Category: Talks SOPhiA

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,…

Antonia Grunert Universität Leipzig The paper argues that interpersonal disagreement, i.e., disagreement among different thinkers, exhibits a paradoxical nature: Even though it is possible for a thinker to think of herself as having disagreed with another thinker in the past, there is a logical problem of identifying a state of interpersonal disagreement in the present.…

Medha Kalyani Nayar Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India Choices regarding courses of action are made via deliberation or reasoning. But sometimes we are left with a lingering sense of missing out on the merits of the choice we did not make. This regret over the unchosen course of action, which shows the weight of…

Niklas Jung Goethe-University Frankfurt Lying is standardly defined as asserting a proposition while believing it to be false (c.f.Chisholm and Feehan, 1977; Meibauer, 2005). This definition presupposes a binary conception of both belief and assertion. However, both notions are more plausibly understood as admitting of degrees. I will argue that lying is best captured as…