Category: Talks SOPhiA

Tessa Supèr Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Consider an agent who enjoys eating treats. One treat at most trivially impacts her health, but eating many treats daily will have adverse effects. Examples like these (“intrapersonal inefficacy cases”) are ubiquitous in our lives, and have raised interesting questions about momentary versus temporally extended instrumental rationality. Tenenbaum (2020), for…

Martin Niederl University of Vienna If you ask me why I φed, I ideally provide you with an explanation in terms of my motivating reasons for φing: a reason explanation ([1], 170). By referring to the rain as my reason for bringing an umbrella, I’m telling you that the rain appeared to me as a…

Andrea Salvador University of Italian Switzerland Lehmkuhl 2018 distinguishes between two variants of supersubstantivalism: (1) modest and (2) radical. Both have been defended in the philosophy of physics. Schaffer 2009 argues from General Relativity (GR) and Quantum Field Theory to identity-supersubstantivalism, which entails (1). Lehmkuhl and Duerr & Calosi 2021 have GR-based arguments for priority-supersubstantivalism,…

Kevin Braun FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg In Hinge Epistemology, philosophers investigate our most basic beliefs about the world, such as the belief that there is an external world, or that physical objects don’t disappear when nobody pays attention to them. On the one hand, we hold beliefs like these with fundamental and unalterable certainty. On the other…

Baoyu Dai University of Wisconsin Mancosu (2008) defines intra-mathematical explanations (IME) as the use of mathematical facts to explain other mathematical facts. For example, Cantor’s theorem can explain the mathematical fact that there is no largest infinity. Recently, Baron et al. (2020) proposed a counterfactual approach to account for IMEs, which consists of two parts.…

Sven Eichholtz Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) The linguistic outputs and internal representations of Large Language Models (LLM) are said to lack referential grounding in the entities they putatively refer to. Anders Søgaard recently proposed that progress on solving the grounding problem can be made by developing an AI system that can match vector representations…

Bogdan Dumitrescu University of Bucharest, Faculty of Philosophy  The problem of free will is often presented as an incompatibility between determinism and freedom. In this presentation I am concerned with a different way of framing the problem: the incompatibility between freedom and certain metaphysics of time. Authors such as Niall Shanks (1994) and Carl Hoefer…

Howard Liu University of Miami In their works, Bueno and Shalkowski critically assess previously dominant modal epistemologies and develop their own account under the metaphysical setting of modalism. They distinguish two camps of dominant accounts–rationalism and non-rationalism–and criticize them respectively. On one hand, they argue against rationalism, particularly intuition-based rationalism, with case studies in history…

Jakob Roloff Justus Liebig University Gießen Ruth Millikan’s (1984) selected effects theory of functions states that having a function does not consist in having a certain disposition, but in the fact that the ancestors of the trait were selected for because they showed certain effects. As the function is an effect a thing’s ancestors showed,…

Elena Garadja University of Pittsburgh I provide a sketch for a theory of action as control. My aim is to give an account of the genus of action, which is maximally inclusive and explains what different types of action have in common and what sets them apart. Most theories that define the genus of action…