Category: Talks SOPhiA

Drishtti Rawat University of Zurich According to R. Jay Wallace and several Strawsonian accounts, an agent is blameworthy if and only if it is appropriate to blame them for their action (1994). In this paper, I first present the two different notions of appropriateness that Wallace uses in his accounts of excuse and exemption. It…

Qianli Zeng Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP), LMU Munich We introduce the positive fragment of noncontingency logic, provide an axiomatic system for the minimal system of it, and prove its completeness. By exploring the positive fragment, we isolate the fundamental behavior of the noncontingency operator without the interference of classical negation. We adapt the…

Robert Finan Trinity College, Dublin This paper argues that Plato’s The Good (τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα), as presented in the Republic, is not a Form, but something metaphysically distinct from and prior to the Forms. The default view in contemporary Plato scholarship is that The Good is a Form. I argue this is untenable. My primary…

Elena Padoan Università della Svizzera Italiana Mozart and Michelangelo are both artists. Are they comparable as artists? They are, since they can be compared with respect to creativity. Yet it does not seem correct to say that one artist is better than the other, nor that they are equally good with respect to creativity, since…

Pengyu He Sun Yat-sen University Non-reductive physicalism aims to reconcile mental causation with the causal closure of the physical domain. A prominent strategy appeals to weak overdetermination, according to which mental and physical causes jointly determine effects without the problematic independence characteristic of standard overdetermination. This paper argues that the strategy is not merely unsuccessful,…

Stanislav Hrubiznyi Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv Since the publication of Quentin Skinner’s seminal 1969 article “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” (Skinner 1969), a vast body of scholarship has emerged, comprising both critical responses to and defenses of his contextualist methodology. A distinctive feature of Skinner’s contextualist methodology is the sustained…

Flavia Cignini Roma Tre University Open-mindedness (OM) is generally regarded as an epistemic virtue, yet its definition remains unstable: it is unclear whether it consists primarily in a willingness to consider alternatives, in the management and assessment of sources, or rather in a constraint on the revision of already acquired beliefs.This work proposes a reformulation…

Pauline Flora Paulik Johannes Kepler University Linz Within epidemiology and public health, physical and mental health inequalities, i.e.,  differences in health status, outcomes, and opportunities, are most commonly explained through the social determinants of health. These have been powerful in identifying how social, economic, and political conditions shape health across the lifespan. Despite their explanatory…

Yiyun Pan Sun Yat-sen University Miranda Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice treats the wrong as “subjectless”: because it arises from gaps in collective interpretive resources rather than individual wrongdoing, the injustice operates through purely structural power, which Fricker takes to mean that no individual agent is culpable for the injustice. This paper argues that the…

Dominik Robel University of Warsaw Wilfrid Sellars and Donald Davidson are usually thought of as philosophers of only superficial similarity. Recently however, scholarship on the former has led to a significant reappraisal of Sellars’ central idea called “”Psychological Nominalism”” (PN) [1]. Besides the line most famously associated with PN, that all awareness is a linguistic…