Category: Talks SOPhiA

Davide Versari University of Eastern Piedmont In the debate on political legitimacy, belief-based approaches have recently become popular. They hinge on two tenets. One is the commitment to political cognitivism, i.e., the idea that there exists, and can be reached, a standard of correctness for political decisions (Landemore, 2013). The other is that said commitment…

Kendra Gordillo Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam A major topic in the bioethical community as well as the broader ethical community is the status of human enhancement. (Bio)technological innovations such as gene editing, brain implants, and AI continue to challenge our notion of what it means to be human and what forms of enhancement are morally permissible,…

Youssef Aguisoul University of Lisbon What grounds the numerical difference of indiscernibles like Black’s (1952) spheres, which stand two miles apart? Some philosophers say empty collections of facts ground it (e.g., Litland (2021)), some say facts of existence ground it (e.g., Rubenstein (2024)), and some say facts of qualitative difference ground it (e.g., Curtis (2014)).I’m…

Yaren Duvarci Central European University Contemporary discussions on free will witness a surge in advocating for naturalistic libertarianism, particularly through the lens of an event-causal framework. This paper explores the compatibility of such perspectives with a broadly physicalist worldview, wherein mental states are construed as either identical to or reducible to brain states. Focusing on…

Irene Senatore Berlin School of Mind and Brain – Humboldt Universität zu Berlin Sullivan has recently argued that the black-box nature of computational models does not get in the way of drawing epistemically robust scientific inferences on the target phenomenon, once a clear link between the model and the target phenomenon is established. That is,…

Natalia Tomashpolskaia University of Malaga There is a problem in contemporary cognitive neuroscience formulated and proposed by Aron K. Barbey, Richard Patterson and Steven A. Sloman in their “change of course memorandum” “Cognitive Neuroscience Meets the Community of Knowledge” published in 2021 in the journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. They start that there has been…

Bartosz Tomasz Żak Jagiellonian University The concept of family resemblance, as conceived by Wittgenstein, is subject to diverse interpretations, different in aspect of their explanatory power and level of modification compared to the source formulation. The aim of my presentation is to review particular interpretive strategies and show that certain solutions are combined into coherent…

Alfonso Romero Zuniga Universität Tübingen Events are central in both our scientific inquiry and our everyday life. But what are events anyway? Are they fundamental? In this talk, I try to answer these questions by arguing that events are four-dimensional structured wholes, composed of matter and form.I begin by examining our “”manifest image”” of events.…

Lepei Liu Sun Yat-Sen University The standard understanding of Doxastic Wronging—the Belief-First view—holds that one can wrong another person by what they believe about that person. However, recent criticisms provide appealing counterexamples to this view, aiming to show that doxastic wrongs lie elsewhere, while the belief itself is neutral. I aim to present and defend…

Yunglong Cao University of California, Irvine Most of us tend to believe that we know certain moral propositions are true. Torturing for fun could be one such example. Such moral propositions can qualify as moral knowledge as they make the case of justified true beliefs. But does this give us the same epistemic confidence to…