UBC PhilSA’s March Dialectic with Dr. Eric Margolis: What Happened to the Debate about Innate Ideas?

Date: Friday, March 14th

Time: 5pm-7pm

Location: BUCH B211

“One of the oldest and most enduring debates in philosophy concerns the origins of psychological traits. What is it about the human mind that allow us to acquire things like natural language, mathematics, and moral norms? In my book The Building Blocks of Thought, I offer an account of how best to understand this debate as it’s playing out in the twenty-first century and argue for a rationalist view of the origins of concepts—a view that has strong affinities with the historical proposal that there are innate ideas. In this talk, I’ll sketch a few of the themes from the book and why I think a combination of philosophical and scientific considerations support a strongly rationalist view of our conceptual capacities.”

Dr. Eric Margolis received his PhD from Rutgers University and held appointments at Rice University and the University of Wisconsin before coming to UBC in 2008. His research is largely concerned with the nature of human concepts. He is interested in the way that concepts allow us to represent the world and in the innate features of the mind that make the human conceptual system possible.