This paper responds to research in early child development on children’s ability to distinguish pretending from joking. These are interestingly related activities, as both engage children with atypical behaviour and speech: stimuli that in some way depart from how things are or should be. The research suggests that in learning to distinguish pretending and joking, children are learning to adopt quite different relations to norms. I will extrapolate from this suggestion, considering it as a route into understanding the norms and norm-violations that matter to sustaining a practice of fiction. On the view I am trying out, the fictional and the humorous do not smoothly and straightforwardly combine (even though it is wonderful to combine them). I will illustrate these claims with some examples of comic fiction that show the fictional and the funny putting norm-related pressure on each other. This discussion will also benefit from reflection on Tom Cochrane’s work on the limitations of humour.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In reconsidering the Socratic desire to ban poetry from public life, I set out by reading from some recent poetry. I cite Alain Badiou’s observation that Socrates objects not only that poetry imitates reality. More seriously, he fears a verisimilitude in poetic expression with which philosophy cannot compete. This objection is updated and used by Koethe, a contemporary poet philosopher, against the idea of poetry as a form of thought. Another classical objection to poetry is that it fails to deal in measurable qualities. Philosophy, however, is vulnerable to a similar charge. Philosophy and poetry may share a common cause at this point.
It is self-refuting to claim that all there is to be truly said is contained within fundamental physics. We may proceed in a more promising manner by developing an idea, à la Badiou, of the production of truth. An understanding of truth as something we produce does not exclude appraisals of truth and falsity. Rather, we need an approach to the tensions between poetry, prose and philosophy that permits us to speak of poetological, painterly, theatrical and musical ways of thought. Thus, in their autonomous forms, we regard them as ways of saying something about what they deal with.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Regarding folk intuition about aesthetic normativism, empirical evidence presents conflicting results: according to Cova and Pain’s (2012) study, folk intuitions deny the idea that aesthetic judgments are normative. This result undermines Kant’s view that it is common sense that aesthetic judgments are normative. But Andow’s (2022) study reveals more complex findings, which show that folk intuition, in some cases, endorses a normative perspective. Harnessing the two-dimensional semantics, this paper aims to reconcile this conflict by arguing that the folk account of aesthetic anti-realism is conditional. To support this claim, a small-scale empirical study was conducted. The results show that people tend to adopt an incompatibilist view in imagined scenarios, but a compatibilist view in actual-world contexts. Finally, this paper proposes a conditional reinterpretation of Kant’s “subjective universality”.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Despite the increasing significance of the notion of aesthetic education to pedagogic theory and aesthetics, it has yet to be seriously considered in relation to mathematical education. This gap in the literature is all the more pressing given that mathematical modelling and reasoning underpin the technology and sciences required to overcome the climate crisis. Since the German tradition of aesthetics has often associated mathematics with instrumentality, mathematical beauty has been implicitly considered a contradictio in terminis. By contrast, in this essay I will argue that Bernard Bolzano’s work—a rare example of a mathematician who writes about aesthetics—opens up the aesthetic dimension of mathematical experience. Moreover, I will argue that the potential of aesthetic education—both as a response to Plato’s accusation against the poets and as a practical theory of the social function of art—will not be fully realised until the German aesthetic tradition has adequately reckoned with mathematical beauty. Through investigating this previously unexplored dialogue between the sciences and humanities, I hope to demonstrate the expansive possibilities of this enriched notion of aesthetic education for future scholarship in pedagogy, aesthetics, the history of German philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-3203 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
