Category: Talks SOPhiA

Anita Semerani UCL         Imagine you are offered a great deal of money to intend today to drink a toxin tomorrow. This scenario is now commonly known as the ‘Toxin Puzzle’. It is widely acknowledged that in this situation ordinary agents would be unable to form the intention to drink the toxin. Or, at least,…

Satarupa Chakraborty Jawaharlal Nehru University The semantic realists and the semantic anti realists have argued for a comprehensive theory of meaning by employing specific criteria to meaning. I argue in this paper that a theory of meaning which presumes a singular notion or a monistic approach to meaning fails to offer a comprehensive account of…

Ragna Talea Oeynhausen LMU Munich The aim of this paper is to evaluate whether Carnap’s pluralism falls victim to the collapse argument against logical pluralism. I first want to illustrate two correspondences between logical  pluralism and Carnap’s pluralism that raise hope that the collapse argument is tansferable to the latter. For now, I will restrict…

Carla Peri University of Padua I argue that haecceities, non-general essential categorical properties of the form being x, or being identical with x, predicated of any particular individual x, are philosophically redundant.My argument relies on the dependence-theoretic accounts for immanence. Immanence is a characteristic desired in haecceities since it fits well with their individuating role…

Shih-Hao Liu University of Miami Knockdown arguments are arguments such that those who object to premises or supporting relations between premises and conclusions of these arguments are irrational or not able to fully understand the argument. In non-philosophical domains, there are ample of examples of knockdown arguments. However, although philosophers do argue in the tone…

Ryan McLaughlin Boston College This paper employs the rigor and clarity characteristic of analytic philosophy to offer a Hayekian critique of the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) indeterminacy thesis, analyzing its implications within key U.S. legal cases. By discussing landmark decisions such as Kelo v. City of New London 545 US 469 (2005) and Citizens United…

Triston Hanna Arizona State University Emotions are integral to our interpersonal relationships and are governed by norms concerning their experience and expression. They are also evaluated based on the epistemic and moral character of their subjects. Just as emotions serve disparate roles in our lives, they are evaluated against similarly disparate criteria. Emotions are evaluated…

Marianna Barcenas  The London School of Economics This paper explores the success of Brian Hill’s (2019) non-Bayesian framework for practical decision-making under ambiguity, where ambiguity is taken to refer to situations where an agent is offered partial information from which they may make inferences, but are unable to build a complete picture of the involved…

Andreas Frenzel LMU Munich (MCMP) This paper concerns the problem of open texture in mathematics. A concept exhibits open texture, when no definition of it can ensure that every future case can be decided as either falling or not falling under the concept. If concepts in mathematics exhibited open texture, this would seemingly threaten its…

Jakub Sochacki University of Warsaw It seems that in the contemporary philosophy of language there are two main readings of Kant’s view on the first-person term. The first is developed by Strawson in his celebrated essay on Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) [1]. The core of his reading is the residual cartesianism diagnosis which helps…