Category: Talks SOPhiA

Martina Giovine Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele This research addresses the topic of gender-fair language from a moral point of view, supported by some experimental studies. Language is not a neutral tool: with words we express concepts, feelings, intentions; and, on the other hand, we can hurt, convey stereotypes, reinforce social hierarchies. These hierarchies manifest themselves…

Vinzenz Fischer University of Vienna The mechanism-based account of explanation tries to tie sociology into a hierarchy of different disciplines of science by describing phenomena as effects of causal mechanisms that can be described by chains of causal processes. In their article “Causal Mechanisms in the Social Sciences” Peter Hedström and Petri Ylikoski present one…

Kristina Bogdan University of Vienna  J. Saul is objecting the theory of R. Langton stating that pornography is speech. She argues that only utterances in context can be speech acts. According to her Langton sees pornography as merely an illocutionary force. In short Saul’s argument is that only utterances can have illocutionary force and that…

Cristina Somcutean University of Bayreuth Evolutionary psychology (EP) is a biologically informed approach to studying human behavior. EP theorizes that contemporary women and men differ psychologically, particularly in mating and sexuality, and has been criticized by feminist science scholars for being androcentric and essentialist. However, EPs argue that their research on gender-specific psychological differences is…

Katrina Kish University of Connecticut Trust blossoms naturally from caring relationships. We tend to trust those who we think care about us, and who we care about too. Annette Baier’s most insightful contribution to theorizing trust is that it is about care, though this is far from her most influential contribution. Baier’s most influential contribution…

Jeffrey Colgan Tulane University The 20th century has seen two strident criticisms of the “traditional” Anglo-American approach to ethics. First, the so-called ‘species chauvinism’ inherent in many ethical theories, which prioritize a particular human group’s summum bonum and neglect more expansive conceptions of biotic well-being, has been identified and contested (see, for example, the foundational…

Natalia Tomashpolskaia University of Malaga (UMA) In CV §16 Wittgenstein listed the thinkers who influenced his ideas, among them and on the first and the second place (respectively) were mentioned Boltzmann and Hertz. In this paper author argues that the ideas of H. Hertz and L. Boltzmann on the representation of reality had an extraordinary…

Emma Jaura University of Nottingham  There have been a number of recent attempts to identify the best metaphysical framework for capturing Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM). To my knowledge, most of these attempts seem to commit to some form of fundamentalia, whether they be traditional objects, physical relations, events or ‘flashes’, or the cosmos as…

Ewa Grzeszczak Jagiellonian University In the debate about categorizing mental disorders, philosophers have often appealed to the causalism-descriptivism dichotomy (Zachar & Kendler 2007, Tsou 2015, Tsou 2016). However, only a few authors have explicitly considered the semantic question which follows the ontological one – what do the psychiatric diagnoses refer to (Radden 2003, Maung 2016)?…

Alfonso Romero Zúñiga University of Tübingen Processes play a ubiquitous role in our everyday lives, and they are also central to scientific explanations. As a result, there has been a renewed interest in the philosophy of processes and their interaction with the sciences. One prevailing and widely accepted account in contemporary metaphysics is that processes…