Category: Talks SOPhiA

Hugo Luzio LanCog, University of Lisbon Animalism is the view that each of us is a human animal. Most animaliststhink that human animals are concrete particulars (i.e. individual things or, inAristotelian terms, individual substances) that persist over time by virtue of thecontinuity of their biological lives. In their view, human animals, like you and me,are…

Valentin Salein Humboldt Universität Berlin Traditionally, T. M. Scanlon’s moral contractualism has been understood in terms of what has become known as ‘principle contractualism’. According to this view, an action is morally required just in case any principle for the general regulation of behavior that permitted people not to perform that action is one that…

Jiwon Kim Lund University This paper addresses the Embedding Problem in the philosophy of language, focusing on how explicit performative utterances, despite their declarative form, embody an illocutionary force that is more than mere assertion when an imperative is embedded. Explicit performatives like “”I order you to leave”” perform actions rather than merely state facts,…

Xingyu Lyu University of Mannheim The aim of this presentation is to argue against color objectivism by appeal to science. Color objectivism is the view that colors are properties of physical objects. Roughly, the typical versions of color objectivism can be classified into two groups: reflectance-grounded objectivism (including reflectance physicalism, micro-structure physicalism, color primitivism) and…

Christian Carbonell Universitat de València / Cornell University What are the effects of ignorance on voluntary and intentional actions? The work of most philosophers suggests no distinction at all. While many have claimed that ignorance undermines voluntary action, others have similarly argued that intentional action suffers from the same condition.My aim in this talk is…

Isa Kooiman University of Groningen The idea of retrocausation, the idea that a later event can affect an earlier one, appears to be so absurd that many conceive of it as an inherently incoherent notion. However, it is not trivially clear that the forward temporal direction is essential to the notion of causation. For instance,…

Niklas Parwez Heinrich-Heine University In many evolutionary models, the concept of fitness is understood probabilistically due to stochastic variations in the survival and reproductive success of organisms. The Propensity Interpretation of Fitness (PIF) acknowledges this by conceptualizing fitness as a Single-Case Propensity (SCP). In this talk, I will challenge this view by arguing that SCP…

Jan Tomasz Balcerowski University of Warwick / Vienese Forum for Analytic Philosophy The financial press often employs language suggesting that markets are rigid entities capable of interacting with social reality. This portrayal contradicts the consensus of viewing markets as mere collections of profit-oriented individuals. Such discord is caused by a lack of a coherent social…

Nino Gobechia Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität If thinking is the business of philosophy, and if philosophy must be able to reflect upon itself, then thinking cannot be understood as a mere psychological process. Otherwise theorizing about thinking would only be up to empirical sciences like psychology and, in consequence, philosophy would not be able to reflect upon itself…

Clelia Repetto University of Turin Traditionally, musical works have been regarded as Platonic abstracta, i.e., eternal and immutable types that are multiply instantiated into tokens, i.e., concrete performances. However, such a type/token distinction is unsuited to explain musical improvisation, even in the versions proposed by Alperson and Kivy, who explicitly attempt to integrate it into…