Category: Talks SOPhiA

Andrej Jovićević KU Leuven In the metaphysical debate about the “framework of objects,” necessitists maintain that necessarily, everything is necessarily something, while contingentists deny the truth of necessitism. Higher-order necessitists maintain that necessarily, all ‘entities’ of higher types (e.g. properties or propositions) arenecessarily ‘something’. By contrast, higher-order contingentists maintain that some properties or propositions could…

Ignacio Madroñal University of Buenos Aires The debate between scientific realists and antirealists is a dispute that aims to determine which commitments we should endorse based on our best scientific theories. In general, realists acknowledge the existence of unobservable entities postulated by them, while antirealists do not. This leads them to the formulation of complex…

Annica Vieser Université de Genève This paper explores different conceptions of personal time and their relevance to the debate on object persistence. Personal time can be invoked in defense of endurantism and perdurantism alike to solve problems arising in the context of time-travel scenarios in which an object travels to a time at which it…

Shivani Aggarwal University of Cambridge Off-label prescription practices are a pervasive, often overlooked, and frequently misunderstood peculiarity of the present-day medical system. I articulate two dilemmas presented by this practice – when is it justifiable for a physician to prescribe off-label, and whether a physician should disclose that a prescription is off-label. By interrogating the…

Dawei Wu Free University of Berlin The concept of emergent properties has stirred up much debate. They are typically considered higher-level properties ascribed to complex systems, simultaneously “dependent” and “autonomous”, in the senses to be explicated. The canonical characterization cashes out their “dependence” in the modal term of supervenience and “autonomy” in the causal term…

Anna-Maria Edlinger École Normale Supérieure Paris  Within contemporary climate ethics discourse, the concept of substitution manifests itself in various dimensions. Initially, it surfaces in economic discussions surrounding sustainability, which endeavor to assess the extent to which natural capital lost to climate change (this includes natural ressources, ecosystem services and services like insolation) can be replaced…

Henrik Hörmann Universität Bielefeld In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the topic of organismal agency. In this talk, I want to draw out some of the implications agency may have on the historical contingency of evolutionary processes. In other words, how does the organism as “active subject” (Lewontin 1983) shape what happens…

Miguel Flament University of Antwerp In Philosophy of Mind, one way to solve the problem posed by mental causation is to offer a ‘nonreductive materialist’ (NRM) account of how mental properties interact with physical properties. Minimally, this solution holds that (i) mental properties are distinct from physical properties, because (ii) mental properties make a real…

Jairo Martinez Martinez University of Amsterdam Debates about what the meaning of fundamental concepts such as democracy or justice should be are of central importance within political theory. However, the fact that the meaning of these concepts is contested —hence ambiguous— makes normative debates about them susceptible to becoming situations in which theorists merely talk…

Shohei Matsumoto The University of Tokyo This paper examines whether and how we can acquire testimonially warranted (justified) beliefs through indirect communication, such as conversational implicature and insinuation. One reason speakers may choose indirect communication is that it allows them to communicate something while retaining the ability to plausibly deny having meant that thing. This…