Category: Talks SOPhiA

Martin Niederl (University of Chicago) Schedule 15:50 – 16:00 Welcome and Introduction by Martin Niederl (University of Chicago) 16:00 – 17:00 Jacob McDowell (University of Chicago)Indexicality and the Contribution of the Environment 17:15 – 18:15 Irmena Tsankova (Central European University)Frege on the Articulation of Thought and the Activity of Thinking 18:30 – 19:30 Michael Powell (University of Chicago)Observational…

Corina Strößner (University of Greifswald), Georg Brun (University of Bern)) Much of what is today known as analytic philosophy has its roots in logical empiricism, in particular in the Vienna Circle, the Unity of Science Movement, and its associated researchers. These persons worked in a challenging political climate, shaped by the past World War, inspired…

Brian Ortmann (University of Hamburg) Schedule 15:50–16:00 Brian Ortmann (University of Hamburg): Welcome & Introduction 16:00–16:45 Alexander Gebharter (Marche Polytechnic University): Does Manipulation Imply Causation?  16:45–17:30 Beate Krickel (TU Berlin): Manipulability and Constitution 17:30–17:45 Coffee Break 17:45–18:30 Bram Vaassen (Umeå University): Why Causal Structure is Not Normative – A Parable 18:30–19:15 Samuel Lee (University of Hamburg): Confounded Manipulation…

Philip Ebert University of Salzburg The notion of risk plays a central role in economics, finance, health, psychology, law and elsewhere, and is prevalent in managing challenges and resources in day-to-day life. In recent work, Duncan Pritchard (2015, 2016) has argued against the orthodox probabilistic conception of risk on which the risk of a hypothetical scenario is determined by how probable it is, and in…

Michela Massimi University of Edinburgh In this talk I build on my previous work on perspectival realism (Massimi 2022) and associated  discussions about the nature of phenomena, realism, and pluralism in science. I will present research originating from my recent RSE project “Ocean and Us” (see co-edited volume by Massimi, Brown, and Jaspars, OUP 2026; here)…

Julian Reiss Johannes Kepler University Linz The concept of scientific objectivity has long been central to the philosophy of science. However, in recent times traditional accounts, such as the value-free ideal, have faced sustained criticism for their inadequacy in addressing the indispensable role of value judgements in scientific inquiry. This paper proposes a novel virtue-theoretic…

Jana Engel Universität des Saarlandes Can an organisation believe that their project has no negative environmental impact even though most of their members think otherwise? The question what group beliefs are is heavily discussed in recent philosophy. It is unclear whether group beliefs are constituted by (some of) the beliefs of their members, as for…

Dani Alnashi Università della Svizzera italiana In this talk, I aim to argue that the power of performative contradictions (PC)  is, contrary to what most people think, very limited. PCs are shown that they are not only contextually relevant but can also be evidentially and pragmatically overweighed.A PC is a sentence where the act of…

Sven Hirsbrunner University of Bern In my talk, I would like to introduce a connection between Mark Bedau’s (1997) concept of weak emergence and the notion of future indeterminacy. A property E of a system S is weakly emergent if E’s instantiation at a future time t’ can be predicted at an earlier time t…

Manuel Englert Universität Hamburg A common objection to some realist views of fictive objects is that theyface the Selection Problem: authors cannot fix the reference of a fictive name such as ‘Sherlock Holmes’, ‘Snowy’, or ‘Arrakis’ because they cannot uniquely identify the object to which they are referring (see Sainsbury 2010, Chapter 3; Kripke 1980,…