Category: Talks SOPhiA

Piotr Paszkowski University of Warsaw The philosophical status of an author’s work is sometimes the subject of emotional debate (cf. [1]), often accompanied by the charge that it is a piece of pseudophilosophy [2]. Notwithstanding, there are few texts addressing the issue of the demarcation between true philosophy and ‘false’, ‘bogus’ or ‘pseudo-philosophy’ ([3], [4],…

Vaggelis Spathis University of Patras Perceptual object recognition requires the ability to discriminate and identify objects as unified individuals. This process depends on the ventral (“what”) pathway, extending from V1 through V2 and V4 to temporal and frontal regions. Recent findings in vision science and neuropsychology highlight a critical role for the perirhinal cortex (PRC)…

Maxim Pfaffenrot Leibniz Universität Hannover In the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, questions concerning the origins of the virus arose, as in the proximity of the epicenter of the first infections in Wuhan, China, was a virology lab conducting Gain-of-Function research on Corona viruses. This gave rise to a widely reported hypothesis, that the outbreak…

Bartosz Wultański University of Warsaw The slogan “meaning is normative” has spread widely across philosophy of language since Kripke’s reconstruction of Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations. Semantic normativists argue that meaning contains an intrinsic normative component, understood most commonly in terms of either (1) correctness conditions or (2) prescriptive rules of use. Both face a familiar dilemma:…

Giulia Sicuro University of Milan The epistemic crisis of contemporary democracies is traditionally understood as a problem of misinformation (Benkler, Faris & Roberts 2018). This diagnosis is self-defeating because it assumes implicitly that some shared epistemic grounds are held among citizens (Fogelin 1985). This is not a lightweight premise within the technological advancement we are…

Travis Rebello University of Colorado, Boulder Many believe that if someone’s life would be overall bad for them, that gives us reason not to bring them into existence, but if someone’s life would be overall good for them, that doesn’t give us reason to bring them into existence. I argue that this asymmetry casts doubt…

Karol Milczarek University of Warsaw While providing examples of reasons to act – i.e., normative or justifying reasons, which are the reasons that count in favour of the action (Alvarez, Way 2024) – it is a common practice to switch between descriptions containing exclusively non-normative and explicitly normative terms. It seems equally acceptable to say…

Jing Sun South China Normal University Chinese modal particles like ba and ne have long puzzled semanticists. They clearly do something—””Tā huì lái”” (He will come) feels different from “”Tā huì lái ba”” (He will come, I suppose?)—but what exactly they contribute resists truth-conditional treatment. Recent work (Fang 2016; Wang 2022) connects them to illocutionary…

Bianca Zito University of Florence Language is often treated as a transparent vehicle for sharing not only practical information, but also our inner states and knowledge about the world. Despite this assumption, I argue that language is a culturally evolved cognitive gadget that does not merely represent the world, but restructures the cognitive practices through…

Danielle  Ravitzki  Columbia University The family occupies a unique position in moral philosophy at the unique intersection of identity, dependency, and permanence as both the primary site of intimate human relationships and a fundamental social institution. This paper examines a pervasive yet undertheorized social norm governing family relations, what I call the “Forgiveness Imperative”: the…