Category: Talks SOPhiA

Lorenzo Arico University of Bologna My aim in this paper is to explore AI as an epistemic agent, namely showing how AI directly participates in knowledge production. AI has an active role in the creation, validation and transformation of knowledge that cannot be underestimated, but that needs instead further analysis to assess its impact on…

Mustafa Khuramy University of Hertfordshire Midgley (2014) wrote a book where she argues for the claim that some philosophers and scientists are mistaken to believe that we are not selves; that the ‘self’ (typically understood) does not exist. Call this doctrine the no-self thesis (NST). In what follows, I outline Midgley’s arguments against the NST.…

James Ross University of Southampton Grounding and causation, so the story goes, are types of causal relation: grounding is metaphysical causation; causation simpliciter is nomological causation (Wilson, 2018). Specifically, they’re species of a causal genus; their differentiae are the laws that mediate them. While the role of a genus-species relation is prima facie unclear, I…

Karol Milczarek University of Warsaw By analysing one of the main sources of the ‘standard story’ of action–Donald Davidson’s account of practical reasons from his seminal Actions, Reasons and Causes–I argue that psychologism about reasons is faced with major challenge. Contemporary variant of this view, which identifies reasons with propositional attitudes of the agent (paradigmatically,…

Luuk Brouns Radboud University This paper argues that folk psychology is not a universal occurrence but a culture-specific adaptation of WEIRD societies (societies categorised as Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic). This opposes the standard mindreading approach. This conventional approach holds that (a) folk psychology results from a universal cognitive capacity called “mindreading,” and (b)…

David Holtgrave Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg Poetry has only very recently been acknowledged as an art form eligible to its own philosophical investigation by analytical aesthetics. And while most of the peculiar questions and challenges are today very well set and defined and answers debated, what seems to me lacking is a more general approach to poetry…

Sadaf Ghaffari Zaki University of Tartu The distinction between the concepts of “”what we are”” and “”who we are”” has profound philosophical implications for understanding identity and personhood. This paper examines the emergence of personhood as a phase within the human organism’s developmental trajectory, challenging the psychological continuity account of personal identity by aligning with…

Andrej Jovićević KU Leuven Recent work in epistemology defends the unorthodox theses that (1) belief is an evidentially weak, (2) question-sensitive attitude, and that (3) rationally permitted belief is sometimes a matter of guessing. These theses fit together naturally to form a unified account of weak, question-sensitive belief. A formal account of weak, question-sensitive belief…

And other (Standard) Linguistic Entities Organisation: Thorben Petersen (Aachen) There is much debate about the ontology of words and other (standard) linguistic entities, with particular attention being paid to the correct categorization of linguistic entities. A venerable tradition conceives of words and sentences and the like as higher-level physical objects: something like Austin’s moderate-sized specimens…

Organisation: Zhitao Zhang & Alexander Gebharter, University College London & Center for Philosophy, Science, and Policy at the Marche Polytechnic University In philosophy of science, causality has become an increasingly popular topic. Many scientific claims and laws are stated in causal terms. For example, we say that a solar storm caused signal jamming. Though the…