Category: Talks SOPhiA

Andrew Zhou University of Milan Contemporary metaphysics seeks to understand the structure of reality, particularly the distinction and interaction between fundamental and non-fundamental entities. Traditionally, fundamental entities are viewed as either mereological wholes (Top-ism) or atomic parts (Bottom-ism). Sara Bernstein (2021) introduces Middleism, proposing that a middle level can be fundamental, challenging the unidirectional nature…

Brent Westlake Leibniz Universität Hannover Multiple realisability has been accepted as standard within Philosophy of Mind since the 1960’s. The idea is that any property kind might be one-for-one replicable by physical systems of a different composition. As pain is evident in animals with very different psychological capacities, we might think that mental states could…

James Alexander McDaniel Paris-Lodron Universität Salzburg Quantifier Variance, specifically as advanced by Jared Warren, is the claim that there may exist multiple logically identical quantifiers that still vary in meaning (Warren, 2020). This variance is supposed to deflate numerous metaphysical debates, since for many different positions there exists a possible quantifier and language to validate…

Karol Milczarek University of Warsaw A recent proposal in the debate over the compatibility of God’s foreknowledge and human freedom states that divine essential omniscience does not pose a threat to our ability to do otherwise, since God’s beliefs depend on agents’ actions, and not vice versa (Merricks 2011, Swenson 2016, Law 2020, Wasserman 2021).…

Mirela Koleva University of Vienna Conversational accounts of blame hold that our diverse blaming practices aim at communicating a disposition, a desire, or a protest to the wrongdoer and/or to the moral community. Two of the most famous conversational accounts are Angela Smith’s (2012) and Miranda Fricker’s (2016). Suppose I see a mother spanking her…

George Wade Università della Svizzera italiana How are objects located in spacetime? A popular answer is identity supersubstantivalism, the notion that objects are numerically identical to regions at which they are located (Calosi and Duerr 2022). This paper provides a novel argument showing that a world where identity supersubstantivalism holds cannot be gunky i.e., must…

Kangyu Wang London School of Economics Incommensurability gives rise to hard choices. A and B are incommensurable when neither option is better than the other, yet they are not equal either (Parfit 1984; Griffin 1986; Raz 1986; Chang 2002, 2010; Sugden 2009). In a hard choice, the agent has no more normative reason to choose…

Chandra Kethi-Reddy University of Central Florida In this presentation, I will defend the claim that for any theory of knowledge or justification, such a theory ought to be self-referentially consistent.  Self-referential consistency means that if a theory purports to explain a domain where the theory itself is embedded, the theory must account for itself as…

Rafaela Schinner Universität Wien In my paper, I will explore to what extent Christine Korsgaard’s concept of practical identity can provide  a rational justification of team reasoning. Team reasoning constitutes a prominent solution in economics1 to explain cooperation in Prisoner’s  Dilemma situations: Prisoners cooperate if they act and reason as members of a team. From…

Sebastián Sánchez-Martínez TU Dresden In this presentation, I defend a dual account about voluntary control for simplification in reasoning. Human reasoners simplify by disregarding complex rules or omitting information in both theoretical and practical reasoning. For instance, when forming beliefs, people disregard skeptical scenarios as well as ordinary doubts. Equally, when making decisions, people omit…