UWE World Philosophy Day 2013-14 - Iain Hamilton Grant

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Before I begin, I want to thank the organising committee of the Philosophy Society for having organised this. So, members of the Philosophy Committee, could you stand, please? Barney! Just Barney. Okay, thanks Barney. The reason being that it's... The reason being that it is extraordinarily encouraging…

• 00:05:16

  What sort of thing then is the whole statement, that? That. That a universe exists, this proposition is the limit of experience. First of all, the proposition occurs in a larger context. It is not a proposition on its own. It does not just say, a universe exists. There is such a thing as an X, we call that X…

• 00:10:40

  Why is this interesting? Because it raises the prospect, some might say speculative, others might say technological, of creating a photograph of the origin of the cosmos that places the photographer, as it were, prior to the cosmos having awakened. So we could picture our photographer in the void. The photograph…

• 00:15:05

  That is to say, when it arises, but was not always. Insofar as that's the case, the concept of creation just is a concept of creation because it's an instance of it. What, however, did we start from? We started from a hypothesis. What is it that a hypothesis does? It does not state X about Y. It does not, for example…

• 00:20:29

  In other words, in a non-local environment, how do we get to the place called before? There can be no map. So, the being prior to, as it were, is not available in advance of taking the photograph. All the more reason why anywhere is good enough, even if anywhere is impossible. But this demonstrates in turn the fact…

• 00:25:50

  I mean, of course, that cannot be true that God is the sum of all possible properties, including existence. God cannot come into existence. But if you think that God is a non-way, God might come into existence. And so the fact that, for him, that claim is neither analytic nor synthetic, God isn't in the universe…

• 00:30:53

  And we say that the, call it matter, exists just when the creation of the concept is thinkable as the blind spot of the concept when we have the correct concept of the creation of the concept. So what is not in the concept, precisely when we have a concept of the creation of the concept. What is other than it must…

• 00:38:55

  I think I'm going to pick up on that. That's it, Bonnie. C205. C205, yeah. Thanks, Bonnie. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for doing it. I'm serious, but I think it's genuinely inspiring to see people wanting to do this. I was really pleased. I think people came. Yeah, yeah, it was great. A full room, isn't…