Category: Talks SOPhiA

Christabel Cane University College London This paper builds upon Heller’s (1984) argument for temporal perdurantism, the view that: a)         Ordinary objects do not wholly exist at any one instant of time. Rather, they exist as partial instantiations (or temporal parts) of the object at every time at which the object exists. b)        These temporal parts…

Yannik Steinebrunner University of Basel  Current philosophy of mind exhibits an increasing interest in radical metaphysics of consciousness. On the one hand, there is strong illusionism, denying that consciousness—understood as the entity according to which it is something it is like to be us—exists. On the other hand, there is panpsychism, which posits that consciousness…

Nicolas Cuevas-Alvear University of Bayreuth The question about how language and reality are related has been central to the discussion in philosophy of language. At the heart of this dialogue lies Frege’s theory of mediated reference, which delineates the functional structure of language by using logic and his semantical distinction between sense and reference. However,…

Daniel Cristian Stancu University of Bucharest The contemporary discourse about intentions and intentionality represents a central problem for philosophy of mind and nature of the mind altogether, due to them emerging in ontological and metaphysical questions about the nature of mental states (Jacob & Pierre, 2023).The concept of intention has been understood as something internal…

Horia Lixandru ILLC, University of Amsterdam Hermeneutical injustice, as defined by Miranda Fricker, results from a gap in our collective conceptual resources. This gap means that sometimes we cannot properly understand our experiences in the right normative light, nor render them intelligible to others. Parallel to Fricker’s concerns, conceptual engineering has developed as an attractive…

Bogdan-Andrei Dumitrescu University of Bucharest, Faculty of Philosophy “The aim of this talk is to tackle David Storrs-Fox’s (2021) argument against the A-theory of time. The argument concerns the A-theory’s alleged inability to account for an explanation of actions. My claim is that his conclusion threatens only some variants of the A-theory of time and…

Germán Massaguer Gómez Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Large Language Models (LLM) are being used in a wide-spread range of environments. Our interactions and use of LLMs raise numerous socio-political, philosophical, legal, and ethical debates. When it comes to their encyclopedic function – the purveyance of information responding to a specific prompt – there are…

Maria Fedorova University of Vienna Several philosophers have recently argued that some of our perceptual imaginings are epistemically useful when they are properly constrained by reality. But the exact nature of imaginative constraints has remained a contentious matter. On the one hand, imaginative constraints are considered to be personal-level mental states, like beliefs or past…

Xindi Ye University of Hong Kong My goal in this paper is to show that there is a dilemma of assessment for conceptual engineering. Conceptual engineering is the activity of assessing and improving our words and concepts (Cappelen 2018). There are many standards (epistemic, metaphysical, ethical, prudential) we can use to assess concepts. Which standards…

Bojin Zhu University of Vienna In the past decade, conceptual engineering (CE) has become a topic of attention. The idea is that apart from analysing our concepts, we could also actively take control of them, assess them, and improve upon them. However, there is much debate in the CE literature on what concepts are, and…