Category: Talks SOPhiA

Julianna Végh Eötvös Loránd University What sets apart mental states from others – in other words what is the mark of the mental? Many philosophers (like Brentano, Bryne, Crane and Tye) have argued that it is intentionality: mental states are directed at something or are about something. They represent things to us, and how they…

Đorđe Lazarević Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Niš, Serbia Recent advances in “creative technology”, particularly AI-generated images, poetry, and scientific ideas, have raised questions about whether machines might one day surpass human creative abilities, or whether they already have. To properly assess these and related questions, it is crucial to first establish a…

Eva Lotta Ingwy Flohrs Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg TikTok is often discussed as a waste of time or even a threat to the minds of young people, with the consequence of its inherently fruitful aspects being overlooked. I will argue that much of the fun to be had on TikTok is not only grounded in familiar ideas…

Damla Belemir Aydin Central European University Society is beset by gender oppression and discrimination, often perpetuated through compliance with unjustified gender norms. If we want a permanent change in this social order, I believe we can start from the very beginning, that is, from the family. Parenting can be a powerful arena for social change.…

Carolina Berrutti University of Amsterdam When considering what a social entity is, there is agreement within the literature that social groups have a particular set of properties which differentiate them from both individuals and a plurality of material objects. However, there is an ongoing debate about what those properties are and what that entails for…

Elena Padoan Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI) The question I aim to address in my talk is “What is a token disposition?”. For example, what is the token disposition to break if struck?  To answer this question, I will assume a tropes ontology and I will provide a possible definition of token dispositions within a…

Ignacy Kłaput University of Warsaw Abstract/concrete distinction and universal/particular distinction both traditionally play a vital role in metaphysics. Nonetheless, both are also notoriously hard to properly explicate. A strategy, dubbed by David Lewis (1986) a Way of Conflation, promises to identify both distinctions and, in doing so, explain one (abstract/concrete) through accounts of another (universal/particular).…

Satsuki Inoue Chiba University This presentation explores the nature of knowledge-how, focusing in particular on whether a group can possess such knowledge. It defends a reductive account of collective knowledge-how, arguing that what is often taken to be collective in nature is reducible to the individual knowledge-how possessed by members of the group—and further, that…

Antonia Siebeck Universität Luzern Within the narrativist debate about personal identity, it is often postulated that there is ‘false’ self-understanding or that its falsity is at least a constant threat (see e.g. Mikkonen 2021: 48, Crone 2020: 67). However, it remains unclear how the truth value of self-understanding should be measured. After all, it is…

Zhitao Zhang University College London Regression analysis uses mathematical equations to express economic hypotheses and estimates how a policy affects a population based on observational data. For certain estimation algorithms to generate unbiased estimations, zero conditional mean must hold. Endogeneity occurs when this condition is violated. To address this problem, an Instrument variable (IV) is…