and act with transformative clarity.
Tamara Fakhoury is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. Her research explores how people resist oppression and what it means to do so ethically and meaningfully. She earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019 and her BA from the American University of Beirut in 2013. Her recent work explores often-overlooked forms of resistance and the virtues they can embody. Her publications include "Wadi Climbing: Quiet Resistance in the West Bank" in The Radical Philosophy Review, "Non-Normative Behavior and the Virtue of Rebelliousness" in The Journal of Value Inquiry and "Violent Resistance as
Tuesday, April 22, 2025 at 6:30pm
Issam Fares Institute, Conference Room - 4th Floor
TIME AND TOTALITY: FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGY AND
THE NEW SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY
Ties van Gemert PhD candidate - Tilburg University
In
Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), Bertrand Russell introduced a new conception of scientific philosophy—one grounded in the method of analysis, deferring questions of “what there is” to scientific inquiry, and aiming to eliminate speculative metaphysics. In this talk, I will trace the reception of this model of philosophy in France. Focusing on three figures—Jean Nicod, Jean Cavaillès, and Suzanne Bachelard—I argue that the encounter with the new scientific philosophy provoked a decisive metaphilosophical reflection among French epistemologists. My objective will be to show that through their critical engagement with the analytic program, these thinkers developed a distinctive metaphilosophy—one that foregrounds the irreducibility of temporality, the historicity of scientific thought, and the impossibility of attaining a totalizing perspective.
Ties van Gemert is a PhD candidate and a member of the Exiled Empiricists project at the Department of Philosophy at Tilburg University. He is currently a research affiliate in the Department of Philosophy at AUB. His research interests include intuitionism in philosophy of mathematics, the French epistemological tradition, and the history of psychology.
Information about his publications can be found at https://research.tilburguniversity.edu/en/persons/ties-van-gemert/publications/
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Tuesday, April 8, 2025 at 6:30pm
Issam Fares Institute, Conference Room - 4th Floor
DOES EVOLUTION UNDERMINE MORAL KNOWLEDGE?
Caner Turan PhD - AUB
Evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) pose a serious epistemic challenge to moral realism—the view that there are objective, attitude-independent moral truths. The core claim is this: if our moral beliefs have been deeply shaped by evolutionary forces aimed at promoting survival and reproduction rather than tracking attitude-independent moral truths, then we have strong reason to doubt the reliability of our moral beliefs. In short, if evolution has profoundly shaped what we believe about morality, and if evolution does not “care” about attitude-independent moral truths, then we lack moral knowledge. This talk critically examines the force of EDAs and argues that, despite their initial appeal, they fall short of undermining our claims to moral knowledge. Along the way, we will consider possible responses to EDAs and how debunkers might reply in turn.
Caner Turan is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at AUB. He completed his MA at King’s College London and PhD at Tulane University, focusing primarily on metaethics and moral psychology, and has published in both areas. His current work focuses on applied ethics, especially bioethics. He recently published “Thoracoabdominal Normothermic Regional Perfusion: Is It Ethical?” in the Monash Bioethics Review (2025), and is now working on additional projects in bioethics, as well as a book on the objectivity of morality.
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Monday, March 17, 2025 at 12:30pm
Issam Fares Institute, Conference Room - 4th Floor
HEALING THROUGH PHILOSOPHY:
AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDICAL HUMANITIES
Pamela Krause - Faculty of Humanities - USJ
Philosophy has long been regarded as a source of healing, a conception rooted in antiquity and expressed in several texts such as the Platonic dialogues, like for example, the
Gorgias and the
Sophist, or the Stoic writings of Cicero and Seneca, and the medical-philosophical works of Galen. Philosophy, particularly epistemology, illuminates a transformative path to healing by critically examining the foundational and often unquestioned criteria underlying nosology. A central theme in the medical humanities is the epistemological complexity of diagnosing mental disorders, especially as reflected in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Epistemology plays a pivotal role in deconstructing psychiatric classification, challenging the very foundations of these diagnoses. This talk will explore the interplay between biological dysfunction and the social, cultural, and normative factors that shape our understanding of pathology. The works of Jerome Wakefield will be invoked to address the concepts of prolonged grief disorder and anxiety. By delving into the foundations of nosology, the talk aims to foster a more reflective interdisciplinary approach to mental health, enriching both medical practice and our understanding of illness as it is experienced.
After completing a dual degree in philosophy and literature, Pamela Krause earned her PhD in philosophy from Sorbonne University under the supervision of Claude Romano. A specialist in contemporary philosophy and phenomenology, she is the philosophy program director at the Faculty of Humanities, Saint-Joseph University, Beirut. She is also a co-founder of the Middle-East Medical Humanities Research Lab, the first of its kind in the Middle East. Established in collaboration with the Faculty of Medicine and the Department of Psychiatry at Hôtel-Dieu de France, it is part of the international College of Medical Humanities (COLHUM) collective. Her recent publications include: L’Art de guérir: une introduction aux humanités médicales, Revue des sciences humaines, 2025; Penser l’évènement: de la phénoménologie aux trauma studies, PUC, 2025.
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Tuesday, February 18, 2025 at 6:30pm
Issam Fares Institute, Conference Room - 4th Floor
THE ONTOLOGICAL TENSIONS BETWEEN UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY:
AVICENNA'S ESSENCE-EXISTENCE DISTINCTION
AND ITS POST-CLASSICAL DEBATES
Sara Mrouwe MA - AUB
One of the most enduring questions in metaphysics concerns the relationship between unity and multiplicity in existence. Avicenna’s distinction between essence and existence provides a foundational framework for understanding contingency, necessity, and causality. However, this model faces challenges when applied to the Necessary of Existence — a being whose essence is identical to its existence. How can we reconcile the unity of God, whose essence is to exist, with the multiplicity of the created world? This debate took center stage in post-classical Islamic philosophy, and the exchange between Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi (d. 1274) and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1274) is one example. Al-Qunawi, drawing from Sufi doctrine, critiques Avicenna’s framework for failing to preserve the absolute oneness of existence, and therefore God, advocating instead for the Oneness of Being. In response, al-Tusi refines Avicennian metaphysics by introducing the concept of "being predicated with ambiguity", allowing for varying degrees and intensities of being. This talk explores how these two perspectives attempt to reconcile the unity of existence with the diversity of creation, highlighting their broader philosophical significance in the timeless debates about existence, necessity, and the nature of reality.
Sara Mrouwe recently earned her MA in Philosophy from the American University of Beirut (AUB), with her research focused on metaphysical issues in Islamic philosophy, particularly post-classical debates on existence. Her work engages the Avicennian and post-Avicennian traditions, as well as the Akbarian Sufi tradition, exploring the interplay of rationalist and mystical epistemologies. Sara is especially interested in questions of ontology, necessity, and causality in medieval philosophy, but also in tracing back their origins in ancient philosophy.
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Tuesday, January 28, 2025 at 6:30pm
Issam Fares Institute, Conference Room - 4th Floor
HOW WE BLAME:A THEORY OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY
Bana Bashour PhD - AUB
Moral responsibility judgments are central to our moral and social lives. In the philosophical literature on the subject, they have been discussed in relation to the metaphysical problem of free will, one of the trickiest issues in philosophy. While I remain neutral on metaphysical issues, I argue that if we restrict ourselves to the domain of the intentional stance, we will be able to make headway in our discussions on moral responsibility. On my view, agents are embodied sentient intentional systems capable of reciprocation, verbal communication and reflective evaluation. I argue that justified attributions of moral responsibility involve justified attributions of intentional states as well as justified perceptions of norm violation. In addition, justified attributions of moral responsibility only make sense when indexed to a particular judge, making judgements of moral responsibility 3-place predicates, a significantly distinctive feature of my account. I conclude by showing how recent empirical literature in moral psychology justifies my view.
Bana Bashour is Tenured Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of General Education at the American University of Beirut. She has published extensively in moral psychology and social epistemology, and collaborated in interdisciplinary works with economists, psychologists and sociologists. She co-edited with Hans Muller an anthology entitled Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implication (2013, Routledge). She is currently finishing a book manuscript (under contract with Routledge) entitled "How We Blame: A Theory of Moral Responsibility" in which she marries traditional philosophical texts with contemporary empirical work.
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Fall 2024-2025
Tuesday, September 17, 2024 at 6:30pm
Issam Fares Institute, Conference Room - 4th Floor
Naming, Saying and Doing:
Brandom's Critique of Sellars' Metalinguistic Nominalism
Ray Brassier PhD - AUB
Sellars’s metalinguistic nominalism maintains that what we are doing in saying something about abstract entities (properties, relations, kinds, or propositions) is saying something about the function of linguistic expressions (predicates, singular terms, or sentences.) This function is not genuinely nominative, unlike the genuinely nominative role played by regular proper and common nouns. Brandom objects that Sellars relies here on a dubious metaphysical distinction between proper and improper nomination at the metalinguistic level. By Brandom's lights, what we are ultimately doing in saying is espousing or ascribing discursive commitments and entitlements to one another. Lacking the concept of pragmatic metavocabulary to catalogue the varieties of discursive activity, Sellars, according to Brandom, ends up conflating the doing involved in saying with the doing involved in naming. This talk will critically reconstruct Brandom's objections and mount a qualified defense of Sellars's account.
Ray Brassier is Professor of Philosophy at AUB. He is the author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan 2007). Over the past decade he has written several articles about the work of Wilfrid Sellars. He is currently completing a second book entitled Fatelessness: Freedom and Fatality between Marx and Adorno (MIT 2025). He is also preparing a collection of essays about Sellars, Brandom, and related thinkers.
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