Category: Talks SOPhiA

Elsa Magnell Lund University According to Ruth Chang (2002, 2022), incommensurability in hard cases cannot be cases of vagueness. This is because vagueness, unlike hard cases, can always be resolved by arbitrary stipulation, leaving no resolutional remainder or substantive disagreement. Contrary to this, I argue that Chang’s argument fails because proponents of the vagueness view…

Justice Cabantangan Georgia State University While playing a video game like 2016’s God of War, if I were asked what I intended to do at some point during gameplay, I would respond with: “I intend to protect my son Atreus,” “I intend to fire Runic Arrows,” and the like. While these phrases assume the form…

Natalia Witosza Jagiellonian University There is no doubt that different issues connected to procreation (e.g. abortion and in vitro fertilization) seem to be widely considered and explored topics in public debates in different democratic states. However, surprisingly, this does not apply to the topic of surrogacy, which seems to be overlooked in the media discourse.…

Freya von Kirchbach Humboldt-University of Berlin Moral Encroachers claim that moral considerations can make doxastic attitudes epistemically unjustified. On radical variants of this thesis, whenever a doxastic attitude morally wrongs someone, it is epistemically unjustified (e.g., Basu & Schroeder 2019). On more moderate versions, the fact that a doxastic attitude morally wrongs someone raises the…

Aleksandar Draskovic University of Belgrad The aim of this talk is to elucidate Galileo’s solution to Aristotle’s paradox of the wheel. Specifically, Galileo, through a specific understanding of the circle (which is supposed to represent a wheel), offered a solution to Aristotle’s paradox according to which two concentric circles, where one is inscribed within the…

Frederikke Egestrand Aarhus University What is the role of race in racial discrimination? The philosophical debate about race has usually focused on two related questions: (1) if anything that we term “race” exists, and (2) if so, what is the nature of such category. Within this debate there are two major camps, viz., realists and…

Tarun Thapar University of Delhi Metaphysical Foundationalism is the view that chains of grounding must ultimately bottom out in something fundamental. Among the arguments that have been put forth for Foundationalism, the most developed argument is the externality argument in Bliss (2019) which states that there is an explanatory demand that any successful metaphysic should…

Marvin Thinschmidt Universität Potsdam Understanding what it means to follow a rule is at the heart of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. The core of his argument is that an expression of a rule cannot by itself determine its application. This is because it is always possible to interpret a rule in the opposite way to its…

Maciej Jarzębski Jagiellonian University Epistemology has been treating the concept of knowledge mostly as a unified subject that is viable for a one common description. The analysis of knowledge has been usually done on the ordinary (or everyday) cases; tigers behind the door (Gibbard 2007), dogs on the field (Chisholm 1966), fake barns (Goldman 1976),…

Davide Saracino University of Milan Most political philosophers take it as a given that political apologies are only appropriate in response to previous morally wrongful acts on the part of state officials. However, I believe it is possible to identify cases in which political apologies ought to be offered in spite of the absence of…